SOCRATES REDUX
Classics in the Multicultural University?
Like Bruce Thornton, I conclude in this review essay (which I wrote not knowing that he was working on the same topic) that Nussbaum’s attempt to “spin” multicultural identity politics as Socratic examination and liberal education is a fraud, her argument redolent of the fifth-century Sophists who “made the worse argument the better.” Unfortunately, Nussbaum is a public intellectual with widespread influence, one whose patina of liberal values masks rampant careerism and intellectual dishonesty, and therefore her career and book represent a phenomenon even more dangerous than that posed by the many obscure theorists cashing in postmodernism for eminence and lucre.
“THIS book began from many experiences stored up from twenty years of teaching at Harvard, Brown, and the University of Chicago and from travels to dozens of American campuses, both as a visiting lecturer and as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Professor” (ix).1 It is hard to imagine a more ominous opening to a book on reform of higher education. Extrapolating from her “teaching” at three elite universities (one quickly infers that Professor Nussbaum has not waded through many half-baked blue books over the years), communiques with faculty she “knew and could trust,” cursory visits to other campuses as well as the notes and tape recordings garnered by her four research assistants dispatched on similar missions, and an extremely narrow interpretation of classical antiquity, the Ernst Freund Professor of Law and Ethics sets out to restore our faith in the new developments in the liberal arts. The resulting apologia aspires to be the feel-good book the academic Left and university administrators have been waiting for. After taking so many hits in the culture wars, could it be that American higher education has finally landed a counterpunch?
Martha Nussbaum proposes to answer the following questions: “What are faculty and students really doing, and how do newly fashionable issues about human diversity affect what they do? What sort of citizens are our colleges trying to produce, and how well are they succeeding in that task?” (2). Her answer, to summarize boldly, is that special studies programs (she limits herself to African-American, Women’s, and Gender) and the study of non-Western cultures have found important places alongside more traditional fare because they shape “world citizens” steeped in Socratic argument who can empathize with differences on an increasingly multicultural, pluralistic planet. She claims that these approaches need not—and she wants us to believe that in fact most do not—embrace the most controversial tenets of the New Humanities and Social Sciences, notably interest-group identity politics, radical epistemological skepticism, and moral relativism. As proof of the success of these innovations in liberal education, we are offered numerous anecdotes primarily in the form of sketches of classroom sessions and course syllabi. Indeed, by providing so many little vignettes, the book becomes a veritable ideological Kama Sutra for multiculturalists, depicting various positions and approaches attempted by a handful of pliant instructors across the nation to encourage their students to lead more tolerant and empathetic lives.
But a word of warning: don’t try these contortions at home. They may look tempting, but upon even mildly close inspection their initial attraction gives way first to incredulity, then to surfeit, boredom, and finally to revulsion. Although Nussbaum poses as a sensible, classically based reformer, the book follows a pattern perfectly predictable by anyone familiar with its author’s previous excursions into the culture wars. Partly because of a remarkable naivete about teaching and college curricula that can be possessed only by today’s on-the-road, TA-dependent academic, partly because of her thinly veiled political agenda, but mostly just because of sloppy argumentation, the various strands of thought agglomerate over the 300 pages into a messy ball of contradictory and muddled assertions and, at best, timid and derivative recommendations. Professors and administrators of the academic Left waiting for a defense of their leadership of the academy must continue their anxious vigil. This Multiculturalism-Lite just won’t do it.
The first chapter, an argument for “Socratic Self-Examination,” quickly reveals the weighty problems that sink the book, and so it warrants a careful review. Nussbaum begins reasonably enough by defending Socratic argument against those who see it as a male, Western device constructed to empower the oppressors. She insists that its purpose rather is the activation of each student’s independent mind and the production of a community that can genuinely reason together about a problem, not simply trade claims and counterclaims. But Nussbaum creates a false dichotomy in the history of education that she bases on a simplistic reading of the Clouds. One branch of thought, she argues, insists that the function of education is to promote acculturation to the time-honored traditions of a society; the other, modern approach emphasizes a “more Socratic education that insists on teaching students to think for themselves” (16). The old system, one apparently in place until just a few years ago, is bad: “We are now trying to build an academy that will overcome defects of vision and receptivity that marred the humanities departments of earlier eras…” (112). But Nussbaum misses the larger significance of Aristophanes’ play, that of the dramatic dispute itself. The comedy offers a mock debate that pokes fun at both adversaries while simultaneously insisting that such disputation is essential to the discovery of how one is to be educated to live a good life.
One of the greatest oddities in this book of oddities is that it seems never to strike Nussbaum as noteworthy that among those “time-honored traditions of Western Civilization” is Socratic argument itself. Yes, there have been proponents of mindless obedience, but the important deliberation about liberal education (leaving technical training aside for the moment) has been whether those skills of argument, logic, and persuasion should be put to personal and professional advantage (Sophistic) or to the pursuit of some larger, universal truth (Socratic). Nussbaum herself has ably written on the confusion of the Sophists with Socrates. But in her praise of Socrates she rarely notes that he saw a purpose in his pursuit: truth. “Socrates himself made no appeal to truths that transcend human experience…” (40). What is missing throughout Nussbaum’s discussion of Socratic dialogue is the ultimate purpose of this argumentation: to decide what is the better course of action and then to pursue that course while trying to persuade others to follow as well. Without this crucial link between intellectual deliberation and decisive action we are left in the realm of the Sophists, and there is nothing to counter the inevitable moral relativism—you think x, I think y, and so be it. This failure to address the Greek connection between word and deed taints her entire argument.
For example, Nussbaum does not include among the four reasons she gives for emphasizing a Socratic education the most important—that only through reasoned discourse can we sift through conflicting claims of truth. Instead, we are to follow Socrates (she includes the Stoics as the foundations for this self-examination) for the following four reasons:
(1) Socratic education is for every human being. Well, yes and no. Nussbaum has to make a tricky (one page, 26) distinction between Plato and Socrates. Plato was an intellectual elitist and an opponent of democracy, and even Socrates was done in by a hostile demos. But Nussbaum’s approach means that parts of the Republic, for example, can be used to demonstrate her point (e.g., Socrates on women’s education), but others must be left aside (e.g., the entire hierarchical structure of Socrates’ utopia and in particular his educational scheme).
(2) A Socratic education should be suited to the pupil’s circumstances and context. This too leads Nussbaum in directions she claims she does not want to go:
It must be concerned with the actual situation of the pupil, with the current state of the pupil’s knowledge and beliefs, with the obstacles between that pupil and the attainment of self-scrutiny and intellectual freedom. Socrates therefore questions people one by one. The Stoics, concerned with the broad extension of education to all, are not always able to do this. But they insist that individualized instruction is always, in principle, the goal. (32)
Bizarrely, she takes this to be a lethal challenge to a “great books” curriculum. Yet her main point is precisely that Socrates—now a walking, breathing great book thanks to his famous pupil—provides her universal model for education. Moreover, she must now side with identity politics far more than she admits, for if we are to adapt the curriculum to the student, we must address the “obstacles” to the student’s intellectual freedom—what could she mean by this but issues of race, gender, sexuality, and so on? (That she does not examine issues of class is extremely revealing and typical of the elite liberal academic, who cannot imagine a poor white student more deprived than a wealthy minority. Supervising the senior philosophy theses of three upper-class minority students does not qualify one for combat pay. On her self-contradictions about identity politics, see below.)
But even more remarkably, Nussbaum does not see that Socrates is criticizing her entire modus operandi and that of the modern elite academic. The point is that the teacher must work with the student. Individualized instruction in the Socratic sense does not mean developing a curriculum to suit the context of the student, but teaching each student with as much personal attention as possible. This requires attention to the individual intellectual progress of the student, not lecturing to hundreds. It means small classes, not auditoriums. It means, in modern terms, grading every exam, reading every paper, meeting with every student, finding the right buttons to push for each learner. It is, in other words, a nearly impossible goal at many of the nation’s universities, but it is a worthy goal nevertheless. Nussbaum has nothing to say about the un-Socratic structure of the modern research university in which she has spent her entire professional career. We should not be surprised. Socratic teaching could never mean spending an afternoon talking to a handful of philosophy majors at one more school on a ten-day junket, or sending out graduate students to do your teaching and research for you. Socrates didn’t lecture to a crowd of a hundred at Sparta in the morning, then depart to Argos in the afternoon leaving Plato behind to answer questions. Socrates didn’t abandon a position at Athens for one at Syracuse because it meant more money, more time to publish, and less conversation with the people. It was the Sophists, of course, who represented the modern academic so well, both in the way they lived and in their similar support for relative rather than absolute values.
(3) Socratic education should be pluralistic, that is, concerned with a variety of different norms and traditions. Nussbaum, against most of the evidence known to me (and she cites none to support her premise), seems convinced that the world is becoming increasingly diverse rather than increasingly homogeneous, indeed, increasingly Western. “Today’s teachers are shaping future citizens in an age of cultural diversity and increasing internationalization. Our country is inescapably plural”(6). “The present-day world is inescapably multicultural and multinational” (8). But the entire thrust of “internationalization,” for good or ill, is the breakdown of “cultural diversity.” I will address this more directly later. But again, Nussbaum does not say what she means, for she doesn’t really want students to deal with all difference, all different norms and traditions. Her entire insistence on a Socratic, rational model of argumentation as the basis for education, for example, reveals that she too believes that certain cultures have better ways of addressing human problems than others. And, like it or not, she has chosen a Western approach to her topic that has been decidedly insensitive to the traditional “dreamtime” norms of indigenous populations throughout the world.
(4) Socratic education requires ensuring that books do not become authorities. Again, this is a strange argument coming from someone who bases her book on the received wisdom found in a handful of books. Here, as often, Nussbaum assumes that philosophy alone can teach Socratic argument and avoid the “great book” syndrome. Literature, in fact all texts except those read by philosophers, “can indeed tone up the slack mind, giving it both the information it needs to think well and examples of excellent argument,” but are “all too likely to become objects of veneration and deference,” especially those produced by Western civilization (35). To learn Socratic logical argument, one must enroll in a philosophy course. “The disciplinary base of such courses should not stray too far from philosophy, or the rigor of analysis so important for the Socratic virtues of mind will be diluted” (42). She concedes that philosophical “reflection may also be infused into a broader humanities course or set of courses, but in that case it is very important that philosophers participate in the design and teaching of these courses” (46). Clearly one of the reasons philosophy departments have been far more immune to the fraudulent epistemological claims of the New Humanities than departments of history and especially literature is their more rigorous skills of logical argumentation. But Nussbaum provides no evidence that in the courses she cites as examples of proper philosophical orientation students have developed any of the skills she seeks in her program of reform. So fuzzy is she in fact on just how Socratic self-examination is to be instilled that at one point (47) she insists that students at Brown, where there are no general education requirements of any kind, engage in Socratic activity merely by choosing their courses!
The function of literature is, as we learn in a later chapter entitled “The Narrative Imagination,” to develop sympathy in order to understand (but not judge) difference. This can certainly be one of the most powerful aspects of art. But to focus on difference rather than similarities, and to limit art to the affective, would result in the most deformed kind of pedagogy. Nussbaum’s brief essays into literature reveal the limitations of her approach. Her discussion of the Philoctetes, for example, concentrates on the role of the chorus, who “vividly and sympathetically imagine the life of a man whom they have never seen, picturing his loneliness, his pain, his struggle for survival. In the process they stand in for, and allude to, the imaginative work of the audience, who are invited by the play as a whole to imagine the sort of needy, homeless life to which prosperous people rarely direct their attention. The drama as a whole, then, cultivates the type of sympathetic vision of which its characters speak” (87). Are we to imagine an audience racing out to help in soup kitchens and tutor the poor after witnessing Philoctetes’ prideful suffering? Is that really the impact of Sophocles’ tragedy? The nobility of Philoctetes is his refusal to seek mindless sympathy, his unswerving faith in the absolute justice of his case, and his insistence on bearing the consequences of his intransigence.
Nussbaum’s strange and limited sense of compassion is now the hallmark of the apparently guilt-ridden academic Left. Compassion is primarily to be reserved for difference, for the Other, rather than for man’s plight in general and the tragic nature of humanity. As becomes more clear in the following chapter, the focus in Nussbaum’s “world citizen” is on difference rather than on commonality, on race, gender, and sexual orientation rather than on dilemmas that link us all. Her world citizen, despite her insistence on critical analysis, is primarily someone who develops a rational “strategy” to tolerate and sympathize with everything and everybody. She says that we are to retain judgment, but virtually nowhere in the book does she pursue the consequences that might follow from such critical reasoning—a rejection of some elements of difference as inferior, for example. Ignored or conveniently forgotten is Socrates’ dictum that the greatest evil is not to exercise one’s critical judgment by punishing wrongdoing.
Her conclusion to the opening chapter is thus necessarily skewed. “We live, as did Socrates, in a violent society that sometimes turns its rage against intellectuals. We may be embarking on a new era of anti-intellectualism in American life, an era in which the anger of Aristophanes’ father is all too real a force” (49). Are professors now being attacked in supermarkets? Mugged on the streets? Forced to drink hemlock by concerned politicians and shopkeepers? Called “four-eyes” by mean-spirited teenage computer geeks? The “rage” here refers, one must assume, to the fact that the public, legislators, and administrators have begun asking faculty to be accountable to their constituents, the tuition-paying students, parents, and taxpayers. The “violence” is a position canceled, a tenure denied, a promotion delayed (an endowed professorship in an elite school of law and divinity rather than in its classics department?), a spate of books pointing out the very un-Socratic behavior of faculty and administrators, particularly at graduate institutions. Recent reports from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and in Harvard Magazine (is Nussbaum’s alma mater turning on her?) simply document what we already know about the lack of commitment to undergraduate teaching at research universities. Nussbaum wants to demonstrate the validity of Socratic reasoning for a flourishing democracy—all well and good—and then gives a perfect argument in the remainder of the book of just why her “reformed liberal education” has come under such attack, not just by vocationalism, but by defenders of the liberal arts and democracy as well.
The goal of a liberal education, according to Nussbaum, is to produce “citizens of the world.” In a chapter of that title, and another on the study of non-Western cultures, she fails to identify exactly what she means by Western, and so it remains unclear what skills and values—other than Socratic argumentation and an easy compassion—this new citizen should possess. Here is another irony in Nussbaum’s project. She insists that the concept of “world citizen” is borrowed from the classical tradition but that this “form of cosmopolitanism is not peculiar to Western traditions” (53). Her only attempt in the book to prove this point is the citation of two writers supposedly outside the West who have discussed the idea of a world citizen. But upon closer inspection one turns out to be an Indian philosopher who “selfconsciously melded them [older Bengali traditions] with Western cosmopolitanism” (53) and the other is a Ghanaian philosopher who we are later informed is the “son of an Englishwoman and a London-trained lawyer…educated at Bryanston and Cambridge, an expert in modal logic…” (149). If Nussbaum wants us to devote more time to non-Western cultures, then she must show us what they have to offer. This is a legitimate project, but one that is not attempted here.
Nussbaum never seems to catch the irony that this so-called cosmopolitanism of the classical world is in fact the utopian dream of a few intellectuals and cranks primarily in the West. Seneca and Marcus Aurelius never contemplated exchanging their culture for that of the barbarians on their borders. They never considered all cultures to be equal or that Romans should in fact abandon their values for a new world order. Neither Socrates nor any other classical Greek believed that non-Greek cultures were superior to that of the polis. Different, yes. Interesting, quite possibly. But to emphasize cultural diversity over chauvinism is simply un-Greek and decidedly un-Socratic. A few antisocial freaks like Diogenes—a favorite of Nussbaum’s—were entirely Greek in their critical spirit, but not in their rejection of the concept of the polis.
On the other hand, these very questions about culture, sometimes posed in the form of literary utopias, are in fact primarily the product of the West. The West is uniquely self-critical, uniquely prone to compare and contrast its own way of doing things with that of others. And so the argument really should be that if we want to explore something outside of our own cultures, we should first understand how that very impulse derives from the Greeks. It is Western culture we should master first. Instead, Nussbaum suggests that her book is based on the classical civilizations merely as an accident of her training:
It was through ancient Greek and Roman arguments that I came upon these ideas in my own history. The Greek and Roman versions of these ideas are immensely valuable to us as we pursue these debates today, and I shall focus on that contribution. But ideas of this sort have many sources in many traditions. Closely related notions can be found in India, in Africa, in Latin America, and in China. One of the errors that a diverse education can dispel is the false belief that one’s own tradition is the only one that is capable of self-criticism or universal aspiration, (ii)
But she provides not a single example to support this statement, and one must assume that once again she does not really mean what she says. As concerned as she is with the study of women, race, sexuality, and religion in the rest of the book, can she really be suggesting that we can find such a rich critique of religion in China, sexuality in Saudi Arabia, women in Africa, or race in Japan?
Nussbaum herself is so deeply embedded in Western thought that she can find no other way to go about her study. When she writes, “Whether we are discussing the multinational corporation, global agricultural development, the protection of endangered species, religious toleration, the well-being of women, or simply how to run a firm efficiently, we increasingly find that we need comparative knowledge of many cultures to answer the questions we ask” (115), she is Western. Or when she observes, “When they [students] encounter violence against women, or assaults on democracy, or discrimination against members of a religious or ethnic minority, they are likely to say, ‘Well, that is their culture, and who are we to speak?’” (137), she is asking questions that are addressed primarily in the West and whose answers have come almost solely from the West. When she glibly insists that “real cultures are plural, not single” and suggests that we “would easily see the defects in a monolithic portrayal of ‘American values,”’ (127) she reveals either her biases or a lack of serious thought on the matter. Freedom of religion and speech? Private property? Democracy? Free markets? A citizen army? A great majority of Americans would find these to be values and institutions that are embedded in our culture and are being adopted the world over. Instead of coming to grips with the dangerous dynamism—the exploration and destruction, the creativity and exploitation—of the West, Nussbaum says we should study non-Western cultures “partly because in so doing we come to understand intellectual and moral wrongs in which our predecessors have been implicated” (116). Once again the liberal academic guilt is found to be the pressing motive behind her discussion. She fails to see that the sins of the West are the sins of mankind and that it’s primarily in the West that the spirit of self-criticism has led to an amelioration of these evils.
There are further ironies. A true exploration of “world citizenship” would focus on the similarities in human nature, on common denominators of experience and response that could unite us. But Nussbaum instead chooses to concentrate on the cultural differences. Permit me to quote a passage in full to give a fair flavor of the kind of anecdotal evidence and odd conclusions that pervade the book:
Anna was a political science major at a large state university in the Midwest. Upon graduation she went into business, getting a promising job with a large firm. After twelve years she had risen to a middle-management position. One day, her firm assigned her to the newly opened Beijing office. What did she need to know, and how well did her education prepare her for success in her new role? In a middle-management position, Anna is working with both Chinese and American employees, both male and female. She needs to know how Chinese people think about work (and not to assume there is just one way); she needs to know how cooperative networks are formed, and what misunderstandings might arise in interactions between Chinese and American workers. Knowledge of recent Chinese history is important, since the disruptions of the Cultural Revolution still shape workers’ attitudes. Anna also needs to consider her response to the recent policy of urging women to return to the home, and to associated practices of laying off women first. This means she should know something about Chinese gender relations, both in the Confucian tradition and more recently. She should probably know something about academic women’s studies in the United States, which have influenced the women’s studies movement in Chinese universities. She certainly needs a more general view about human rights, and about to what extent it is either legitimate or wise to criticize another nation’s ways of life. In the future, Anna may find herself dealing with problems of anti-African racism, and with recent government attempts to exclude immigrants who test positive for the human immunodeficiency virus. Doing this well will require her to know something about the history of Chinese attitudes about race and sexuality. It will also mean being able to keep her moral bearings even when she knows that the society around her will not accept her view. (50-51)
This may be one of the silliest passages yet in the culture wars. Anna could have majored in Chinese culture for four years at the best university in the country and not known all this. Moreover, as Nussbaum herself admits without seeing the contradictions, Anna “had a rough time getting settled in China, and the firm’s dealings with its new context were not always very successful. A persistent and curious person, however, she stayed on and has made herself a good interpreter of cultural difference” (51). So on the practical level, Anna didn’t need all those women’s studies courses after all. What she needed was some intelligence, a desire to succeed, and the ability to think critically which she could have received in any solid course of study in the traditional liberal arts. It is also curious that a professor of Greek and Latin who has claimed to have the best current working knowledge of philosophical Greek, who has boasted of a competency equivalent to the ancient Greeks themselves,2 should fail to mention that Anna would be best served by learning a little Chinese.
Who would disagree that we must be made aware of cultural variety in order to become a “sensitive and empathic interpreter” of others? But one might more reasonably argue that it is the rest of the world that has learned to act like the West, to understand how we do things. The world is becoming more Western, just as Nussbaum would have us dedicate more of our education to cultures who want to be or are simply forced to be like us. Why would we want to deprive our students of the very material that Nussbaum has found so stimulating and is the source of her own sensitivities?
Faculty and administrators who remain grounded in the quotidian realities of teaching undergraduates know that a curriculum can accomplish only so many things. Could we ever design a course of study that would have prepared Anna for every possible event life might throw in her way? Well, perhaps—the traditional liberal arts are exactly what students need in today’s fast-changing world: to learn to think, to learn to learn, to learn to act in accordance with their reasoned thoughts. Yet Nussbaum seems to want to dilute the learning of the process and the study of the West in favor of sensitivity training.
Nussbaum’s argument also runs aground on the moral sandbar of cultural relativity. She wants to reject moral relativism—“World citizenship does not, and should not, require that we suspend criticism toward other individuals and cultures” (65)—but she in fact never suggests what we are to do when cultural values clash in such a way as to require us to make a choice. And what criteria are we to use, if not Western, as the basis for this criticism? For example, the famous case of clitorectomies is frequently raised in her text. What are we to do? Talk. Sympathize—it’s okay to disagree. Argument, in other words, not for truth or action, but apparently for therapy and mutual understanding. Another of her telling anecdotes again proves the exact opposite of what she is trying to demonstrate. In an attempt to show that a nonjudgmental approach to moral issues in other cultures based on Socratic argument is optimal and can be successful, Nussbaum cites the example of a class taught by a teacher with a “nonrelativist moral view.” The paper receiving the highest grade is one with which the instructor, a Professor Stoddard, vigorously disagrees—a defense of a “hands-off’ relativist position toward female circumcision:
“Because it is impossible to judge a practice so foreign to our own conception of establishing social identity,” writes Student Q (a male), “it is better to take a neutral position on the issue, and to accept…choices made by a culture with graciousness.” Stoddard writes in the margin, “Where do you draw the line? If a country were slaughtering all male children, should we intervene?” As the argument unfolds, Stoddard commends parts of Q’s strategy—his insistence, for example, that internal critique and opposition are likely to be more knowledgable and precise than Western judgment at a distance; she commends his careful exegesis of material about two African cultures from books read in the course. (209)
Nussbaum’s logic simply fails here. If she agrees that “internal critique and opposition” of a culture are likely to be more knowledgable (and therefore superior?) than another culture’s views, her argument for applying Socratic argumentation to all courses of study falls apart. Any internal critique, whether based on tradition, divine revelation, the king’s word, or holy text, must be considered more valuable for understanding another culture than Nussbaum’s own Western dialectic. But Nussbaum doesn’t believe this herself—her thesis is that we need Western, rational thought to overcome the flaws in our culture. So which is it?
Moreover, if the “best” essay hasn’t taken into consideration the logical consequences of the moral stance—the professor asks a good and obvious question but apparently does not expect the student to have thought of it—what can this possibly say about the worse essays? Since the entire Socratic and reason-dominated approach Nussbaum advocates is Western, why is it commendable to subordinate that tradition to, or even equate it with, another? If argument is supposed to arrive at a defendable answer and not mere acceptance of difference, why would we want our students to accept practices that can’t be defended logically? Apparently the universal standards we use to condemn all the dreaded -isms of our own culture are to be suspended when judging behavior in other cultures.
Though she also claims to reject identity politics (109-111), Nussbaum nonetheless defends its practitioners on the most peculiar of grounds. “Indeed, it seems a bit hard to blame literature professionals for the current prevalence of identity politics in the academy, when these scholars simply reflect a cultural view that has other, more powerful sources” (110). And what are these? Market economists, of course. She quotes Milton Friedman, “who said that about matters of value, ‘men can ultimately only fight.’ This statement is false and pernicious.” But why? Wasn’t our Civil War primarily fought over “matters of value”? Didn’t millions die in Europe in this century over “matters of value”? Whether the values are good ones, or worth fighting over, should be subject to argument, but again, where but in the West is there such a long tradition of open and rational critique of the causes and necessities of war? There are different values, and they do conflict, and sometimes one must act on the basis of those values in order to defend them. All disagreement must not, and does not, lead to battle, but what would Nussbaum, who proudly discusses her adopted Judaism throughout the book, have had us do in the early 1940s? Were we to try to understand and sympathize with the “different” cultural approach taken to the value of human life by the Third Reich?
What is especially troublesome in this attack is Nussbaum’s hypocrisy. How much longer will we have to listen to self-proclaimed liberal academics criticize the open market system while they negotiate higher salaries, lower teaching loads, and demand more perks for themselves, bouncing one offer against another as they travel the world lecturing for pay on the evils of capitalism?
Nussbaum’s agenda is clear, but her solution to the perceived problems is not. After thirty pages of misunderstanding the uniqueness of the West as well as misrepresenting it (who, if not the Romans, stumbled upon a notion of religious toleration unlike any that was to be seen for the next 1,500 years?), what are Nussbaum’s recommendations for an improved curriculum? They are three: a world religions course, foreign language proficiency, and the study of one non-Western culture. These are remarkably tame and sensible, and many universities already have them. Still, would this not-so-new curriculum accomplish Nussbaum’s goals, would it have helped poor Anna clear the hurdles in China? Even if she had taken “Introduction to the Religions of Asia,” a year of Chinese, and “Women in Contemporary China,” my guess is that she would still have been lost in Beijing. And what if Anna had ended up in Moscow instead?
Two chapters on African-American Studies and Women’s Studies follow parallel paths. A few anecdotes from contemporary classrooms are followed by the institutional histories of these programs at Harvard, from which conclusions about their necessity and usefulness are then drawn. Nussbaum desperately wants to appear to be arguing against identity politics and insists that the primary reason for these studies is to foster world citizenship. She tries to ignore the remarkable politicization and extremism of many of these departments and programs, but she avoids any serious examination of the frequent critiques made by critics of the university. She dismisses the arguments of such censors of academic feminism as Christina Hoff Sommers, and Daphne Patai and Noretta Kortge, as based on a “small number of anecdotes” and the comments of anonymous and “disgruntled individuals.” She then supplies a small number of anecdotes and comments from a few nondisgruntled individuals to prove the success of these courses. As Nussbaum herself admits, one of the differences may be that Hoff Sommers looked at Women’s Studies programs, whereas Nussbaum concentrates on courses on women in traditional departments, although even here she again must concede that “a number of courses I visited seemed to err in the direction of withholding criticism” (205) in rather un-Socratic fashion. Still, she defends even Catharine MacKinnon, whose conclusions about men’s “perverse” control of women’s preferences are notoriously extreme.
Nussbaum concludes: “Critics of feminism are wrong to think that it is dangerous for democracy to consider these ideas, and dangerous for college classrooms to debate them. Instead, it is dangerous not to consider them, as we strive to build a society that is both rational and just” (221). Few critics of academic feminism argue against any form of rational debate, and Nussbaum’s attempts to sidestep the charges of indoctrination simply draw attention to the problem. The issue has almost always been the reverse, that advocates of special studies programs feel rational debate to be an attempt to undermine their authority, to impose male, Western, hegemonic discourse upon others. That is the reason they, and Nussbaum, talk so frequently about “exciting new methodologies” that inevitably call in the social constructionists and epistemological skeptics who hypocritically argue against the possibility of meaning and truth in jargon-laden academic prose we are supposed to accept as a true account of the subject at hand.
Nussbaum also fails to make any serious effort to prove that academic feminism is necessary for a “just” society. In fact, she completely ignores her basic question, which is whether Women’s Studies is necessary at all. That people should study the role of women in history and culture and political policy, and so on, is denied by few. But her examples—for instance, Sarah Pomeroy’s work from the mid-1970s—are hardly representative of modern academic feminist scholarship, at least in classics. Pomeroy used—and continues to use—very traditional methods to open up a new area of study. What Nussbaum needs to do is demonstrate why we need special interest programs now, when she herself admits that there is little to justify them methodologically or curricularly (194-195).
Her final chapter on special interest programs—the study of human sexuality—begins, as we would expect, by defending Foucault’s claims that sexuality is a “social construct.” She uses the work of Dover, Halperin, and Winkler in classics to demonstrate the importance and possibility of investigating “sexuality historically and scientifically, without losing one’s sense of moral urgency about one’s choices” (256). To accomplish this sleight-of-hand she must completely ignore the criticisms of Foucault, not to mention those of Halperin and Winkler, that have challenged the validity of this work. If Nussbaum were really interested in argument and Socratic disputation, she would have to discuss the criticisms of such scholars as Camille Paglia and Bruce Thornton, who demonstrate with all logic and clarity that most of the work in classics based on Foucault is flawed, not just because the great man himself was inconsistent and extreme, but also because he was gravely misunderstood by his acolytes. Indeed, if she cared at all about honest argumentation, she would have recused herself from any discussion of Colorado’s Amendment Two, in the court case concerning which she has been accused of lying under oath.3
She closes her analysis by comparing the acceptance of special interest programs at two different religious universities, Notre Dame and Brigham Young. One final time Nussbaum gives us her argument and then betrays it.
It seems plausible that a religious university can thrive only if it protects and fosters inquiry into all forms of human culture and self-expression, providing students with the mental tools they need to confront diversity in their own lives as citizens, workers, and friends. This does not entail a hands-off attitude to criticism of what one encounters; it does entail respect, and a sincere and prolonged effort at understanding. (259)
But eventually one must make a choice. Can homosexuality be part of the good Christian life? Do women belong in the upper echelons of religious institutions founded upon divinely inspired texts and dogmatic exegetical traditions that exclude them? Is abortion permissible? Nussbaum continues to treat education as a matter only of the mind, not of action. As long as we’re talking, it’s good. And especially as long as we’re talking from the right perspective, it’s good. But this academic approach is exactly what is wrong with the current curriculum. The good life isn’t merely self-examination, but acting upon what one believes is right on the basis of that self-examination. Socrates drank the hemlock.
Nussbaum’s argument—that Notre Dame is more open to discussion of sensitive social issues and therefore a better university—is a bit of a non sequitur but generally acceptable taken on its most basic level. Once again, though, her methodology is weak. Her voice for the Catholic institution is primarily that of Philip Quinn, who “is a leading liberal on faculty issues of gender and sexuality” (264). But the campus as a whole, as she admits, is divided on these issues, and even a reader like this one, who considers Brigham Young to be an unlikely place to find much provocative teaching or research in the liberal arts, has to feel a bit of sympathy for that institution after Nussbaum’s muddled attack. For example, she suggests that at BYU “the doctrine of ‘continuing revelation’—conspicuously invoked on June 9, 1978, to alter long-time church policy by admitting African-American males to the priesthood—makes it perpetually unclear whether the statements that seem most authoritative today will continue to bind tomorrow” (280). Yet just eleven pages earlier she had indirectly praised an identical flexibility of the Catholic Church, when she commented that in 1954, “conservative theologians in Rome tried to get [president] Father Hesburgh to withdraw a book published by the University of Notre Dame Press because of an article by liberal Jesuit John Courtney Murray on religious liberty in a pluralistic society—defending positions that are by now official positions of the church—Hesburgh fought vigorously…” (269). When Mormon officials change their mind, they make the university a difficult place in which to think. When the Catholic Church changes its mind, it has wisely adopted liberal Jesuit thinking promoted by the university. In general, the entire approach is offensive. Nussbaum passes judgment on these two institutions—and Notre Dame, in the minds of Nussbaum and Quinn, has far to go—on the basis of their openness to special studies programs. Nussbaum is finally ready to judge, but only with a litmus test of institutional sensitivity to her extremely politicized social agenda. Indeed, she could have examined the role religion can play in opening or shutting the mind by a much more interesting comparison of the way theology, for example, is taught at Notre Dame and at a Vatican-chartered campus like the Catholic University.
Nussbaum concludes her study by misinterpreting what is really going on in the culture wars.
By portraying today’s humanities departments as faddish, insubstantial, and controlled by a radical elite, cultural conservatives-while calling for a return to a more traditional liberal arts curriculum—in practice feed the popular disdain for the humanities that has led to curtailment of departments and programs and to the rise of narrow preprofessional studies. When critics such as Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, and George Will caricature the activities of today’s humanities departments by focusing only on what can be made to look extreme or absurd, they probably do not promote their goal of increasing university support for traditional humanistic education. (298)
Again, as so often in this book, Nussbaum tells half the story. If “the state legislator or parent who reads such attacks” disdains the humanities, that is not the fault of critics like Harold Fromm or Dinesh D’Souza. They tell far more ugly (and equally true) anecdotes than Nussbaum tells pretty ones, if one must rely on tales, and they often use statistics, whereas Nussbaum uses none. And the cultural critics of the modern university also have the reams of jargon-ridden, epistemologically skeptical, morally relativistic research to quote. Nussbaum rarely cites recent academic research from the special studies programs she supports, and with good reason—it would prove her vision of the modern liberal arts wrong in nearly every case.
The one curricular experiment, the one reform of higher education that has not been tried on a vast scale in the last twenty years of an increasingly diverse student population, is that of an intensified Western culture sequence. Such a program would accomplish most of Nussbaum’s goals—the inculcation of Socratic argumentation, an understanding of the importance of culture and cultural difference, the need to question, and the significance of the blending of reason and emotion in one’s study and life—while avoiding the glaring weaknesses of her reformed curriculum: intellectual inquiry put to simplistic, political uses; the emphasis on cultural, racial, and sexual difference rather than the common bonds of human nature; the shutting down of judgment; the loss of truth as an object of intellectual pursuit; and the neglect of action as an essential element in morality. It would also do a great deal to explain how the world got to where it is today, and even suggest what we might do to get it where we would like it to go.
Ultimately the trouble with Cultivating Humanity may be that Nussbaum’s brain knows better than to lead where her politics want to take her. And so she has written a classical defense of reform in liberal education, one that unintentionally but resoundingly calls for a reform of the reformers. She never sees the irony in one of her opening sentences, the connection between what has happened to liberal education and its failure to take root in the university or the public at large: “Never before have there been so many talented and committed young faculty so broadly dispersed in institutions of so many different kinds, thinking about difficult issues connecting education with citizenship. The shortage of jobs in the humanities and social science has led to hardships; many have left the professions they love” (2-3). Captain Nussbaum doesn’t appear to wonder why the crew of her ship has thinned out as she orders it full speed ahead into the looming iceberg. And one suspects that the Ernst Freund Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago will not be going down with her ship.