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 materialists, 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.
In the mid-1970s, aware that the Mao era in China was coming to an end, Martin Bernal began to sense that ‘the central focus of danger and interest in the world’ was the east Mediterranean, and he began to study Jewish history. There were, he says, ‘scattered Jewish components’ in his own ancestry, and an interest in his roots led him to study ancient Jewish history and the surrounding peoples. This led to an examination of early Mediterranean languages for the light they threw on prehistory, in particular the ancestry of classical Greece. His research took him ten years before it appeared in book form, but when it was published, it proved very subversive. Bernal eventually demonstrated to his own satisfaction that classical Greek culture – the very basis of the canon – did not develop of its own accord in ancient Greece around 400 BC, as traditional scholarship has it, but was actually derived from North African peoples who were black.
Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation (1987–91) is a massive three-volume work incorporating and synthesising material in philology, archaeology, history, historiography, biblical studies, ethnic studies, sociology, and much else, and so it is not easy to do justice to Bernal’s complex arguments.22 In essence, however, he makes the following points. One is that North Africa, in the form of ancient Egypt – several of whose dynasties were black, in the sense of Negroid – was the predominant influence on classical Greece; that there were extensive trading links; that ancient Egypt was a military power in the area; that many place names in Greece show North African influence; and that the finding of objects of North African origin at classical Greek sites cannot be dismissed as casual trading exchanges. No less controversially, Bernal also claimed that this view of Greece was ‘standard,’ had always prevailed in European scholarship, until it was deliberately ‘killed off by ‘racist’ north European scholars in the early nineteenth century, men who wanted to show that Europe, and northern Europe at that, had a monopoly on creative and imaginative thought, that civilisation as we know it was born in Europe, all as one of a number of devices to help justify colonialism and imperialism.23
Bernal believed that there was once a people who spoke Proto-Afro-Asiatic-Indo-European, which gave rise to all the peoples and languages we see on these continents today. He believes that the break between Afro-asiatic and Indo-European came in the ninth millennium B.C. and that the spread of Afro-Asiatic was the expansion of a culture, long established in the East African Rift Valley at the end of the last ice age in the tenth and ninth millennia BC. These people domesticated cattle and food crops and hunted hippopotamus. Gradually, with the spread of the Sahara, they moved on, some down the Nile valley, some into Saudi Arabia and thus into Mesopotamia, where the first ‘civilisations’ arose.24 Furthermore, civilisation, including writing, developed across a swath of Asia, stretching from India to North Africa, and was in place by 1100 BC or earlier. Bernal introduces evidence of a succession of Upper Egyptian black pharaohs sharing the name Menthope who had as their divine patron the hawk and bull god, Mntw or Mont. ‘It is during the same century that the Cretan palaces were established and one finds the beginnings there of the bull-cult which appears on the walls of the palaces and was central to Greek mythology about King Minos and Crete. It would therefore seem plausible to suppose that the Cretan developments directly or indirectly reflected the rise of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom.’25 But this is only a beginning. Bernal examined classical Greek plays, such as Aeschylus’s The Supplicants, for Egyptian influences; he looked at correspondences between their gods and functions; he looked at loan words, river and mountain names (Kephisos, the name of rivers and streams found all over Greece with no explanation, he derives from Kbh, ‘a common Egyptian river name “Fresh” ’). In a chapter on Athens, he argues that this name is derived from the Egyptian Ht Nt: ‘In Antiquity, Athena was consistently identified with the Egyptian goddess Nt or Neit. Both were virgin divinities of warfare, weaving and wisdom. The cult of Neit was centred on the city of Sais in the Western delta, whose citizens felt a special affinity with the Athenians.’26 And so on into pottery styles, military terms, and the meaning of the sphinxes.
The second half of Bernal’s book follows the writings of scientists and others in the Renaissance, men like Copernicus and Giordano Bruno, to show that they accepted the Egyptian influence on Greece much more readily than later scholars. Following the French Revolution, however, Bernal discerns a reaction by Christians against the threat of the ‘wisdom’ of Egypt, and a rise of ‘Hellenomania.’ He describes a series of German, British, and French scholars, all more or less racist in outlook (anti-black and anti-Semitic), who he says deliberately played down the significance of Egypt and North Africa generally. In particular, he singles out Karl Otfried Müller, who ‘used the new techniques of source criticism to discredit all the ancient references to the Egyptian colonisations, and weaken those concerning the Phoenicians.’27 According to Bernal, Müller was anti-Semitic and denied the Phoenicians any role in the creation of ancient Greece, an approach other scholars built on in the years 1880–1945, resulting in the Greeks being given ‘a semi-divine status.’ In essence, Bernal says, classical studies as we know them today are a nineteenth-century creation, and false.
Bernal’s book evoked a detailed response, which appeared in 1996 under the tide Black Athena Revisited, edited by Mary Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers, both of Wellesley College.28 Here a collection of scholars – from America, Italy, and Britain, and including Frank Snowden, a distinguished classics professor from Howard University, a black institution – concluded that Martin Bernal was wrong on almost every count, except perhaps that of causing classicists to look at themselves with a more questioning mind. In particular, they concluded that (a) ancient Egypt wasn’t black; (b) its influence on classical Greece, while not nonexistent, was not predominant either; and (c) by no means all of the scholars promoting the ‘Aryan’ view of the past were anti-Semites or romanticists. Bernal’s revised dating of certain allegedly key events in Egyptian-Greek history was based on faulty radiocarbon readings; analysis of ancient Egyptian skeletons and skulls shows that they were comprised of a variety of peoples, closest to racial types from the Sudan but not to those of West Africa, the most negroid of all. Analysis of ancient art, and ancient Greek, Roman, and other languages, shows that the Egyptians were regarded as very different from traditional ‘black’ groups, the Aithiopes or Aesthiopes (Ethiopians), literally ‘burnt-faced peoples.’29 Frank Snowden showed that in classical times the Ethiopians were used, by Herodotus among others, as the yardstick in blackness and in their style of ‘woolly’ hair. Nubians were seen as not as black as Ethiopians but blacker than the Egyptians, who were darker than the Moors. Bernal claimed that various Greek city names – Methone, Mothone, and Methana – went back to the Egyptian mtwn, meaning ‘bull fight, bull arena.’ But other scholars pointed out that methone means a ‘theatrical-looking harbour,’ and all the cities referred to by Bernal were exactly that.30 On the matter of racism, Guy Rogers took Bernal to task for singling out George Grote as an anti-Semite, when in fact Grote was associated with the founding of University College, London, in 1829, one specific aim of which was to offer higher education to groups excluded from Oxford and Cambridge, namely Nonconformists, Catholics, and Jews.31
Bemal was accused of doing more harm than good, of throwing in his lot with other writers like C. A. Diop, who in The African Origin of Civilisation (1974) had ‘falsified’ history in portraying Egyptians as black, and of ignoring evidence that went against the hypothesis (for example, that mythical beasts on many Greek vases were inspired by Near Eastern motifs rather than North African ones).32 Many scholars shared the view of Mary Lefkowitz, one of the editors of Black Athena Revisited, that Bernal’s ideas were no more than ‘Afrocentric fantasies,’ and his description of the Egyptians as black ‘misleading in the extreme.’ ‘For black Americans (many of whom now prefer to be known as African-Americans), the African origins of ancient Greek civilisation promise a myth of self-identification and self ennoblement, the kind of “noble lie” that Socrates suggests is needed for the Utopian state he describes in Plato’s Republic.’33 The issue is not settled and perhaps cannot hope to be. For this is only partly an intellectual debate. Exploring the alleged racism behind the theorising was just as much part of Bernal’s ‘project’ as was the substantive result.
These ‘culture wars’ were accompanied by ‘history wars’ and ‘curriculum wars,’ but they were all essentially the same thing: a fight between traditionalists and postmodernists.
One of the more bitter engagements arose over plans to mount an exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum (NASM), part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, in 1995, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945. Among the exhibits was a reconstructed Enola Gay, the Boeing B-29 bomber that had actually dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.34 After its historic mission, Enola Gay had a chequered history. For many years its disassembled components could be seen, by appointment only, in a suburban Maryland warehouse, so that it was for all practical purposes hidden from sight. Following representations from B-29 veterans, its restoration was eventually begun at the end of 1984, and as the anniversary of World War II approached, the possibility of displaying the plane began to rise. Even so, there were those wary of doing so in view of what Enola Gay represented. For many, there was nothing of unusual aeronautical interest in this B-29, merely its mission and its ‘equipment.’
When the decision was taken to mark the anniversary at the NASM, the idea grew at the Smithsonian that the exhibition should be not only a celebration of a military and technical victory but an examination of the use of atomic weapons and the opening of the nuclear age. Here the problems began, for many veterans and service organisations wanted a more propagandistic approach, more of a celebration than an examination of issues. When the various service organisations saw the script for the exhibition – 300 pages of text, which became available eighteen months before the start of the show – they didn’t like it. It was too ‘dark.’ Beginning in the pages of Air Force Magazine, the objections spread, taking in the media, the Pentagon, and Congress.35 It seemed that almost everyone except the historians wanted the exhibition to be a celebration, not raising uncomfortable questions about whether the decision to drop the atomic bomb had been correct. Forty historians wrote to President Clinton soliciting his support for the exhibition as a serious piece of history, but it did no good. In January 1995 it was announced that the exhibition was cancelled and was being replaced by a much less contentious show, more celebratory in tone. At the same time, the director of the Smithsonian also resigned. The decision to cancel the exhibition was widely welcomed in certain sections of the press and in Congress, where Newt Gingrich said that ‘people’ were ‘taking back’ their history from elites.36
The academic world had been the focus of Allan Bloom’s initial attack and defended by Stanley Fish and others. Not surprisingly, the university itself came under scrutiny in a series of surveys, in particular what was taught and how. The first of these, and the most intemperate, was Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, published in 1990.37 Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion, a conservative cultural and intellectual journal, had the idea of attending a number of seminars at various universities and amalgamating his account of them into a book. These conferences included ‘Architecture and Education: The Past Twenty-Five Years and Assumptions for the Future,’ a day-long symposium sponsored by the Princeton School of Architecture in 1988; another was a panel discussion at the Williams College convocation in 1989; and a third was the publication, in 1986, of a volume of essays taken from a conference at Stanford University, entitled Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality and the Self in Western Thought.38 Kimball found very little to admire or like in what he saw. He thought that most of the postmodernists showed an ‘eclectic’ mix of left-wing idea that were a hangover of the radical 1960s, owing a great deal to Marcuse’s notion of ‘repressive tolerance.’ He devoted a chapter to Paul de Man and to Stanley Fish, and he had great fun deriding what are admittedly some of the wilder excesses of postmodernist thought.39 He conceded that politics do influence artistic judgements but denied that, in the final analysis, they determine them.
But Kimball’s book was essentially an hysterical reaction, journalistic rather than considered. A more thoughtful response came from Dinesh d’Souza, an Indian who had emigrated to America in the late 1970s. His Illiberal Education: The Politics of Sex and Race on Campus appeared in 1991 and was an examination of six campuses in America – Berkeley, Stanford, Howard, Michigan, Duke, and Harvard – and how they dealt with the issues of sex and race, both in their admissions policy and in their teaching.40 D’Souza’s approach was statistical but not heavily so; he used figures where they were appropriate but also looked beyond them. At Berkeley, for instance, he quoted a confidential, internal report which showed that, after five years, only 18 percent of blacks admitted on affirmative action completed their courses, whereas 42 percent of blacks admitted to the regular program had graduated. D’Souza’s response was not hysterical, however. He admitted that one could look at the figures in two ways – as a sort of success and a sort of failure. His own idea was that these very students, ‘California’s best black and Hispanic students,’ might have fared better at other campuses, ‘where they might settle in more easily, compete against evenly matched peers, and graduate in vastly greater numbers and proportions.’41 He then looked at Stanford, where the faculty had, amid much controversy, dropped the Western civilisation course and replaced it with ‘Culture, Ideas, Values’ (CIV), which was intended to stress other values, ideas, and cultures besides the Western. He gave a list of the kind of works to be included in the ‘Europe and Americas’ track.
| Poets: | José Maria Arguedas, Pablo Neruda, Ernesto Cardenal, Audre Lorde, Aimé Césaire |
| Drama: | Shakespeare, Euripedes |
| Fiction: | García Márquez, Naipaul, Melville, Hurston, Findley, Rulfo, Ferre |
| Philosophy: | Aristotle, Rousseau, Weber, Freud, Marx, Fanon, Retamar, Benedict |
| History: | James, Guaman Poma |
| Diaries: | Columbus, Cabeza de Vaca, Equiano, Lady Nugent, Dyuk, Augustine, Menchu, Barrios de Chungara |
| Culture: | Films on popular religion and healing in Peru (‘Eduardo the Healer’) and the US (‘The Holy Ghost People’) |
| Music: | Reggae lyrics, Rastafarian poetry, Andean music |
D’Souza emphasised that this list was not mandated: ‘Stanford professors are given flexibility as long as they ensure “substantial representation” for the Third World.’42 Yet he was very critical of the way Shakespeare was taught, as primarily a function of ‘colonial, racial and gender forces,’ and he singled out I, Rigoberta Menchu, subtitled ‘An Indian Woman in Guatemala,’ as a typical new text, which was dictated to someone else because Rigoberta did not write. The book conveys much mundane information, especially about her family life, but spliced in among all this is her political awakening. D’Souza evinces scepticism as to how typical, or moving, or aesthetic, the book is; Rigoberta is said to speak for all native Americans, but among her experiences she goes to Paris to attend international conferences. (Later, in 1998, it emerged that Rigoberta Menchu had made up many of the experiences she reports in the book.)
D’Souza also took on Stanley Fish and Martin Bernal and quoted distinguished scholars, from David Riesman to E. O. Wilson and Willard van Orman Quine, who said they were distressed by the trends in American higher education.43 D’Souza’s final point was that when one puts together the dismal results from affirmative action alongside the new courses on third-world cultures and ideas, there is a major risk of replacing an old form of racism with a new one. ‘In one sense, the new racism is different, however. The old racism was based on prejudice, whereas the new racism is based on conclusions…. The new bigotry is not derived from ignorance, but from experience. It is harbored not by ignoramuses, but by students who have direct and first-hand experience with minorities in the close proximity of university settings. The “new racists” do not believe they have anything to learn about minorities; quite the contrary, they believe they are the only ones willing to face the truth about them … they are not uncomfortable about their views…. They feel they occupy the high ground, while everyone else is performing pirouettes and somersaults to avoid the obvious.’44
Not everyone found American campus life so bleak. Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, has taught all over the continent. Her book Cultivating Humanity appeared in 1997 and concerned not six but fifteen ‘core institutions,’ chosen to represent different types of higher-education outfit – the Ivy League elite, large state universities, small liberal arts colleges, religious universities like Notre Dame, Brandeis, and Brigham Young.45 Approaching her task as a classicist – the subtitle of her book was ‘A Classical Defence of Reform in Liberal Education’ – she argued that even ancient Athens, the crucial point of reference for conservative critics of multiculturalism, was more open to alternative views than these critics like to acknowledge. Nussbaum’s model was drawn from Socrates and the Stoics, who, she said, established three ‘core values’ of liberal education – critical self-examination, the ideal of the world citizen, and the development of the narrative imagination.46
Nussbaum’s message, from a greater number of campuses than anyone else had looked at, is that the number of extremists in universities is much less than anyone thinks, that there is a great appetite for, and interest in, philosophy, other cultures, and other lifestyles, that these courses are growing because they are popular among students rather than because a left-wing faculty is forcing them on pupils, and that when they are taught, they are taught far more often than not with a commendable academic rigour. There are, Nussbaum says, many ways for the imaginative teacher to bring home to students the relevance of the classics and philosophy: for example, in one class in Harvard the students are asked, Would Socrates have been a draft resister? She argues that Athens took seriously the idea of world citizenship and quotes Herodotus considering the possibility that Egypt and Persia might have something to teach Athens about social values.47 She finds it not at all odd that Amartya Sen teaches a course at Harvard called ‘Hunger and Famine,’ in which standard ideas about economics are given a new twist. She finds that the tragic form in the narrative imagination is especially powerful in crossing cultural boundaries – its universality and abstractness especially useful in drawing people together.48 She notes that, again, in ancient Athens the moral and the political went hand-in-hand, and asks if it is really possible to read George Eliot or Dickens without detachment and get from them all that there is. She too invokes Lionel Trilling and The Liberal Imagination, drawing from it the lesson that ‘the novel as genre is committed to liberalism in its very form, in the way in which it shows respect for the individuality and the privacy of each human mind.’49 The study of non-Western cultures, she says, is there to help combat what she calls ‘the descriptive vices’ – chauvinism and romanticism – and ‘the normative vices’ – chauvinism (again), arcadianism, and scepticism. She shows that many in the West have traditionally overestimated the extent to which Western culture is individualistic and Eastern culture is the opposite, and spends some time showing how individualistic non-Western societies can be. She applies the same approach to courses in African-American studies and women’s studies (she argues, for instance, that the sociobiologists base their theories in part on chimpanzees, but never on Bonobos, another primate, not discovered till 1929, whose ‘graceful and non-aggressive’ style differs sharply from that of the chimp). She found Notre Dame University (Catholic) much more open to matters that in theory ought to have been an intellectual threat than, say, Brigham Young (Mormon), and as a result the former was still changing, still popular, while the latter languished.50 In other words, Nussbaum is saying that once you go out and investigate the campuses, what is actually happening is much less sensational, much less worrying, much more worthwhile, than appears to be the case from the headlines. She was not the first person to find that evidence is a healthy counterweight to prejudice; that, after all, is what distinguishes scholarship proper from mere journalism.
The most original response to the culture wars was David Denby’s excellent Great Books, published in 1996. Denby, film critic of New York magazine and a contributing editor to the New Yorker, attended Columbia University in 1961, when he took two foundation courses, ‘Literature Humanities’ and ‘Contemporary Civilization.’51 In the autumn of 1991, he had the idea of sending himself back to Columbia to do the same courses. He wanted to see how they had changed, how they were now taught, and what effects they had on himself and the young freshmen attending Columbia in the 1990s. He had been a film critic since 1969, he said, and though he still loved his job, he was tired of the ‘society of the spectacle,’ the secondhand, continuously ironic world of the media: ‘The media give information, but information, in the 1990s, has become transitory and unstable. Once in place, it immediately gets pulled apart…. No one’s information is ever quite adequate, which is one reason among many that Americans now seem half-mad with anxiety and restlessness. Like many others, I was jaded yet still hungry; I was cast into the modern state of living-in-the-media, a state of excitement needled with disgust.’52 Denby takes us through the great books he liked (Homer, Plato, Virgil, the Bible, Dante, Rousseau, Shakespeare, Hume and Mill, Marx, Conrad, de Beauvoir, Woolf), leaving out what didn’t engage him (Galileo, Goethe, Darwin, Freud, Arendt, Habermas). His book is notable for some fine passages describing his own reactions to the Great Books, for the way he occasionally related them to movies, and for the way he fears for his son, Max, overwhelmed by tawdry and trivial media, against which these older voices cannot compete. He notes that minority students sometimes rebel against the ‘White, European’ nature of the books, but such rebellion, when it occurs, is heavily tinged with embarrassment and sorrow as much as with anger. And this was his main point, in conclusion: that students, whether white, black, Latino, or Asian, ‘rarely arrive at college as habitual readers,’ that few of them have more than a nominal connection with the past: ‘The vast majority of white students do not know the intellectual tradition that is allegedly theirs any better than black or brown ones do.’ The worlds of Homer, Dante, Boccaccio, Rousseau, and Marx are now so strange, so different, that he came to a surprising conclusion: ‘The core-curriculum courses jar so many student habits, violate so many contemporary pieties, and challenge so many forms of laziness that so far from serving a reactionary function, they are actually the most radical courses in the undergraduate curriculum.’53 Denby found that in fact the Great Books he (re)studied were capable of individual and idiosyncratic interpretation, not necessarily the interpretation the cultural right would wish, but that didn’t matter – the students grasped that ‘they dramatise the utmost any of us is capable of in love, suffering and knowledge.’ And, perhaps the best thing one can say about it, the Western canon can be used to attack the Western canon. ‘What [non-whites] absorb of the older “white” culture they will remake as their own; it cannot hurt them.’54
For Denby, a much greater danger came from the media. ‘Most high schools can’t begin to compete against a torrent of imagery and sound that makes every moment but the present seem quaint, bloodless, or dead.’55 In fact, he said, the modern world has turned itself upside down. On his first time round, in 1961, the immediacy of pop had been liberating, a wonderful antidote to the stifling classroom; but now ‘the movies have declined; pop has become a field of conformity and complacency, while the traditional high culture, by means of its very strangeness and difficulty, strikes students as odd. They may even be shocked by it…. The [great] books are less a conquering army than a kingdom of untameable beasts, at war with one another and with readers.’56
In 1999 Harold Bloom returned to his first love. In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom argued that the great poet ‘invented us,’ that ‘personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention.’57 Before Shakespeare, Bloom claims, characters did not grow and develop. ‘In Shakespeare, characters develop rather than unfold, and they develop because they reconceive themselves. Sometimes this comes about because they overhear themselves talking, whether to themselves or to others. Self-overhearing is the royal road to individuation.’58 Bloom’s book is deeply unfashionable, not only in its message but in the way it is written. It is an act of worship. He freely concedes that Bardolatry is and has been ‘a secular religion’ for some two hundred years, and he enjoys being in that tradition because he believes that the very successes of Shakespeare transcend all ways of approaching him: he is simply too brilliant, too intelligent, to be cut down to size, as the feminists, cultural materialists, and Marxists would like to do. ‘Shakespeare, through Hamlet, has made us skeptics in our relationships with anyone, because we have learned to doubt articulateness in the realm of affection…. Our ability to laugh at ourselves as readily as we do at others owes much to Falstaff…. Cleopatra [is the character] through whom the playwright taught us how complex eros is, and how impossible it is to divorce acting the part of being in love and the reality of being in love…. Mutability is incessant in her passional existence, and it excludes sincerity as being irrelevant to eros.’59 ‘When we are wholly human, and know ourselves, we become most like either Hamlet or Falstaff.’60
There is something magnificent about this ‘Bloom in love,’ dismissing his critics and opponents without even naming them. It is all very unscientific, but that is Bloom’s point: this is what art should seek to emulate, these are the feelings great art exists for. Individuation may have been one of the great issues of the century, but Shakespeare got there first, and has still not been equalled. He is the one man worth worshipping, and we are, if we will only see it, surrounded by his works.
One more distinguished combatant joined the Blooms on the barricades, an academic Boadicea whose broadsides went wider even than theirs: Gertrude Himmelfarb, the historian wife of Irving Kristol, founder (with Daniel Bell) of the Public Interest. In On Looking into the Abyss (1994), Himmelfarb, professor emeritus of history at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, attacked postmodernism in whatever guise it raised its head, from literary theory to philosophy to history.61 Her argument against literary theory was that the theory itself had displaced literature as the object of study and in the process taken away the ‘profound spiritual and emotional’ experience that comes with reading great works, the ‘dread beasts’ as she put it, ‘lurking at the bottom of the “Abyss.” ’62 As a result, she said, ‘The beasts of modernism have mutated into the beasts of postmodernism – relativism into nihilism, amorality into immorality, irrationality into insanity, sexual deviancy into polymorphous perversity.’63 She loathed the ‘boa-deconstructors’ like Derrida and Paul de Man and what they had done to literature, thinking their aim more political than literary (they would have agreed). She attacked the Annales school: she admired Fernand Braudel’s fortitude in producing his first great book in a concentration camp, from memory, but thought his concept of la longue durée gave him a fatally skewed perspective on such events as, say, the Holocaust. She thought that the new enemy of liberalism had become – well, liberalism itself. Liberalism was now so liberal, she argued, that it absolved postmodern historians, as they saw it, from any duty to the truth. ‘Postmodernists deny not only absolute truth but contingent, partial, incremental truth…. In the jargon of the school, truth is “totalising,” “hegemonic,” “logocentric,” “phallocentric,” “autocratic,” “tyrannical.” ’64 She turned on Richard Rorty for arguing there is no ‘essential’ truth or reality, and on Stanley Fish for arguing that the demise of objectivity ‘relieves me of the obligation to be right.’65 But her chief point was that ‘postmodernism entices us with the siren call of liberation and creativity,’ whereas there is a tendency for ‘absolute liberty to subvert the very liberty it seeks to preserve.’66 In particular, and dangerously, she saw about her a tendency to downplay the importance and horror of the Holocaust, to argue that it was something ‘structural,’ rather than a personal horror for which real individuals were responsible, which need not have happened, and which needed to be understood, and reunderstood by every generation. She tellingly quotes the dedication in David Abraham’s book The Collapse of the Weimar Republic, published in 1981, which contained the dedication, ‘For my parents – who at Auschwitz and elsewhere suffered the worst consequences of what I can merely write about.’ In Himmelfarb’s view, the reader is invited to think that the author’s parents perished in the camps, but they did not. This curious phraseology was later examined by Natalie Zemon Davis, an historian, who concluded that Abraham’s work had been designed to show that the Holocaust was not the work of devils ‘but of historical forces and actors.’67 This was too much for Himmelfarb, a relativising of evil that was beyond reason. It epitomised the postmodern predicament: the perfect example of where too much liberty has brought us.
There is a sense in which the culture wars are a kind of background radiation left over from the Big Bang of the Russian Revolution. At exactly the time that political Marxism was being dismantled, along with the Berlin Wall, postmodernism achieved its greatest triumphs. For the time being at least, the advocates of local knowledge have the edge. Gertrude Himmelfarb’s warning, however timely, and however sympathetic one finds it, is rather like trying to put a genie back into a bottle.