Salvaging Classical Studies

by J. Lawrence Scholer

If I were a prominent notable classicist at Harvard, or even at Chicago, chances are good that I would start this review off with a few embarrassing personal anecdotes loosely related to my subject.

This may sound absurd, but it is exactly what many scholars at prestigious institutions are doing, regardless of the expense to their field. It is "personal voice" theory, and many scholars see this as "the golden mean between narrow philological pedantry and incomprehensible postmodernist theory."

Articles incorporating personal voice have little to do with classical studies and more to do an author’s lust for a colleague, homosexual fantasies, and childhood sexual abuse. In "Reading and Re-Reading the Helpful Princess," Judith de Luce, considering mythological figures like Theseus, wonders why so many privileged, white males in classical literature use women for personal gain and then abandon them. Luce makes her point and writes, "Like many women, I have found myself performing the role of the helpful princess too often." As it turns out, a good friend of Luce’s had been abandoned by her career-driven doctor husband upon his graduation from medical school. Not too lurid, but still it is better material for a daytime talk show than the already crowded body of classical criticism. Criticism has become a forum for scholars to whine about their own shortcomings while leaving shattered classics in their wake.

Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, and Bruce Thornton, all classicists, reach this conclusion, among others, in Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age. Hanson et al. see the classics as an academic discipline on the verge of extinction in higher education. Apathetic students and an ignorant public, however, are not guilty; their disinterest is justified. Blood is on the hands of classicists who have butchered their own discipline: "The study of ancient Greek and Latin language and civilization has been immolated in various bonfires lit by any numbers of modern Savonarolas, the ideologues of the multicultural and postmodern Left who wish to destroy the beauty and brilliance they cannot acknowledge or appreciate."

Bonfire consists of eight essays, all published previously. Hanson, Heath, and Thornton are the pariahs of the politically correct body of classicists. A feminist colleague once claimed to give Hanson and Heath’s names to the FBI as possible Unabomber suspects. They do not fear criticizing their colleagues—several of these essays are direct responses to papers published by other classicists. They however are not polemicists. Bonfire instead sets out to rescue the classics, and we watch as their colleagues, their claims of saviorhood aside, are only hastening their death.

For classics to survive, the subject must attract students—something it has not done of late. Interest in classics has diminished greatly as politics has entered the discipline and as students themselves have changed. College students today seek a college education as a means of procuring a good job. Seventy-five percent of entering freshmen this fall said "being well-off" was the most important goal of their education. Only 40.8 percent chose "developing a philosophy of life." In 1968, the results were reversed: 40.8 percent wanted financial security and 82.5 percent sought a philosophy of life. A bell weather, high school Latin enrollment has plummeted as well.

This drop in student interest has occurred alongside politicization of the classics—the introduction of multi-culturalism. "The decline of the appeal of the humanities, in fact, oddly coincides almost directly with the rise of race-gender-class scholarship," writes Heath. Why? Students "recognize the difference between indoctrination and education, even if professors don’t." These undergraduates may be smarter than their professors/researchers think. Multiculturalism strips classics of what they teach best; "to learn to think, to learn to learn, to learn to act in accordance with reasoned thoughts." Instead, many current classicists teach the classics as sensitivity training. Each student is a budding "world citizen," which is "someone who develops a rational strategy to tolerate and sympathize with everything and everybody."

Multiculturalism has "drained the last drops [of blood] from a fading patient," write Hanson and Heath. For the classicists criticized in these essays, multiculturalism is a social construct, a breed of identity. Whites presumably "feel some mystic kinship with Homer and Shakespeare." It is as if whites "have a great books gene that can overcome the limitations of economic class and ignorance." Black Americans, for example, have an African culture that is "so completely different from American culture and its European antecedents that any black student would find them at some level incomprehensible." This is a polarized multi-culturalism; the white male is the oppressor and everyone one else is the victim.

Classical studies has long held a penchant for snobbery, of keeping aristocratic ranks. Though many current scholars despise British classicists, dismissing them as elitists, they are the far worse snobs. "For those who are so angry at British snobbery, why [are there] so many off-the-cuff and meaningless references, such as an association with George Bush’s boyhood academy or personal contact with [former vice president Al Gore]," writes Hanson. For all their efforts to come off as populist, the new generation of classicists takes great pride in dropping the names of Massachusetts’ prep schools or even B-list celebrities. At best irrelevant in their scholarly writings, such petty petit-bourgeois striving unveils a deeply-seated contempt for the equality they preach from their lecterns while trivializing their would-be classical subjects.

Elitism rears its ugly head again when these professors pick up a pen. Clear, precise prose is no more. Instead, scholars preach that "complex ideas necessitate convoluted syntax, incoherent organization, and pretentious jargon." Of course, that their writing may be mis- or un-understood is not their fault. "If the reader does not understand the essays it is because he is not smart enough and so had better go back and read them again."

Hanson offers an example of this new, incomprehensible writing from modern scholar John Henderson: "Phew! There, that’s better. But…O scholarship, industry of avowal & deniability! Those men! They would say that, wouldn’t they?"

What student would prefer to read this mess?

Other authors try to break from the formulaic rigidity of academic writing with profanity. Classicist Susanna Braund praises colleague Amy Richlin for her pointed vulgarity: "What is refreshing here, and throughout Richlin’s book, is that she does not shirk the relevant four letter words. She has broken with tradition in introducing words like asshole, cunt and f-ck into her text." "Using f-ck in print rather than intercourse is about as courageous, refreshing, and unusual as talking publicly about an alcoholic parent," writes Hanson. And about as useful as talking about an alcoholic parent in a physics lecture.

How can a discipline attract students when they will be subjected to jumbled nonsense, profanity, and celebrated incoherence in the place of traditional criticism? How is this kind of study more useful than its predecessors? Bonfire’s point: it can’t and it isn’t.

The introduction of postmodernism and personal voice theory have done nothing but harm classical study. If truth is a construct, and there is no truth innate in anything, what does Homer’s Odyssey become? It can become anything: "Greeks could become anything you wanted…Forget what the Greeks actually said and did; new rules were enlisted to prove what they did not say." And, so, why bother to study the Odyssey?

Postmodernist scholars have become the ultimate hypocrites. Dutifully deconstructing classical writings, they tap away at their laptops composing obscure articles to pad their curriculum vitae. Postmodernism is only practiced when convenient: Homer’s epics have no meaning when a scholar is butchering them, but the scholar’s writing has meaning when it appears in a philological journal.

John Heath sums the disconnect well: "The link between what we say and do, so central to Greek thinking, has of course been completely severed in the modern world university, where we are judged solely by what we write or say to a handful of colleagues and not at all on how this matches what we do or how we live."

As long as this hypocrisy exists in higher education, the classical tradition is doomed. Professors bash the Greeks as having been sexists and racists. They deny them the core values they have contributed to the West, pointing instead to Africa, or they pass these values off as oppressive to all things except straight, white males. Would these professors rather live "under indigenous pre-Columbian ideas of government, Arabic protocols for female behavior, Chinese canons of medical ethics, Islamic traditions of church and state, African approaches to science, Japanese ideals of race, Indian social castes, or Native American notions of private property?"

In order for classics to survive, its scholars must resolve their practice. Will they remain with the Lotus-Eaters: leading easy lives, sequestered in their offices writing obscure articles, sucking on the fruit of multiculturalism? Or will they heed Bonfire’s advice?

The classics hold the answer.