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Following the Herd In 1981 my father, an intellectually frustrated political scientist, came home from work, took off his trench coat, dropped his grey tweed jacket patched at the elbows, and quit the academic clan for good. The immediate cause was a case at a New York college. My father had failed a student in his Urban Politics class on the grounds that the student had lifted entire sections of his term paper directly from one of the courses’ main texts. The ruling dean overturned the failure on the grounds that the student was a decent enough fellow who was working two jobs to put himself through college and so deserved a second shot. The academic horde was, in 1981, well into its transition to the narrow ideologies of race-gender-class politics, and the consequent subjugation of the artistic and the humane. It was that narrow race-gender-class orientation which deemed plagarism redeemable in my father’s student because he was poor and of sympathetic ethnicity. Discussion of ethnic studies is inherently inseperable from discussion of race-gender-class ideology — it is that very ideology which spawned the ethnic studies discipline. Deconstruction judges the motives of Western cultures corrupt, and initiates a charge into the third world in search of less corrupt cultures. Hence ethnic studies, which holds the politics and culture of disparate peoples to be immediately relevant. This search and this conclusion are equally misguided. The art of a culture, in all of its forms, cannot be condemned simply because of that culture’s politics. Were Hamlet written by a collaborating Russian during the time of Stalin, it would be no less a work of art than if it were written by an Elizabethan Englishman. Were Picasso found to be a Nazi sympathizer, it would make his works no less aesthetically sound. Even if we accept the deconstructionist’s impulses and arguments, the case for ethnic studies does not follow. Even if we believe the West to be politically corrupt, that is no reason to ignore its cultural achievements. The recent proposal of an ethnic studies curriculum for Dartmouth brings these arguments home to Hanover. The curriculum has an agreeable political bent for the faculty and already has the tacit approval of the administration. What remains to be seen is how deeply the ethnic studies mentality will permeate the campus — in effect, how deeply these ideologies will carve up Dartmouth. If outside evidence is any measure, we are not in terribly good shape. This week I interviewed Professor John Ellis, a literature scholar at the University of California who has published prominently on the state of modern academia. When I asked Professor Ellis what he thought of ethnic studies programs, he bellowed at me “Cowardly!” Professor Ellis went on to describe the damage such curricula have done to intellectual discourse on the west coast. These programs and their supporting ideologies have, he argues, substituted political acceptibility for methodological standards, and politicized every aspect of academic discussion and campus discourse. The problem with Deconstructionist ideology is its overarching focus on theory, and ‘Theory’ has, for the past thirty years, been a euphemism for political bent. Deconstruction is built around an accepted political reference point, and as such steps distinctly outside of the Western tradition of rational dissent. It creates an intellectual culture of spiralling agreement and self-congratulation.
We do not study the Western Canon out of arbitrary narrow-mindedness. We study it instead because it grows from a history of dissent, a history of tension between notions of aestethic validity, and a history of writers and artists who know their context and study it with a critical eye. You can take your Herder and shove it. I’ll keep my Rome. -- Benjamin Wallace-Wells |
The
moral superiority complex bred by this
self-congratulation makes the prophecies of
Deconstruction inherently self-fulfilling. Anyone who
criticizes deconstruction is by definition insensitive to
foreign points of view and necessarily Eurocentric,
racist, sexist, and likely facist.