Humanities Replaced by Banalities

29 January AD 2014

In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

Thucydides

I recall as a boy the first day I made the magic acquaintance of Thucydides who unlocked for me an enduring love of ancient Greece. I then passed on to Herodotus and Plutarch, and next to Plato and Aristotle. As a boy and teenager in Paris, Illinois the great historians and philosophers of Greece, and then Rome, became my favorite instructors. Looking on the way in which most colleges and universities ignore this priceless heritage today is painful. My favorite living historian, Victor Davis Hanson describes the magnitude of the loss:

If the humanities could have adopted a worse strategy to combat these larger economic and cultural trends over the last decade, it would be hard to see how. In short, the humanities have been exhausted by a half-century of therapeutic “studies” courses: Peace and Conflict Resolution Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, Environmental Studies, Chicano Studies, Women’s Studies, Black Studies, Asian Studies, Cultural Studies, and Gay Studies. Any contemporary topic that could not otherwise justify itself as literary, historical, philosophical, or cultural simply tacked on the suffix “studies” and thereby found its way into the curriculum.

These “studies” courses shared an emphasis on race, class, and gender oppression that in turn had three negative consequences. First, they turned the study of literature and history from tragedy to melodrama, from beauty and paradox into banal predictability, and thus lost an entire generation of students. Second, they created a climate of advocacy that permeated the entire university, as the great works and events of the past were distorted and enlisted in advancing contemporary political agendas. Finally, the university lost not just the students, but the public as well, which turned to other sources—filmmakers, civic organizations, non-academic authors, and popular culture—for humanistic study.

The way this indoctrination played itself out in the typical humanities class was often comical. Homer’s Odyssey was not about an early epic Greek hero, who, with his wits, muscle, and courage overcomes natural and human challenges to return home to restore his family and to reestablish the foundations of his community on Ithaca—a primer on how the institutions of the early polis gradually superseded tribal and savage precursors. Instead, the Odyssey could be used to lecture students about the foundations of white male oppression. At the dawn of Western civilization, powerful women, such as Calypso and Circe, were marginalized and depicted as anti-social misfits, sorceresses on enchanted islands who paid a high social price for taking control of their own sexuality and establishing careers on their own terms. Penelope was either a suburban Edith Bunker, clueless about the ramifications of her own monotonous domesticity, or, contrarily, an emancipated proto-Betty Friedman, who came of age only in the 20-year absence of her oppressive husband and finally forged outlets for her previously repressed and unappreciated talents. The problem is not necessarily that such interpretations were completely untrue, but that they remain subsidiary themes in a far larger epic about the universal human experience.

Students were to discover how oppressive and unfair contemporary life was through the literature, history, and culture of our past—a discovery that had no time for ambiguity such as the irony of Sophocles’s Ajax, or the tragedy of Robert E. Lee. Instead, those of the past were reduced to cut-out, cardboard figurines, who drew our interest largely to the extent that they might become indicted as insensitive to women, gays, minorities, and the poor of their age—judged wanting by comfortable contemporary academic prosecutors who were deemed enlightened for their criticism. To the extent that these dreary reeducation seminars were not required as part of the General Education curriculum, students voted with their feet to pass them up; when enrollment was mandatory, students resigned themselves never to suffer through similar elective classes in the future.

Go here to read the rest. Cicero noted that to be ignorant of history is to forever remain a child. It should not surprise us then that we have raised up generations in which too many people are physically adults, but otherwise think and act like children whose education has been sorely neglected.

Donald R. McClarey

Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.

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Pinky

Wednesday, January 29, AD 2014 1:50pm

Not surprising that Hanson nails it, but he really does nail it. History requires humility. It requires you to not judge by your standards, but to step back and attempt to judge by universal standards. Without the former, it’s advocacy like Hanson condemns. Without the latter, it’s the relativism which proceeded the modern advocacy. You can’t learn anything by saying that Homer doesn’t comply with the current modern standard of, say, sexuality. But you can learn from him, maybe get another datapoint for appraising your own era and his.

T. Shaw

Wednesday, January 29, AD 2014 3:24pm

“Money” quote: “A liberal arts education was once a gateway to wisdom; now, it can breed ignorance and arrogance.”

I would have deleted “can.”

Pat

Wednesday, January 29, AD 2014 5:30pm

~1970:
The professors of current professors began to “be cool” in manner. Classic classrooms with now sought after as antique wooden desk front and center (if not raised on a platform) became the chair for his grubby jeans or the stool for his feet to scratch. The self-proclaimed humanists, ironically, were meticulous about forming amorphous circles for students to be able to be on the gritty floor after pushing the chairs an desks out of the way. Communications were no longer sent by raised hand and surrounding silence. Interruptions of first person experiences were indulged as the clock ticked and weeks and months passed. It would be interesting to study the evolving syllabi and course titles from that time to present in the path to a Bachelor of Arts degree.

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Humanities Replaced by Banalities

Donald R. McClarey

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