Nothing More Timeless Than Ignorance
A response to Rebecca Schuman
13 January 2014
The minimal qualification for teaching literature should be the ability to read. Rebecca Schuman’s attack on my recent Wall Street Journalarticle on humanistic learning (adapted from a longer essay) suggests that even that qualification is now optional.
Schuman, Slate’s education columnist and an adjunct literature instructor at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, summarized my essay thus: “Mac Donald . . . chides the literary disciplines for losing ‘timelessness’ in favor of contemporary critique.” She then expends considerable rhetorical energy arguing against the notion that literature is “timeless,” asserting instead that any great work is necessarily caught up with issues of its time. The only problem is, I never used the word “timelessness” or any of its cognates. I am at a loss as to how she came up with the phrase or even the idea that I was arguing for the “timelessness” of literature as against, presumably, the innocuous proposition that literature is inevitably grounded in its particular moment of creation.
My thesis was rather just the opposite: in contrast to the narcissism of today’s identity studies, the humanist tradition was founded “on the all-consuming desire to engage with the genius and radical difference of the past.” The Renaissance humanists were attracted to Classical Rome precisely because it differed so much from their contemporary Rome, with its papal intrigues and corrupted Latin; they were acutely aware of historical change and developed the seminal methods of textual scholarship to overcome the effects of time on historical and literary sources. It is instead the contemporary identity theorist who lacks an appreciation for the specificity of the past, determined as he is to expound on his own or others’ victimhood rather than lose himself in a world that may not mirror his narrow obsessions.
Schuman’s predilection for substituting her own words and ideas for those on the page is relentless. As I recounted in my article, in 2011, UCLA replaced the requirement that students takes courses in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton with the mandate that students take courses in such categories as Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies and Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies. Schuman facetiously paraphrases my characterization of this change as “nothing less than truth-and-beauticide.” If the literature profession possesses a core competence, it is an understanding that language matters (and in the case of great literature, that it matters profoundly). I never used the word “truth” in my article, nor would I ever do so, believing as I do in the unavoidable multiplicity of interpretations when complex meaning comes into play. (I plead guilty to using the word “beauty,” however—apparently a conservative weakness when invoking Mozart or the Saint Matthew Passion.)
But Schuman has no use for the actual language on the page when she can simply plug in her standard anti-conservative tropes. Like all defenders of the current academic scene, Schuman accuses me of exaggeration and distortion. Not to worry, she says: all this “neo-conservative pearl-clutching” about the demise of traditional learning is just “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” And if the country’s literature faculty were not attending the annual Modern Language Association conference, she says, they, too, would let me have it.
Funny she should mention the MLA. Let’s see how much that organization’s concerns support Schuman’s claim that the literature profession remains dedicated to the close study of literature, rather than political play-acting. This year’s conference theme is “Vulnerable Times.” MLA president Marianne Hirsch explained the concept a few months ago: “The Presidential Forum [one among many panels on the topic] will theorize vulnerability’s complex temporalities. Discussing embodiment, poverty, climate, activism, reparation, and the condition of being unequally governed, forum participants will expose key sites of vulnerability and assess possibilities for change.” Not much about literature there. It is unclear what “climate” and “reparation” have to do with tracking the emergence of the novelistic narrative voice, say. What is clear is that “forum participants” possess a remarkably inflated notion of their own political efficacy.
President Hirsch explains further: “The sessions associated with Vulnerable Times promise to illuminate how the textual, historical, theoretical, and activist work we do as teachers of languages and literatures has been and can be mobilized to address social and political problems, whether urgent and immediate or persistent and recurring. They promise to engage the aesthetic as a space of vulnerability [sic] and as a practice that engages in resistance.” Given students’ abysmal ignorance of a basic literary canon, even an approved multicultural one; given as well students’ vanishing capacity to write a clear sentence, the only “activist work” that should engage “teachers of languages and literatures” should be cramming as much knowledge of great writing as possible into students’ heads. “Address[ing] social and political problems” is a ludicrous diversion.
The MLA statement bulges with similar gems of pretentious politicking. Why bother to mess around with the locus amoenus topos when you can take on “globalization” and “minoritization”? In the meantime, literary knowledge is disappearing. A chaired professor of French and the humanities wrote me in response to my piece: “In 10 years there will be nobody left who can teach the Western canon. Emory [for example] replaced their Renaissance, 18th century, and 19th century specialists with three post-colonialists.” Ph.D. programs have cut drastically back on the foreign languages that they require of their graduate students and on the depth and breadth of the actual literature that students must absorb. Theory courses, on the other hand, abound.
Schuman speculates that UCLA eviscerated its English major because it is “tough to teach” and to take single-author courses. In fact, the coup occurred because the younger faculty demanded that their identity- and politics-based specializations be reflected in the core major requirements (how else guarantee warm bodies in such courses?). Their demand was presented to the rest of the department as virtually a fait accompli. (Schuman’s explanation is absurd on its face: Any Milton specialist who can’t handle teaching a course on Milton is in the wrong profession. And any English major who can’t handle taking a course in Shakespeare or Chaucer is in the wrong major).
Schuman soft-pedals as well the nature of the change at UCLA. The recent curricular shift was “minor,” she says. Really? Imagine the opposite scenario: UCLA junks its requirement that students take identity-based courses and replaces it with Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. The reaction would be swift, severe, and probably national in scope: UCLA would be accused of silencing the “voices” of the oppressed in favor of the white patriarchy. Moreover, the curricular change does more than merely “giv[e] students a choice to take a course on Queer Literature since 1855,” as Schuman claims. UCLA students always had that choice, but they weren’t taking advantage of it to the satisfaction of the junior faculty. And contrary to Schuman, UCLA does not require any “historical literature classes” in “Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Milton.”
Is Schuman content with a situation in which a Columbia student rails against having been asked merely to listen to Mozart because Mozart is a dead white male? Where might that student have picked up that attitude if not from the academy and its offshoots? Whiteness studies, black studies, feminist studies, and queer studies are not a fever dream of the “neocons.” For decades now, students have been taught to search for an echo of their own “voices” in the books they read and to reject those works that they believe “exclude” them, a remarkably narrow approach to the arts. I don’t want to hear my own “voice” in what I read; it bores me. (And pace Emerson, I don’t recognize my own“rejected thoughts” in works of genius; those creations transcend anything I could possibly conceive.) Why not revel in the far more eloquent and surprising “voices” of Dreiser, Beerbohm, or Wells, for example, whose understanding of human passions and ability to craft sentences of stunning beauty and precision far outstrip our own?
Schuman concludes by revealing the unbridgeable abyss between the academic hothouse and the outside world. Purporting to turn the tables on academia’s critics, she maintains that it is they who are playing the victim card: “their gesture [of criticism] is itself a triumphant coopting of the very manufactured, hyperbolic narratives of oppression they oppose.” Huh? Is Schuman admitting that academic “oppression narratives” are “manufactured” and “hyperbolic”? Who knows? Moreover, her purported gotcha is without any logical grounding: To criticize a trend is not, in itself, a claim of victimization. Schuman then suggests the real motive for concern about the humanistic tradition: “It’s the Manhattan Institute against a rising tide of literate poors who dare question the politics of privilege.” Schuman thus confirms the adolescent political pretensions that she claims conservatives are simply making up.
More remarkable are Schuman’s twin beliefs that precious academic theorizing is liberating the “poors,” per some Freirian fantasy, and that the Manhattan Institute is threatened by such a development. It’s hard to imagine a greater sign of how cut off from reality the academy is. Nothing in the critiques of academia, including my own, over the years have even hinted at this absurd class-warfare scenario. Yet Schuman can imagine no motive other than allegedly beleaguered class privilege for lamenting the loss of the scholarly, loving study of great art—perhaps because she and her peers have never engaged in such an activity.
America's Dwindling Economic Freedom
Regulation, taxes and debt knock the U.S. out of the world's top 10.
Jan. 13, 2014 8:05 p.m. ET
World economic freedom has reached record levels, according to the 2014 Index of Economic Freedom, released Tuesday by the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal. But after seven straight years of decline, the U.S. has dropped out of the top 10 most economically free countries.
For 20 years, the index has measured a nation's commitment to free enterprise on a scale of 0 to 100 by evaluating 10 categories, including fiscal soundness, government size and property rights. These commitments have powerful effects: Countries achieving higher levels of economic freedom consistently and measurably outperform others in economic growth, long-term prosperity and social progress. Botswana, for example, has made gains through low tax rates and political stability.
Those losing freedom, on the other hand, risk economic stagnation, high unemployment and deteriorating social conditions. For instance, heavy-handed government intervention in Brazil's economy continues to limit mobility and fuel a sense of injustice.
Getty Images
It's not hard to see why the U.S. is losing ground. Even marginal tax rates exceeding 43% cannot finance runaway government spending, which has caused the national debt to skyrocket. The Obama administration continues to shackle entire sectors of the economy with regulation, including health care, finance and energy. The intervention impedes both personal freedom and national prosperity.
But as the U.S. economy languishes, many countries are leaping ahead, thanks to policies that enhance economic freedom—the same ones that made the U.S. economy the most powerful in the world. Governments in 114 countries have taken steps in the past year to increase the economic freedom of their citizens. Forty-three countries, from every part of the world, have now reached their highest economic freedom ranking in the index's history.
Hong Kong continues to dominate the list, followed by Singapore, Australia, Switzerland, New Zealand and Canada. These are the only countries to earn the index's "economically free" designation. Mauritius earned top honors among African countries and Chile excelled in Latin America. Despite the turmoil in the Middle East, several Gulf states, led by Bahrain, earned designation as "mostly free."
A realignment is under way in Europe, according to the index's findings. Eighteen European nations, including Germany, Sweden, Georgia and Poland, have reached new highs in economic freedom. By contrast, five others—Greece, Italy, France, Cyprus and the United Kingdom—registered scores lower than they received when the index started two decades ago.
The most improved players are in Eastern Europe, including Estonia, Lithuania and the Czech Republic. These countries have gained the most economic freedom over the past two decades. And it's no surprise: Those who have lived under communism have no trouble recognizing the benefits of a free-market system. But countries that have experimented with milder forms of socialism, such as Sweden, Denmark and Canada, also have made impressive moves toward greater economic freedom, with gains near 10 points or higher on the index scale. Sweden, for instance, is now ranked 20th out of 178 countries, up from 34th out of 140 countries in 1996.
The U.S. and the U.K, historically champions of free enterprise, have suffered the most pronounced declines. Both countries now fall in the "mostly free" category. Some of the worst performers are in Latin America, particularly Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador and Bolivia. All are governed by crony-populist regimes pushing policies that have made property rights less secure, spending unsustainable and inflation evermore threatening.
Despite financial crises and recessions, the global economy has expanded by nearly 70% in 20 years, to $54 trillion in 2012 from $32 trillion in 1993. Hundreds of millions of people have left grinding poverty behind as their economies have become freer. But it is an appalling, avoidable human tragedy how many of the world's peoples remain unfree—and poor.
The record of increasing economic freedom elsewhere makes it inexcusable that a country like the U.S. continues to pursue policies antithetical to its own growth, while wielding its influence to encourage other countries to chart the same disastrous course. The 2014 Index of Economic Freedom documents a world-wide race to enhance economic opportunity through greater freedom—and this year's index demonstrates that the U.S. needs a drastic change in direction.
BEWARE THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE
Compliments of Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) one of the very few countermoonbats who can be found within the Beltway:
Behold my display of the 2013 Federal Register. It contains over 80,000 pages of new rules, regulations, and notices all written and passed by unelected bureaucrats. The small stack of papers on top of the display are the laws passed by elected members of Congress and signed into law by the president.
At least we don’t need to worry about degenerating from a transparent constitutional republic into an opaque tyrannical oligarchy. It has already happened.
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