Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (144 page)

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 antiSemites 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.
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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.
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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.