Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (145 page)

These ‘culture wars’ were accompanied by ‘history wars’ and ‘curriculum wars,’ but they were all essentially the same thing: a fight between traditionalists and postmodernists.

One of the more bitter engagements arose over plans to mount an exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum (NASM), part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, in 1995, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945. Among the exhibits was a reconstructed
Enola Gay,
the Boeing B-29 bomber that had actually dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.
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After its historic mission,
Enola Gay
had a chequered history. For many years its disassembled components could be seen, by appointment only, in a suburban Maryland warehouse, so that it was for all practical purposes hidden from sight. Following representations from B-29 veterans, its restoration was eventually begun at the end of 1984, and as the anniversary of World War II approached, the possibility of displaying the plane began to rise. Even so, there were those wary of doing so in view of what
Enola Gay
represented. For many, there was nothing of unusual aeronautical interest in this B-29, merely its mission and its ‘equipment.’

When the decision was taken to mark the anniversary at the NASM, the idea grew at the Smithsonian that the exhibition should be not only a celebration
of a military and technical victory but an examination of the use of atomic weapons and the opening of the nuclear age. Here the problems began, for many veterans and service organisations wanted a more propagandistic approach, more of a celebration than an examination of issues. When the various service organisations saw the script for the exhibition – 300 pages of text, which became available eighteen months before the start of the show – they didn’t like it. It was too ‘dark.’ Beginning in the pages of
Air Force Magazine,
the objections spread, taking in the media, the Pentagon, and Congress.
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It seemed that almost everyone except the historians wanted the exhibition to be a celebration, not raising uncomfortable questions about whether the decision to drop the atomic bomb had been correct. Forty historians wrote to President Clinton soliciting his support for the exhibition as a serious piece of history, but it did no good. In January 1995 it was announced that the exhibition was cancelled and was being replaced by a much less contentious show, more celebratory in tone. At the same time, the director of the Smithsonian also resigned. The decision to cancel the exhibition was widely welcomed in certain sections of the press and in Congress, where Newt Gingrich said that ‘people’ were ‘taking back’ their history from elites.
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The academic world had been the focus of Allan Bloom’s initial attack and defended by Stanley Fish and others. Not surprisingly, the university itself came under scrutiny in a series of surveys, in particular what was taught and how. The first of these, and the most intemperate, was Roger Kimball’s
Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education,
published in 1990.
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Kimball, managing editor of the
New Criterion,
a conservative cultural and intellectual journal, had the idea of attending a number of seminars at various universities and amalgamating his account of them into a book. These conferences included ‘Architecture and Education: The Past Twenty-Five Years and Assumptions for the Future,’ a day-long symposium sponsored by the Princeton School of Architecture in 1988; another was a panel discussion at the Williams College convocation in 1989; and a third was the publication, in 1986, of a volume of essays taken from a conference at Stanford University, entitled
Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality and the Self in Western Thought.
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Kimball found very little to admire or like in what he saw. He thought that most of the postmodernists showed an ‘eclectic’ mix of left-wing idea that were a hangover of the radical 1960s, owing a great deal to Marcuse’s notion of ‘repressive tolerance.’ He devoted a chapter to Paul de Man and to Stanley Fish, and he had great fun deriding what are admittedly some of the wilder excesses of postmodernist thought.
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He conceded that politics
do
influence artistic judgements but denied that, in the final analysis, they determine them.

But Kimball’s book was essentially an hysterical reaction, journalistic rather than considered. A more thoughtful response came from Dinesh d’Souza, an Indian who had emigrated to America in the late 1970s. His
Illiberal Education: The Politics of Sex and Race on Campus
appeared in 1991 and was an examination of six campuses in America – Berkeley, Stanford, Howard, Michigan, Duke,
and Harvard – and how they dealt with the issues of sex and race, both in their admissions policy and in their teaching.
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D’Souza’s approach was statistical but not heavily so; he used figures where they were appropriate but also looked beyond them. At Berkeley, for instance, he quoted a confidential, internal report which showed that, after five years, only 18 percent of blacks admitted on affirmative action completed their courses, whereas 42 percent of blacks admitted to the regular program had graduated. D’Souza’s response was not hysterical, however. He admitted that one could look at the figures in two ways – as a sort of success and a sort of failure. His own idea was that these very students, ‘California’s best black and Hispanic students,’ might have fared better at other campuses, ‘where they might settle in more easily, compete against evenly matched peers, and graduate in vastly greater numbers and proportions.’
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He then looked at Stanford, where the faculty had, amid much controversy, dropped the Western civilisation course and replaced it with ‘Culture, Ideas, Values’ (CIV), which was intended to stress other values, ideas, and cultures besides the Western. He gave a list of the kind of works to be included in the ‘Europe and Americas’ track.

D’Souza emphasised that this list was not mandated: ‘Stanford professors are given flexibility as long as they ensure “substantial representation” for the Third World.’
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Yet he was very critical of the way Shakespeare was taught, as primarily a function of ‘colonial, racial and gender forces,’ and he singled out
I, Rigoberta Menchu,
subtitled ‘An Indian Woman in Guatemala,’ as a typical new text, which was dictated to someone else because Rigoberta did not write. The book conveys much mundane information, especially about her family life, but spliced in among all this is her political awakening. D’Souza evinces scepticism as to how typical, or moving, or aesthetic, the book is; Rigoberta is said to speak for all native Americans, but among her experiences she goes to Paris to attend international conferences. (Later, in 1998, it emerged that Rigoberta Menchu had made up many of the experiences she reports in the book.)

D’Souza also took on Stanley Fish and Martin Bernal and quoted distinguished scholars, from David Riesman to E. O. Wilson and Willard van
Orman Quine, who said they were distressed by the trends in American higher education.
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D’Souza’s final point was that when one puts together the dismal results from affirmative action alongside the new courses on third-world cultures and ideas, there is a major risk of replacing an old form of racism with a new one. ‘In one sense, the new racism is different, however. The old racism was based on prejudice, whereas the new racism is based on conclusions…. The new bigotry is not derived from ignorance, but from experience. It is harbored not by ignoramuses, but by students who have direct and first-hand experience with minorities in the close proximity of university settings. The “new racists” do not believe they have anything to learn about minorities; quite the contrary, they believe they are the only ones willing to face the truth about them … they are not uncomfortable about their views…. They feel they occupy the high ground, while everyone else is performing pirouettes and somersaults to avoid the obvious.’
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Not everyone found American campus life so bleak. Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, has taught all over the continent. Her book
Cultivating Humanity
appeared in 1997 and concerned not six but fifteen ‘core institutions,’ chosen to represent different types of higher-education outfit – the Ivy League elite, large state universities, small liberal arts colleges, religious universities like Notre Dame, Brandeis, and Brigham Young.
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Approaching her task as a classicist – the subtitle of her book was ‘A Classical Defence of Reform in Liberal Education’ – she argued that even ancient Athens, the crucial point of reference for conservative critics of multiculturalism, was more open to alternative views than these critics like to acknowledge. Nussbaum’s model was drawn from Socrates and the Stoics, who, she said, established three ‘core values’ of liberal education – critical self-examination, the ideal of the world citizen, and the development of the narrative imagination.
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Nussbaum’s message, from a greater number of campuses than anyone else had looked at, is that the number of extremists in universities is much less than anyone thinks, that there is a great appetite for, and interest in, philosophy, other cultures, and other lifestyles, that these courses are growing because they are popular among students rather than because a left-wing faculty is forcing them on pupils, and that when they are taught, they are taught far more often than not with a commendable academic rigour. There are, Nussbaum says, many ways for the imaginative teacher to bring home to students the relevance of the classics and philosophy: for example, in one class in Harvard the students are asked, Would Socrates have been a draft resister? She argues that Athens took seriously the idea of world citizenship and quotes Herodotus considering the possibility that Egypt and Persia might have something to teach Athens about social values.
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She finds it not at all odd that Amartya Sen teaches a course at Harvard called ‘Hunger and Famine,’ in which standard ideas about economics are given a new twist. She finds that the tragic form in the narrative imagination is especially powerful in crossing cultural boundaries – its universality and abstractness especially useful in drawing people together.
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She notes that, again, in ancient Athens the moral and the political went hand-in-hand,
and asks if it is really possible to read George Eliot or Dickens without detachment and get from them all that there is. She too invokes Lionel Trilling and
The Liberal Imagination,
drawing from it the lesson that ‘the novel as genre is committed to liberalism in its very form, in the way in which it shows respect for the individuality and the privacy of each human mind.’
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The study of nonWestern cultures, she says, is there to help combat what she calls ‘the descriptive vices’ – chauvinism and romanticism – and ‘the normative vices’ – chauvinism (again), arcadianism, and scepticism. She shows that many in the West have traditionally overestimated the extent to which Western culture is individualistic and Eastern culture is the opposite, and spends some time showing how individualistic non-Western societies can be. She applies the same approach to courses in African-American studies and women’s studies (she argues, for instance, that the sociobiologists base their theories in part on chimpanzees, but never on Bonobos, another primate, not discovered till 1929, whose ‘graceful and non-aggressive’ style differs sharply from that of the chimp). She found Notre Dame University (Catholic) much more open to matters that in theory ought to have been an intellectual threat than, say, Brigham Young (Mormon), and as a result the former was still changing, still popular, while the latter languished.
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In other words, Nussbaum is saying that once you go out and investigate the campuses, what is actually happening is much less sensational, much less worrying, much more worthwhile, than appears to be the case from the headlines. She was not the first person to find that evidence is a healthy counterweight to prejudice; that, after all, is what distinguishes scholarship proper from mere journalism.

The most original response to the culture wars was David Denby’s excellent
Great Books,
published in 1996. Denby, film critic of
New York
magazine and a contributing editor to the
New Yorker,
attended Columbia University in 1961, when he took two foundation courses, ‘Literature Humanities’ and ‘Contemporary Civilization.’
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In the autumn of 1991, he had the idea of sending himself back to Columbia to do the same courses. He wanted to see how they had changed, how they were now taught, and what effects they had on himself and the young freshmen attending Columbia in the 1990s. He had been a film critic since 1969, he said, and though he still loved his job, he was tired of the ‘society of the spectacle,’ the secondhand, continuously ironic world of the media: ‘The media give information, but information, in the 1990s, has become transitory and unstable. Once in place, it immediately gets pulled apart…. No one’s information is ever quite adequate, which is one reason among many that Americans now seem half-mad with anxiety and restlessness. Like many others, I was jaded yet still hungry; I was cast into the modern state of living-in-the-media, a state of excitement needled with disgust.’
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Denby takes us through the great books he liked (Homer, Plato, Virgil, the Bible, Dante, Rousseau, Shakespeare, Hume and Mill, Marx, Conrad, de Beauvoir, Woolf), leaving out what didn’t engage him (Galileo, Goethe, Darwin, Freud, Arendt, Habermas). His book is notable for some fine passages describing his own reactions to the Great Books, for the way he occasionally related them to movies, and for the way he fears for his son, Max, overwhelmed by tawdry and trivial media, against
which these older voices cannot compete. He notes that minority students sometimes rebel against the ‘White, European’ nature of the books, but such rebellion, when it occurs, is heavily tinged with embarrassment and sorrow as much as with anger. And this was his main point, in conclusion: that students, whether white, black, Latino, or Asian, ‘rarely arrive at college as habitual readers,’ that few of them have more than a nominal connection with the past: ‘The vast majority of white students do not know the intellectual tradition that is allegedly theirs any better than black or brown ones do.’ The worlds of Homer, Dante, Boccaccio, Rousseau, and Marx are now so strange, so different, that he came to a surprising conclusion: ‘The core-curriculum courses jar so many student habits, violate so many contemporary pieties, and challenge so many forms of laziness that so far from serving a reactionary function, they are actually the most radical courses in the undergraduate curriculum.’
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Denby found that in fact the Great Books he (re)studied were capable of individual and idiosyncratic interpretation, not necessarily the interpretation the cultural right would wish, but that didn’t matter – the students grasped that ‘they dramatise the utmost any of us is capable of in love, suffering and knowledge.’ And, perhaps the best thing one can say about it, the Western canon can be used to attack the Western canon. ‘What [non-whites] absorb of the older “white” culture they will remake as their own; it cannot hurt them.’
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