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Saturday, February 21, 2004

Feserfest:  final words

Professor Edward Feser is unhappy with me, to gauge by his followup to his earlier two-part essay on the academic left.  But I really don’t see why he bothered to include me in his reply to his “critics”: he’s quite right, I haven’t engaged substantively with his initial argument, and that’s largely because I don’t think his initial argument merited substantive engagement.  So I’m not really a “critic” of Feser, in any meaningful sense of the term.

As for Feser’s latest, I can’t possibly manage a better reply than that offered by Paul Myers over at his lovely site, Pharyngula.  Feser had written:

Since Professor B?©rub?© is, despite his experience in teaching literature, apparently as literal-minded as the hapless students he likes to badmouth in national publications, let me briefly explain for him the (apparently too subtle) meaning I was trying to convey.

No, I don’t really think that left-wingers like Hitler. The point was rather that, given the actual content and historical development of Fascist and National Socialist doctrine, there are far more connections between it and the modern Left than there are between it and the modern Right. Therefore if, as so many Leftists like to do, you are going to play “pin the Swastika on the donkey,” it follows that it is far more plausible to pin it on the Left than on the Right. So, Leftists should, if they are intellectually honest, stop playing that stupid game, and in particular quit using the tired “Nazi” and “Fascist” labels to smear anyone who disagrees with them. All clear?

To which Professor Myers replies,

All clear, sir. You don’t think left-wingers like Hitler, they are like Hitler. And leftists don’t get to play stupid games and smear their opponents with tired insults because that’s your job. Yes, sir.

Also, Feser shouldn’t call me “Shecky,” as he does a bit later on in his piece.  I’m not a Jewish comic.  I come from a rich tradition of French-Canadian humorists, like Jean Beliveau, Raffi, and Celine Dion.

All clear?

Good.  But I will make one thing clear (I hope) about Wednesday’s post (and I’ve been crazy busy all week, or I’d have kept up my US FDA recommended daily allowance of blogging these past two days): it is true, as I’ve said before-- in fact, I think that even when I said it before I’d remarked then that I’d said it before: some departments in the arts and humanities, emphatically including my own, are dominated by liberals, and some are actually sprinkled (liberally!) with genuine leftists.  Now, this in itself doesn’t make such departments monolithic, as any intellectually serious person will tell you: just because a hallway full of professors voted for Clinton in 1992 doesn’t mean that they can’t tear each other up over the Habermas-Lyotard debate or Michael Warner’s advocacy of a queer counterpublic sphere-- or, for that matter, over the most ordinary job search for a new assistant professor in British literature of the late seventeenth century.  The left is a house of many mansions, some of which (as I’ve, ahem, made clear in the course of my career) I personally have no use for. You claim to be a man of the left-- but you’re eating a cheeseburger! That kind of thing-- you know, the politics of personal righteousness and moral witness and cryptoreligious arguments about who’s an “apostate.” Still, we do dominate a handful of departments, really we do.  And as I’ve remarked before (many times!  really!), sometimes this makes us intellectually lazy, because we get in the habit of taking a number of premises for granted that can’t be taken for granted when you address broader publics.  As I wrote in Public Access way back in 1994 (this would be a self-promotion moment, right here),

Public gatherings of the academic left are singularly deficient in this regard: one cannot get out of an academic conference without hearing X number of appeals to a politics of coalition and alliance, but then one usually cannot get out of the same academic conference without hearing a great deal of hostile if not contemptuous criticism directed at academe’s potentially closest allies in the culture at large.  We appear to have developed an academic subculture that can theorize ‘hegemony’ up and down the historical bloc [this is a Gramsci joke, by the way-- it slayed them in Turin about 70 years ago] but that in practice proves less skilled at cultivating actual political alliances and coalitions than at pissing off contrary factions in faculty meetings.

Still, it’s silly-- that is, disingenuous-- for people like Edward Feser and David Horowitz to pretend that hardcore leftists control the entire damn campus.  This kind of talk is appropriate, as Horowitz knows very well, when you have to throw a bit of red meat to the faithful in order to get them to whip out their checkbooks (and “the faithful” here means, roughly, “the people who associate the name Stanley Fish with the name Leon Trotsky, and who hear the news that ‘Katie Couric will deliver the commencement speech’ as ‘Rosa Luxembourg will deliver the commencement speech’").  But in any other rhetorical setting, people who say “every American campus is overrun by members of the extreme left” are going to be heard as close cousins of people who say “if only Michael B?©rub?© would stop sending me messages through the fillings in my molars, I could think straight about these damn leftists.”

For the record, my essay arguing on behalf of courses in the literature and philosophy of Western civilization is available from The Common Review (not online, though; go buy a copy).  That’s the essay in which I write,

The ‘Western canon,’ as too many of its polemical defenders tend to forget, is not a static repository of Great Ideas or an unbroken string of Deep Thoughts connecting Americans to Athenians.  It is a vast repertoire of ways of thinking, writing, and feeling, a record of how humans have imagined the world-- often contradicting one another, always in dialogue with one another.  To present that repertoire, that record, in fine detail-- and in historical context-- is only to try to do justice to the men and women who created it.

And now that that’s clear, let’s hope that all graduates from American colleges come out more willing and able to think critically and seriously about the world than they were when they came in.

Posted by Michael on 02/21 at 07:07 AM
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