In 2011, the University of California at
Los Angeles decimated its English major. Such a development may seem
insignificant, compared with, say, the federal takeover of health care.
It is not. What happened at UCLA is part of a momentous shift in our
culture that bears on our relationship to the past—and to civilization
itself.
Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one
course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton—the
cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior
faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was
part of the “Empire,” UCLA junked these individual author requirements
and replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of
three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity,
Disability, and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and
Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and
critical theory; or creative writing. In other words, the UCLA faculty
was now officially indifferent as to whether an English major had ever
read a word of Chaucer, Milton, or Shakespeare, but was determined to
expose students, according to the course catalog, to “alternative
rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.”
Such defenestrations have happened elsewhere, of course, and long
before 2011. But the UCLA coup was particularly significant because the
school’s English department was one of the last champions of the
historically informed study of great literature, uncorrupted by an
ideological overlay. Precisely for that reason, it was the most popular
English major in the country, enrolling a whopping 1,400 undergraduates.
Let’s compare what the UCLA student has lost and what he has gained. Here’s Oberon addressing Puck in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
Once I sat upon a promontory
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres
To hear the seamaid’s music
To which UCLA’s junior English faculty respond: Ho-hum. Here’s the
description of a University of California postcolonial studies research
grant: The “theoretical, temporal, and spatial intersections of
postcoloniality and postsocialism will arrive at a novel approach to
race, gender, and sexuality in present-day geopolitics.” To which UCLA’s
junior English faculty respond: That’s more like it!
Other readers and listeners have not been so obtuse in their literary
judgments. Consider the response of a nineteenth-century Frenchman
exposed to Shakespeare for the first time. In early 1827, a troupe of
British actors arrived in Paris to perform six Shakespeare plays. The
young composer Hector Berlioz was in the audience at the Théâtre de
l’Odéon and, like most spectators, read along with the English language
performances in a French prose translation. Berlioz later recalled the
moment in his
Mémoires:
Shakespeare, coming upon me unawares, struck me like a
thunderbolt. The lightning flash of that sublime discovery opened before
me at a stroke the whole heaven of art, illuminating it to its remotest
depths. . . .
But the shock was too strong, and it was long before I recovered from it. . . . As I came out of Hamlet, shaken to the depths by the experience, I vowed not to expose myself a second time to the flame of Shakespeare’s genius.
This resolution proved fleeting:
Next day the playbills announced Romeo and Juliet.
After Denmark’s somber clouds and icy winds, to be exposed to the
fiery sun and balmy nights of Italy, to witness the drama of that
passion swift as thought, burning as lava, radiantly pure as an angel’s
glance, . . . was more than I could bear. By the third act, scarcely
able to breathe—it was as though an iron hand had gripped me by the
heart—I knew that I was lost.
Berlioz’s reaction was typical. Alexandre Dumas, also in the
audience, wrote that Shakespeare arrived in France with the “freshness
of Adam’s first sight of Eden.” Fellow attendees Eugène Delacroix,
Victor Hugo, and Théophile Gautier, along with Berlioz and Dumas, would
create works inspired by those seminal evenings. The Bard’s electrifying
combination of profound human insight and linguistic glory would
continue catapulting across national borders to influence poets,
painters, and composers the world over, as no other writer has done.
Yet the UCLA English department—like so many others—is more concerned
that its students encounter race, gender, and disability studies than
that they plunge headlong into the overflowing riches of actual English
literature—whether Milton, Wordsworth, Thackeray, George Eliot, or
dozens of other great artists closer to our own day. How is this
possible? The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of
our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless
determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the
shallow categories of identity and class politics. Sitting atop an
entire civilization of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic
wants only to study oppression, preferably his own, defined reductively
according to gonads and melanin. Course catalogs today babble
monotonously of group identity. UCLA’s undergraduates can take courses
in Women of Color in the U.S.; Women and Gender in the Caribbean;
Chicana Feminism; Studies in Queer Literatures and Cultures; and
Feminist and Queer Theory.
Today’s professoriate claims to be interested in “difference,” or, to
use an even more up-to-date term, “alterity.” But this is a fraud. The
contemporary academic seeks only to confirm his own worldview and the
political imperatives of the moment in whatever he studies. The 2014
Modern Language Association conference, for example, the annual
gathering of America’s
literature (not social work) faculty, will
address “embodiment, poverty, climate, activism, reparation, and the
condition of being unequally governed . . . to expose key sites of
vulnerability and assess possibilities for change.”
It was not always so. The humanist tradition
was founded not on narcissism but on the all-consuming desire to engage
with the genius and radical difference of the past. The
fourteenth-century Florentine poet Francesco Petrarch triggered the
explosion of knowledge known today as Renaissance humanism with his
discovery of Livy’s monumental history of Rome and the letters of
Cicero, the Roman statesman whose orations, with their crystalline Latin
style, would inspire such philosophers of republicanism as John Adams
and Thomas Jefferson.
But Petrarch didn’t want just to read the ancients; he wanted to
converse with them as well. So he penned heartfelt letters in Latin to
Virgil, Seneca, Horace, and Homer, among others, informing them of the
fate of their writings and of Rome itself. After rebuking Cicero for the
vindictiveness revealed in his letters, Petrarch repented and wrote him
again: “I fear that my last letter has offended you. . . . But I feel I
know you as intimately as if I had always lived with you.”
Petrarch was hardly the only Renaissance scholar to feel so immediate
a bond with the classical authors. In 1416, the Florentine clerk Poggio
Bracciolini discovered the most important Roman treatise on rhetoric
moldering in a monastery library outside Constance, a find of such value
that a companion exclaimed: “Oh wondrous treasure, oh unexpected joy!”
Bracciolini thought of himself as rescuing a still-living being. The
treatise’s author, Quintillian, would have “perished shortly if we
hadn’t brought him aid in the nick of time,” Bracciolini wrote to a
friend in Verona. “There is not the slightest doubt that that man, so
brilliant, genteel, tasteful, refined, and pleasant, could not longer
have endured the squalor of that place and the cruelty of those
jailors.”
This burning drive to recover a lost culture propelled the
Renaissance humanists into remote castles and monasteries across Europe
to search for long-forgotten manuscripts. Despite their rapport with
their Greek and Roman ancestors, they were no historical naïfs. The
humanists were well aware, unlike their medieval predecessors, of the
chasm between their present and the classical past, as exemplified most
painfully in the fallen state of medieval Latin. It was precisely to
overcome the effects of time on historical sources that they developed
the seminal methods of modern scholarship.
The knowledge that many ancient texts were forever lost filled these
scholars with despair. Nevertheless, they exulted in their growing
repossession of classical learning, for which they felt, in Emerson’s
words, a canine appetite. In François Rabelais’s exuberant
Gargantua
stories from the 1530s, the giant Gargantua sends off his son to study
in Paris, joyfully conjuring up the languages—Greek, Latin, Hebrew,
Chaldean, and Arabic—that he expects him to master, as well as the vast
range of history, law, natural history, and philosophy. “In short,” he
concludes, “let me find you a perfect abyss of knowledge.”
This constant, sophisticated dialogue between past and present would
become a defining feature of Western civilization, prompting the
evolution of such radical ideas as constitutional government and giving
birth to arts and architecture of polyphonic complexity. And it became
the primary mission of the universities to transmit knowledge of the
past, as well as—eventually—to serve as seedbeds for new knowledge.
Compare the humanists’ hunger for learning with the resentment of a
Columbia University undergraduate who had been required by the school’s
freshman core curriculum to study Mozart. She happens to be black, but
her views are widely shared, to borrow a phrase, “across gender,
sexuality, race, and class.”
“Why did I have to listen in music humanities to this Mozart?” she
groused in a discussion of the curriculum reported by David Denby in his
book on Columbia’s core. “My problem with the core is that it upholds
the premises of white supremacy and racism. It’s a racist core. Who is
this Mozart, this Haydn, these superior white men? There are no women,
no people of color.” These are not the idiosyncratic thoughts of one
disgruntled student; they represent the dominant ideology in the
humanities today. Columbia not only failed to disabuse the student of
such parochialism; it is also all but certain that some of its faculty
strengthened her in her close-mindedness, despite the school’s admirable
commitment to its beleaguered core.
Of course, the absurd game of reducing all expression to gender or
race politics is particularly ludicrous when it comes to music—but the
charge of Eurocentrism is even more preposterously leveled against
Mozart, who makes a Muslim pasha the only truly noble character in his
opera
The Abduction from the Seraglio, and whose Sarastro in
The Magic Flute appeals to a universal humanity.
W. E. B. Du Bois would have been stunned to learn how narrow is the
contemporary multiculturalist’s self-definition and sphere of interest.
Du Bois, living during America’s darkest period of hate, nevertheless
heartbreakingly affirmed in 1903 his intellectual and spiritual affinity
with all of Western civilization: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces
not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas. . .
. I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come
all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.”
This Petrarchan intimacy with the past is precisely what is missing
from the humanities today, and its antithesis—shallow narcissism—has now
leaped out of the campus and into the arts world at large. Directors in
Europe and the U.S. are dragooning poor defenseless operas to serve as
mouthpieces for their own hobbyhorses. These egotistical stage directors
wrench centuries-old works into the present and force them to ape the
political and sexual obsessions of today’s cultural elite. Audiences can
expect to see lots of nudity and kinky sex on stage, as well as cell
phones, Big Macs, and snide put-downs of American capitalism. Mozart’s
aristocratic seducer, Don Giovanni, is infallibly a charmless,
drug-addicted lout wallowing in the detritus of consumer culture and
surrounded by sluts, psychopaths, and slobs (see “
The Abduction of Opera,” Summer 2007).
The official excuse for such mutilation is that a work can only be
“relevant” to a modern audience if it is tricked out in modern garb and
forced to speak, however incoherently, of modern concerns. As the
director of the Frankfurt opera declared, no one should care what Handel
wanted in his operas; what matters is “what interests us . . . what we
want.”
Actually, the
only thing that matters is what Handel, Mozart,
and Tchaikovsky wanted. It is their artistic genius that allows us to
enter worlds radically different from our own and expand our
understanding of what it is to be human. The revisionist director, like
the contemporary academic, detests any values, such as nobility,
grandeur, or sexual decorum, that differ from his own, and will
shamelessly rewrite an opera’s plot to eliminate them. But in an era of
twerking and drunken hookups, there is much to be gained by
experiencing, if only for a few hours, a courtly ethic where desire can
be expressed by the slightest inclination of a hand or an almost
imperceptible darkening of the voice.
As for the visual arts, artists learned their craft for centuries by
lovingly studying and copying the masters. No more. Today’s would-be
artist need only stage his own predictable politics to claim artist
status, a view that has given us such current performance pieces as the
publicly performed loss of anal virginity at a London art school or a
video-recorded use of a cement sex toy at the San Francisco Art
Institute.
There is, in other words, much bad news
today about the humanist impulse. What we rarely hear is the good news:
thanks to enlightened philanthropy, the enduring lure of beauty, and,
yes, market forces, the humanist impulse is thriving in many places
beyond the university.
The most important classical music development of our time is a
direct rebirth of the Renaissance spirit: a loose group of performers
known as the “early-music” movement is determined to re-create how music
from the baroque and classical eras was originally performed. Like the
Renaissance scholars who realized that the classical texts that had come
down to them had been corrupted by errors, these musicians believe that
twentieth-century performance styles veered drastically from how
baroque music was intended to be played. The results have been a
revelation, releasing submerged dance rhythms and resurrecting
long-forgotten composers—such as Hasse, Porpora, and Steffani—who
urgently deserve to be heard again (see “
Classical Music’s New Golden Age,” Summer 2010).
But even those musicians not seeking the holy grail of authentic
period performance are driven by the same humanist reverence for past
genius. At the 2013 Texas State International Piano Festival (that
despised Red State hosts many such festivals), an 11-year-old
Asian-American pianist (and violinist) proudly recounted that her first
piano instructor boasted a teaching lineage stretching back to Haydn. “I
was so excited to learn that. I respect Haydn
so much,” she told the NPR program
From the Top,
apparently untroubled by Haydn’s lamentable white-male status and
thinking of him, like Petrarch of Cicero, as an almost-contemporary.
Regarding the visual arts, New Yorkers are particularly fortunate:
many of New York’s museums still present the best of human creation,
untainted by identity politics. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
former director Philippe de Montebello consciously fought off pressures
for trendy relevance; his successor, Thomas Campbell, has so far
preserved de Montebello’s magnificent legacy. (See “
The Met’s Triumphant Democratic Elitism,”
Winter 2001.) The Frick’s and the Morgan’s commitment to standards and
taste is almost terrifyingly superb. Even the Brooklyn Museum of Art,
which has flailed of late, can still triumph: its 2013 John Singer
Sargent watercolor show was the exhibit of the year, flooding the
galleries with Sargent’s jewel colors, blinding light, and lush
sensuality, and accompanied by a catalog of sound and empathetic
scholarship.
None of this accomplishment can be taken for granted; leadership is
crucial, and it can turn in an instant. New York’s music press has been
baying for the Metropolitan Opera to give over the house completely to
revisionist opera directing. Yet New York audiences, unlike those in
Europe, can still see productions that take the composer’s intention as
their lodestar, however much such fidelity enrages the commentariat.
The demand side for the humanities is also robust. The Great Courses
Company has been making a nice profit selling recorded lectures on such
topics as Virgil’s
Aeneid, the Enlightenment, and the Civil War to adults who rightly feel shortchanged by their college education (see “
Great Courses, Great Profits,”
Summer 2011). Publishing has capitalized on this thirst for knowledge
as well. The success of Myron Magnet’s wonderful new book,
The Founders at Home,
like that of other recent serious studies aimed at a broad readership,
proves that the public’s appetite for urbane explorations of American
history is boundless.
Yet though the humanist spirit is chugging
along nicely outside the university, the university remains its natural
home, from which it should not be in exile. We have bestowed on the
faculty the best job in the world: freed from the pressures of economic
competition, professors are actually
paid to spend their days
wandering among the most sublime creations of mankind. All we ask of
them in return is that they sell their wares to ignorant undergraduates.
Every fall, insistent voices should rise from the faculty lounges and
academic departments saying: here is greatness, and this is your best
opportunity to absorb it. Here is Aeschylus, whose hypnotic choruses
bear witness to dark forces more unsettling than you can yet fathom.
Here is Mark Twain, Hapsburg Vienna, and the
Saint Matthew Passion.
Here is the drama of Western civilization, out of whose constantly
battling ideas there emerged unprecedented individual freedom and
unimagined scientific progress.
Instead, the professoriate is tongue-tied when it comes to promoting
the wonders of its patrimony. These privileged cowards can’t even summon
the guts to prescribe the course work that every student must complete
in order to be considered educated. Need it be said? Students don’t know
anything. That’s why they’re in college, and they certainly don’t know
enough to select courses that will give them the rudiments of culture.
The transcripts that result from the professoriate’s abdication of its
intellectual responsibility are not a pretty sight, featuring as many
movie and video courses as a student can stuff into each semester.
When the academy
is forced to explain the value of the
humanities, the language that it uses is pathetically insipid. You may
have heard the defense du jour, tossed out en route to the next gender
studies conference. The humanities, we are told, teach “critical
thinking.” Is this a joke? These are the same people who write sentences
like this: “Total presence breaks on the univocal predication of the
exterior absolute the absolute existent (of that of which it is not
possible to univocally predicate an outside, while the equivocal
predication of the outside of the absolute exterior is possible of that
of which the reality so predicated is not the reality. . . . of the
self).”And we’re supposed to believe that they can think? Moreover, the
sciences provide critical thinking skills as well—far more rigorous
ones, in fact, than the hackneyed deconstructions of advertising that
the left-wing academy usually means by critical thinking.
It is no wonder, then, that we have been hearing of late that the
humanities are in crisis. A recent Harvard report, cochaired by the
school’s premier postcolonial studies theorist, Homi Bhabha, lamented
that 57 percent of incoming Harvard students who initially declare
interest in a humanities major eventually change concentrations. Why may
that be? Imagine an intending lit major who is assigned something
by
Professor Bhabha: “If the problematic Ωclosure≈ of textuality questions
the totalization of national culture. . . .” How soon before that
student concludes that a psychology major is more up his alley?
No, the only true justification for the humanities is that they
provide the thing that Faust sold his soul for: knowledge. It is
knowledge of a particular kind, concerning what men have done and
created over the ages. The American Founders drew on an astonishingly
wide range of historical sources and an appropriately jaundiced view of
human nature to craft the world’s most stable and free republic. They
invoked lessons learned from the Greek city-states, the Carolingian
Dynasty, and the Ottoman Empire in the Constitution’s defense. And they
assumed that the new nation’s citizens would themselves be versed in
history and political philosophy. Indeed, a closer knowledge among the
electorate of Hobbes and the fragility of social order might have
prevented the more brazen social experiments that we’ve undergone in
recent years. Ignorance of the intellectual trajectory that led to the
rule of law and the West’s astounding prosperity puts those achievements
at risk.
But humanistic learning is also an end in itself. It is simply better
to have escaped one’s narrow, petty self and entered minds far more
subtle and vast than one’s own than never to have done so. The
Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino said that a man lives as many
millennia as are embraced by his knowledge of history. One could add: a
man lives as many different lives as are embraced by his encounters with
literature, music, and all the humanities and arts. These forms of
expression allow us to see and feel things that we would otherwise never
experience—society on a nineteenth-century Russian feudal estate, for
example, or the perfect crystalline brooks and mossy shades of pastoral
poetry, or the exquisite languor of a Chopin nocturne.
Ultimately, humanistic study is the loving duty we owe those artists
and thinkers whose works so transform us. It keeps them alive, as well
as us, as Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini understood. The academic
narcissist, insensate to beauty and nobility, knows none of this.
And as politics in Washington and elsewhere grows increasingly
unmoored from reality, humanist wisdom provides us with one final
consolation: there is no greater lesson from the past than the
intractability of human folly.
Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Her article was adapted from her 2013 Wriston Lecture.
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