Shattering the Silences: THE CULTURE WARS AND THE GREAT CONVERSATION

With titles like Richard Bernstein's Dictatorship of Virtue and James Davison Hunter's Before the Shooting Starts screaming at us from bookstore windows and "Mercenaries of the Culture Wars" trumpeting from the magazine racks, we ought to know what it is we are about to die for before we salute any of the contending Caesars. The term "Culture Wars" refers here to debates over the past twenty years or so about a variety of discrete but related issues, among them:

• the establishment of ethnic, women's, and gay and lesbian studies programs in colleges and universities
• the attempt to define a "canon" of works from the Western tradition and the question of whether such a canon should form the basis of liberal education in America
• "deconstructionism" and other tendencies in contemporary academic literary criticism
• the notion of cultural or moral relativism as applied not only in anthropological studies of pre-literate societies but in thinking about the divisions in modern American life over religion, race, ethnicity, art, entertainment, sexual behavior, child-rearing, psychosocial norms, public-school curriculums, immigration, language, and the proper forms of patriotism.
• In sum, the question of what "we" in America mean when we speak or write about "us" and "them."

These "culture wars," however, are only the current incarnation of what in gentler times (the 1950s!) was called "The Great Conversation," an argument about education and citizenship, and about individual freedom and social order, stretching back over the centuries at least to Socrates's strictures on what the poets should and should not say about the gods. Interestingly, in the 1950s Robert M. Hutchins -- president of the University of Chicago and the Founding Father of the integrated core curriculum based on the great books of the Western tradition from Homer to Freud -- was attacked, along with his sidekick, the philosopher Mortimer Adler, as subversive if not outright Communist for spreading the Great Books program from his own campus to adult discussion groups across the country. Alan Filreis, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has come up with what are in retrospect hilarious documents -- scary at the time -- from the secret files of the Commie-chasers infiltrating Great Books discussion groups.

Late in that decade, when the graduate faculties of the University of Chicago sought to abandon or de-emphasize the core curriculum for undergraduates, it was left-wing students who led the resistance to change. Allan Bloom, who was there at the time (Ph.D. 1955, lecturer 1955-60), was not on the ramparts. (He may have been behind the arras.) Similarly, 30 years later, according to Stanford historian Barton Bernstein, when it was proposed to drop the Western Culture course (Stanford's comparatively truncated survey of Western civilization) for lack of student (and faculty) interest, it was the two leftist members of the history faculty who were the strongest proponents of keeping the course intact. The great sin of the Great Books, it seems, was the insistence of Hutchins and his followers that in America everyone should have the kind of education reserved in more formally hierarchical societies for the offspring of the ruling class.

In his essay on the debates at Stanford hyperlinked in the previous paragraph, Herbert Lindenberger, the Avalon Professor of Humanities at Stanford (and the current president of the Modern Language Association) observes that the historical origin of Western Culture courses is in the War Issues course taught at Columbia and other universities in 1918 for American bumpkins going off to fight in Europe during World War One; the courses have always been inspired as much by politics and nationalistic concerns as by intellectual or cultural concerns. Ron Grossman, former professor of ancient and medieval history at Lake Forest College (and now a reporter for the Chicago Tribune) makes the further observation that the whole question is a quintessentially Western [or even peculiarly American] one that is not tolerated in, for example, Islamic societies. But Japan, China, India, and other societies, including Islamic societies, have historically debated the question, and still do, as a consequence of their forced encounters with each other and with the West. The difference is that in some of these places you get your head chopped off for advocating the teaching of other cultural traditions or incorporating other traditions into one's own.

In The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education (the introductory essay to the 54-volume set of Great Books of the Western World, Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 19th printing, 1971), Hutchins addressed a question frequently asked today in debates about multicultural education: "How can comprehension of the tradition [these books] embody amount to participation in the world republic of learning? How can such comprehension create world community, since great books of the East are not included?" His answer to that question puts to shame the most self-assured voices on both sides of today's debate:

"The Editors [Hutchins and Adler] are impressed by the many reminders given to the West by Eastern thinkers that the parts of the Western tradition that are now the least known and the least respected in America [presumably referring to the Plato/Augustine line as opposed to the Aristotle/Aquinas line -- rd] are the very parts most likely to help us understand the deepest thought of the East. On the other hand, the Editors are convinced that those aspects of the West which the East finds most terrifying, its materialism, rapacity, and ethnocentric pride, will get no support from the great books which illustrate the main line of the Western pursuit of wisdom. The Editors believe that an education based on the full range of the Western search is far more likely to produce a genuine openness about the East, a genuine capacity to understand it, than any other form of education now proposed or practicable."

One of the things that made other forms of education impracticable, Hutchins noted, was that there were not many people in American universities qualified to teach the great books of the East. And the students in those universities ("The president and the students are wonderful," Hutchins remarked of the University of Chicago, "but the faculty are a bore") were overwhelmingly Euro-American and it was not a priority in those days to attract Native American, Hispanic, African American, or Asian American youngsters to the campus. Chicago's strongest effort at undergraduate diversity, for a once Baptist-affiliated university in which, it was more or less accurately alleged, "atheist professors teach Thomas Aquinas to Jewish students," was the Small Schools Talent Search, an outreach program to find promising students from exotic places like North Dakota. (When I was at Stanford in the late 1960s and saw those thousands of blond, tanned, physically perfect, and nearly naked specimens of youthful humanity cavorting on the quads, I instinctively understood that the Farm was the Northwestern of the West -- Northwestern in those days being a place where students were more concerned about fall fashions than the fate of the Earth; that these great white gods and goddesses could not be, like my dark and stunted New York Jewish classmates at Chicago, intellectually acute and politically committed. I was wrong. Pace, David Harris.)

But part of the core curriculum at Chicago -- which billed itself as "the teacher of teachers" -- supporting and surmounting the tripod of cross-referential three-year sequences in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, was the study of at least one modern foreign language -- many were offered -- and a year-long course in one of several non-Western civilizations: Russia, East Asia, etc. (The State of Illinois, following Plato's Socrates, also required proficiency in gym class as a condition for the baccalaureate. Hutchins, uncharacteristically abandoning the Ancients, said that whenever he felt the need for exercise, he would lie down until it went away.)

Times have changed. The "one world" Hutchins wanted has come to be, fractionated as he predicted it would be if his prescription were not followed. The Western canon is now championed by cultural and political conservatives, and disparaged by many on the Left who espouse multiculturalism. Unlike the students of the 1950s, American college students today are a motley and polyglot lot, increasingly likely to be heirs or claimants to traditions other than that of the Graeco-Roman-Judaeo-Christian West. They insist on respect for their ancestral cultures within the context of American pluralism. In a parallel development, in the late 1960s, graduate students and junior faculty in anthropology, sociology, history, and other disciplines began asking: On whose behalf, and to what ends, do we study the people of Papua-New Guinea or Bedford-Stuyvesant? Who is empowered by these studies, and who is marginalized? Ann Maxwell Hill of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in a paper given at the 1995 meetings of the American Anthropological Association, recounts her own odyssey as a student at Columbia and a teacher at Oberlin and Dickinson of the introductory course in anthropology. Once reluctant to apply the insights of "village studies" ethnography to the world that her mostly white, suburban students came from, she arrives today at this pedagogical conclusion: "If, in the political climate of the nineties, diversity at home has become more problematic than our differences with strangers, then our commitment to our discipline and our students compels our attention to our own neighborhoods and communities."

Garry Wills, the journalist and professor of American Studies at Northwestern University, makes the interesting observation in a New York Times Magazine article ("There's Nothing Conservative About the Classics Revival," Feb. 16, 1997), that cultural collisions and dislocations have been at the heart of every revival of the Western classics. "Eurocentrism," he wrote,

"when it was embedded in the study of the classics, created a false picture of the classics themselves. Multiculturalism is now breaking open that deception. We learn that "the West" is an admittedly brilliant derivative of the East. Semites created the stories the Greeks revered in Homer -- just as Jewish scholars brought Aristotle back to the West from Islam in the Middle Ages.

"Multiculturalism, far from being a challenge to the classics, is precisely what is reviving them. If there is a resurgence of interest in the classics, it is because we are making them our classics -- as the Renaissances of the 12th and 15th centuries did, as the Enlightenment and the Romantic period did. But do we want the classics to be like Clinton's first Cabinet and 'look like America?' Whether we want them to or not, that is the only way the classics have ever been revived. The classics are not some magic wand that touches us and transmutes us. We revive them only when we rethink them as a way of rethinking ourselves."

So the Culture Wars rage, fueled by munitions imported from Burke, Foucault, and Fanon. As the hyperlinks in this essay suggest, the great conversation is now on the Internet, which will reward the interested Nethead with days, weeks, or years of stimulating information and argument. For context, one might check out the syllabus and reading list of Robert Bannister's course at Swarthmore College on American Intellectual History in the 20th Century. The Columbia Journalism Review has an excellent website of resources, on the Web and off, on topics related to the Culture Wars. Useful recent books include:

La Belle, Thomas J. and Christopher R. Ward: Multiculturalism and Education: Diversity and Its Impact on Schools and Society (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994)

Goldberg, David Theo: Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1994) (Includes articles by Charles Taylor, Raymond Gutierrez, Barbara Christian, Henry Louis Gates, Michael Eric Dyson, Michelle Wallace, and others.)

Fiol-Matta, Liza and Mariam K. Chamberlain: Women of Color and the Multicultural Curriculum: Transforming the College Classroom (New York: City University of New York, The Feminist Press, 1994)

Jacoby, Russell: Dogmatic Wisdom: How the Culture Wars Divert Education and Distract America (New York: Doubleday, 1994)

Gitlin, Todd: The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Henry Holt, 1995)

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