Category: Culture Matters

Excerpts from, and commentary on, John Gray, Why the Humanities Can't be Saved.  HT: Karl White.

It is hard to see why any sensible person would enroll in a humanities degree at the present time. A common argument used to be that the humanities taught students how to think. [. . .]

This is not an argument that can be made today. “Critical thinking” has become a cluster of progressive dogmas, which are handed down as if they were self-evident truths. Students learn an intra-academic argot – intersectionality, hetero-normativity and the like — that has zero utility in the world in which they will go on to live.

They also learn that disagreement in ethics and politics is illegitimate. Anyone who departs from the prevailing progressive consensus is not just mistaken but malevolent. When enforced in universities, this is a prescription for censorship and conformism. What is being inculcated is not freedom of mind, but freedom from thought. Losing the ability to think while attending a university may be considered a misfortune. Incurring fifty or sixty thousand pounds of debt in order to do so looks like carelessness.

It looks more like stupidity.

The decline of the humanities is one of the defining facts of the age. Yet there has not been a great deal of serious discussion of its causes. In the Eighties and Nineties, an influential critique argued that universities had been co-opted by “tenured radicals”—the title of a provocative book published by the American art critic Roger Kimball in 1990.

As Kimball saw it, an academic nomenklatura controlled sectors of higher education and used its position to attack the values of the societies that funded it. Any version of a western canon was discredited, and its origins in classical philosophy and Jewish and Christian religion disparaged.

There is some truth in this critique. Though they remain ineffably redolent of the bourgeoisie at their most sanctimonious and self-deceiving, academic radicals define themselves by their opposition to the bourgeois civilisation that produced and now supports them. Kimball’s critique also identifies a key feature of tenured radicalism: it is self-reproducing. Through their powers of patronage, the nomenklatura decide the prospects of new entrants, and exclude anyone who deviates from the party line. No young scholar who fails to genuflect to it has any prospect of a future in academic life.

So far, so good.

What this analysis fails to explain is the appeal of the ideology this class has adopted. Marx may be worth re-reading in a time when capitalism is entering another of its recurrent crises. But how could a turgid mishmash of Heidegger, Derrida and Lacan have gained such a stranglehold on institutions of higher learning?

The metamorphosis in liberalism that has occurred over the past generation has played a role. From being a philosophy of tolerance aiming at peaceful coexistence among divergent world-views, it has become a persecutory orthodoxy that tolerates no view of the world other than its own. If the contemporary academy is hostile to liberal values as they used to be understood, one reason is the rise of a new liberalism that dismisses these values as phony and repressive. But this only pushes the question one step back. Why has illiberal liberalism become so popular?

Gray notes correctly that "persecutory orthodoxy" has replaced the classically liberal philosophy of tolerance and then asks a very important question. Why has this illiberal liberalism taken hold?   His answer follows.

Part of the answer may be found in a short, strange and inexhaustibly interesting volume that was published nearly a century and a half ago. The chief subject of Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy(1872), is the nature of Greek tragedy, which he interpreted as an art-form that overcame the lack of meaning in human life by reframing it as an aesthetic spectacle.

The most celebrated aspect of Nietzsche’s interpretation is his claim that Greek drama turns on an interaction between an Apollonian striving after reason and order, and a Dionysian yearning for chaos and frenzy. But the most important section of the book, to my mind, comes when he applies his account of Greek tragedy to the secular faith of modern times, which he calls “Socratism” — the belief that the world becomes properly intelligible only when the human mind has rid itself of myth.

“Socrates is the archetype of the theoretical optimist,” Nietzsche writes, “who in his faith in the explicability of things, attributes the power of a panacea to knowledge and science, and sees error as the embodiment of evil.” [. . .]

The end-result of Socratism for the West is “a resolute process of secularization, a break with the unconscious metaphysics of its previous existence”. In turn, the triumph of Socratism leads to a violent rebirth of mythic thinking, inspiring the frenzied totalitarian movements that Nietzsche saw coming and which, ironically, he was blamed for inspiring.

Writing when Europe’s high bourgeois civilisation seemed unshakably secure, Nietzsche foresaw the present crisis of the humanities. Deconstruction is Socratism in an extravagant form, an all-out effort to subvert the myths and metaphysics that underpinned western civilisation — not least Socrates’s own faith in reason. [. . .]

Like Plato, Socrates was the mouthpiece of a mystical faith. It was this—not any process of ratiocination—that allowed him to assert that the true and the good were one and the same. The ideology of deconstruction aims to demystify this Socratic faith, along with everything else. As Nietzsche understood, once Socratism knocks away its metaphysical foundations it becomes a type of nihilism.

Gray is asking an important question. How did "persecutory orthodoxy" come to replace the classically liberal philosophy of tolerance? This philosophy includes belief in free speech, open inquiry, and acceptance of dissent, all underpinned by the belief that at least partial insight into the truth is possible by dialectical means, that is, by dialog, discussion, and friendly competition in a 'free marketplace of ideas.'  On classical liberalism, dissent is not hate, as it for the persecutorily orthodox, but a goad to inquiry. If you disagree with me, I don't hate you for it; I try to see what I can learn from you. I take your disagreement as a reason to examine my beliefs more carefully.  I assume that there is a truth beyond both of us.

The assumption, of course, is that the world is intrinsically intelligible, and that it is possible to know something about it as it is in itself.  Logos can and must supplant mythos as the guide to truth and to life.  There is an impersonal truth, a truth that is not perspectival and merely expressive of the interests and the will to power of individuals and tribes, but is instead objective and absolute.  And again, this truth is assumed to be knowable, to some extent at least.

Gray, leaning on Nietzsche, is in effect telling us that these assumptions about intrinsic intelligibility, truth, and knowability are part of a "mystical faith," Socratism, according to which "the belief that the world becomes properly intelligible only when the human mind has rid itself of myth." This faith in reason, in the value of critical examination, and in its efficacy at getting at the truth, then gets turned upon the very project of rational inquiry.  The upshot is that the Enlightenment project, which begins with Socrates, undermines itself.  Skepticism and nihilism result.  Faith in reason wanes when reason cannot secure life-guiding results acceptable to all.

The critical assault on the dogmatism of tribal traditions and myths having failed, new dogmatisms arise:  people need to have life-guiding beliefs.   Only the rare Pyrrhonian skeptic can live adoxastos, and even for him that is arguably only a rarely attained ideal. The vast majority cannot live belieflessly. Thus arise dogmatisms that persecute other dogmatisms. There is, for example, the dogmatism of the hate-America leftist with his slanderous talk of systemic racism.

The question again, is: How did "persecutory orthodoxy" come to replace the classically liberal philosophy of tolerance? It is not clear to me what Gray's answer is.  He may be telling us that the "mystical faith" in reason is as groundless and mythical as any other myth, and that once this was appreciated suspected late in the history of the West by Nietzsche, it was just a matter of time before that the "mystical faith" was de-mystified and a sort of perspectivism arose that at once privileges its own tribal perspective while denying that there is any absolute 'perspective' (e.g. a God's eye point of view or that of an ideal spectator hovering above the flux and shove of history).

This privileging of a mere perspective seems definatory of the contemporary culturally Marxist Left.  It is at once both relativistic and dogmatic. It denies that there is objective truth by holding that truth is relative to tribal interests while at the same time dogmatically asserting those interests as if they were absolutely valid.

What is unclear to me is whether or not Gray agrees with Nietzsche that there are no facts, only interpretations; no truth, only power; that Being has no intelligible bottom, that, in the end, Die Welt is der Wille zur Macht und nichts anders! (From the eponymous and posthumous book.)  If such a view is accepted, then there is no saving the humanities.

If Nietzsche’s diagnosis is even half-way sound, some awkward conclusions follow for the future of the humanities. Many lament the collapse of standards of truth and evidence in higher education. But what is their remedy? To restore rationality, no doubt. It seems not to have occurred to them that this may not be possible. For the most part, those who lament the condition of the humanities are evangelists for the Socratism that has led the humanities to where they are now.

But how does Gray know that there is an inevitable slide from "Socratism" to "persecutory orthodoxy"?  That the former must lead to the latter? It could be that the faith in reason is a true faith and nothing 'mythical' or 'mystical,' and that the loss of that faith was a grave mistake sired by decadence. Or better: Socratism was never a mere faith but a rational insight into the importance of reason and its power to lead us toward truth. Our falling away from that insight would then condemn us, not reason.

The claim that the Enlightenment Project undermines itself is a mere claim from one perspective among others. Those who make the claim privilege their perspective for no good reason: that a belief enhances one's power over others is no good reason for believing it to be true.  Those who reject that perspective have been given no good reason to accept it. The defenders of "Socratism" are entitled to stand their ground and assert: You Nietzscheans are wrong, and indeed non-perspectivally wrong.

For "Socratism" to undermine itself, it would have to be non-perspectivally true that it bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction.  That is something a sort of inverted Hegelian could maintain, but not a Nietzschean.

But suppose now that I assert that I have rational insight into the objective, non-perspectival, truth that the world is intrinsically intelligible, and knowable to some extent at least, and that what I know is true non-perspectivally  — what stops that claim from being a dogmatic assertion? I cannot prove it. I can of course presuppose it. My opponent, however, can presupposes the opposite. The specter of groundless and ungroundability arises.