In Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire the author relates how the aristocratic elite of ancient Rome could recognize each other by the manners of speech and the literary allusions made in casual conversation. Despite the militarization of the late Empire, elite Roman society remained a fundamentally civilian and lettered subculture. The first Roman Emperor who was reputedly illiterate did not ascend to the purple until the 6th century, and this may itself have been a scurrilous accusation by his enemies. A similar ethos of cultured learning permeated much of the Chinese ruling class for most of the history of that civilization. This stands in contrast to the orientation of the aristocracy of Europe after the fall of Rome, which was fundamentally that of a barbarian warrior caste which overthrew the old Roman order, even if it genuflected in a superficial sense to their predecessors. Charlemagne was responsible for the preservation of much of ancient learning through his patronage of the Carolingian Renaissance, but the first Holy Roman Emperor never learned to write. Despite their real cultivation of the arts and sciences, the European nobility did not transition away from a martial ethos until the rise of firearms, which led to the transformation of war into a process which involved mobilization of nations, as opposed to a personalized clash between ruling classes.
The point is that societies organize themselves around a particular ethos. In traditional societies since the Neolithic Revolution the numerous sons of the ruling class have found various ways to form bonds, whether on the fields of battle, or in the halls of the academy. The milieu is less important than the fact that those bonds must be made in some fashion. Individuals must have common currency of experience, whether concrete or intellectual. Two strangers who may not know each other may still feel some comfort if they fought in the same battle, or absorbed the same book. Therefore the Classical and Chinese elites looked to specific literary touchstones which would have been read by all. This model isn’t unfamiliar to us, as post-Renaissance European culture resurrected classical education as a form of preparing males of the ruling elite for their role in society.
This is the perspective and framework I bring to the table when attempting to understand what is going on with the latest flair up over the humanities in the academy within the broader culture. It began with a column by my friend Heather Mac Donald, The Humanities Have Forgotten Their Humanity. In Slate Rebecca Schuman responded with the perspective of what I take to be the average academic humanist, pointing to an even stronger response from a faculty member at Yale. You can read the opinions of the protagonists yourself. Rather than deconstructing particular arguments, I will admit right now that most fundamentally humanistic production is a matter of politics, insofar as it reflects and projects what we think is of value in the social order. And it is always important to remember who the particular “we” is. In the American contexts conservatives tend to defend Great Books in the fashion which Mortimer Adler would understand. In contrast the literary academic avant-garde is naturally rather unenthusiastic about reflection upon a static canon. I am not a Platonist about literature or human creative production, and have some understanding and sympathy for those who would favor a more flexible understanding of the canon. But ultimately I tend to side with conservative critiques for two different specific reasons. The first is one of depth, and the second one of breadth. In short, too much of both.
In regards to the first I believe that close reading often devolves into a process of such irrelevancy that it is like extracting blood from a rock. Of course close reading in a modern sense has an ancient pedigree in terms of the exegetic glosses which were common forms of intellectual production in the domains of philosophy and religion for several thousand years. I believe that these earlier endeavors were frankly a waste of time, in that they did not contribute much to the broader society and had little substantive content in and of themselves aside from advancing narrow professional careers. I believe that contemporary attempts at close reading are nothing more than intellectual masturbation sessions, analogous to the later incarnations of medieval scholasticism. What would be far more fruitful than reading works closely would be to produce one’s own works, even if they might not measure up. Creativity in that sense is at least future-directed, and in keeping with the whiggish sensibility at the heart of modern society.
The second problem I see with modern humanistic “discourse” is that it is highly fragmented, unfocused, and selective. With the academy scattering out across domains of “race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability” as perspectives and paradigms it has lost both broad universal relevance and also began to give rise to politically preferred silos. As I argued above a coherent society requires an ethos, and an emphasis on the lack of a unified ethos (“diversity”) is both incoherent and futile. The modern secular academy does not focus too much on the whole area of evangelical Christian fiction to my knowledge. Why? Because for some reason this domain of religious diversity is not of particular interest to many scholars. That is totally acceptable, but, it does point out that the range of diversity explored in the modern academy is delimited by their own presuppositions (notice that the quote above from the Yale academic leaves out religion, which is arguably one of the most important fissures in modern society).
With the rise of diverse perspectives individuals are now becoming fragmented even more than their “race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability” would imply, because they lack access to the same common vocabulary of ideas. This is a tragedy because the reality is that most literary themes do reflect human universal impulses and conditions. One might state them in spare aphoristic forms, but we are a storytelling species, and embedded within a narrative they are much more likely to spread, persist, and impact. The fracturing of the narrative shatters even the barest pretense of elite coherency, and likely will add to confusions which might not otherwise emerge.
Finally, on a less relativistic and instrumental note, I suspect one reason many revolt against literary narratives of dissent from particular subcultures is that we haven’t had enough time to discern the great from the not-so-great in many areas. The canons of the traditional civilizations have accumulated organically over time over thousands of years. A list of great works in queer literature is going to be the opinion of a small number of professors who matured in the same recent intellectual milieu. It is unlikely that it will be as stellar a series of narrative works simply because top-down judgment by critics with the same intellectual orientations is unlikely to be a very good sifter.
Ultimately the reason that the conservative vision of Shakespeare etc. is appealing is because they have a coherent vision. In contrast the modern humanistic academy seems to think they are the revolutionary vanguard of cultural change. Perhaps they are, but in that case they should not be surprised when the non-revolutionary majority rejects their project and deems it abhorrent.
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