318. Winning Trust in the Debate over Black Culture

It's the trust of the professor out in the public arena trying to talk about deficiencies in black culture that I'm worried about here — as at the end of my last post.  Let's make it the hardest case: he's male and white, in America a member of the tribe so distrusted, so justifiably distrusted, for so long.

Well, I hear my colleagues ask, what's wrong with the traditional academic way, speaking always in neutral (i.e., objective, scientific) language?  No color shading the nouns, no tendentiousness sliding into the verbs.  Not a hint of a distracting love for Socrates.  Do this so carefully that your audience, seeing that you're interested only in the truth, detaches you from your tribe and places you in the tribeless tribe.  Behold a professor!   A member of the tribe most worthy of each tribe's trust.

It's a way that once worked pretty well — possibly only in an Arcadian university of my dreams, I'll admit — but well enough to persuade administrators of American universities to grant (in 1940) iron-clad tenure to professors.  Teachers aspiring to speak this way could be trusted not to speak in a political way, for a tribe (and certainly not for the communist tribe, the feared one).  They needed the freedom ("academic") necessary to inquire and speak their way.  Secure tenure, as a guarantee of that freedom, was justified.

If you were the inquirer out in the world you described your method, reported your findings, and, if nobody detected tribal preference in the words you used (still possibly in Arcady), your findings were credited.  No orator's music, no sophist's twist, no play for the rhetorician's compliment; just the philosopher's slow march toward the truth.  As for the marcher, his identity as white, or male, or European, went unnoticed or, if noticed, was taken to be irrelevant.

To keep this going some universities, like mine, placed a College or University representative on each department committee granting a graduate degree.  His ears were those of Socrates, listening for departures from the academic way.  And he had the power of veto.  Knowledge of that out in the world gained the graduate trust when he spoke there.

So there's a first explanation of the loss of trust: universities no longer enforce adherence to the academic way.  There's nobody now to stand up, as classics professor Paul Murphy did at the end of an oral examination in my department , and say, "If this is acceptable then everything I've learned about scholarship is wrong."  Either the German notion of unquestioned competence within each department has prevailed over the Anglo-Hellenic notion of one university-wide, freely questioning dialogue or, in the view I'm urging here, love has prevailed over accuracy.

I might more successfully urge such a view if I had said, "Politics has prevailed over accuracy."  Then I could count on the reputation of sociology departments as advocates of positions on the left.  Or summon up memories of feminists plugging their cause before a class, and defending those plugs (as prioritized advocacy) in journals.  It's hard not to do that.

But it's easier if you see politics, or the strongly argued politics of our day, as love.  I see those who now give their cause priority over the academic cause doing so in the name of a Higher Love.  It's a commitment to people, human beings, deserving human beings, a gender, a race, loved warmly, and deservingly.  What an attractive alternative to the love of cold truth!

Another explanation of the loss of trust is the postmodern improvement in our powers of detection.  The "armed vision" of the New Critics became doubly and triply armed in deconstruction, which found few cloaks of objectivity impenetrable.  It is much easier now to see, and explain to  another, what a writer or speaker is "really saying."  And, for readers of Michel Foucault, that will nearly always be something useful to the stronger tribe.

For readers of Stanley Fish trust will come even more slowly.  If language is "rhetoric all the way down" then it's politics all the way down.  It's tribe all the way down. 

A third explanation is related to our difficulty in passing judgment on any group at all (see Post 315).  It was easy to pass judgment in the thirties, as my parents did.  But that was before the revelations of the Holocaust, the horrors of the judgment the Nazis so easily passed.  I see this as the great divide of my life, and of my time, with free judgment on one side and reluctant judgment on the other.

The next generations missed out on this, but oh what I can put on the blackboard.  "See how it starts?  Singling out a group.  Stereotyping them.  Demeaning them. Everywhere in Europe.  A build-up.  Then a Hitler to tap into the steam, get outrageous judgments to pass, and the horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau follow."  Remember, children, how it starts.

In the eighteenth century Christian love, with the help of affluence, made its breakthrough.  Care for the widow and orphan became care for the imprisoned, the enslaved, the mentally ill, and the incapacitated, as well as for the close ones.  The Age of Sensibility, but of rough categories.  Now love makes a leap.  Care for the lesser capacitated, the mentally fragile, the vulnerable, the marginal, the potentially oppressed, the incipiently persecuted.  The Age of Sensitivity, with finer categories.  Powering it is the vision of a slippery slope, with Auschwitz at the bottom.  The victims and their terrible victimizers.  You put yourself on it by demeaning, degrading, depreciating people different from you.  Categorizing them, even.  Categorization is discrimination.  That's how our great-grandparents started, and that's how we could start.  Catch yourself early.

This, to me, looks like the deepest source of distrust.  It feeds fear in the dominated, the minority, the black, and fear in the dominator, the majority, the white, a fear of being victimized, and a fear of victimizing.  And now we have the means to justify those fears earlier than ever before.  The most objective-sounding professor, reporting facts that depreciate a minority group, that make it appear deficient, could be putting us on that slope.