379. Blindness in Elites: (2) Blindness of the Humanities Elite to Science

In my English-literature classes in the forties Science was the monster that killed Poetry.  Its weapon was Reduction, with which it cut down rich and many-colored Life.   Ripped off its fine clothes, hewed off its limbs, and cut out its tongue.  Shoved the naked stump aside and replaced it with a zombie, constructed out of the basest material by Logic and Mathematics, and able to make only a few baby sounds.

We at the time were unable to see real science, a plain and modest maiden, because the monster filled our field of vision.  This blindness let us assert our superiority, something easy to do with a monster if you depreciate the physical and elevate the moral and esthetic.

That blindness is different, but not basically different, from the blindness to science in postmodern English departments, blindness brought on, I believe, by the relativism and constructivism learned from French theorists, the elite of the humanities elite.

This is the blindness exploited in 1996 by the physicist Alan Sokal when he got an outrageously unscientific paper accepted by the leading journal in cultural studies, a new (say 1964) discipline nourished in American English departments.  The editors couldn't see that science in its easiest but epistemologically identical form, common sense, had been violated.  You didn't need a very uncommon sense, believed Sokal, to tell you that some things, like pi, can't be relative, a belief confirmed by the popularity of his hoax.

I'm told that French theorists are fully understandable only in the context of phenomenology, a philosophy dominant on the continent of Europe.  The category I fall into is "American pragmatist."  I'm drawn to the corresponding English philosophy by its helpfulness (cf. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words) in the low field where I labor, English Composition.  That, it turns out, credentials me as a populist.  I see criticism or theory coming from the continent and I feel obliged, as populists do when they receive a delivery from their elite, to examine it for its helpfulness.  What I can understand I find unhelpful.  And I'm too busy to learn this philosophy I'm supposed to read French theory in the context of, so, life being short, I decide to just judge it by its fruits.  What do these continental phenomenologists do for me in the world I live in?  Nothing that I can see.  I'm abandoned by a blind elite.

Yet I understand their blindness because I myself was once blind in the same way.  In my first attempts to teach poetry I was a hotshot graduate student, eager to unpack the metaphors doubly and triply layered in Donne's sonnets.  My students were freshmen trying to figure out where the hell the verb was in these intricate combinations of strange new phrases.  Recent uses of the words "elitist" and "populist" fit, I see, the picture of my first classes: an elitist standing before a swarm of populists.

That elitist, blind as a bat, stayed blind for some time.  What had made him blind was — I know it sounds odd — his own quickness and experience.  Like other young English instructors he had been quick to learn English words and how they fit together to form sentences and was so experienced at doing this that the operations necessary to do it disappeared from sight.  Blind to this, his privilege, he was blind  to the work those of lesser privilege had to go through.  And his ailment was shared, I believe, by all his fellows. Their recruitment selected for it.

Now I, like a lot of those fellows, having learned that in the poststructuralist vocabulary we are "foundationalists," and having learned from relativist and constructivist philosophers to doubt that there is any absolute and permanent support for anybody, have been trying to locate our foundation, the epistemology that supports what's done in our classrooms.  Is there really no sure knowledge?  Does the status of every sentence depend on the interests of the speaker?

I found my answer not by reading more theory but by putting myself in the position of a beginning student, opening my eyes to his problem and going through the operations he had to go through to solve it.  That student, when he came upon Shakespeare's 16th-century language, for example, was pretty much moving into the unknown.  Not among those who were already familiar with the language, or among those who gave up until they got to class, he had to figure out what words meant and how they fit.

"He jests at scars that never felt a wound."  That doesn't make sense to him.  He takes "that" to refer to "scars."  How do you get a scar without being wounded?  And the sentence doesn't fit the situation.  Mercutio is speaking of Romeo, and he's had plenty of wounds.  "What makes sense?  What fits?" he asks.  He tries some alternatives.  Nothing fits unless he takes 'that' to mean 'who.'  Jigger the sentence to make it modern and he's got, "He who has never felt a wound jests at scars."  Fits Mercutio and what he's just said.  This forces the student to ask, 'Which is better, a good fit with a twisted word-meaning or a bad fit with a straight word-meaning?'  For help he goes to the probabilities.  "What are the chances that Shakespeare would counter all he has going with me, all that the contrast between Romeo and Mercutio does for my understanding of callow romantic types?  They have to be very low against the chances that he'd use a word that looks twisted to me, a 20th-century reader.  Go with the probabilities.  Take 'that' to mean 'who.'"

Without recourse to any repository of knowledge, like a historical dictionary, the student has gained knowledge, and has turned unknown into known — by looking at evidence, making probable inferences, checking for consistency with what's known, and for coherence within accepted theories, that is, by doing the things scientists do. 

Is the knowledge he gains useful in the way theirs is?  Clearly.  Say in the future he comes to the closing lines of Edna St.Vincent Millay's poem, "Oh, sleep forever in the Latmian cave."  These lines are addressed to the eternally sleeping mortal, Endymion, by the moon goddess Selene, who is passionately in love with him.  After nights of despair at her inability to make love to him she "wanders mad, being all unfit/ For mortal love, that might not die of it."  He's puzzled until, after a shorter time, he guesses that Millay has picked up the older meaning.  He repositions "that" in the old way and gets, "She, who can't die for love, is unfit for it; so, she is going mad."

After they get that straight the students' imaginations can take off.  One says, or at least thinks, "Wow, a goddess unfit for something human.  And what makes her unfit is she can't die!  Crazy."  Another goes further and pictures a woman at the edge of a Lovers Leap.  Someplace a goddess can't go!  "I never in my life thought of that as a privilege," she says.  Another student goes on to think of how the poet's view changes her view of her own coming death.  It's not anything to make you envy the gods.  It puts drama and urgency into your life,  something denied to the immortals.  "Rejoice," she concludes.  Another goes as far as "rejoice" and adds a "ha ha."  And the sixth student, probably a graduate student, runs through all that and adds, "Ah, carpe diem.  Winding up there again," while a creative-writing student goes crazy over the word "unfit."  "What a great choice!  So down-scale and so high-octane!"  If that thought is spoken we'll get a sympathetic Ph.D addressing the skeptical:  "Do you doubt there's a bomb in that word?  Look at the explosion among all these kids." 

These last might appear to us as hotshots, but they had to work their way up to it.  They're just not conscious of the work.  Nor, when their hot shooting takes them to high theory, takes them to Paris, are they likely to be conscious of its epistemological foundation.  They will be free to think of themselves as "anti-foundationalists."

I believe that the wonderful explosion of the imagination that epitomizes what poetry contributes to our lives is not possible without operations of the reason we associate with science.  I say "associate with" rather than "derive from" because we, hotshots and under, performed these operations long before scientists systematized them, and many of us now make them easily and unconsciously.  We call this "common sense" or "using our heads."  Whatever we call it it is epistemologically the same as what scientists do.

And it is incompatible with epistemological relativism, which removes its foundation, which is not anything absolute or permanent in a metaphysical way but is sure and persisting in a mundane way, the way that matters in our world.  This is the modest way of science, and English teachers who must in part pursue that way cannot believe what Sokal's French theorists believe about science.  If they do they have cut off their own legs.  With evidence and inference undermined they have nothing to stand on in class when they try to help students read a poem. 

This, I think, would explain rising low-level outrage at high-level theory.  "You are depriving us of our vocation!"  "You are blind to it."  "Go back into your cave."

We in English departments were in a cave because of our superior quickness and early intelligence.  This was our privilege, and when we conversed among ourselves it produced some very adventurous and evidently fruitful theorizing.  But it made us into one of the elites blind to what was going on outside.  And down below.