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.
