Notions of Oppression of the Dead White Male in Today’s “Institutions of Higher Learning”

Subverting Structures of Minority Privilege and Deconstructing Diversity

In this article, The New Learning that Failed (published in the New Criterion), Victor Davis Hanson explores (and criticizes) the reasons for the failure for academic institutions to promote the study of classics (in other words, the so-called Western canon of white male dead authors). He makes several valid assessments on the state of the humanities departments in today’s university. He touches upon the inability to recognize beauty:*

There is no vocabulary left to convey ugliness or near perfection in art or literature—at least none that is not instantly deconstructed to prejudices of race, gender, and class. In a university class, we read mostly poems without meter, rhyme, musicality, or an elevated vocabulary, and novels without heroes or protagonists or even much action; we view art that is far removed from what the eye sees or would wish to see. The result is that our students cannot recognize beautiful things around them or within themselves.

Having studied plenty of minority and post-colonial literature, there’s some really beautiful work written (of course, we never described it using that word) that is well worth studying. But that doesn’t mean that a dead white male cannot write something relevant to us today. And there are plenty of poems without meter, rhyme or musicality, and protagonist-less novels that are excellent, but that doesn’t mean the ones that have them are so antiquated that they are not worth reading.

It’s important to study the writings of dead white males (and yes, there are exceptions), because they have in large part shaped the structure and basis of our society today. If we are to understand who we are now, we need to go back and understand where we have come from. We also need to understand what relevance they might have for our current situation.

Of course, I do believe it’s important to understand other cultures and acknowledge the ways that the Western canon may have omitted them, but if that becomes our sole war cry, then we may soon lose sight of reality:

Theories of exploitation were divorced from the real world. While relatively well-off students anguished in class over perceived gender and radical oppressions, the United States remained the number-one destination of the world’s immigrants fleeing political bias, poverty, and religious intolerance. The first-generation Mexican national who ran as fast as he could from the oppression of Oaxaca, and clipped the bushes outside the tasteful faculty office, instinctively knew and appreciated the advantages of Western culture far more than did the leisured professor inside.

Feminists insisted that Harvard’s president Larry Summers must be fired for insensitive remarks regarding the under-representation of women on math faculties; elsewhere, thousands of honor killings and millions of female circumcisions transpire yearly. In Saudi Arabia, feminism is not second-guessing the remarks of a college president, but simply wanting to drive a car; on the West Bank, it is not being murdered when dating someone your father and brothers don’t like; in the Sudan, it is avoiding genital mutilation; in Iran, it is escaping stoning when accused of adultery. In contrast, Greek learning had emphasized that deeds must match words; otherwise, to paraphrase Aristotle, it is easy to be ethical in our sleep.


Language in the university has lost its connection with reality—a danger that Socrates warned about in his battles with the Sophists and we have seen in our own time with the communist attempt to remake vocabulary to further social and economic agendas. “Diversity” does not mean diverse anything, surely not differences in political thought or ethnic backgrounds, but rather a requisite number of different skin colors. A classroom with three offspring of affluent African-American professionals can be “diverse” while having children of Appalachia or impoverished immigrants from Eastern Europe is not. The “free speech” area may mean that radical pro-Palestinian groups can hand out anti-Semitic literature or Chicano activists may vandalize conservative newspapers, but it is not a place where one can talk safely and candidly about the problems of illegal immigration, or social contributors to the AIDS epidemic, or the need to calibrate affirmative action more on class than race.

…

We, in contrast, have lost all sense of proportion and simply use the self-absorbed yardstick of our own times versus all others. Thus Iraq—not the summer of 1864 or December 1950—is the worst (fill in the blanks) war, blunder, or quagmire in our history or of all time. A flippant campus slur is the most sexist thing ever heard, as if the frontier woman on the Colorado plains without electricity and with eleven sick children never had it as rough. Wounded Knee is tantamount to Okinawa, the loyalty oaths of the 1950s commensurate to the Inquisition. And why not, when the purpose of education now is not to train young minds in a method of disinterested inquiry supported by historical exempla, but to condition them to think in preordained, deductive fashion—in other words, as Sophists rather than Socratics?

We’ve prioritized these assumed values of diversity over the quality and influence of the work itself, and abstained from making value judgments about any pieces of work lest we offend someone. The academy, supposedly a place for honest intellectual inquiry and pursuit of truth, has been overrun by political correctness. As the study of literature becomes more concerned with the nitpicking about notions of gender construction in Dicken’s novels, it loses more and more of its relevance.

Then again, it’s not like this is anything new:

Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely acquire wisdom by doing so. We have done this by inculcating the Historical Point of View. The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the ‘present state of the question’. To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge – to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour – this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded.

~ from C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters

*Of course, that’s also because we’ve assumed, that literature is a rather subjective matter, like all other things… and therefore, we can’t really say that it reveals any truth of any kind, only that it perhaps produces certain effects and reflects certain notions of prejudices and etc…