VDH - Sounds like a disease to me

From some guy with a blog (thanks, J), a column by Victor Davis Hanson, who is apparently a scholar...though I don't see any evidence of it based on this example.

Over at Engage, J takes the high road in asking questions about Hanson's column.

I am not going to take the high road. VDH is an idiot.

He gets me at the first paragraph:

Is “ho”—the rapper slang for the slur “whore”—a bad word? Always, sometimes, or just when an obnoxious white male like Don Imus says it? But not when the equally obnoxious Snoop Dogg serially employs it?

Um, there are actually lots of black people who don't like those words, either. Thing is, many of them are black women. When white folks make complaints like this, it suggests they haven't heard - or bothered to look for - any black people, male or female, who are speaking out against misogynistic language like this.

This sort of smug, self-righteous garbage makes me think someone like VDH here is a bit of a racist. Or, at the least, he's exercising some class and race privilege here - he gets to call people out for "not speaking out" about something, when really it's he who hasn't been listening.

And that's the opening paragraph. I don't think I'm going to like this column.

Moving on:

Americans increasingly cannot seem to answer questions like these adequately because they are blissfully uneducated. They have not acquired a broad knowledge of language, literature, philosophy, and history.

Instead, our youth for a generation have been fed a “Studies” curriculum. Fill in the blanks: Women’s Studies, Gay Studies, Environmental Studies, Peace Studies, Chicano Studies, Film Studies, and so on. These courses aim to indoctrinate students about perceived pathologies in contemporary American culture—specifically, race, class, gender, and environmental oppression.

Such courses are by design deductive. The student is expected to arrive at the instructor’s own preconceived conclusions. The courses are also captives of the present—hostages of the contemporary media and popular culture from which they draw their information and earn their relevance.

Wow.

While I *might* agree that Americans (or at least American college graduates) don't have a "broad knowledge of language, literature, philosophy, and history," I doubt I'd agree with this guy on why that's the case (and for the record, I don't think what Hanson is claiming has EVER been the case - it's a myth). I would blame it on massive reductions in funding for higher education and a push to make even four-year universities into technical schools where students aren't required to take a humanities core (which is a result of students attending college just to make more money and not to get "an education").

Oh, and Hanson's complaint about all the *-Studies departments? Totally irrelevant to his point. The classics classes are still there, at least in every curriculum I've ever seen, and furthermore, the classics classes are usually required as part of a humanities or undergraduate core, while the "Studies" classes are not. They are almost always electives.

On the other hand, it appears Hanson has a problem with the *-Studies' existence:

The theme of all such therapeutic curricula is relativism. There are no eternal truths, only passing assertions that gain credence through power and authority. Once students understand how gender, race, and class distinctions are used to oppress others, they are then free to ignore absolute “truth,” since it is only a reflection of one’s own privilege.

Uh-huh. While some courses are indeed set up for the students to deductively reach the professor's conclusions, insofar as this is a problem, it's a problem in all fields and departments, not just those things that VDH doesn't like. It's not like the "classics" courses don't have the exact same issue - what, like there is one correct, objective way to understand the history of white people, and that happens to be the way it's actually taught? Please.

Oh. Whoops. I guess Hanson does think there is one objective truth, since he complains that "The theme of all such therapeutic curricula is relativism. There are no eternal truths, only passing assertions that gain credence through power and authority."

Um, that's rather a obviously bullshit statement if you've sat through any of the courses one presumes Hanson is talking about. (And I have. Lots of them.)

First, there's no way to make a blanket claim about all the possible courses in all these fields, which he is doing - note the use of the word "all." Bad VDH! Bad!

Second, he seems to be arguing against the most extreme form of relativism possible, one which lots (and lots and lots and lots) of "Cultural Studies" (to use a broad and inaccurate blanket label) professors who don't believe in this form of relativism any more than Hanson does. That's a logical fallacy called a strawman: Just make up an argument that's not very good or accurate to your opponent, demolish it, and declare victory. It's practically the most common tool used to deride and ignore anyone to the "left" of Joe Lieberman, especially on TV, where I we can't shout back.

I actually took a class on the epistemological foundations of knowledge (in a roundabout way) which really hammered home how this sort of relativism works - and why even someone like me would be better off without it. Suffice to say, there are lots of forms or types of relativism, and Hanson is picking on the most extreme version, which, while certainly used by somebody somewhere, cannot be generalized in the way he is claiming.

There's more:

By contrast, the aim of traditional education was to prepare a student in two very different ways. First, classes offered information drawn from the ages—the significance of Gettysburg, the characters in a Shakespeare play, or the nature of the subjunctive mood. Integral to this acquisition were key dates, facts, names, and terms by which students, in a focused manner in conversation and speech, could refer to the broad knowledge that they had gathered.

Second, traditional education taught a method of inductive inquiry. Vocabulary, grammar, syntax, logic, and rhetoric were tools to be used by a student, drawing on an accumulated storehouse of information, to present well-reasoned opinions—the ideology of which was largely irrelevant to professors and the university.

Sometime in the 1960s—perhaps due to frustration over the Vietnam War, perhaps as a manifestation of the cultural transformations of the age—the university jettisoned the classical approach and adopted the therapeutic.

You know what that sounds like? White supremacy. In this case, the way courses used to be taught - viewing everything through a European lens and focusing almost exclusively on the accomplishments and history of white people - can only be labeled as "traditional" or "objective" if those are synonyms with "Eurocentric."

Hanson also claims these courses were inductive, providing tools for students to use later in life. Obviously, then, he doesn't think the same of the "Cultural Studies" material. However, I would argue that it they are fact a whole new set of tools, developed by people focusing on different things than in the past, and using some different assumptions about the world. A major difference is the willingness to focus inward and also on the social aspect of humanity.

I will agree with Hanson that the tools he describes - language skills especially - are extremely useful and instrumental in today's world. I just don't think a) we're losing those because of some nebulously-defined "Cultural Studies" or b) those tools are enough to allow us to understand what's really going on in the world. And I suspect that the way Hanson visualizes those tools leaves a lot of people out in the cold.

Finally:

If few Americans know of prior abject disasters during the winter of 1776, the summer of 1864, or January 1942, then why wouldn’t Iraq really be the worst mistake in our history?

If there are no intrinsic differences—only relative degrees of “power” that construct our “reality”—between a Western democracy that is subject to continual audit by a watchdog press, an active political opposition, and a freely voting citizenry, and an Iranian theocracy that bans free speech to rule by religious edict, then it will matter little which entity has nuclear weapons.

Hanson's massive and fundamental misunderstanding of relativism also leads to the tripe I just quoted. Find me a college professor who actually believes that, and I'll show you a scarecrow. What he's missing here, and I'm not quite sure how, is that there are still consequences in the everyday lives of almost everybody no matter what you believe, and I think most folks who are in favor of social justice know that. Given how often social justice advocates stamp their feet and scream their faces blue trying to draw attention to those in Darfur, Iran, or Palestine, for example - I would think that Hanson would surely know better.

Oh, and that little dig about Iraq? That's just fucked up (unless I am misunderstanding - the sentence is very convoluted). Hanson is apparently claiming that the lack of proper education for college graduates are what has allowed us to get mired down in Iraq in the first place, but that makes no sense: The folks who took lots of classes in the "Cultural Studies" area that Hanson derides are the same people that opposed Iraq in the first place, often on the basis of greater relative knowledge of the history and culture of a non-white, non-European area. In other words, us lousy relativists got it right, and the uptight Western Civ folks got it wrong.