Shakespeare's Fault or Yours? Melzer's Maxim: A Guide to Tentative Omniscience for the Congenitally Hyperfallible

Abstract

Arthur Melzer's tremendous accomplishment is even greater than he may realize. The tradition of esoteric writing in political philosophy exists, as he convincingly demonstrates, and the consequences of this discovery are as significant as he claims. But the method of esoteric reading that he recommends applies more broadly than he seems to suggest. Applied liberally, moreover, as a corrective to nearly everything that's gone wrong with education in the humanities and social sciences over the last forty years, his humble heuristic—Melzer's Maxim, I call it—has the potential to reorient and renew the whole concept of Liberal Education for an age whose pedagogy is foundering. A boon to the sub-discipline of Political Theory in particular, Philosophy Between the Lines has even more to offer to classroom instruction in general. Read between the lines, Melzer's specialized work of scholarship promises nothing less than the opening of the American mind. It is the antidote to the poison of politically correct multiculturalism.

Keywords:

• liberal education
• political correctness
• multiculturalism
• literary theory
• historicism
• Fredric Jameson
• Arthur Melzer

Notes

¹Paul Cantor's early review is typical of the works’ reception thus far. He refers to it as “one of the most important books I've read in years” (“Philosophy in a Clown Suit,” Weekly Standard, December 22, 2014).

²The circles of Politically Correct Hades are many. What I am describing in this essay is the fundamentally negative impact on students’ motivation to want to read serious books seriously (and their chances for being asked to do so). But given the nightmare stories one hears frequently nowadays about administrative abuse of PC ideology to discipline faculty in Kafkaesque ways, I would be remiss were I not to mention that PC's quintessentially authoritarian impulse also serves bureaucratic might, at this brute panoptic “Foucauldian” level of literally policing thought. Castigating those whom he dubs aptly the “aggressively self-righteous” members of the “humane-values-are-good-for-you-and-I-will-ensure-that-you-obey-me-crew,” a leading liberal academic, Michael Bérubé, noted some time ago that “[w]hat really makes for hideous travesties of political correctness … isn't this strange combination of good intentions and moral authoritarianism; by itself, the mix is merely irritating. But when you've also got a campus disciplinary apparatus with all the due process guarantees of a Star Chamber, then you've got the potential for some serious abuse” (What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education [New York: Norton, 2007], 129). While I strongly disagree that the pervasive atmosphere of Stalinoid persecutory self-righteousness—giving rise to so many witch-hunts, even as it drives the dumbing down of education into the cellar—is just an “irritation” to be sloughed off with an episode or two of South Park or The Simpsons at the end of the day, I concur with Bérubé's suggestion that the combination of cheap but “aggressive” moralism and corporate-style management techniques in higher education generates a quintessentially modern form of evil. The tyranny of what's been called “the New PC” may indeed be—à la Hannah Arendt—thoroughly “banal” and without intention, but it is wrecking education anyway.

³Signs that we need such healing waters are manifest all around us. But a particularly insightful take on the polluting effects of the higher cynicism that universities and colleges secrete, like oil from a sinking tanker, is Ted McAllister's. Regarding America's first Politically Correct Commander-in-Chief, the Pepperdine political theorist argues that President Obama's “populism appears to affirm American values but actually seethes with resentment toward middle America. The president constructs a progressive and reassuring historical narrative, drawing Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt into an arc of history that leads to the present age of social awakening. Yet Mr. Obama, in candid moments, lets slip the bitterness underlying his philosophy, as during the 2008 presidential campaign when he maligned those who ‘cling to guns or religion’ or when he promises a ‘fundamental transformation’ of American society” (“‘Sweet Populism’ Awaits Its Leader,” Wall Street Journal, August 5, 2014 http://www.wsj.com/articles/ted-mcallister-sweet-populism-awaits-its-leader-1407281018). A truly “careful” reading of the political theory canon—and of the Western tradition as it was once cherished—would make such resentful populism less appealing to educated people. McAllister's “sweet populism,” by contrast, is nurtured on a love of patrimony that today's anti-American education suffocates in the nursery.

⁴Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 9.

⁵At least Jameson himself made truth claims for his own work as a scholar. With his epigones, the so-called “New Historicists,” it gets worse. Aping the great W. E. B. Du Bois's provocative phrase, “All art is propaganda and ever must be,” a pair of American literature professors sink so low as to bluntly reduce all scholarship to propaganda—declaring blithely, in an unsubtle misreading and crude appropriation of Du Bois, “all American studies scholarship is ever propaganda.” That's just the way it is, report Russ Castronovo and Susan Gilman, thus unabashedly affirming their own willful abandonment of any but the most crassly “political” standards as, “a place to start, not something either to celebrate or to decry” (introduction to Russ Castronovo and Susan Gilman [eds.], States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009], 1). Here the bathetic slide from the level of “scholarship” to “art,” in a pretentious substitution, is almost as telling as the frank confession by Castronovo and Gilman that professors of their ilk self-consciously think of themselves as propagandists in the classroom. Maybe this is why the academic subdiscipline of American Studies is in the “state of emergency” it's in, with once-flourishing programs closing down, having been vandalized from the inside, to be replaced by more marketable majors in Ethnic Studies.

⁶Arthur Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 297.

⁷A recent intramural scrum over the meaning of liberalism in American intellectual circles provides a telling example of just how lockstep and intolerant today's PC-ism has become. Recall discussions around the untimely demise (in late 2014) of the leading independent journal of ideas and opinion, The New Republic. In effect, the magazine had been dissolved from what it was for a long time—a serious publication by anyone's standards—and reconstituted as a flashier/trashier website with a more Politically Correct line, in keeping with a more Internet-savvy business model. According to radical historian Greg Grandin, this is a welcome change. Writing in the pages of The Nation, a much less interesting journal than the one over whose despoliation he gloats, Grandin chummily reminds his readers that—lo and behold!—The Nation's own monotonously militant pages are the ones that enlightened individuals should instead have been reading all along. As proof, he drones on about how unfairly critical TNR had “suddenly” become of Noam Chomsky, over a period of decades. But all this really shows is that Grandin himself is driven by envy and animosity above all—like so many “radical” academics—toward those even so much as an inch to his right, declaring the whole lot of them persona non grata. It is an old story. But with a new post-BuzzFeed twist: He’d rather read Gawker (the online tabloid whose motto is, “Today's gossip is tomorrow's news”) than the old TNR. Who would have expected a Marxist professor to celebrate the market's capacity for “creative destruction”—and gossip—with such gusto? Callous cash nexus, indeed! In the same spirit of intellectual vandalism (and in the same snarky column), Grandin trashes his fellow historian, Slate contributor David Greenberg, merely for having had the temerity to lament (along with many, many other thoughtful liberal voices) the loss of TNR and what it so honorably represented (Greg Grandin, “Death to ‘The New Republic’! Long Live the New ‘New Republic’!” The Nation, December 4, 2014, http://www.thenation.com/article/death-new-republic-long-live-new-new-republic/). Greenberg, a notable voice at TNR himself for a time, resigned in protest at the changes, along with more than thirty other contributors and editors—including Paul Berman, Jonathan Chait, Julia Ioffe, John Judis, Adam Kirsch, Jeffrey Rosen, Ryan Lizza, Noam Scheiber, and Judith Shulevitz—all of whom left the magazine in solidarity when two of its top editors, Franklin Foer and Leon Wieseltier, were said to have quit before they could be fired. Bold, iconoclastic Grandin, however, will have none of it. Instead of respecting the principled stance taken by those who resigned, he mockingly quotes several of Greenberg's perfectly justified laments: “[h]e appreciated the magazine's ‘contrarianism’; he ‘found its pages more stimulating than those of rival publications, which tended to toe what was already being called the ‘politically correct’ line.” This is too much for Grandin, alas, who takes it all rather personally—as an implied attack upon … him and his peers at The Nation, of course. It's all about Greg. Though Greenberg doesn't actually mention The Nation, Grandin seems to think the narrow shoe fits perfectly. By contrast, TNR, established in 1914, had over the course of a century come to represent a commodious home for an intelligent liberal voice that—unlike The Nation—distinguished itself from the enforced conformity of academic PC, on the one hand, and the din of cable news chatter, on the other. As Grandin's trite hit-piece showed, this was simply unacceptable to the PC far-left—who turned out to prefer even more clickbait and less dissent from their creepily synchronized Party Line.

⁸To avoid misunderstanding, I am not recommending that we simply “bow down” before the Great Books by assuming they’re unimpeachable. As if that were possible! For one thing, “great minds do not think alike” (to quote one of my students, years ago, in a classroom discussion). The great writers disagree among themselves, and it is our job to think through those essential disagreements, which comprise for us the permanent problems. As Patrick Deneen says thoughtfully of the Western canon, about which he (like me and Dad) is passionately ambivalent: “We ignore these books at our peril—not because they will make us more urbane and cultured, but because they shape us whether we know it or not. Only by understanding the competing teachings of the great books can we reconsider the lessons that our age has embraced—lessons that have led us to think that we can dispense with reading the great books—and even ponder whether it would be wiser to commend the teachings of the humble books as we witness the accumulating wreckage amid our progress.” See his esoterically titled, “Against Great Books,” First Things (January 2013), http://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/01/against-great-books.

⁹As the narrator of Saul Bellow's final novel put it, adumbrating the views of that book's eponymous hero: “[A]ll the great texts had esoteric significance, he believed and taught. This, I think, has to be mentioned, but no more than mentioned. The simplest of human beings is, for that matter, esoteric and radically mysterious” (Ravelstein [New York: Penguin, 2000], 22).

¹⁰As Mark Bauerlein and Adam Bellow remark, apropos of what they see as the real significance of another remarkable “game-changer,” Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind: “People responded to Bloom's argument because it seemed to apply to the entire country, not just higher education” (foreword to Mark Bauerlein and Adam Bellow, eds., The State of the American Mind [West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2015]). And that is my claim about Melzer—he will find a broad audience because his book illuminates much more than its stated topic.