I just listened to a talk Steven Pinker gave on his book The Blank Slate. Pinker argues that our brains are hard-wired to do specific things like learn language, love, and so on. Currently, this is the less popular position in the nature vs. nuture debate.
In the talk he covers the two topics in his book where he received the most strongly negative feedback: parenting, and the arts. I have some experience in both of these areas but it’s his criticism of how the arts, and university academics in particular, have failed society that resonated most strongly with me.
Contrary to what the arts community and academics would tell you, Pinker claims, most of the arts (broadly defined) are not in decline. There are three exceptions: elite art after 1930 (i.e. Modern and Post-Modern art), literary criticism, and university humanities programs. What is the problem with those three fields? They have all denied human nature in favour of other things.
Virginia Woolf notes in 1910 that the forms of appreciation of art prior to the 20th were in decline. Over the next 40 years or so, we dropped the idea of finding beauty and pleasure in art, enjoying a good story plot, and look for clarity and insight from our literary critics.
My romance with the university setting is almost over. After 8 years of professional work, it was refreshing to come back to a university campus. All of the positive clichés about the academy are true: it’s a luxurious place to think beautiful thoughts and occasionally write them down. It also has its traps. In the English department, among others, the trap some academics fall into is called Critical Theory. This has come to replace clarity, insight, and an appreciation of beauty.
In place of people like C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkein (they were critics before they were authors), who could spin a yarn and tell you something about yourself in the process, we have Judith Butler:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugerate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
That was a single sentence. It didn’t say anything (go ahead, read it again). It’s logic is cumbersome. The hardest part about working in academia is to politely side-step this kind of sophomoric language and reasoning from people who should know better. What they should have figured out by the time they earn a Ph.D. is what matters–what helps people understand the world and themselves differently. The human universals that interest Pinker matter. How we live, love, and die matter.
I suspect this is an unpopular view in my department. One professor, who teaches critical theory, yelled at a student once for asking about the relevance of theory to literary studies: the professor felt that if mathematicians and theoretical physicists didn’t have to justify their research, neither should critical theorists. I think Noam Chomsky responds best:
Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I’m missing, we’re left with the second option: I’m just incapable of understanding [post-modern theories]. I’m certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I’m afraid I’ll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don’t understand — say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat’s last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I’m interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. — even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest — write things that I also don’t understand, but (1) and (2) don’t hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven’t a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures.
The inability for literary theorists to account for themselves is no different than a religious extremist’s inability to explain why God supposedly told him to hurt people. Put another way, people like Derrida claim that you can only say what you mean if you have a false sense of what “meaning” is. Of course, he couldn’t say that outright. Try reading him sometime and explain what he’s added to our collective knowledge.
Not all academics behave this way but it only takes a few, vocal critical theorists to lower the value of a healthy debate.
