Author: Ophelia Benson

Another, more minor point from the MLA convention.

“The famous line about the M.L.A. is that you’ve never seen a convention where people drink so much and fuck so little,” said Michael Bérubé, an English professor from Penn State University.

Really. That’s so interesting, because I had always heard that was philosophers.

I always knew I didn’t want to be an academic, and a story like this reminds me why. Oh God. The jostling, the ogling, the sucking up, the trend-sniffing, the star-chasing, the pretension. I’d rather be a prison warden, a chicken plucker, a bus driver.

And that’s especially true of the MLA. There’s something about…what used to be called literary criticism, but is now called, in a move that to my mind reeks of pretension and seriosity-envy, ‘literary theory’, that makes me want to grab a shovel and cover myself in mud. Which is odd enough, because I’ve always been a literary type. But then again maybe that’s why: after all literature, unlike other academic fields, has always been a ‘popular’ or general or non-technical subject. The mystification and guild protectiveness and fencing-off aspect of academic literary study is bound to raise the hackles of people who think that at a pinch we can read Shakespeare and Keats on our own.

And that thought may have something to do with the main subject of the article: the scarcity of jobs and opportunities to publish for literary academics. The sad truth is that it’s hard to care very much. How many books and articles about literature do we need? How much research can literary ‘theorists’ do, what sort of discoveries can they make? It’s odd that the article never mentions this aspect of the subject, for all the time it spends on cutbacks and job interviews. But perhaps it’s not odd after all, when the people in the field are so divided (or is it opportunistic?) about whether they speak to Everyone or only to Specialized Professionals. Witness these two comments from Stephen Greenblatt:

“We need to remind ourselves and gesture toward the fact that this is not an esoteric private club,” said Mr. Greenblatt. “It’s as big as the people riding on the subways with their noses in books, or at home watching television shows. Our culture is saturated with the making and consuming of stories.”

“It would be great to sell a lot of books,” said Mr. Greenblatt, “but you don’t say to a physicist or a chemist, ‘Write for a larger audience!’ Any serious profession produces specialized work that is obviously not going to sell tens of thousands or hundreds or thousands, but a very small number of copies.”

Well which is it? Whichever one is needed for the argument at hand, probably. (Not to mention the fact that surely literature is about more than ‘stories’, which one would think Greenblatt of all people would know.) But it’s that tell-tale ‘physicist or chemist’ that gives the game away. Oh dear oh dear. Sad but true: lit crit, even literary theory, is not physics or chemistry. It is a mistake to compare them. Now, where is my shovel…

There is an interesting comment on the letters page of the New York Times Science section.

The conversation with David Sloan Wilson quotes him as saying, “I tell people I’m an atheist, but a nice atheist” (“The Origins of Religion, From a Distinctly Darwinian View”). The idea that atheists, secular humanists, agnostics and other free thinkers are not “nice” or, as is often more bluntly put, “cannot be moral without a belief in God” is highly offensive to the millions of Americans who are nonbelievers.

I entirely agree with the basic thought, but I would have phrased it a little differently. (Plus, in Wilson’s defense, I think he is reacting to the prejudices of other people, not expressing his own.) For one thing, why specify Americans? But that is a minor point, and probably just a habit picked up from political rhetoric. But more to the point, I think offensive is the wrong word here. Even though the implication is offensive, the point is surely that it’s inaccurate and a non sequitur. There are good reasons for de-linking religion and ethics, and good reasons for saying the link is not necessary. John Stuart Mill is incisive on the subject in his Autobiography, for example, describing his father’s contempt for the bribe-taking view of morality religion purveys: be good and you’ll go to heaven, be bad and you won’t. I think such issues are both more interesting and more useful than crying “offense”.

Here is a review of what sounds like a very strange book by a ‘New Democrat’ (i.e. a Democrat so conservative he might as well be a Republican) and adviser to Clinton named William Galston. He wraps himself in the cloak of Isaiah Berlin, the reviewer Stephen Macedo wittily remarks, in an effort to make a case for ‘value pluralism’; but it sounds more like Balkanization and desecularization. Particularly bizarre and indeed alarming is the fact that he condemns the U.S. Supreme Court for striking down the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was written so broadly as to give religious groups the ability to challenge any law that imposed an ‘undue burden’.

The review is particulary sharp with the all-too fashionable idea that the US is too secular and not accomodating enough to religion.

Galston and others who support RFRA evidently believe that liberals have not been sufficiently respectful and accommodating toward religious groups and other kinds of cultural communities…As a general proposition, this claim seems to me astonishing. America is an extraordinarily religious country by any plausible measure. Politicians fall over one another in affirming their religious faith and courting religious voters.

Indeed they do, until one begins to think that atheists are the only truly insufficiently respected group in the country. Perhaps I’ll write a book.

This is an essay that talks (among other things) about the convergence of two subjects (if not more) that keep coming up here: the fashion for biographies of intellectuals–poets, philosophers, historians, scientists–that dwell lovingly on prurient personal details and skip lightly over the ideas and thought and books that are why the people are interesting to begin with; and the dominance of identity politics over every other kind.

The fixation on biography, particularly when it is mixed with interpretive suspicion, suggests a retreat from philosophy’s aspiration to truth; we wallow in the particular and revel in salacious detail, whether it be Wittgenstein’s homosexuality, A. J. Ayer’s promiscuity, Foucault’s “sadomasochistic” experimentations in the gay subculture, Dewey’s sexual shyness, or Hannah Arendt’s affair with Martin Heidegger. The ease with which moral judgments are passed on the lives and passions of others and the titillation derived from cutting intellectual giants down to size are indicative of our own culture. Citizens in a republic of voyeurs, we are intent on microscopic moralism, incapable of appreciating more gracefully the contradictions, tensions, and ragged edges of all lives and unwilling to take ideas seriously, as something more than bandages for personal wounds.

Just so. There is a very interesting passage where Benhabib questions the way Richard Wolin takes his subjects to task for being ‘assimilated’ Jews, for not being ‘authentic’ Jews, and says that his analysis suggests a disturbingly fixed idea of ‘authentic’ Jewish life. Indeed. It is after all possible to be Jewish, or a woman or a Muslim or gay or Nicaraguan or what you will, and still not be consumingly interested in the fact. It is possible, in fact, to be intensely interested in other things, in a wider world than one’s own race or gender or religion, to be fascinated with stars or rocks or molluscs or maps or Louis XIV or Keats or topology, instead of being interested in one’s own parochial roots. It is a terrible claustrophobic oppressive stifling ghettoization that the identity-enforcers want to thrust on everyone, a narrow Balkanized world they want us all to live in, brandishing our ‘identities’ at each other and boring each other to death.