Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.

Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, by Martha C. Nussbaum (Harvard, 328 pp., $26)

Mr. Kopff is associate director of the Honors Program at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and editor of a critical edition of Euripides' Bacchae.

MARTHA Nussbaum, a celebrated classicist who has lately become Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, has good news about American universities. "Never before have there been so many talented and committed young faculty so broadly dispersed in institutions of so many different kinds, thinking about difficult issues connecting education with citizenship." Or is it good news? If I heard that "never before have there been so many talented young mechanics, thinking about difficult issues connecting transportation with citizenship," I should want to know whether cars were running better. Talented young faculty may be thinking at East Boondoggle State Teachers College, but I am more concerned to know whether their students are learning the difficult subjects they will need to learn in order to participate effectively in the complex Western traditions of self-rule and science.

Here is an example of the good news. At St. Lawrence University, "a small liberal-arts college in Upstate New York," the young faculty get sent to Kenya for a month "to study African village life." Then they teach classes in which "students submit closely reasoned papers analyzing arguments for and against outsiders' taking a stand on the practice of female circumcision in Africa." Prof. Nussbaum returns to this program again and again, in part because the teachers do not believe in the "ultimately incoherent" notion of cultural relativism. She discusses two student papers. The one opposing the practice is rambling and unclear. The paper saying it is none of our business is intelligent and forceful. The outraged teacher gives it a good grade, but scribbles in the margin, "Where do you draw the line? If a country were slaughtering all male children, should we intervene?" Liberals really want to know, not whether we should take a position, but when we should invade.

Which is to say, the "difficult" issues that talented young faculty are meditating on turn out to be the usual PC suspects: sex and race.

What about "citizenship"? "When I use a word," said Humpty Dumpty, "it means what I want it to mean." When Martha Nussbaum says "citizenship," she means "world citizenship." By "world citizenship" she means an attitude of support for global free trade and conventional Enlightenment liberalism. When she says "classical," as in the subtitle of her book -- she means either world citizenship, as just defined -- because the phrase "citizen of the world" was used by the ancient Stoics, on whom she has elsewhere written some rather good pages -- or the demolition of traditional values, which she calls "Socratic."

This is not Plato's Socrates, except when Mrs. Nussbaum uses passages from Republic V to bolster feminism, but something more like the head of the Thinkery in Aristophanes' Clouds, a parody of Socrates, on which, again, Mrs. Nussbaum has previously written a good scholarly article. This Socrates is not sent by Apollo to awaken in each person's soul a rational consciousness of the traditional wisdom we recognize but cannot explain. He is an ancient Voltaire who destroys young people's loyalty to traditional values. He is also a democrat, gadfly to a democracy he calls "noble but sluggish." In my text of the Apology, Socrates uses that expression to describe the city of Athens, not its democracy, the irrationality of which he is constantly mocking; but the scholarly precision which plays so impressive a role in Prof. Nussbaum's text of Aristotle's De Motu Animalium disappears when she defends the liberal regime.

People who are familiar with recent controversies in the academy will not be surprised by this. In 1993, testifying as an expert witness on behalf of gay-rights activists in a case challenging a Colorado constitutional amendment as, among other things, an "establishment of religion," Mrs. Nussbaum told the court that moral opposition to homosexual conduct was a peculiarly Christian theological innovation and did not exist in pre-Christian traditions. To support this claim, the now professor of ethics brazenly misrepresented to the court not only the writing of Plato, but also the work of present-day historians. In this, she was detected by John Finnis of Oxford and Robert George of Princeton. Prof. Nussbaum's classical scholarship cannot be relied upon when she places it in the service of her political causes.

Major non-Western traditions fare no better at her hands. Universities should teach about China, she asserts; but how? "When we decide to teach 'Chinese values' . . . , what should we be studying? The Confucian tradition? The Marxist critique of that tradition? The values of contemporary Chinese feminists?" For her, the question is an open one. When Prof. Nussbaum portrays an American businesswoman's problems working in China, she points not to the woman's dealings with a brutal dictatorship, but to her difficulties adjusting to Chinese nannies. Mrs. Nussbaum's nuanced care, typical of liberals, not to offend Marxist dictators contrasts with her attitude toward the traditional American way of life, which she describes as "suffused with group hatred," "consumed by bigotry," etc. There are no such bouquets for Marxist China.

At least she mentions Confucius. She objects to teaching the tradition of the Vedas, without mentioning them explicitly. That would mean confronting students with a vision of the transcendent, of the priest and the warrior, the brahmin and the kshatriya, even of the role of the castes. These are not thoughts a liberal wants to have disturbing the minds of students contemplating the fate of the Kenyan clitoris.

We get pages on Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, in a way that suggests that measures of reform are needed to give black literature a more prominent place in university curricula. Actually, the American Negro is quite the opposite of invisible in today's university. He is, in fact, George Gilder's Visible Man. The Invisible Man is the traditional conservative. Mrs. Nussbaum calls Women's Studies programs diverse because the faculty hold positions that range from liberal to Marxist. Sounds like Chinese culture without the Confucianism. She praises a course at Scripps College, where students ponder the Enlightenment, then read opponents of the Enlightenment and liberal responses to them. The opponents are "formerly colonized populations, feminists, non-Western philosophy, Western post-modernist thought." No Burke or Irving Babbitt, no de Maistre or Donoso Cortes, no Carl Schmitt or Oswald Spengler, no Rene Guenon or Julius Evola. "Dialogue" in Prof. Nussbaum's mind is only for those who accept the premises of the Enlightenment: privileging the secular over the transcendent, the economic over the political, the global over the national and local.

Prof. Nussbaum was first prompted to defend reform when she read Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. Despite her polemic she shares with Bloom an explicit commitment to Socrates and liberalism. Neither devotes much time to the curriculum praised by Thomas Jefferson, John Stuart Mill, and Albert Jay Nock as the foundation of self-rule and science: the study of Greek, Latin, and mathematics. For Prof. Nussbaum, Classics was the Renaissance invention of anti-clerical humanists, and American culture "is not in any meaningful sense continuous with that of ancient Greece." The only university she mentions as doing a respectable job of teaching foreign languages is Brigham Young, in the business of training globetrotting Mormon evangelists, from whom she turns with a shudder. Today's university has little time for the study of difficult foreign languages and math. Students are too busy to learn the Pythagorean Theorem or the vocabulary of Plato and St. John, of Cicero and St. Thomas, when their minds are occupied with writing essays on the Closing of the African Clitoris. The list of university presidents whose plaudits crowd this book's dust-jacket indicates the curricular fate of America's college students: subjects which transmit the mental infrastructure of our society are marginalized in favor of the degraded and the degrading. The educational model for America's best universities is Aristophanes's Thinkery.