Lessons of the past relevant today: the collected essays in Bonfire of the Humanities highlight multiculturalism's devastating effect on today's universities and the humanities' vital importance in higher education. (Book Review).

Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age, by Hanson, Victor Davis, et al., Wilmington: ISI Books, 2001, 373 pages, hard-bound, $24.95.

When it comes to problems in America's education system, what usually comes to mind are the difficulties facing parents, teachers, and children at the primary and secondary levels. Americans concern themselves less with problems in the universities, not because these institutions are so sound and strong, but because higher education is fairly well insulated from the rest of society. Thus it is occasionally extraordinary and always interesting when professors leave the Ivory Tower and present evidence that all is not well in academia. This is precisely what classics professors Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, and Bruce S. Thornton have done with their collection of essays entitled Bonfire of the Humanities. While interesting, this book provides a discouraging look into the intellectual pathogens currently attacking the once proud disciplines of the humanities.

Multiculturalism

From the authors' testimonies, it would appear that the problems in the humanities are legion. Under the inviting umbrella of multiculturalism, the intellectual plagues of moral relativism, radical skepticism, fanatical feminism, and crass careerism are running rampant on campus. Appropriately, therefore, the book takes up first the underlying problem of multiculturalism in two essays, written respectively by Bruce S. Thornton and John Heath, that review liberal academic Martha Nussbaum's book Cultivating Humanity.

Nussbaum, an influential scholar at the University of Chicago, attempts to defend the multiculturalist orthodoxy. But according to Thornton and Heath, she falls into many of the old multiculturalist errors. Probably the most egregious such error -- because it is so at odds with the traditional practice and ends of the humanities -- is the notion that all cultures are created equal. Nussbaum insists that "any and every human tradition is a tradition of reason...." Thornton appropriately takes Nussbaum to task for this statement. "I'd like to know how human sacrifice, female infanticide, cannibalism, slavery, suttee, clitoridectomies, female foot-binding, torture, apartheid, and witch burning are 'traditions of reason,'" he remarks.

What Thornton and the book's other essayists ignore is why such cultural relativism harms the humanities. It needs to be explained that multiculturalism, in asserting that all cultures are equal, is stating that man is unable to judge between right and wrong, and, by extension, unable to discover truths that are absolute and applicable in all times and places. This radical skepticism is the basic multiculturalist premise. But if humanities professors, those who study the classics for instance, adopt this view, then they are destroying the very objects of their scholarly inquiry, as Allan Bloom explained as far back as 1968 in the introduction to his translation of Plato's Republic. "[W]e must except," Bloom wrote, "the claim of the older thinkers that the truth is potentially attainable by the efforts of unaided human reason at all times and in all places. If we begin by denying the fundamental contention of men like Plato and Aristotle, they are refuted for us. from the outset, not by any immanent criticism but by our unreflecting acceptance of the self-contradictory principle that all thought is related to a specific age and has no grasp of reality beyond that age." If, as multiculturalism demands, we deny truth from the outset and accept that there is no truth in Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Suetonius, or, for that matter, the American Founding Fathers, then these are little more than curiosities and it's pointless to spend time seriously studying them. Is it any wonder then that the humanities are in trouble?

The Federal Role

The authors note that the problems in the humanities "have a wider context: the utilitarian assault on liberal education in America that has been going on for nearly the entire twentieth century." Curiously, the timing of this assault corresponds with increases in federal financing of institutions of higher education. According to author Thornton, "[B]y the early nineties 60 percent of the budget for all of higher education, both public and private, came from the federal government."

All this federal money has had some interesting effects. For one, it has helped make possible the vast expansion of enrollment in higher education based on what Thornton describes as "the peculiar American doctrine of higher education as an entitlement for everybody...." As expected, the increased enrollment resulted in the need for more professors. "To meet the expanding demand, professors had to be manufactured very quickly," writes Thornton. "The result was creeping mediocrity, as standards for students and professors alike had to be debased to accommodate the vast numbers of both."

All of the money available through federal largesse has also changed the focus of today's professorate. Instead of concentrating their efforts on transmitting essential cultural knowledge and understanding to students, professors have become career minded, more interested in taking whatever steps are necessary to enrich themselves. And as the multiculturalist priesthood dominates the profession, obeisance to their corrosive orthodoxy becomes the primary means of career advancement. As Hanson and Heath note late in the book, to get ahead in the academy requires that humanities faculty bash the West: "[N]early everything that academics in the humanities value -- appointments, fellowships, peer reviewed publications, release time -- is predicated upon a fashionable disdain for almost everything Western."

Such careerism results in great contempt for teaching undergraduates, and this disdain is communicated clearly to the graduate students preparing to take their places in the Ivory Tower. The message "that teaching is at best a necessary evil and more likely a waste of valuable time" is communicated to graduate students "in a thousand subtle and not-so-subtle ways," Heath notes in his chapter on "Self-Promotion and the Crisis in the Classics." In the framework of multicultural careerism in the academy, time, being valuable, is spent pursuing research and writing, hence the admonition handed out to aspiring academicians: publish or perish. The reader may be forgiven for thinking that these pursuits are also valuable, for outside the academy such work is viewed as essential to transmitting and understanding knowledge and ideas. But again, humanities professionals are not interested in such base concerns. They are interested in career advancement, and so their work is composed for an incredibly narrow audience of fellow academicians looking for creative interpretations (forget the truth) and obscure construction.

"Books in classics are praised in professional journals for their small-mindedness and pedantry" note Hanson and Heath. "They are hailed for their bad prose; this is called 'challenging.' They are lauded for their jargon-filled phrases; this is termed 'methodologically sophisticated.' The contemporary prejudice against big ideas ('assumptions' and 'assertions') and jargon-free writing ('middle-tone approach') ensures that no one outside a tiny cadre of subspecialists will read Homer." This approach, which the authors allege is "the engine driving the demise of the classics' is all about career advancement. "The more tiny the idea, the more obscure the allusions, the more likely no one has ever thought such a vision of the Greeks possible (and for good reason), the more conferences, colloquia, and chat rooms -- the better for one's career."

So What...?

If academicians in the universities care more for their careers than for their students and their subject matter and have willingly sold out to the multiculturalist orthodoxy, so what? What have the humanities done for anyone lately anyhow? It's not as if Sophocles' Antigone is much on the minds of the American people. Nor are the merits of Pericles' Funeral Oration likely the subject of conversation in the world of office cubicles or the factory floor or the bar on Friday night. And Thucydides; well, just exactly who or what is Thucydides?

Americans may be forgiven for such sentiments. Nothing, indeed, appears more remote from daily life at the beginning of our new century than the lessons of antiquity. Appearances, though, are not what they seem. And, in fact, the crisis in the humanities has enormous and terrifying consequences for the future of free societies in the Western tradition.

This being so, one might fully expect the authors of Bonfire of the Humanities to address this subject at length. The book, however, largely fails to discuss how relevant the humanities are. It is an egregious omission and one that is particularly regrettable in the post-September 11th age when terrorists resentful of the West threaten destruction and politicians seem willing to trade liberty for security. If Western Civilization is to survive our age and live to grant its blessings to and be improved by future generations, then we must, among other things, look to the humanities. It is in the disciplines of the humanities that students learn to think clearly and deeply about the issues and challenges facing society and civilization. It is in the humanities that students can learn from the successes and failures of the past and judge the applicability of those lessons in present circumstances. It is in the humanities that students can best hone their powers of discernment and judgment through the study of the accumulated wisdom of the ages. In short, it is in the humanities that students can acquire the understanding so vitally needed to become responsible citizens of a free republic.

In truth, Bonfire of the Humanities is a flawed book. But we should not judge it too harshly. If, like the proverbial canary in the mine shaft, it sounds a warning that contributes to a rebirth of the humanities, it will have performed a very useful and badly needed service.