Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age by Victor Davis Hanson & John Heath & Bruce S. Thornton

Author:Victor Davis Hanson & John Heath & Bruce S. Thornton
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Classics, History
ISBN: 9781882926541
Publisher: ISI Books
Published: 2000-12-02T23:00:00+00:00

The fact is, to the honest poststructuralist, a phrase like “gay rights” or “human rights” has no meaning. Rather, is it not a mere freezing of the play of signifiers, the inauthentic conjuring of the subject’s spurious essence, one wrought by the machinations of a relentless economic and social power-network consolidating and extending its control over a contested field of human identity, a field arbitrarily marked and traversed by the discourses those same networks manipulate?

Second, this political posturing is rank with a hypocrisy that most students can see through in five seconds. These professors are not street activists fighting the establishment. They do not proselytize in the ghetto or on the assembly line. They are all elitists enjoying the financial and institutional privileges that accrue to their profession. As Crews notes, “they are members in good standing of the academic establishment from which they claim to be freeing us…. [T]he benefits they seek are conferred, not upon the huddled masses, but upon themselves, at the expense of others.”70 This contradiction between endorsing a liberationist agenda while aggressively pursuing careerist ambition has been noted for years—“Blessed are the academic revolutionaries,” Russell Kirk wrote in 1978, “for they shall know tenure.”71 Recently Harold Fromm has been our best analyst of the unholy alliance of poststructuralist politics and careerism:

[W]hen I look at today’s deconstructors of unconscious agency, I see consumers, trendies, exploiter-beneficiaries of “capitalism”—in sum I see ordinary people no better or worse than you or I, except for their pretensions. I certainly do not see St. Francis monks in hair shirts renouncing the evils of the “capitalism” on which they in fact thrive as they race about to conferences in jet planes, enjoy the benefits of computer technology, barter their articles and books for upward mobility in the academy, but I do see much to lament in the use of stylized moral jeremiads as coin to obtain yet a bigger share of the very spoils that are being denounced. I lament this as a postmodern betrayal of the clerks, who (to recall Johnson’s Rasselas) talk like angels but live like men.72

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