"A new and more terrible servitude"

"He must have never known cats," we feverishly scrawled in the margins of Aussie scholar Keith Windschuttle's The Killing of History back in our snail-blogging days in the summer of '96. We were referring to postructuralist Jacques Derrida's anti-Enlightenment "texturalist" approach to the notion that "there is no such thing as a fixed meaning." Try telling that to Tiny and Baby -- above, chowing down yesterday afternoon -- when they hear the words "Want your suppers?"

"A political culture that is in denial about a serious social problem will condemn those who seek to discuss it and try its best to silence them," the great British political philosopher Roger Scruton told members of a "Euroskeptic" party audience in Belgium recently [Brussels Journal via Milt's File]:

By denying a problem you prevent its discussion, until discussion is too late. Throughout the thirties the European political élite lived in denial over German re-armament. By the time the truth could no longer be hidden, it was impossible to deter Hitler’s seizure of Czechoslovakia. Reflecting on such examples it is surely reasonable to conclude that we have a duty now to brave the charge of ‘racism and xenophobia’, and to discuss every aspect of immigration. We owe this not just to the indigenous people of Europe, but to the immigrants themselves, who have just as great an interest in peaceful coexistence as the rest of us.

"Beginning in 1987," writes Roger Kimball in his 1996 The New Criterrion review of Keith Windschuttle's The Killing of History, "with Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, a small but steady stream of books and articles have appeared to take issue with one or another dimension of the academic assault on truth." Our former employer, The Art Institute of Boston (founded in 1912 as The School of Practical Art), celebrated its 75th anniversary in 1987, and as head of publicity, we were responsible for lining up a big-name speaker for the big celebration. We don't remember who finally ended up on the podium, but the Institute's predictably politically-correct dean of faculty must have been relieved when our first choice, Allan Bloom, called to say he would have loved to do it but was previously booked.

Scruton summed up the dynamics of denial by recalling his own experience twenty years earlier:

Reading some of the attacks on the Vlaams Belang [the Belgian party Scruton was addressing], I cannot help recalling the time, twenty years ago, when I too was accused of ‘racism and xenophobia’ by the left-liberal media in Britain, and was forced to run the gauntlet of disgrace by my university colleagues. My offence was to have argued, through the Salisbury Review which I edited, and through my weekly column in the London Times, that the official policy of ‘multiculturalism’ was a mistake, and that the future of Britain depends not on encouraging immigrants to live apart in cultural ghettoes, but on integrating them into a common culture of nationhood. The very same liberal establishment that reacted then with outrage to my arguments, has since quietly accepted them, and the received view today is that we need a culture of Britishness, in which all our citizens can share.

On this side of the pond, we haven't noticed much "quiet acceptance" of the argument that multiculturalism was a mistake, but we're on the case. Meanwhile, why do they [intellectuals on the Left] hate us [the West]? Scruton continues:

This repudiation of the national idea is the result of a peculiar frame of mind that has arisen throughout the Western world since the Second World War, and which is particularly prevalent among the intellectual and political elites. No adequate word exists for this attitude, though its symptoms are instantly recognized: namely, the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’ and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours.’ I call the attitude oikophobia [ecophobia] -- the aversion to home -- by way of emphasizing its deep relation to xenophobia, of which it is the mirror image. Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which intellectuals tend to become arrested . . . and this has often made them willing agents of foreign powers.

Scruton never puts his finger on exactly the source of the arrested development of so many intellectuals on the left, but Australian historian Keith Windschuttle does in The Killing of History -- published for American audiences in 1996 --  when he writes that the "postmodern intellectual still wants to be the centre of attention, just like all the radical intellectuals who have gone before him" (p. 130). Let's give the last word to Roger Kimball, who said of Windschuttle's work:

Although published by an obscure house (a fact that tells us a great deal about the priorities of academic publishing today), this is the most important work of cultural criticism to have appeared all year -- indeed, in many a year . . .

But at a time when what Windschuttle calls “the return of tribalism” threatens many parts of the world with a descent into barbarism, to embrace cultural relativism is also to embrace the “charnal house politics” that have brought such misery and destruction to Sri Lanka, the Sudan, Central Africa, the Balkans, and elsewhere. This indeed is where the arcane theories of Derrida, Foucault, and their epigoni collide with the real world. They abandon the constraints of empirical truth in the name of liberation. But what they wind up with is not freedom but a new and more terrible servitude.

That was written five years before 9/11, but back then, the powers that be weren't connecting the dots.

Update: Multiculturalism, no. Multispeciesism, yes, at Modulator's 93rd Friday Ark.

Comments

[goomp]

A great description of our academic liberals, perpetual adolescent teen agers

[Tara]

I can't remember where I read it but there is an article that reports on a study done by Discovery Network which demonstrates that certain segments of society are in the throes of permanent immaturity.

If I recall the article correctly, academics and intellectuals were specifically cited as part of the groups wallowing in arrested development.

There was a correlation between continual higher education and immaturity..go figure that it would catch them like pigs who mess where they eat, so to speak...

[Jille]

"Arrested development" is right. Discovery News had the story I call "The Immaturity of Unfinished Minds." http://www.estatevaults.com/bol/archives/002820.html

"People such as academics, teachers, scientists and many other professionals are often strikingly immature outside of their strictly specialist competence in the sense of being unpredictable, unbalanced in priorities, and tending to overreact.”

[Teresa]

Jille I've been seeing links to that story all over the place - it has apparently made a huge impact. I haven't read it yet - so I'll have to go check it out.

I find it amusing that they have certain things they will completely melt down over that are in their own self interest (in other words - protecting their country and way of life is a bad thing). Yet, the most dangerous things in the world seem to cause them no anxiety at all and are considered to be self expression of a set of people (terrorists are the best example).

It's almost as if they have a wish to self-destruct. Unfortunately, if they do that, the rest of us get to go along for the ride.

[P. Froward]

I like the bit about oikophobia. Can anybody get Charles Johnson to pick that word up? You could even play folk etymology and tie it in with lefty class prejudice via the UK slang "oik".

But...

"A political culture that is in denial about a serious social problem will condemn those who seek to discuss it and try its best to silence them,"

...he says.

The trouble with that, is that you can point it at anything. Consider Chomsky, or Ward Churchill, or the 9/11 conspiracy lunatics, or the Holocaust deniers. All of 'em think that rational society's lack of fascination with their ravings, and its occasional polite encouragement to STFU, prove that we're all in denial about something.

[ScottSA]

Excellent essay. I took the liberty of posting Scruton's speech in its entirety on my own blog http://lighthorse.blogspot.com/