WHY INTELLECTUALS LOVE MARX

PART THREE:

THE CRISIS IN THE HUMANITIES

There is one thing you have to understand before we go any further: the choice culture is "American" only in the sense that it developed in America first. It's the product of real changes in technology that will not go away unless we're willing to turn the clock back on a lot more than fast food and Freddy Kreuger. Pious platitudes about "sustainable development" and anti-globalization protests notwithstanding, most of us are not willing to do any such thing. We like central heating in the winter, air conditioning in the summer, and being able to read past midnight without ruining our eyes in the light from candles. We like the Internet, too, and everything that comes with it, including the fact that it puts us in touch with people who think the way we do and makes us feel that we are not only not alone, but maybe not even part of an insignificant minority. Totalitarian and repressive regimes like China and Iran work so hard to prevent their people from getting wired, and to monitor what they see when they do get wired, because they know what connections mean. Connections mean the end of isolation, and the end of isolation means resistance.

In the long run, the change will come everywhere--the choice culture is built on ease of communication, on the ability of lonely dissidents to find other lonely dissidents who share their ideas and thus to end their loneliness. The Internet is a global phenomenon, not an American one. It has had significant effects in Riyadh as well as in Detroit.

For a number of reasons, however, the change has come fastest and with greatest impact in the United States. The companies that invent the products to facilitate the communication are here, as is most of the innovation that makes that communication faster, easier, and more far-reaching. A vigorous economy, coupled with a peculiarity of telecommunications law--that is, the fact that Americans pay only ordinary local calling charges to access the Internet, while people in most other countries pay more--means that Americans are far more wired far more broadly across the population than the citizens of most other countries are, and once they're wired they spend more time on the Internet.

But there is one other thing that makes the choice culture and the wired generation seem so American, and that's what Americans don't have: a social/government structure capable of slowing the process down. Consider, for a moment, the difference in the way Western European countries go about the business of education and the way America does. Most Western European countries have a national curriculum or a set of curriculum content guidelines that applies to all children within their borders, whether they're educated at a private school, a public school, or at home. America has no such national curriculum. Individual states establish guidelines for the public schools within their borders. Individual towns and cities work within those guidelines to establish curricula tailored to their citizens' desires. These guidelines apply only to public schools and schools--like some Catholic parochial ones--that accept aid of one sort or the other from the state or town. Private schools and parents who teach at home have pretty much carte blanche to teach what they want in most states. There's even a Supreme Court case--Pierce vs. Society of Sisters (1925)--establishing the right of parents to refuse to send their children to public schools and to reject the curricula established by public schools as well. That means that although the curricular standards of the state of Connecticut may specify instruction in the theory of evolution, Connecticut religious schools and homeschooling parents are free to teach nothing at all about evolution and substitute creationism instead.

If you want to watch a display of utter, disbelieving stupefaction, try getting this peculiarity of American society across in an international Internet forum. Wait--you mean there is no standard at all that determines what a high school diploma means? People who graduate from high school in California could have learned completely different things from people who graduate from high school in Louisiana? People who graduate from private high schools could have learned completely different things than people who graduate from public ones, even if the schools are in the same town?

Americans are used to this state of affairs, and even some of us find it intolerable. We itch to make rules for other people, to establish "standards" for private schools and home schools that will bring them into line. For someone from a society where such rules are accepted as a matter of course, the situation is difficult even to comprehend. It's also very threatening.

There are other areas in which most of the world establishes society-wide standards and America does not. In almost every area where such standards do exist, opt-outs and exemptions also exist that make it possible for individuals and groups to refuse to obey for reasons of religion or conscience. Laws that require children to be vaccinated only require them to be vaccinated in order to enter school. Parents can, and often do, refuse to vaccinate their children before that, and parents who home school can refuse to have their children vaccinated at all. What's more, most states allow parents with religious objections--such as Christian Scientists--to opt out of vaccinating even those of their children who go to public schools. Some states allow parents to opt out for any reason at all, including parental distrust of "mainstream" medicine. The Amish are everywhere exempt from local building codes that require new houses to have indoor plumbing and electricity. The federal government requires states to have religious exemptions to child abuse and neglect charges stemming from the decision of parents to refuse to treat their children with conventional medicine and to rely on faith healing instead.

The point here is that Americans not only often reject professionally credentialed expertise, but that the American government, federal and state, does not enforce the findings of experts, no matter how well grounded. Is it true that vaccinating a child against pertussis is far more likely to save that child's life than it is to result in side effects that might hurt him? Yes. Is it true that refusing to vaccinate against pertussis puts that child at risk of disease, disability, and death? Yes. Doesn't that mean that the law should require parents to have their child vaccinated against pertussis even when their religion says that vaccination is evil or their own researches have convinced them that vaccination is a medical mistake? No.

In practice, what this means is that revolts against expertise--movements against teaching reading by the whole language method, or childhood vaccination, or evolution, or "conventional" medicine, or the very idea of global warming--take hold far more quickly here than they do elsewhere. There's little or nothing to stop them. Think of the process as a snowball rolling down a hill. Western European governments put up a lot of roadblocks to slow that snowball down and strip it of some of the padding it picks up on the way. America puts up few such roadblocks, and alternative movements tend to gather weight and speed in no time at all. Americans can not only protest the advice of professionally credentialed experts. They can refuse to follow it.

Let's face it. If you're a professionally credentialed expert, it's in your best interests to be part of a social democratic welfare state like France's or Germany's. Having the government enforce your advice by law gives you a lot of power. Even if you're the kind of professional whose expertise is in the area of taste, the fact that you belong to the same social group as the psychologists and education specialists whose expertise is being enforced gives you prestige, and can give you some perks as well. National curricula create markets for literature teachers as well as for teachers of mathematics.

Even so, it's necessary to note that credentialed professionals in the humanities and social sciences are faced with a fundamentally different dilemma from that faced by hard scientists and technicians. Hard scientists and technicians often discover knowledge and create things and ideas that have an immediate practical effect on the way people live. They're also indispensable for making highly technological societies work. No matter what Joe Blow may think of "experts" in general, he wants the latest in electronic gadgetry and he wants it to work. He wants bridges to stay up when he crosses them and buildings to stay up when he works in them. He wants the doctor to know what to do about his bronchitis before it kills him. He wants trucks and trains and planes to work well enough for him to use them, and to bring him fruits and vegetables in the off season and mail from his friend in Nebraska.

Credentialed professionals in the humanities and social sciences are often suspected of not having anything to offer at the same time they give themselves airs of superiority and demand the power to impose their prejudices on their fellow citizens. Joe Blow doesn't see how his life would be enhanced if he went to see American Beauty instead of Men in Black II--and if he has indeed seen both, he's likely to feel that he would have been better off not seeing the first at all. He doesn't understand why he should accord someone "respect" because they liked the first and didn't like the last. He really has no use for the condescension of people who "explain" his preference for Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones as a result of "false consciousness" or "brainwashing" by the religious-military-industrial-capitalist complex. He thinks the courses he was required to take in literature and the arts were mostly a waste of time.

It's no accident that the first credentialed experts to feel the cold winds of social irrelevance were professors in the humanities. Even other credentialed professionals didn't see the point of much of what these people did, and university administrators--who largely determine what funding academic departments will receive, how many tenured professors they will be able to hire, and what the salary scale will be for teaching and research staff--began very early to view humanities departments as net drains on revenue.

The situation was exacerbated by student disinterest. Fewer and fewer students wanted to major in the humanities, or even to take humanities courses. Without college-wide distribution requirements, departments of English, philosophy, art history, music history, and comparative literature would have ceased to exist on many college campuses. Many of them did cease to exist on some. Others were absorbed into all-purposed "humanities" departments that offered a course or two in philosophy, a course or two in art history, but no major or minor concentration. Stories about cabdrivers with Harvard Ph.D.s in Slavic Languages or Medieval Studies began to crop up in newspapers and magazines across the country. News weeklies solemnly proclaimed a "crisis in the humanities." Surviving as a humanities scholar began to seem like surviving as an actor--you could make a fortune, by being one of the very few academic stars on that small number of elite campuses that still took the humanities semi-seriously, but you couldn't make a living. If you weren't a star, you were an adjunct, teaching part time, making $1500 to $3000 per course, without status, without benefits, without a parking space.

As the status of professors in the humanities plummeted, the status of the men and women who had once taken their degrees in the humanities also plummeted. If the English professor was now a laughable figure, pretending to "expertise" about nothing at all, the ex-English major now writing a political column for the Washington Post was just as laughable, having gone to college and majored in "nothing." If students could ignore the claims of literature professors to expertise, they could ignore the claims of literature graduates to expertise, too.

Credentialed professionals in the humanities were not just fighting for position and prestige. They were fighting for survival in a world that already had little or no respect for them and was well on its way to having no use for them. And they could see the future far more clearly than the rest of us. Given the way the world was going, their position was going to become less tenable every year.

In the meantime, the future was catching up with psychologists, political scientists, education specialists, nutritionists, sociologists, anthropologists, and the kind of medical professional who issues health guidelines from public agencies. People just weren't listening any more, and when they did they were rejecting expert advice and insisting on their right to choose to think, live, eat, and exercise as they--not the experts--saw fit.

Over the next several years there would be articles and essays without end asking why so many intellectuals were Marxists, and why the ones who weren't Marxists were overwhelmingly committed to one form of soft socialism after the other. In a world that had decisively rejected Marx and begun to roll back the welfare state in one country after another, that small subset of people--university educated in the humanities and social sciences; members of the "knowledge professions"--was staunchly and even stridently left-wing, and increasingly anti-American on top of it. Conservative publications analyzed them, without saying much. Progressive publications lauded them. Every once in a while, politically-oriented humor columnists like Dave Barry and James Lileks would point out where they made no sense.

What nobody noticed was this: Marxism is attractive to intellectuals because it gives them something to do.

(Part 4 coming up)

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