I agree with the author that the danger lies not in an individual biased professor as much as the general environment of academia. Having come from a university with a less liberal environment, I now see what it is like to be at a more typical American university. For example, when I took a class in Intellectual History as an undergraduate, we read Rousseau. We read Marx. But we also read Smith, and Locke (who I think is hard to categorize in today's world), and Burke, and even Wagner's libretti. A good well-rounded class. Then I took a class in political theory that read Machiavelli, Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Marx, and Nietzsche. Another good well-rounded class. It drew from both sides and we read them to understand what they said and why they said it. There was very little preaching.
But on arrival here I learned that other people in my own department have not read or even glanced at what I think of as crucial texts in the development of Europe. For example, an individual working on pre-revolutionary France admits to knowing little about Locke, yet the English philosopher influenced many French Enlightenment thinkers. This individual told me that such texts were not assigned in undergraduate classes. This individual also attended a university with a higher profile and higher ranking than my own undergraduate institution. This is troubling.
The popularity of studying marginal figures has hurt the attention given to the classic "big boys." Yet in focusing on those that we retrospectively perceive as neglected, we neglect those who did in fact influence history and essentially create an alternative and incomplete picture. Believe it or not, some figures were perceived as important because they were in fact important.
This quote is from Steven Shapin, a historian of science, in his Social History of Truth (Chicago: U of Chicago press, 1994), p. xxii in the preface:
I am both well aware of, and deeply sympathetic towards, the new cultural history of the disenfranchised and the voiceless. That much ought to be apparent from my treatment of support personell in chapter 8 and of women intermittently. Nevertheless, if my basic claim about the significance of the gentle in the formal culture of science is correct, then there need be no apologies for the fact that this is a book about a small group of powerful and vocal actors; that is, as the current sneer has it, about Dead White European Males. Given the nature of the cultural practice in question, if there are past voices--of women, of servants, of savages--in the practice to be attended to and made audible, then there is every reason why historians should, if they choose, concern themselves with them. However, if there are no such voices, or if they are almost inaudible, then the same sensibility should induce historians to attend to the local practices of inclusion and exclusion through which some speak and others are spoken for, some act and others are acted upon. These practices will, by definition, be those implemented and enforced by those who have put their mark upon the cultural form one proposes to interpret. Nor is there any reason to dismiss as 'politically incorrect' the possibility that the legitimacy of gentlemanly practices was locally conceded beyond the bounds of gentlemanly society. If that was so--and it is a matter for inqury to determine--then historians can also, if they want, ask what that legitimacy consisted in and how far it extended.
What a gutsy passage! In other words, we should not be averse to the gentlemen because of current fashion, particularly when, as in Shapin's case, one is discussing something that was dominated by those gentlemen. The ladies will have to get over it.
So to sum up, if the pendulum swings too far in the other direction, it's still wrong. We should not overcorrect the supposed bias of a past generation by imposing biases of our own. But this is what professors in all sorts of fields do today, and try to call it fair and balanced. This has created an environmet that leans heavily in one direction. So that study the NYTimes reports on... well, the majority rules.
No comments:
Post a Comment