Can
Western Universities be Saved?
This is in
the nature of an interlude. At the time I am writing there is in
Australia controversy over the Australian National University in
Canberra, which although it has happily accepted money from Chinese
to set up a “Confucius Institute” and money from Saudi Arabia,
Iran and Turkey for Islamic studies institute, has
rejected funding from an Australian magnate's will to set up a centre
for the study of western culture!
The deal
was apparently all set when leftist students and staff protested –
objecting to Western culture as the scourge of the earth – and the
university capitulated to them. Staff anf students at other first
tier universities have been quick with pre-emptive protests. More
moderate media commentators have been lamenting this Marxist knee
jerk reaction and the loss of intellectual freedom it represents.
I'm going
to paste in one rather long article from last Saturday's
“Australian”. It is long, and I don't agree
with all its assertions, but it gives an expert
sociologists insights into the demise of Western culture that is
pertinent to the discussions in many of my previous blogs. So I
commend it to you. (PS highlights are mine)
Human epic is about more than university power struggles
-
The Australian
-
12:00AM June 9, 2018
-
150
One
further step in the demoralisation of the academy has just taken
place, care of ANU senior management caving in to a minority of noisy
radical students, one which, while small in itself, can count on
background support from most of the academic staff in the humanities.
There is a long history behind how we, as a society, have let this
come to pass. At issue is what has transpired in the humanities
and social sciences, not in the rest of the university.
The
Western university as we know it today was founded in the Middle Ages
as a Christian institution. It was predicated on unquestioned
and unifying faith. Within the faith, its central task was
theological, to explain the works of God to man and to train minds
for that interpretative work. The university was transformed by the
Renaissance, and later the Enlightenment, into a humanist
institution. In this, its second phase, culture replaced God as the
transcendental force that welded the unifying vision. We are now well
into a third phase in which the university has a confused idea of
itself, and inasmuch as it has direction, it is to be found
in pockets still under the influence of the ghosts of the old
beliefs.
This
history is best clarified by a closer look at the humanist era. The
humanist university drew its lifeblood from three related ideals.
One was aristocratic, that of the gentleman, a character ideal. The
assumption was that the good society depends on a social hierarchy
led by a cultivated elite, one with a strong sense of civic duty.
That elite was defined by the character of its individuals.
The
second ideal was that of “civilisation”, which was imagined
as the pinnacle of human achievement. It depends on the most
intellectually and imaginatively gifted, in trained
application, producing great works. Civilisation has created the
gothic cathedral and the steam engine, Hamlet and the Sistine
ceiling, Newton’s laws of motion, graceful town planning,
hygiene, democracy and codified law. The works of civilisation show
humans at their highest, transcending mundane everyday life;
making of themselves something immortal and godlike; and creating
both powerful tools for the conquest of necessity and objects of
supreme and edifying beauty.
A
fresco featuring Plato, Arisotle and The School of Athens in the
Vatican.
The
third ideal was a utilitarian one, that culture and knowledge are
useful. In Matthew Arnold’s formulation, deriving from Socrates,
knowledge will make a person better and happier. Ignorance is the
source of misery and evil. Humans who have knowledge will find it
more difficult — in the extreme version, impossible — to do ill.
They will be more rational about their lives and therefore make them
more pleasurable and fulfilling. These qualities applied to society
will result in it, too, being reformed and improved.
This
humanist optimism had gone by the end of World War I, as German
sociologist Max Weber reflected in a 1918 lecture titled
“Knowledge as a Vocation”. Weber’s question was whether the
university is possible in a godless and prophetless time, a time in
which the traditional ultimate values had lapsed and no new ones had
appeared. Weber observed that many were looking to the university to
provide the meaning that had gone out of a disenchanted world.
However, knowledge cannot provide meaning in the ultimate sense of
answering Tolstoy’s questions: “What should we do and how shall
we live?” Nor, according to Weber, should it try. Prophecy does not
belong in the lecture halls.
What
then remains? Weber finds three functions for the university: the
advancement of knowledge, the teaching of methods of thinking, and
the imposing on students of a clarity and consistency of thought
within the framework of already given ultimate values. At this point,
Weber’s defence of the university collapses in unacknowledged
contradiction. The one function that preoccupies him is the third,
but it depends on already given ultimate values, the lack of which is
the problem that stimulated his lecture in the first place.
Weber
concludes by defending the virtue of intellectual integrity, founded
on the individual teacher’s own conscience. The implication is that
rigorously disciplined scholars dedicated to their own
branches of knowledge will communicate enough moral authority to
their students to fill the metaphysical void.
Behind
this flattering absurdity, Weber has described the modern
university: where there is authority, it is in individuals
obeying their own consciences, usually in isolation, an odd
dispersion of one-person sects to be found sprinkled thinly through
an ever-expanding bureaucracy.
In
the US, there were examples of the survival of the old education,
especially in the liberal arts colleges, often centring on
courses teaching the great books of Western culture. Chicago and
Columbia were notable. The Ramsay initiative at the ANU sought to
revive this noble tradition.
In
the 20th-century wake of the humanist university, there was one quite
different strategy: to create a politically active institution. In
the ashes of the last “idea” grew the university as training camp
for political and social reformers. Here the university again
followed the church, in compensating for a lack of belief in itself
with political activism. Weber knew the phenomenon in the German
universities of the 1890s. It reappeared in the 1930s with the
sacking of Jewish professors, the burning of books and Heidegger’s
rectorial address at Freiburg in which the eminent philosopher urged
commitment to Hitler.
In
the 30s it also appeared in other countries, England for instance,
where a Marxist socialism became the fashion among intellectuals.
The political motivation returned in the 60s and has continued ever
since, this time pioneered by leftist students demanding that
radical social reform replace learning as the main activity of
the university.
Activism
was energised by a displacement of religious zeal into politics. With
the death of God and the marginalisation of the churches, salvation
came to be sought in social crusades and highly charged moral
causes, loosely guided by Marxist ideology. One might have imagined
that the main historical lesson of the 20th century would provide a
cautionary tale, that redemptive politics — whether communist or
fascist — leads not to utopia but to a human wasteland strewn with
a hundred million corpses. The universities, free from any
constraining reality principle, were blind to this lesson.
The
politicisation of the university continues unabated. For instance,
until a decade or so ago, courses teaching Shakespeare and Jane
Austen remained common. Today, if the creator of the classic novel is
to be found in any English literature department, it will probably be
because of her picture of colonialism — in reality, so trivial
amid the magnificence of her work as needing a microscope to find.
The
demoralisation of the humanist university was compounded by a
profound attack launched by Friedrich Nietzsche in the 1880s, in a
castigation of intellectuals, and indeed of the entire
Western ascetic tradition of scholars and priests. Sorel, Spengler,
Benda, Rieff, Allan Bloom and other later critics of intellectuals
have been much under his influence, although their work is pale
by comparison. Weber’s 1918 lecture is troubled precisely because
it accepts Nietzsche’s case and cannot get around it.
Nietzsche’s
argument contrasts instinct and knowledge. The history of
civilisation is the history of increasing repression, of steadily
proliferating checks on the instincts. This development is
against nature. Healthy, strong, admirable human individuals are
decisive, they see things clearly and can act on what they see —
their instincts are good, and they obey them.
The
high level of repression concomitant with civilisation produces
people, by contrast, whose passions are tepid, who dither, who are
ineffectual and who take to moralising in compensation for their
inability to decide and to act. Hamlet is the literary exemplar. He
lost the instinctive sense of what is good and bad, what is
worth doing and what is not, and lived under the delusion that he
could reason himself into action. It follows that the celebration of
knowledge, epitomised in the philosopher and the university, is
not a mark of progress, not the banner under which human life will be
made better and happier.
In
effect, Nietzsche makes two points. One is about the human types who
pursue knowledge; the other about the function of knowledge itself.
The first point is that it is the worst people who become
intellectuals, types who are devious, inhibited and rancorous.
Not only is repressed emotion sublimated into thinking but the
overcharged intellectual faculty is then commandeered to manufacture
tortuous justifications of bad motives as good ones, of bad acts
as reasonable ones.
The
recent politicisation of language in the universities exemplifies
this. In diametric opposition to the principle of free speech,
students are discouraged from saying what they think lest they
transgress approved usage and risk being damned as a “racist”
or whatever the current target for righteous indignation. It is
as if they are being trained in political inhibition.
Nietzsche’s
second point is that knowledge has helped us become more comfortable,
not better or happier. The best societies have strong cultures.
Culture is rooted in myth, not knowledge. Indeed, the pursuit of
knowledge is a sure sign that the sacred myths have lost their
authority. In particular, academic history is an abstract endeavour
and only appears once real ties to the past have withered — family
ties, tribal ties and communal ties. Our own Anzac Day illustrates
this in its revitalised mythic force.
The
last part of the argument is that the increasing repression of the
active individual, combined with the canonisation of knowledge, has
killed God. There are no transcendental powers left in a rational
world. Where comfort is the highest value, it is the stomach, not the
sacred, that rules. However, without belief in a higher order of
some kind, human life becomes meaningless, losing purpose and
direction.
Weber’s
defence of the university is against modern culture as interpreted by
Nietzsche. The task of the university is not to restore the spirit or
revive the heart. In any case, Weber is too pessimistic to believe in
that possibility. His modest claim is that the university allows
specialist disciplines and that they have a virtue as long as their
practitioners obey their ethos, that of intellectual integrity.
We
know, early in the 21st century, that Weber’s uncertain defence of
the university does not work — as a conglomerate of specialist
disciplines vaguely unified at the individual level by an ethic of
intellectual integrity.
Nor
is a polytechnic a university, and, in any case, it only suits
the natural sciences and perhaps such in-between studies as business
and the various professions. A university draws its sustenance from
the ultimate questions about the human condition, and therefore it
centres on the humanities (including the social sciences). It always
has.
The
university requires a unifying and guiding vision. Experience in the
past century proves that, without such a vision, it becomes
demoralised, and those teachers who are not completely listless in
their vocations tend to become rancorous, teaching against the
authorities and truths of the inherited culture in what they
themselves often celebrate as a “critical” or “radical”
manner. This is not criticism in the sense of open-minded scrutiny of
a text in order to gain access to some truth.
A
university depends on collective belief in universals of goodness,
beauty and truth — and that they carry with them some kind of
transcendental value. When that belief fails, all that remains is to
tear down and to shock — what the contemporary academy has
unselfconsciously legitimised as “deconstruction”. The high
priest of modernism, Marcel Duchamp, entered a urinal in an art
exhibition in New York in 1917. His intention was to shock but
also, more seriously, to challenge that there are no standards left
by which to say that my porcelain urinal is less beautiful, good or
true than any of the works of the old masters. Duchamp has carried
the day, both in contemporary art and in university arts faculties.
A
further cost of the collapse of confident belief in the university
has been the failure of academics in the past two decades to resist
bureaucratisation, to their own further detriment. Fifty-five
per cent of those employed in Australian universities today are
administrators. This is not the place to go into what they all do, or
don’t do, in an institution devoted to teaching and research.
Academics have joked, borrowing from Yes Minister, that the
perfect university for the new order of management is one in which
there are no academics and no students. Indeed, there is little
chance that these vast structures of senior and middle management,
with rare exceptions, will have any sense of the higher purpose of
the institution they run. Recent events at the ANU are, given this
context, unsurprising.
The
humanist university has run down. The Christian university,
founded in medieval form, is too culturally alien to the contemporary
West to be revived. The church, the
one institution that could replace the university as the master
teacher of eternal truths, is in a state of hopeless disrepair.
Yet the university is here to stay, for a bureaucratically organised
society will, of its nature, maintain an educational hierarchy, with
the universities at the pinnacle.
Nietzsche
saw that cultural demolition will start with ascetic individuals,
ones subject to high levels of instinctual repression, complexity of
psychological disposition, given to thinking, those very individuals
to fill the ranks of the priesthood, the academy and the caste of
artists, writers and musicians. When they begin to lose their
faith, they turn on the gods that have failed them.
It
is commonplace that the most virulent critics of the pope and the
Church of Rome are priests with faltering belief or laity in the
process of defection. There is a sense of betrayal, a rage against
the sacred walls that have crumbled, against the past
authorities that still roam around uneasily in the individual
unconscious but no longer command.
And
“rage” is not an overstatement. George Orwell lamented towards
the end of World War II that the whole left intelligentsia in
Britain had been secretly pleased whenever the Germans won a battle.
Orwell called himself a socialist at the time, and while he no doubt
exaggerated, the visceral intensity and irrationality of national
self-hatred is exemplified here — preferring Hitler to
your own people. There is very little left at any level in the
universities with the spine to resist this kind of cultural
self-loathing.
The
rage against a culture that has lost authority has percolated more
and more widely through left-green political culture, if usually in
more mellow tones. Generations of students in schools and
universities have now been subjected to Marxist ideology, teaching
them about the West’s capitalist exploitation of other
peoples, of its own minorities and of the disadvantaged in general.
That the West is evil has become the default reading for much of the
tertiary-educated upper middle class. Yet only a small, noisy
minority are rancorous. For most, a vague reflex view of the world
has come to prevail, ignorantly held and often naive, while
occasionally grounded in genuine empathy for those who are less
well-off.
It
is, of course, true that Western history has its negative episodes,
but which society or civilisation hasn’t? Realist comparisons show
the modern West, especially since 1945, in a very favourable light in
terms of quality of life, fairness and respect for universal human
rights.
The
hatred of Western civilisation that has arisen in the cultural elites
draws on one further motivational strand: power envy.
The
very success of the West, in creating the most prosperous, the most
powerful and the most just society the world has ever known, creates
its own irritant. Those who are unhappy with their lives, insecure
in their identities and anxious about their future may come to resent
the extraordinary privilege, comfort and opportunity into which they
have been born. Their society is successful and powerful; they are
not.
What
follows is identification with the “wretched of the earth”, those
victims who are helplessly disadvantaged. This first appeared among
radical university students in the 1960s, in a ludicrous inversion of
the reality that they were a uniquely privileged generation of
spoiled rich kids.
University
rancour has commonly surfaced in a condescending disparagement of
ordinary people and popular culture — for cheap taste, crass
materialism, jingoism, xenophobia and syrupy values. The reality is
that Western popular culture, by contrast, has retained a healthy
belief in universal moral laws, in the value of the beautiful and in
the ultimate significance of truth.
Power
envy is linked with a paranoid reflex, which holds that if I can
destroy what has power and persecutes me, then I myself can gain that
power. Hence the radical hostility to the main power on our side, the
US, and, increasingly on the left, to Israel — as the one
prosperous, democratic and successful country amid the wretched
stagnation of most of the Middle East.
Where
to now? Central to any viable idea of the university, whether
Christian, humanist or other, is a retelling of the human story as a
kind of epic, with gravity and dignity, following the diverse ways it
plays out its fateful tragedies. This requires interpretations of the
story that reveal that life is more than an egoistic performance
governed by power struggles.
All
humans want answers to the big questions of where they come from,
what they should do with their lives in order to make sense of them
and what happens when they die. Deep engagement with the best
literature, art, music and philosophy of our own Western culture is
fundamental. Today’s students crave just this sort of education.
Here
is the aim of the Ramsay Centre for western Civilisation, which will
almost certainly have to set up its own independent institution if it
is to prosper.
It
is vitally important for the country that it succeeds.
John
Carroll is professor emeritus of sociology at La Trobe University.
johncarrollsociologist.wordpress.com
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