!
,
MARK LILLA
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Hofstadter shows that Americans' indifference to the study of history and
foreign languages, and their belief that education should be practical and
psychologically reassuring, have very long histories. "The appearance
within professional education of an influential anti-intellectualist move–
ment is one of the striking features of American thought." He was
speaking of the 1870s, but it might as well have been the 1970s. This is
old news.
But the university was always different from the public school system,
we will be told.
In
the postwar years, perhaps. But no one the least bit
acquainted with the American university's history before this period -
with its provincialism, moralism, and hostility to Jews and other immi–
grants - will want to make an exemplar of it. (One only has to read the
shocked letters and memoirs of the emigre scholars who found themselves
in this stale environment in the thirties to return oneself to earth.) As for
the period since the mid-sixties, the most important change the university
suffered was its own absorption into the mass-education establishment,
where it inevitably fell victim to the anti-intellectual impulses already
present there. The fact that every university today promotes a multicul–
tural education, yet few demand the real mastery of a single foreign lan–
guage, is just one more sign that the university is being driven by the
same democratic passions that have traditionally hobbled American sec–
ondary education. While American high schools have always been forced
to prove the "practicality" of their offerings to the average student, to–
day the university must prove that its offerings "reflect" the diverse
"sensibilities" of its average students. The university, for better or worse,
is being massified and Americanized.
So where does that leave us? Does it mean that PC, multiculturalism,
and the culture wars are not threats to American intellectual life today?
On the contrary, they are our most pressing problems. But it is very im–
portant that we understand how they have arisen before we consider
how to respond. The European critics of these developments echo what
our own history teaches us: American democratic culture remains in
profound tension with the life of the mind. That tension may have slack–
ened in the postwar period, but now it is as strong as it has ever been.
One can rebel against the current anti-intellectualism and attack it head–
on; we don't lack pamphlets that do just that, and we should be grateful
for most of them. But there are dangers in letting oneself be drawn too
deeply into these debates, and not simply because people will stop listen–
ing. The danger is that one will forget that the destiny of intellect is not
that of democracy in America, and that the pursuit of the first may at
times require a studied indifference to the latter. At the end of his book,
Hofstadter rightly reminds us that "dogmatic predictions about the col–
lapse of liberal culture or the disappearance of high culture may be right
