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nite repose. "Ideology," "empowered," "sensitivity," "r, c, g,
"difference," "power relationships," and "reconceptualize" are all within
this context of airless prose as inert as last semester's notes.
Part of the point of such language is that it asserts one's goodness of
will, intentions of virtue and benignity, radical courage and solidarity of
sentiment with the oppressed, the deprived, the needy and the mistreated.
It
is very difficult, indeed it would be wicked and perverse, to disparage
these motives; they are indeed impeccable. But the results they can lead
to are something else. For example, some scholars'
el1gages
have under–
taken to explore how the English language itself has been the uncon–
scious vehicle for racist and colonialist thinking. "Snow White" as the
name of the heroine of a fairy tale is one frequently-cited example of
such an unwitting if baleful tendency. I recently ran across another in–
stance brought forward by an anthropologist who is studying American
political and cultural colonialism. As evidence of this pervasive social dis–
position, the anthropologist referred to the candy Mars Bars as a confec–
tionary embodiment of America's indefensible impulse to colonize every–
thing, including extra-terrestrial planetary space.
It
was not a relevant
consideration that: 1) the candy was named and marketed long before
space flight had ever occurred; or 2) that the name belongs
to
the family
that owns the candy manufacturing company.
In
this instance, as in many
others throughout our history, silliness and scholarship consort in happy
tendentiousness.
As does ignorance consort as well. A colleague recently recounted
to
me that she had been teaching Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes" to a
class of students who were by and large studying poetry for the first time.
She asked the students what their first responses to this marvelous early
nineteenth-century rendering of a romance were, and, after some hesita–
tion, a bright young woman responded, "Date rape." Soft totalitarian–
ism can occur in moments that are almost winning in their poignancy.
I close with these two illustrations that are amusing in their fatuity
and triviality. And I do so not because I think that the situation in our
universities is a good one or that their condition is not serious. Far from
it. But I do not believe either that it is catastrophic or beyond redemp–
tion. A good deal of damage has been done, to be sure, to both these
institutions and to individual persons as well; and the general intellectual
tone has become worse than ever, while standards and judgments of
quality, in the humanities and the social sciences, have continued to go
more or less out the window. But the long-term prospects may be
something else again, and here we have
to
stand back and regard things
in historical perspective. For America as a national society seems in the
last generation or two to have arrived at something like a common de-
