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lengers: that ethnicity is important; that cultures are intellectually equal ;
that representativeness is crucial in the curriculum and in faculty compo–
sition; and that an important function of the humanities is political and
social change. Now let me identifY a fifth: There are no such things as
objective standards. As one pamphlet published by the American Council
of Learned Societies put it, "As the most powerful modern philosophies
and theories have been demonstrating, claims of disinterest, objectivity,
and universality are not to be trusted, and themselves tend to reflect local
historical conditions." According to the ACLS pamphlet, such claims
usually involve some power grab on the part of the person who is
claiming to be objective. This presupposition, that there are no objective
or intersubjective standards to which one can appeal in making judg–
ments of quality, is a natural underpinning of the first four. The idea that
there might be some objective standards of what is good and what is
bad, that you might be able to show that Shakespeare is better than
Mickey Mouse, for example, threatens the concept that all cultures are
equal and that representativeness must be the criterion for inclusion in
the curriculum. The whole idea of objectivity, truth, rationality, intelli–
gence, as they are traditionally construed, and distinctions of intellectual
quality, are all seen as part of the same system of repressive devices.
This leads to the sixth presupposition, which is the hardest of all to
state, because it is an inchoate attitude rather than a precise thesis.
Roughly speaking, it involves a marriage of left-wing politics with cer–
tain antirationalist strands derived from recent philosophy. The idea is
that we should stop thinking there is an objective reality that exists inde–
pendently of our representations of it; we should stop thinking that
propositions are true when they correspondend to that reality; and we
should stop thinking of language as a set of devices for conveying mean–
ings from speakers to hearers. In short, the sixth presupposition is a re–
jection of realism and truth in favor of some version of relativism, the
idea that all of reality is ultimately textual. This is a remarkable guise for
left-wing views to take, because until recently extreme left-wing views
claimed to have a scientific basis. The current challengers are suspicious of
science and equally suspicious of the whole apparatus of rationality, ob–
jective truth, and metaphysical realism, which go along with the scientific
attitude.
A seventh presupposition is this: Western civilization is historically
oppressive. Domestically, its history is one of oppressing women, slaves,
and serfs. Internationally, its history is one of colonialism and imperalism.
It is no accident that the works in the Western tradition are by white
males, because the tradition is dominated by a caste consisting of white
males.
In
this tradition, white males are the group in power.
I have tried to make explicit some of the unstated assumptions of
