BEYOND THE TWILIGHT OF REASON
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should eventually draw those disengaged millions back into the political
process. One never knows. As ever, our story is one everybody on the
face of the earth follows . Our society has been the dark horse and it has
been the Triple Crown Winner. Perhaps that is how we have to see our–
selves, as jockeys moving in and out of the light with our mounts,
winning, losing, improvising, learning, making great jumps, taking horri–
ble falls, but always refusing to give an ear to anything less than the tragic
optimism of the blues to be redefined.
John Silber:
Thank you. Professor Gertrude Himmelfarb will comment.
She is Professor of History Emeritus in the Graduate School of the City
University of New York.
Gertrude Himmelfarb
Redefining
OUf
Ideals
Stanley Crouch describes himself as a "tragic optimist." I like to
think of myself as a "cheerful pessimist." At least, that is the condition I
aspire to. I've never quite succeeded in achieving it; pessimism tends to
trump cheerfulness. That is particularly true today, for all the reasons we
have just heard. At the moment, however, I find myself in a state of un–
common cheerfulness. Things cannot be all bad when we have, among
our most distinguished public intellectuals, someone as wise and eloquent
as Mr. Crouch.
The causes for pessimism - the "tragic sense" Mr. Crouch speaks of-
are all too evident in our public life today. For some time, some of us
were able to comfort ourselves (although it was small comfort at that) that
the race-class-gender mantra - the categories that are presumed to govern
and determine
all
subjects - was confined to academia (not this university,
to be sure, nor Dr. Silber's, but most universities - the generic university,
as it were). That mantra has had the most unfortunate effects: It is divi–
sive, setting every group against every other; subversive, undermining the
common core of knowledge that was at the heart of the curriculum; and
ultimately nihilistic, denying the very idea of truth that was once the as–
piration of scholars and students alike, of whatever color, sex, or ethnic
and economic background.
Unhappily, that mantra has now pervaded
all
the institutions of soci–
ety, with predictably disastrous consequences. Differences of race, class,
and gender have been so magnified and distorted that we now have a so-
