THE CORE CURRICULUM AS INTELLECTUAL MOTIVATION
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brides, music videos, pop art, radio, rock and rap music, sports, television,
textile trade, theme parks, vagrancy, Vanilla Ice, and world wide web.
Not only are such topics devoid of a sense of the past-they're devoid of
greatness. One reason to study the past is that there is not a Shakespeare or a
Lincoln in every generation. The new courses are aggressively contemporary
and anti-elitist. Here's one example, there are others. At the University of
Wisconsin at Milwaukee, humanities requirements can be met by taking any
of a list of hundreds of courses. The inclusion of "Vampire Fiction" on this
list seems to have evoked no controversy or even notice. However, when a
group of faculty asked to offer a "Great Books" alternative that would
include freshman seminars on such works as Homer's
fliad
and
The Federalist
Papers,
all hell broke loose. A faculty group organized to prevent its adoption
as an option for students. Ironically, one of the leaders in that effort is the co–
founder of the organization called "Teachers for a Democratic Culture,"
which is out to prove that political correctness does not exist. They argued
that a Great Books progran1 implied that some works are actually greater than
others, which is not acceptable to the anti-elitist mentality. Well, opponents
of Great Books almost succeeded until alumni and the public got involved
and their argument didn't seem to persuade anyone other than themselves. In
fact, I thought
if
the course in vampire fiction had been called "Great
Vampire Fiction," it probably would have been dead in the water.
Another way to fail to pass on the past involves what I call the fallacy
of presentism-the fallacy of applying standards that make sense today to
figures in the past. It's the opposite or mirror image of anachronism. If
we're not, for example, monarchists it must have been wrong for
Shakespeare to be one. What a pig Milton must have been to have held
such reactionary views on women. Hadn't he heard of the ERA? There's
an importing of our current controversies into the past and judging of his–
torical figures in contemporary, often poli tical terms.
Presentism is a seductive vice.
It
is a form of the sin of pride. We enjoy
seeing ourselves as the epitome of human progress and I think you'll find
it very difficult if you try to perform this thought experiment. It's hard for
us to believe that someday in the future, future generations will look back
on us and smile and smirk at what odd and quaint things we believed,
much as we do at the Victorians and others before us. The optical illusion
of looking through the wrong end of the telescope makes our predeces–
sors look very small and even venal.
We need to reverse the telescope and look at our predecessors up close
and in their own terms. We should not assume that, when we and Shakespeare
disagree, it is Shakespeare who was wrong. He may have something to teach
us. Monarchy may not be relevant in our own day. What did it mean in his?
Are his insights into the character of princes relevant only to monarchy?
