Philistines à la Mode

The news is that Goldsmiths College, a subsidiary of the University of London, has cut its Queer Studies Program. The college is facing what is now a common enough crisis, running in the red because enrollments are down, with no...

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The news is that Goldsmiths College, a subsidiary of the University of London, has cut its Queer Studies Program. The college is facing what is now a common enough crisis, running in the red because enrollments are down, with no end in sight to the decline. Who is to blame? Not Goldsmiths College, according to students, professors, and friends of Goldsmiths College. The world about them is to blame. It is full of Philistines who have no eye for how beautiful and important a program in Queer Studies is.

Meanwhile, I have had occasion to look at the lineup of courses being offered in the English Department at the University of Florida, and though there are scores of them, only two or three have anything to do with English literature written before 1900. Many of the courses are on film, comic books, and so forth. Most of the descriptions fall into two forms:

In English X, we will study how the literature (or film, et cetera) of Y helped to establish and perpetuate the injustices of patriarchy (or racism, misogyny, environmental depredation, classism, ableism, and whatnot).

In English XX, we will study how the literature (or film, et cetera) of YY helped to problematize and resist the injustices of patriarchy (or et cetera, and whatnot).

But the really clever descriptions will combine elements of both forms, not just to have one author (or filmmaker, or cartoonist) in opposition to another, but to have the same author in opposition to himself. That way, we can see the good Charles Dickens, who approves all that we approve, in combat with the bad Charles Dickens, who does not approve all that we approve. (READ MORE: Teaching the Constitution in a World Without Books)

For this, in the United States, you put your house in hock over the gables?

The Professors Have Become the Philistines

The Philistine, in the old use of the insult, would not value a thing unless it could be put to use; if he did have a sense of beauty, it was as merely decorative, and often, if the Philistine was a moneybag, as decoration to highlight his Most Important Self. To the Philistine, it made little sense to study the humanities. How can you make hay out of it? Does Pope help you turn petroleum into plastics? Is Perugino a plus for your portfolio? Will Plato pump your products to the people?

But here we see that the professors themselves have given the game away and joined the other side. It is they who conceive of all they do in terms of political gain. There is no sense in their course descriptions, none, that you might study the poetry of Wordsworth because it is full of serene and subtle human wisdom, often expressed with an understated beauty that brings him into the company of Homer in literature, and, to cross the seas, to such keen-sighted and amiable artists of the natural world as Hokusai. (READ MORE: Oklahoma School Districts Must Teach Scripture. Is That a Good Thing?)

There is no sense of self-criticism, none, to suggest to the professors that the desire to turn art to partisan profit makes you more like the huckster P. T. Barnum, who sponsored a grand tour of the United States for the famous soprano Jenny Lind, than like that kindly nightingale from Sweden who won the hearts of Americans. Once, at an inn in Rochester, New York, Lind sang Swedish folk songs to several Onondaga chiefs, who had come to the inn to hear her, and who listened in respectful and most appreciative silence. They were not Philistines. They were not politicians. They did not speak professorial patois.

And yet it may be unfair to Barnum, that inventor of the American circus, to suggest that professors who turn literature or any of the humanities into politics by other means are like him. In many ways, Barnum was their superior. He actually did entertain people, and he knew talent when he saw it. And though he was full of himself, the shows he put on were not about P. T. Barnum. He did not hector his audiences about the history of huckstering.  He did not teach Mountebank 101 at Michigan State. But that is the sort of thing you get, almost by definition, from something like Queer Studies, or most of the other “Studies” studies in our colleges and universities.

You study yourself to flatter yourself, to promote yourself, to justify yourself, or to soothe uneasy feelings about yourself.  Your college education is about “self-discovery,” which means, in effect, that you never do discover yourself, because the only way to do that is to leave yourself behind and look at something else for a change. He who would find himself must forget himself. He who would save his life must lose it. It is a fundamental law of being and of love.

The Edgiest of Them All

The art that the Philistinism of political (and personal) activism produces is of a singularly garish and offensive kind. It cannot help but be so, as its object is not to delight others but to parade oneself and one’s political demands. Even when the object of study is ostensibly someone like Shakespeare, it really is oneself. Shakespeare is the vehicle or hostage, or a pseudo-Shakespeare decked out as the Bard but really a stooge who will speak our minds in an Elizabethan accent. (READ MORE: Trump v. Big Government: The Department of Education Won’t Die Easy)

What does Shakespeare have to teach us that we have forgotten or never known in the first place? Nothing, apparently. Such was the English production several years ago of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which a female Bottom the Weaver, when “translated” to somebody with the head of an ass, was provided with a big furry masculine tool to boot — and we are to nod our own ass’s heads and remark about how subversive it is, how transgressive, how what’s-it and so forth, while the magical ambiance of the play is destroyed, just as if Nazis were to go goose-stepping across Mendelssohn’s wedding march.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the edgiest of them all?”

“You are, O Queen.”

There are two kinds of people who look askance at this new sort of Philistinism. The first are the old Philistines. I suppose we will always have in our midst people who do not see the value of art, poetry, and music since they see only what they can use, and not what they should submit themselves to learn from or to accept with grateful hearts. They are like the Veneerings in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, who overspend themselves in advertising themselves, with “bran-new” furniture and “bran-new” bests of friends and everything “bran-new,” shiny, bulky, and expensively ugly.

The second are people whom the new Philistines accuse of being Philistines, but who are not so because, in fact, they do love art, poetry, and music, they do love the humanities, and they do not see why they should be shamed for not wanting to shell out money to buy politically accoutered garbage.

I love the poetry of Wordsworth, and I do not see how you can call yourself a student of English literature if you know nothing about him. I love the poetry of Milton, who believed that my Church was a sinkhole of falsehood and wickedness. I love it for its considerable virtues, for what it has taught me about good and evil, for its courage and honesty even when its object was partly mistaken; and I think that Paradise Lost is the greatest poem in our language. Such art has the power to induce people to leave their political disagreements behind because something greater than the Electoral College is here; anyone who loves the art of John Constable is, if for that alone, a fellow traveler and a friend of mine.

It is not, then, that green-eyeshade financiers and political enemies have killed the humanities. The enemies within the humanities did that long ago.  What we are noticing now is not that the victim is dead, but that the corpse has begun to stink. If the humanities are still alive, it is not at such charnel houses. I will have more to say about where they do indeed live and thrive.

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