"The Pursuit of Truth Is Inherently Disruptive and Anti-Authoritarian"
by Betty Jean Craige, University of Georgia
[published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 6, 1993]
In a recent essay, "Telling the Truth," Lynne V. Cheney, outgoing chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, accused liberal and left-wing university faculty members (including critical theorists, feminists, and multiculturalists) of "replacing truth with politics."
If professors whose political views differed from Mrs. Cheney's had abandoned the pursuit of truth, our colleges and universities would indeed be worthless. But that is not the case. Mrs. Cheney's ideological opponents are training students to examine critically longstanding "truths" about race, gender, and our civilization's past truths that Mrs. Cheney defends.
A century ago, the Anglo-American intellectual community experienced a similar conflict, occasioned by the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. This historical comparison sheds light on the controversy swirling around our campuses today. Darwin's adversaries greeted his theory that species evolve through the process of natural selection with as much anger as conservatives today direct at feminism and multiculturalism--and for much the same reason. They feared a non-anthropocentric conception of nature, in which change does not follow a preordained and progressive course, but instead is continuous and undirected. Darwin's theory contradicted the 19th century certainty that human society is a God-created, and therefore stable, hierarchy.
In our time, conservatives fear a vision of human society as a continuously evolving system of interdependent individuals and cultures--a vision that I have called "cultural holism." Such an approach threatens traditional hierarchical notions of race, gender, and social class, and challenges a longstanding interpretation of Western civilization as a validation of those hierarchies. Conservatives recognize that this approach can prompt social change by holding up to scrutiny what Americans have long regarded as truth.
The social and conceptual revolution that we are now witnessing, which is characterized by a call for the appreciation of diversity, can be traced back to Darwin. He revolutionized the study of living forms by replacing the assumption of rigid species types with a new concept of populations. He argues that species do not represent eternal types, but are in fact mutable. They form categories of organisms--that is, "populations"--that can be defined only statistically. Organisms have no single, correct appearance, only a population average and variance. They have no ideal structure, no ideal mode of behavior, only different strategies for adapting to changing environmental conditions. They have no fixed or divinely ordained relationship to each other, no eternal order.
The arguments of today's cultural holists echo this conception of populations. If no eternal types--such as species or racial, ethnic, or gender ideals--exist by which to evaluate individuals, then social prejudices have no natural foundation. If there is no natural "chain of being," the perception of a rank-order among individuals, species, races, or any other category is culturally derived. No natural law decrees that whites should be considered superior to blacks or that men should be considered superior to women. Diversity is natural, even desirable.
This new cultural holism, which has been manifested in the various civil rights movements, is incompatible with the model of reality embedded in the literary canon. That model we can trace back to Greek Antiquity. From Aristotle, who described the natural world in terms of a "scale of ascent, "we inherited a propensity to rank everything, including the races and the sexes. From Plato, we inherited both a belief in an unchanging order governing the earth's biological diversity and a propensity to dichotomize everything--into oppositions of spirit and matter, mind and body, self and world, nature and culture.
Our traditional literary courses, drawing on this way of thinking, have transmitted to students an assumption of the superiority of Western ideas over non-Western, a greater respect for the colonizing nations than for the colonized, a higher esteem for the white race than for the colored races, and a greater admiration of men's abilities than of women's. That is why the curriculum has been a site for battle between cultural holists and conservatives.
During the past 20 years, the traditional model of culture has come under scrutiny by humanists seeking to understand the origins of contemporary Western values, just as 150 years ago the traditional concept of immutable species became the object of Darwin's skepticism as he strove to understand how species originate. By focusing on Western civilization as just one model of culture, humanists have undermined its claims to universal truth. By asserting that our thinking is governed by one model of reality or another, humanists are challenging the very possibility of objectivity.
The cultural holists' critiques of what has long been considered truth in the West are really not very different from the critiques of early-19th-century science made by the Darwinian evolutionists. Not only are the cultural holists, like the evolutionists, rejecting the conceptualization of reality bequeathed by Plato and Aristotle, but they also are using evolutionary and ecological concepts to explain social conflict and social change. As revolutionary as their work may appear to conservative scholars, it is grounded in the evolutionary model that scientists no longer question.
The critique of the traditional model of culture does indeed have political consequences. Laying bare patriarchal values in literature, for example, may alert students to patriarchal values in our laws and customs. Exposing the racial attitudes implicit in Western historians' accounts of the world may arouse criticism of American foreign policy. The pursuit of truth therefore becomes political action, dangerous to those content with the present order of things.
Some 150 years ago, Darwin's adversaries considered him and other evolutionists, who were teaching students to discard established "truths" about nature, to be dangerous atheists. Many members of governing boards tried to expel them from their positions in American colleges and universities in the decade following publication of the Origin of Species. The parallel today: Some conservatives condemn contemporary scholars for being relativists and seek to constrain their authority over the curriculum and the classroom. A few critics even propose discontinuing tenure. Although, if those critics have their way, right-wing and left-wing scholars alike would lose their security, the effect would be to stifle the voices on the left--the voices criticizing the political status quo. Mrs. Cheney, who at the end of "Telling the Truth" invites trustees to exercise more intellectual control over the institutions for which they are responsible, must recognize the consequences of such action.
What right-wing critics of the academy did not understand in the late 19th century, and do not understand now, is that the pursuit of truth is inherently disruptive; it is anti-authoritarian. To seek truth is to disbelieve what others take on faith. It was to protect the pursuit of truth that late-19th-century American academics--responding to the effort to silence advocates of Darwin's theories--adopted the principle of academic freedom. According to that principle, proven scholars are given tenure to insure their freedom to investigate, publish, and teach ideas that may be unpopular with the general public, governing boards, or the politically powerful.
Think what would have happened to American science and culture if Darwin and his followers had been silenced. The academy must remain a site for vociferous quarrels over what is true. Let us hope that the public will continue to view any attempt to silence debate as decidedly un-American.
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