Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
- Truth:
George
Will
George Will, Commencement Speech at the College of William and Mary, May 15,
1994:
"My subject is the nature of knowledge and the nature of our
nation. This may seem like a subject sufficiently broad to consume this afternoon and many
more, but fear not. I know the rules of academic ceremonies such as this...
"Is the educated, temperate public right to wonder about the temperateness of many
educators? Is it reasonable to wonder whether many educators are remaining faithful to
their traditional mission? That mission is the conservation, enlargement and transmission
of the ideas, understandings and values on which a society such as ours -- a society based
on persuasion and consent -- depends.
"I believe the educated public is rightly worried. The problem is that a particular
cluster of ideas, and a concomitant sensibility, have gained currency in some academic
circles. If the ideas are not identified, understood and refuted, they can seep like slow,
cumulative poisons into the larger society, with large and lasting consequences in our
politics, our governance and our tradition of civility.
"The ideas advance under the banner of postmodernism. That is a faith with
many factions, but it claims to have had one founding prophet. His name was Nietzsche. He
proclaimed the words that postmodernists have made their core tenet. His words were:
'There are not facts, but only interpretations.'
"Now, Nietzsche is here conscripted as a prophet without
his permission. In fact, regarding Nietzsche the postmodernists are guilty of
philosopher-abuse. They are saying something silly: Nietzsche was not. He was not
asserting, as postmodernists do, a kind of epistemological despair arising from a radical
indeterminacy about reality. Rather, he was making a sober epistemological point. It was
that facts are never only facts, naked and pristine and self-evident and immediately
apprehended by all minds in the same way in all circumstances and contexts. Rather, he
said knowledge is conditioned in complex ways by the contexts in which what we call facts
are encountered, and by mental processes, not all of them conscious mental moves, that can
be called interpretations.
"The postmodernists' bowdlerizing of Nietzsche distills to a simple, and
simple-minded, assertion. It is that because the acquisition of knowledge is not a simple
process of infallible immediacy, there can be no knowledge in any meaningful sense.
Therefore, we are utterly emancipated from rules of reasoning and may substitute
willfulness for rationality. All interpretations are let loose to play in a theater of
unrestrained semantic egalitarianism...
"Postmodernism is all about the wielding of power, because it is not -- it cannot be
-- about anything other than power. It has no content other than the assertion that the
content of any proposition, any book or any mind is arbitrary, or the result of race or
ethnicity or sex or class, and deserves no more respect than any other content of any
proposition, book or mind...
"Concerning these ideas, let us not mince words. The
ideas are profoundly dangerous. They subvert our civilization by denying that truth is
found by conscientious attempts accurately to portray a reality that exists independently
of our perception or attitudes or other attributes such as race, ethnicity, sex or class.
Once that foundation of realism is denied, the foundation of society based on persuasion
crumbles. It crumbles because all arguments necessarily become ad hominem; they become
arguments about the characteristics of the person presenting a thought, not about the
thought.
"Once a society abandons its belief in facts and truths, and its belief in standards
for distinguishing facts and truths from fictions and falsehoods; once intellectuals say,
'We are all Nietzscheans now, and there are no facts, only interpretations' once this
occurs, then, as Professor John Searle says, 'it seems arbitrary and elitist to think that
some theories are simply true and others false, and that some cultures have produced more
important cultural products than others.'
"Searle, a philosopher at the University of California at Berkeley, knows what
follows form the postmodern fallacies. If there are no standards rooted in reason, if
there are only preferences and appetites arising from "solidarity" and
interests, then there can be no education as education has traditionally been understood.
"For example, until recently it was believed that, Searle
says, 'the study of the great classics of literature gave the
reader insights into human nature and the human condition in general.' But nowadays many
intellectuals consider it arrogant folly to speak of the 'classics' or 'great works.'
Indeed, as Searle says, many people avoid the word 'works,' preferring to speak merely of
'texts.' That word has the 'leveling implication that one text is as much a text as
another.' Therefore the works of, say, Walt Whitman or Walt Disney are all, and equally,
texts...
"...we are witnessing, on campuses and throughout society, the displacement of books
and all they embody -- a culture of reason and persuasion -- by politics. And it is
politics of a peculiar and unwholesome kind, called 'identity politics.' The premise of
such politics is that the individual is decisively shaped, and irrevocably defined, not by
conscious choice but by accidents. The premise is that people are defined not by
convictions arrived at by processes of reason and persuasion, but by accidents of birth
and socialization - by their race, ethnicity, sex or class. The theory is that we are
whatever our group is, and that we necessarily think and act according to the
circumscribed mental makeup of the groups' interests. This theory is starkly incompatible
with, and subversive of, the premises of American democracy...
"Professor Searle draws the correct, and dismaying, conclusion about the idea of
organizing society around, and basing politics on, 'respect' for group 'differences.' If
identity politics is valid, then 'it is no longer one of the purposes of education.. to
enable the student to develop an identity as a member of a larger human intellectual
culture.' If the premise of identity politics is true, then the idea on which America
rests is false. If the promise of identity politics is true, then there is no meaningful
sense a universal human nature, and there are no general standards of intellectual
discourse, and no possible ethic of ennobling disputation, no process of civil persuasion
toward friendly consent, no source of legitimacy other than power, and we all live
immersed in our groups (they once were called tribes), warily watching all other groups
across the chasms of our 'differences'...
"The result of such politics can eventually be the Balkanization of our nation. Note
the word "Balkanization." What that term derives from is much in the news just
now. A geographical expression has become a political pathology. And if you want to see
the world that the postmodernist sensibility could make, look abroad.
"If you want to know what happens when all differences immediately become power
struggles and nothing but power struggles, look at the Balkans. There identity
politics is practiced with the ruthlessness that comes with the belief that there can
be no other kind of politics -- no disinterested politics of ideas and persuasion. When
groups assume that they are locked in their mutually unintelligible differences, you get
the nasty and brutish state of nature that Hobbes depicted. Odd, is it not, how the
postmodern sensibility seems suited to, and conducive to, a world of postmodern tribalism.
"A society steeped in postmodern sensibility will have an uneasy conscience about
teaching certain great truths, values or works because it will wonder: Who are we -- who
is anyone -- to say that anything is greater than anything else? And a postmodernist
community cannot long remain a community. It will lose the confidence necessary for the
transmission of precious things -- tested ideas and values -- held in common..."
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