I cannot praise highly enough Mark Edmundson's article in the latest issue of American Scholar, entitled "Teach What You Love." Although aimed primarily at teachers of literature, it applies with equal force to teachers of history, law...and really everybody. If everyone would read this article, the world would be a better place. Prof. Edmundson articulates well something I have been trying to grasp for the past year or so, and that is this: the academy today is so invested in the concept of power that it reduces absolutely everything to power, or tries to. Thus our scholars refuse to accept the ideas offered by literature, or the explanations left behind by the people who lived through historical events, because they insist instead that there is always some hidden, material motive of power behind every phenomenon. Whatever else might be said for this approach, it fails in one overwhelming respect: there is at least one human phenomenon that cannot be accounted for by a theory of power, and that is love.
Love is incompatible with power in every respect. It cannot be explained as a form of power. It cannot be transformed into power. It cannot be controlled by power. And no matter how much their rhetoric may try to conceal it (and boy, do they try!) the fact is that Michel Foucault and Ta-Nehisi Coates and the rest simply cannot explain or even describe adequately, this basic human capacity: the thing that suffereth long, and is kind; envieth not; vaunteth not itself; is not puffed up; doth not behave itself unseemly; seeketh not her own; is not easily provoked; thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, or endureth all things. And yet this quality of human life underlies at least as many of the historical realities and literary treasures we have as does any other motive such as politics or fear or racism or greed. How petty, how inadequate, how paltry, is an explanatory theory if it cannot account for or speak in this language, or even sense its solemnity? Yet our universities, with all their deconstructive theorizing and pseudosophisticated jargon, and angry tribalism and activism, are bereft of this idea, which means that they are totally impoverished. Well, that is an exaggeration. Of course, love remains, in spite of the best efforts of those who consider themselves far too woke to believe in it.
Here's an excerpt from Edmundson:
I am persuaded that the first step in the renovation of our discipline is a return to what we have loved and a commitment to share that love with others, in an open, generous way that is always ready to take No for an answer. And then is willing to come back and try again. We have succumbed too smoothly to the trance of the negative. It’s become standard issue clothing for the professoriate, like tweeds and brogans once were. But the current model is full of holes. The work it produces by way of scholarship often shows signs of brilliance, but it is sterile. No one reads it to enlarge one’s spirit. Scholarly books now are not so much read and savored as they are positioned one atop the other for the aspirant to climb in order to write his or her own volume and gain position and preferment—though given the state of the art, these emoluments will be had by few, and fewer all the time.
How long, really, will we draw any students at all, if what we do is mock the meat that feeds us and has for so long...? When I reflect on our situation, I sometimes think: “It’s as though some people might go into the study of astronomy because certain planets actively annoyed them.” If we continue to judge literature as a waste site teeming with toxins, how long before the students will simply say, “I think I’ll avoid that locale altogether and do my business elsewhere”? Indeed, they are already doing so.
You say: close attention to the toxins in the old books helps reveal their presence in the current atmosphere. I might say anyone can smell rot in the air. Anyone can see the pollutant clouds roiling the cultural sky. What’s needed is the air of promise, the new start, the freshness that enters the world best in art, to move us to new and renovating exertions in our lives.
Again, what Edmundson says here applies not just to literature, and not just to teachers, but to all of us who live in the world of the humanities, which is all of us. This article is important. People need to read it...before it is too late.
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