The Ivory Glower

At The Good Professor's mention, I've been rereading Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt, which is just so goddamn lucid, yaw no? In the first several essays, she treats the development of history from an effort to commemorate great deeds as a memorial bulwark against mortality and transience to its more contemporary incarnation as a "scientific" discipline devoted to causal processes, a change, as she puts it, from what to how as the basis for inquiry.

Somehow those essays stuck in my mind as I read The Evil Professor, Stanley Fish, arguing for the umpteenth to the nth degree time that "higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world." Let me here express some modest sympathy for Fish. His profession is under steady attack in the popular media; a layaway McCarthyism stalks the borders of the academe, accusing humanities profs of sedition. But Fish's solution, which is to retreat into cloistered irrelevance, studying a scale-model human universe in a drafty library lit by candlelight, is what you might call fake anachronism, the desire to emulate a time and practice that never really existed in the present day.

So we will all still read Marx or Foucault or Derrida or whoever is the subversive anti-American ideologue-of-the-week, but never fear, we shall be certain to impress upon our students the total inuntility of this body of work, remind them not to apply anything they may have learned from their reading to any analysis of the world in which they live, encourage them to think of real, lived human experience only in the most banal, broadly accessible, and thoroughly popular manner possible.

In making his case, Fish marshals to his side Michael Oakeshott, Immanuel Kant, Max Weber, and Aristotle, who, being dead, were indisposed to burn their draft cards. What is there to say except that Fish seems genuinely to believe that "measurable effects in the world" are the results of quadrennial elections and the outcomes of lawsuits. That is all. Counsel rests, your honor. There can be no profounder misunderstanding of those four men than to believe their lives and works support the half-baked argumentation of one Professor Stanley Fish. For good measure, he hauls out and decontextualizes Arnold's dictum that poetry will save us from anarchy, as if it were meant to mean that quatrains would bring peace to Palestine.

Words fail. What a fucking douche.