July 13, 2003
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The Flight from Knowing (Professor Lisa Ruddick, University of Chicago English Department)The tensions within our field have reached the media and even our own journals in the distorted form of a culture war, with a clear cleavage between a traditionally humanist right and an antihumanist left. In the middle, but without a base, are people like this woman who are not traditionalists but nonetheless have convictions about "what sustains people" that in the current environment would be discounted as conservative, humanist illusions. (She might for example be asked, "Which 'people' are you presuming to speak for?") Such scholars survive by putting a part of themselves into hiding, and their voices aren't heard....
When I was writing my first book I was so concerned about getting tenure that I adhered to the theoretical norms of the moment. It was alienating at times, but I did it. After that, though, I became paralyzed, because I couldn't make myself observe certain omnipresent intellectual taboos that came under the heading of poststructuralism--taboos that I thought were oppressive but that I couldn't challenge without courting disgrace. I felt I had to hide or smuggle in my humanist convictions about "what sustains people"--my faith for example in some quality of shared humanity that makes literary experience meaningful. And my anger and sadness about this feeling of constraint were preventing me from writing with conviction at all....
[Y]ou may or may not find the fear and defensiveness I'm describing odd. Maybe you too have experienced an exhausting internal debate between the ordinary self that has something it cares about and the piped-in voice of the profession that can only coldly approve or blame....
[A]s I started to rethink what I was about intellectually, I initially feared developing my own perspective because I thought I might become someone who would alienate old friends and acquire some new "friends" from the right, as well as new enemies....
Every profession binds its initiates to itself by inducing a subtle spiritual depletion-what the legal theorist Duncan Kennedy, in his 1983 manifesto Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy, called "'the sneaking depression of the pre-professional," and what Jeff Schmidt, again in Disciplined Minds, describes as an "emotional numbness" and a "loss of vitality and authenticity" common among professionals. I think that the theoretical models that have dominated English and the related disciplines in the last two decades are especially effective tools for creating this kind of demoralization, because in their depletion of the meaning of such words as authenticity and humanity they eat away at a person's sense of having a vital interior life apart from his or her professional identity.... The message we send ... is: there's no real authenticity anywhere, there's no humanity you can count on ...
I was talking with a medievalist friend about these ideas, which I'm in the midst of developing into a book, and he said something that made me stop and think, namely that "there is no growth without ascesis." He was using the religious term ascesis to describe the discipline of meaningful self-questioning or self-abnegation. He was making a powerful point: you can't educate without asking students to renounce much of what they formerly took for granted, including some dimensions of their younger selves. But there are environments in which ascesis, or renunciation, shades over into a kind of hazing, and people lose sight of what exactly is being relinquished and what is being grown there. In these environments ascesis can become mere self-flagellation and self-alienation: rather than the surrender of fixed assumptions that's necessary for building suppleness and awareness, there is the crushing and unproductive experience of coming to despise what one still carries within oneself from the period before one merged with a group identity....
What I would wish to see is a profession that did a better job of teaching everyone who comes here how to distinguish for himself or herself ... between the ascesis or self-transformation that produces integrity, flexibility, and intellectual strength, and the sham ascesis, too common in the professions, that is really a loss of self.
Robertson Davies in one of his speeches argues that among the Seven Deadly Sins, moderns are most prone to Acedia -- commonly translated into English as "Sloth." Acedia refers not to physical laziness, as the English word suggests, but to spiritual sloth: the unwillingness to distinguish good from evil, the unwillingness to love good passionately and despise evil with gusto. A person in the grip of Acedia is lukewarm as the Laodiceans.
Acedia and its companion sins are "Deadly" not because they kill immediately: they are also known as the "Capital Sins," because they lead to other sins. They are deadly because they corrupt. Acedia in particular leads to relativism and to a lack of energy, to an unwillingness to strive for any worthy goal. It leads to demoralization, in which nothing seems good enough to struggle for.
I doubt the left developed its program consciously, but it has become very effective at spreading demoralization and Acedia. Professor Ruddick wisely connects "loss of morale" to "loss of moral conviction"; the two go together, as Forrest Gump would have said, like peas and carrots.
It is interesting that, apparently by consensus among the English professoriate, humanist values are now associated with the right, anti-humanist values with the left. To me this indicates the decline of liberalism as I once understood it: it shows that liberalism's crisis has proceeded to the point of its virtual destruction. In pursuit of power, liberals have allied themselves with the anti-humanist left and joined the effort to demoralize conservatives and those who share conservative values. But this essentially anti-human enterprise corrupts liberalism and poisons its humanist elements, with the result that liberalism as it once was vanishes. Liberals have been absorbed almost insensately into the radical left.
There is a profound need in modern society for a moralizing force: for people who can give encouragement to those who love, who embrace a worthy moral vision with gusto and passion. Professor Ruddick states our need quite well in the final lines I have quoted: and it is a fundamentally religious need. Sadly, religious institutions whose purpose is precisely to lead such a moralization -- for instance, the Catholic bishops -- have become demoralized themselves. I don't know where the moral energy to re-moralize society will come from. But I am sure we need it.