The title of this post appears to contain a contradiction, but stay with me. Many years ago, while teaching a course in which several 19th-century European novels were on the syllabus, I was struck by the presence in the center of these novels of a nostalgia for something lost, something that could not be named. It also struck me that the nostalgia lay heavily on certain objects and places and that these objects and places took on a resonance that, in itself, is not inherent in objects and places, i.e., in material things. Proust, I suppose, is the 20th-century writer who has most notably portrayed the effects of such resonance.
But objects are unreliable, and they cannot always retain their resonance, and what further struck me was that the nostalgia was not simply about the objects, but concerned a deep human longing to attach value, a longing that is at the center of our being. Unfortunately, the industrialization going on in the 19th century was accompanied by materialist philosophies that asserted that there was no such deep center to our being. The rest is history, as they say.
At the time I thought that a course might be instituted, alongside the traditional courses in literature departments and proposed to call it "The Literature of Spirituality: the 19th Century." I had in mind not only the writings of 19th-century Europeans and Americans, but also non-Western writers whose works portrayed the effects of a society being catapulted into the midst of secular culture and spiritual disorientation. This was back in 1994, when I attended an MLA conference in Toronto and heard a talk by
Nathan A. Scott, Jr. It was a sign of the way that certain discourses had been already marginalized by 1994 that, despite five years in a Ph.D. program, I had never heard of Professor Scott. The occasion was the presentation of a kind of lifetime achievement award on behalf of the "Christianity and Literature" section of the MLA, and his talk concerned his own life and introduction to literature.
His intellectual journey began in the 1950s, and it was one of indomitable inner strength and conviction of a black man desirous of learning in the face of the prevailing norms of society in those years. Already in 1994, such a journey was already classified as a sell-out by certain portions of black leadership. The academics followed suit, not because Scott was black, but because the goal on which he had set his sights and which he achieved was, in their eyes, no longer of value. By 1994 humanities professors were infected with the virus of deconstruction. At its core, deconstruction concerns exposing the submerged ideology of power, racism, misogyny, repression, and so on that is hidden below the overt text of a novel. In other words, the past is a bad place, and the values of the past had to be "deconstructed."
When professors stopped talking about Milton’s prose and began pointing out his treatment of his daughters, students got the point immediately. Why would eighteen-year-olds hang around to confirm what they knew only a year or two earlier, anyway: that anyone born before their own birth year doesn’t have a clue? The result, over the last several decades, has been the deterioration of literature departments throughout the U.S. Scholars now talk primarily to themselves.
The above is a long-winded way of approaching the subject of the current "woke culture" among young people today. “Woke” is so apposite, such a culturally apt description of the thinking (!) of kids who have been raised deconstructively. From my own long-ago experience teaching undergraduates, they are not only highly susceptible to overestimating their own worth, but they are also very idealistic. One has only to teach the novels of Hermann Hesse to a class of undergraduates to know this. (Remember
Demian? Or
Siddhartha?) Novels are the only place where you can get into the mind of another person, but the minds of the young protesters are virginal, without depth, without empathy for differences of point of view, because they were taught to repudiate the kinds of novels that once helped young people to overcome their own vanities or that encouraged them to measure up to the standards of literary heroes.
Scott's publications include
Adversity and Grace: Studies in Recent American Literature;
The Poetry of Civic Virtue: Eliot, Malraux, Auden;
Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling. And he contributed the foreword to the original 1966 edition of
The Gospel According to Peanuts. By the 1990s the spiritual grounding that informed the writings of scholars like Scott had been marginalized. And continue to be so. Young people now channel their idealism into spouting shibboleths, and have become spooky commissars merrily carrying on the work of deconstruction. What could be more deconstructive that toppling historical monuments? After all, they know what kids instinctively know: they are always right.
