In Their Crisis, Universities Can’t Shove Truth Down the Memory Hole

It is a matter for public concern that American universities begin 1989 in serious difficulty explaining what they are, what they should teach and by what right they teach.

The universities’ crisis is related to a profound problem of the 20th Century, a cause of war in our times, which is the problem of truth--an intellectual problem, obviously, but political as well. If truth doesn’t exist, or cannot be determined, why do we do what we do? If it does exist and can be determined, and I possess the truth while you are in error, why should I not send you to prison, Siberia or the gas ovens in order to eliminate error from society?

The Western civilization that produced the ferocious modern politico-ideological “truth” systems of Marxism-Leninism, mutating into Stalinism, and of Nazism-Fascism, is the same civilization that has most effectively resisted the ideologizing of knowledge. It has defended free thought and created, in the course of its history, the democratic political system that actually asks people to decide a nation’s course. It has done this on a continuing assumption of the possibility of discovering the truth about things through the use of reason.

The values of this civilization, “the West,” are now questioned, directly or indirectly, in the course of the university controversy. First there is a debate concerning cultural relativism, which was most publicized at Stanford. People ask why the thought and art of the West should be taught in the American university, rather than the thought and art of China or India.

People ask why the oral literature of Africa or the pre-literate cultures of the North American Indian should be shunted off onto the margins of what is considered civilization. Women note that few women are among the “great” figures taught in the university, and they challenge that this should be so.

A political explanation is proposed, which says that European or European-descended white men have always controlled Western universities and dominated Western cultural life, and that they have imposed what suited them.

This obviously is true, but is just as obviously reductionist. To say that Western society is Eurocentric is to repeat oneself. To say that its culture has been dominated by men is to state a historical fact about not only this civilization but all others as well. Yet self-interest, plot and power-brokerage are not satisfactory explanations. To claim that they are is implicitly to deny that values or standards exist outside the play of power, or that judgments have been or can be made that are not those of power-in-action.

Behind the cultural relativism of the controversy is the influence of “postmodernism,” which says that universal principles and values, and the Western liberal, rationalist, effort to discover general truths--”meta-narratives,” as the postmodernists call them--are no longer credible.

The founding assumption of the Western university is that reality is knowable through reason. Postmodern thought holds, to the contrary, that reason has become “pluralized,” and relativized, and that reality is indeterminate. Knowledge exists only as “regimes” of knowledge, which is to say as political systems (an academic department or intellectual school, for example) that dictate that certain things are so, and use power, pain and reward to make this accepted.

The layman has to reply, well, yes and no--mostly no. The questions are not well addressed in a newspaper column, but it is necessary to note that the political implications of all this are greater than some of the academic sponsors of postmodernism may think.

George Orwell’s great dystopia, “1984,” basically concerned whether “truth” exists or whether it is arbitrarily invented, onthe one hand, by a “power-system,” made into “goodthought,” or, on the other hand turned into “crimethought” and stuffed down the “memory hole,” to disappear. Orwell was rather pessimistic about the matter, apparently assuming that the view that truth is merely an expression of power was likely to prevail in society.

He might have been been surprised if he saw what actually happened. Not only has Nazi totalitarianism been so completely discredited that people can scarcely imagine that millions took it seriously in the 1930s and 1940s, but the Soviet Union, which really did rewrite its history books and encyclopedias to meet the everchanging demands of “truth” as the Soviet leaders wanted it, today is engaged in a traumatized effort to come to terms with the fact that the “truths” of Lenin and Stalin were false.

All the things pushed down the memory hole are having to be taken out one by one, uncrumpled and flattened out, reconsidered and admitted still to be true after all. Truth really has prevailed. This is a profoundly liberal notion--a “modern” notion, as opposed to a “postmodern” one. In the university controversy the notion of truth as an absolute value is said to be discredited, “our ideal of a unifying reason . . . fractured by the dissemination of knowledge and the intrusions of power”--to quote the leading article in a recent issue of the Phi Beta Kappa quarterly letter.

The civilization that we live in would be incomprehensible, and unworkable, if we abandon the beliefs that reason can arbitrate the moral claims of society and that truth exists and is ascertainable. Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues that our moral identity and civilization are integrally related, and that if we abandon a belief in truth for a cultural relativism, we are giving up all possibility of moral judgment.

Moral reasoning, he says, is itself historical, functioning in terms of a tradition and cultural legacy, which is what makes our grasp of that legacy so important. Without that, we will be left with “no ends to pursue, no ideal or vision to confer significance upon our political action.”

We will be left to act on whim or fashion, if not worse. This year and last year, for example, we are all anti-racist. Why are we anti-racist? We know that it is right. How do we know? Fifty years ago black people certainly knew it, but it seems fair to say that at that time most white people, in or out of Western civilization, took for granted a natural inferiority of black people. A hundred years ago science and the universities offered serious theories justifying racial hierarchy and racist public policies.

Seventy-five years ago most Gentile Europeans and North Americans were probably to some degree, often virulently so, anti-Semitic. Fifty years ago the most powerful political movement in Europe attempted to exterminate the Jewish people, holding that this was not only the “right” thing to do but was scientifically justified as well.

In both cases minorities resisted the majority on grounds of a value system that insisted on the absolute worth of the individual person, and in the belief that truth has nothing to do with the prevailing power system. Eventually they won.

Who can say what people may believe or do 50 or 100 years from now if, as postmodernism contends, nothing objectively is true, and values and moral reasoning are merely power-games? If they are power-games, truth is defined by power--and the only moral difference between you and Hitler is that he lost a war.

A visit to Delphi, in Greece, is a sobering experience. Next to the Acropolis, Delphi is the most important archeological site in the classical world. One regards the statues and images that have been rescued from the past--those from the Archaic period, before the 6th Century B.C.--wearing stylized, idealized, half-smiles, seductive but undifferentiated (the smile of a newborn child, the guide says). In the classical period the faces become increasingly individual, intelligent, self-conscious; they become moral persons. They offer a shock, the shock of recognizing an individual across 25 centuries.

They speak as well. There are the classical texts, which we have, but at Delphi itself, incised at the entrance to the Temple of Apollo, were two very modern injunctions: “Know thyself” and “Nothing in Excess.” We still fail to know ourselves, and still are victims of our excess, but it seems undeniable that we still live in a continuity of intelligence and moral responsibility that began with Greek rationalism. To cut ourselves off from this means cutting ourselves off not only from a usable past but from our essential quality as a society.

The possibility that this could actually happen is what is most troubling about the whole affair of the universities.