Meeting Humanists? No Way

Re Ermanno Bencivenga’s op-ed article, “Humanists and the Public Must Meet Each Other Halfway,” July 21:

The writer’s most startling observation is that divisiveness exists between the public and what he calls “professional humanists.” That observation is about as interesting as the notion that fog contains moisture.

Of course the public and professional humanists are divided: What have professional humanists done for the public lately? Bencivenga notes that the humanities are the “true laboratory” for developing and mastering “difference,” which, he says, is the most human of capacities. Yeah. We innocent bystanders know all about his idea of “difference.”

After all, university humanists have jammed political correctness and cultural diversity down our throats, masking each movement as if it were the key to American solidarity. As a result of all the correctness and diversity, we now live in the age of raging victimization, where no one has anyone to blame except each other, whatever the ill, real or perceived.

Bencivenga further points out that humanists are not prepared for the challenge of “unsympathetic probing.” Why not? Henry David Thoreau could battle unsympathetic probing; so could his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. So could John Milton, James Madison and Samuel Johnson. But university students don’t read those writers anymore because they are all white, all male, all of European stock, and all dead; therefore, university humanists do not teach their writings.

The professor betrays himself when he talks about the “mutual education” of the public and university humanists, assuming the split between the two groups. If a split exists, then it was not cleaved by the public. University humanists, using a polysyllabic vocabulary that masks the dust-covered trifles of their thinking, cannot correspond with a public sickened by the notion, for example, that literature means to a student whatever the student thinks it means, regardless of the emptiness of thought, however trite the notions that the student pours into an essay.

Humanists used to be tough. Clark Kerr never wavered from his ideas, however willing he was to change those ideas when logic dictated that he do so. The same goes for Jacques Barzun and for Noam Chomsky.

Now university humanists weep on newspaper pages, bemoaning their outcast state. They brought it upon themselves.

DON K. PIERSTORFF

Costa Mesa