Teaching the young

Public Interest, Spring, 1998 by David Frum

Nussbaum is no stranger to the Culture Wars. She testified against the amendment to the Colorado constitution that would have barred localities from treating homosexuality as a prohibited basis for discrimination. In her latest book, she enters the fray again, with a mix of commentary on philosophic texts, educational theorizing, and interviews with college students and teachers.

Nussbaum acknowledges that the American university curriculum is indeed changing - and changing for political reasons. "New topics," she writes:

have entered the liberal arts curricula of colleges and universities: the history and culture of non-Western peoples and of ethnic and racial minorities in the United States, the experiences and achievements of women, the history and concerns of lesbians and gay men. These changes have frequently been presented in popular journalism as highly threatening, both to traditional standards of academic excellence and to traditional norms of citizenship. Readers are given the picture of a monolithic, highly politicized elite who are attempting to enforce a 'politically correct' view of human life.

In Nussbaum's view, these criticisms of the contemporary university are not so much wrong (for her own descriptions of campus life make plain that today's university rejects both traditional standards of excellence and traditional norms of citizenship) as beside the point. If old ideals and norms have been rejected, it's because they have been held up to the bright light of inquiry and found wanting. Nussbaum conceives of herself as an intellectual explorer in the Socratic tradition. She argues for the examined life - "a life that accepts no belief as authoritative simply because it has been handed down by tradition or become familiar through habit, a life that questions all beliefs and accepts only those that survive reason's demands for consistency and for justification." But it never seems to occur to her that a genuine questioning of "all beliefs" might overturn liberal idols, as much as the traditional ones she opposes.

"In colleges and universities around the country," Nussbaum reports, "students are following Socrates, questioning their views to discover how far they survive the test of argument." She reassures parents who might be disturbed by the effects upon their young of Socratic questioning.

To parents in contemporary America, as to parents in the time of Socrates, such developments can appear very unsettling. Argument seems like a cold strange invader into the habits of the home.... The parents of the philosophy majors at Belmont may encounter 'secular humanism' at the end of the semester, where previously there had been traditional Christianity.

But Socratic questioning might lead in directions other than "secular humanism"; indeed it can lead to distinctly illiberal truths. Certainly such questioning did not lead Socrates himself to become a 1990s-style liberal. It did not have that effect on Nietzsche either.

This is not to say that Socratic inquiry is necessarily a bad thing; only that it's not what Nussbaum is really interested in. One sees this in her defense of what's called multicultural education, for instance. Consider the following anecdote that she tells. "Anna was a political science major at a large state university in the Midwest. Upon graduation, she went into business.... One day, her firm assigned her to the newly opened Beijing office. What did she need to know, and how well did her education prepare her for success in her new role?" Good question. Here, in its entirety, is Nussbaum's reply:

She needs to know how Chinese people think about work (and not to assume there is just one way); she needs to know how cooperative networks are formed, and what misunderstandings might arise in interactions between Chinese and American workers. Knowledge of recent Chinese history is important, since the disruptions of the Cultural Revolution still shape workers' attitudes. Anna also needs to consider her response to the recent policy of urging women to return to the home, and to associated practices of laying off women first. This means she should know something about Chinese gender relations, both in the Confucian tradition and more recently. She should probably know something about academic women's studies in the United States, which have influenced the women's studies movement in Chinese universities. She certainly needs a more general view of human rights, and about to what extent it is either legitimate or wise to criticize another nation's way of life. In the future, Anna may find herself dealing with problems of anti-African racism, and with recent government attempts to exclude immigrants who test positive for the human immunodeficiency virus. Doing this well will require her to know something about the history of Chinese attitudes about race and sexuality. It will also mean being able to keep her bearings even when she knows that the society around her will not accept her view.

It's an eye-opening list. Chinese attitudes about race and sexuality? Who but an American professor of the 1990s could itemize the subject matter useful to an understanding of China without mentioning knowledge of the Chinese language, Chinese history before 1964, Chinese literature, religion, and philosophy (except in reference to gender relations)? Who but an American professor of the 1990s could think knowledge of "academic women's studies in the United States" crucial to an understanding of the Chinese people? Nussbaum, the advocate of Socratic inquiry and multicultural education, takes no interest in anything about China except the preoccupations of a modern academic liberal.