Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education

National Review, Feb 9, 1998 by E. Christian Kopff

Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, by Martha C. Nussbaum (Harvard, 328 pp., $26)

Mr. Kopff is associate director of the Honors Program at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and editor of a critical edition of Euripides' Bacchae.

MARTHA Nussbaum, a celebrated classicist who has lately become Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, has good news about American universities. "Never before have there been so many talented and committed young faculty so broadly dispersed in institutions of so many different kinds, thinking about difficult issues connecting education with citizenship." Or is it good news? If I heard that "never before have there been so many talented young mechanics, thinking about difficult issues connecting transportation with citizenship," I should want to know whether cars were running better. Talented young faculty may be thinking at East Boondoggle State Teachers College, but I am more concerned to know whether their students are learning the difficult subjects they will need to learn in order to participate effectively in the complex Western traditions of self-rule and science.

Here is an example of the good news. At St. Lawrence University, "a small liberal-arts college in Upstate New York," the young faculty get sent to Kenya for a month "to study African village life." Then they teach classes in which "students submit closely reasoned papers analyzing arguments for and against outsiders' taking a stand on the practice of female circumcision in Africa." Prof. Nussbaum returns to this program again and again, in part because the teachers do not believe in the "ultimately incoherent" notion of cultural relativism. She discusses two student papers. The one opposing the practice is rambling and unclear. The paper saying it is none of our business is intelligent and forceful. The outraged teacher gives it a good grade, but scribbles in the margin, "Where do you draw the line? If a country were slaughtering all male children, should we intervene?" Liberals really want to know, not whether we should take a position, but when we should invade.

Which is to say, the "difficult" issues that talented young faculty are meditating on turn out to be the usual PC suspects: sex and race.

What about "citizenship"? "When I use a word," said Humpty Dumpty, "it means what I want it to mean." When Martha Nussbaum says "citizenship," she means "world citizenship." By "world citizenship" she means an attitude of support for global free trade and conventional Enlightenment liberalism. When she says "classical," as in the subtitle of her book -- she means either world citizenship, as just defined -- because the phrase "citizen of the world" was used by the ancient Stoics, on whom she has elsewhere written some rather good pages -- or the demolition of traditional values, which she calls "Socratic."

This is not Plato's Socrates, except when Mrs. Nussbaum uses passages from Republic V to bolster feminism, but something more like the head of the Thinkery in Aristophanes' Clouds, a parody of Socrates, on which, again, Mrs. Nussbaum has previously written a good scholarly article. This Socrates is not sent by Apollo to awaken in each person's soul a rational consciousness of the traditional wisdom we recognize but cannot explain. He is an ancient Voltaire who destroys young people's loyalty to traditional values. He is also a democrat, gadfly to a democracy he calls "noble but sluggish." In my text of the Apology, Socrates uses that expression to describe the city of Athens, not its democracy, the irrationality of which he is constantly mocking; but the scholarly precision which plays so impressive a role in Prof. Nussbaum's text of Aristotle's De Motu Animalium disappears when she defends the liberal regime.

People who are familiar with recent controversies in the academy will not be surprised by this. In 1993, testifying as an expert witness on behalf of gay-rights activists in a case challenging a Colorado constitutional amendment as, among other things, an "establishment of religion," Mrs. Nussbaum told the court that moral opposition to homosexual conduct was a peculiarly Christian theological innovation and did not exist in pre-Christian traditions. To support this claim, the now professor of ethics brazenly misrepresented to the court not only the writing of Plato, but also the work of present-day historians. In this, she was detected by John Finnis of Oxford and Robert George of Princeton. Prof. Nussbaum's classical scholarship cannot be relied upon when she places it in the service of her political causes.

Major non-Western traditions fare no better at her hands. Universities should teach about China, she asserts; but how? "When we decide to teach 'Chinese values' . . . , what should we be studying? The Confucian tradition? The Marxist critique of that tradition? The values of contemporary Chinese feminists?" For her, the question is an open one. When Prof. Nussbaum portrays an American businesswoman's problems working in China, she points not to the woman's dealings with a brutal dictatorship, but to her difficulties adjusting to Chinese nannies. Mrs. Nussbaum's nuanced care, typical of liberals, not to offend Marxist dictators contrasts with her attitude toward the traditional American way of life, which she describes as "suffused with group hatred," "consumed by bigotry," etc. There are no such bouquets for Marxist China.