Professor Jere P. Surber, a philosophy professor at the University of Denver, has a very intriguing piece up over at The Chronicle. Title, “Well, Naturally We’re Liberal,” is half re-freshing honesty, and a cloyingly narrow self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s more in the article to discuss, but I’ll stick to just two of his points.
On the one hand, it’s nice to see a liberal arts professor come out and openly admit most of his peers lean left, and even more so when he admits that:
virtually all instructors in the liberal arts are aware of the disparity between their level of education and their financial situation. There’s no secret that the liberal arts are the lowest-compensated sector of academe, despite substantially more advanced study than business instructors and the equivalent of those in the natural sciences…It’s real simple: Those who have less and want more will tend to support social changes that promise to accomplish that; those who are already economic winners will want to conserve their status.
Liberal arts professor don’t make as much as their colleagues in other fields with comparative training and skill, so they might be inclined to take it out in egalitarian fashion via the ballot box. Fair enough, I can see some merit for that, and it’s nice of him to be honest about it.
Later, however, Surber lists as another reason:
liberal-arts professors tend to be politically liberal is that they have very likely studied large-scale historical processes and complex cultural dynamics. Conservatives, who tend to evoke the need to preserve traditional connections with the past, have nonetheless contributed least to any detailed or thoughtful study of history. Most (although, of course, by no means all) prominent historians of politics, literature, the arts, religion, and even economics have tended, as conservatives claim, to be liberally biased. Fair enough. But if you actually take the time to look at history and culture, certain conclusions about human nature, society, and economics tend to force themselves on you. History has a trajectory, driven in large part by the desires of underprivileged or oppressed groups to attain parity with the privileged or the oppressor.
Consider the Greek struggle against Persian tyranny, the struggles to preserve the Roman Republic, the peasant uprisings of the Middle Ages, the American and French revolutions, the abolitionist and civil-rights movements, and now movements on behalf of other groups—women, Latinos, homosexuals, and the physically impaired. As President Obama recently put it, any open-minded review of history (and perhaps especially American history) teaches at least one clear lesson: There is a “right side of history,” Obama said —the side of those who would overcome prejudice, question unearned privilege, and resist oppression in favor of a more just condition.
If you don’t study history, whether because it doesn’t pad quarterly profits, isn’t sufficiently scientific or objective, or threatens your own economic status, then you won’t know any of that. But most of those in the liberal arts have concluded that there really isn’t any other intellectually respectable way to interpret the broad contours of history and culture. They are liberal, in other words, by deliberate and reasoned choice, based upon the best available evidence.
Whoa Ho!
That’s a full mouth there. If you study history, you’ll automatically become a liberal because you’ll want to be on the “right” side of history.
The obvious rejoinder to Surber is that there is more than one way to study history, and I find it pretty arrogant to assume that his historical narrative (the generic liberal narrative mind) is the one and only historical narrative. In fact, using the liberal narrative of history to prove that all people who study history should be liberals, is a bit circular.
Is it possible that the entire course of history is not necessarily motivated by the study of oppressed/disadvantageous groups struggling for legitimacy (a very late 20th century notion of legitimacy too I might add)? If history is that easy to understand, why is it so difficult that all us dunderhead conservatives can’t get it?
Maybe history is motivated by lots of competing forces and various dynamics? Maybe wars, economic innovations, and intellectual ideas exert a lot more influence? Would anyone with more than a cliched textbook understanding of the middle ages really think that Medieval man was entirely preoccupied with peasant uprisings? Apparently, someone forgot to tell the Cistercians.
We all know how Paris rescued Helen because Priam was “marginalizing” them.
And the Age of Exploration kicked off because Columbus secretly put on dresses and wrote awkward letters to his mother.
Isaac Newton revolutionized the world because of a dispute with the apple growers union.
Something I find funny is that Surber’s very psuedo-Hegelian philosophy of history isn’t all that new, or even widely accepted anymore. I don’t converse with eminent historians routinely, but even I know that historical study has moved away, practically run away, from believing in any sort of neat formula that adequately describes the record of human activity.
Surber gets in a dig at Conservatives who cried bloody murder over the ‘”relativism,” if not “nihilism,” implicit in the (alleged) poststructuralist hijacking of the liberal arts.”
Given Surber’s childishly simple vision of history, I could use a little poststructualism right now.
There’s more to go into in Surber’s piece, and it does bring up a really important point that I do think Conservative’s tend to turn a blind eye to (namely, the opposition still has a monopoly on the humanities. We can pat ourselves on the back about having businessmen and a bunch of the hard scientists, but we’re really really really setting ourselves up for trouble by not worrying more about the humanities). But I’ll leave off for now. I need to go find some good thinkers who have a grasp of history that wasn’t old before the internal combustion engine.
Guess I’ll have to find some liberal history profs then…
Oh, nope. Nevermind. Pomocon.
Categories: Art, Culture, Miscellany, Political Philosophy, Traditions
\\ Tags: Conservatives, History, Jere P. Surber, liberal arts, Liberals, Philosophy of History
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