In his work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim asserts that “educational institutions are capable of communicating the truly rational foundation for morality in the wake of the decline of religion.” Whether in the famed schools of Plato and Aristotle, or the indispensable monastic universities of the Middle Ages, the West’s vast reservoir of intellectual traditions and discoveries have been safeguarded and transmitted down through time by one form or another of the Ancient academy.
While the respective cultures of the Ancient Greeks and the Medieval Europeans are obviously distinguishable through different critical lenses, the Western intellectual shibboleth, carried for centuries, ushered in a rigorous and catholic approach to learning that our modern academies have either failed to uphold or to match. What can account for the increasingly inhibited attitude towards knowledge and education in modern American universities? When we examine the recent introduction into classrooms of Marxist and socialist rhetoric, the cult of tolerance, and cultural and gender studies, it is plain to see that our modern standards of knowledge and information exist in supremely awkward relation to the conception of liberal studies realized in the first European universities in the Middle Ages.
To better understand the intellectually segregated environment of the modern American university, we can apply Durkheim’s general analysis of why breakdowns in social institutions occur in what he refers to as “common culture.”. American readers of Durkheim cannot fail to get a sense that a deep understanding of social structures emerges from his conception of a collective social consciousness, even if we seem to be dispossessed of the means of achieving such a rounded view of the world for ourselves. Durkheim’s conception of what it means for a group of people to possess a “common culture” presupposes the long-standing distinctions between human and animal societies, between high and low culture, and recognizes the necessity of communal social mores, conventions, and institutions. The cultural treasures of the West have been denounced and purposely undermined by academic propagandists as being the products of ideological class coercion, racial and gender exclusion, and “Eurocentricity.” However, it is plain that “multicultural” curriculums do not wish to simply purify the inherited cultural traditions of the West, but wish instead to eradicate particular social and political attitudes that do not conform to their prejudices. The body of texts that communicate the values, ideals, and history of a culture are not disposable resources; and yet it is precisely the opposite notion that now masquerades as education at every level. At the risk of oversimplifying the point, what American literature professor can supply a coherent argument for their continuing to assign readings from Shakespeare, George Eliot, or Plato to students, rather than newspapers, magazines, or blogs on the internet? How many students can supply a coherent argument for why they should read at all?
A common culture, as Durkheim understands it, cannot be imparted as a free choice among alternatives, because common culture cannot be divorced or isolated from the political life of a society. A recent article on internet communities as a third species of Durkheimian society misses the point of what human culture signifies for Durkheim, namely “universal” “human values and an historical community of sentiment. The ineffable dynamics of a commonly held system of values does not translate into binary code– what passes for “internet communities” is mechanical anonymity paradoxically functioning as a simulacrum of organic public forums. That all human societies are historically embedded organisms is what makes simulacrums of communities temporarily arresting as “signs,” but ultimately vacuous in the absence of a tangible “signified.”
Durkheim tells us that the members of a common culture define themselves in relation to what is venerated and preserved in a given culture, such as a culture’s religious and legal institutions. Once these institutions are razed by external or internal exigencies, organizational deficiencies and failures are inevitable: “…commonly held beliefs and practices are only active when partaken by many. A man cannot retain them any length of time by a purely personal effort.” In other words, a common culture is not maintained by a “hands-off” approach. The preservation of culture requires ingrained assumptions that are arguably arbitrary, fictitious, and unreal. Common culture operates like great dramatic theater, in the respect that an audience’s suspension of disbelief toward the action on the stage never veers off entirely into insular fantasy, but traces a path from representation back to reality (e.g., Aristotle’s theory of katharsis) through the medium of a shared spectacle. The pluralistic conception of society as a department store, where one shops for the most appealing and desirable identity, dates back to Plato’s Republic, and homogenized pluralism has largely replaced habituation into the social order in America, as well as replaced the rites of passage that mark the stages of individual social responsibility. The Ancients— our cultural and intellectual forbearers— were able to be prodigious in their assimilative energies, and vast in their interpretive powers because they possessed what Americans have forfeited, namely a common culture. In the latter 1960’s, many American academics began to surrender their allegiance to the notion of common culture in the wake of the first wave of French New Left Theorists, and have, at the beginning of the 21st century, all but severed the last tie to the idea of American culture functioning as a melting pot. In place of the melting pot, some groups of liberal academics have substituted a sort of pseudo-cultural “newspeak” that either fosters indifference to social outcomes, or wages a war of subversion for its own sake.
Ideologically minded American academies have, for the most part, no abiding interest in asserting or defending the Durkheimian, or any culturally conservative vision of social life, and their students reflect the laissez-faire attitude of their professors. Theory is elevated above praxis; “tolerance” above a robust ethical sense; and unconditional (as well as unconditioned) personal freedom above duty to a common good. The public intellectual in America has been entirely replaced by the growing influence of iconoclastic academic theorists and ideologues that speak a language that mocks ordinary human meaning, and imparts to students a sense of homelessness and isolation, rather than belonging. Durkheim’s conception of “anomic suicide” asserts that when “society’s influence is lacking in the basically individual passions,” desires and drives lack an identifiable object, “thus leaving them [the individual passions] without a check-rein.” The converse of the conditions for anomic suicide might be stated in the following terms: individual persons desire membership; but membership exists only among those who do not desire it; and those who have no positive conception of membership— in other words, those who belong— presuppose that having membership in a common culture is a way of existence that is simply inscribed into the fabric of nature. It is common culture— the cult of the tribe— that allows for unmediated access to the ethical vision of man, and helps to avoid conditions that lead to outbreaks of anomic and cultural suicide.
There is a large consensus in American academia that prohibitions and punishes “academic dishonesty”— dishonesty meaning such things as plagiarism and “cheating” in any detectable form. This ironic prohibition is leveled at students by administrators and professors who nevertheless advance students who can neither read nor write, nor think critically or respond effectively to arguments. But the same students can preach to any passerby a full set of sermons that somehow mirror the liberal political consensus dollar for dollar. The student market capital for memorization is enormous, yet impoverished and shivering when it comes to the most elementary analysis of, for instance, why we must loathe and denounce Columbus Day every year.
How such an approach to education can be squared with any semblance of a vision of common culture defies the terms upon which a common culture is built on, or sustained in the world. The absent-minded professor has been transmogrified into honest Iago, the instigator of anxiety and paranoia in those who are most ill-equipped (i.e., the young) to judge between the empty verbiage of leftist propagandists, and works of profound human interest.
While mental laziness may have its reward in a high grade point average, there is no argument that can support the fruits born of ignorance and prejudice. I would maintain there is nothing more dishonest to the office of administrator or professor than to draw a comfortable salary, churn out commentaries on commentaries, and attend conferences, while consistently lowering or violating educational standards to “meet the needs of students.” Educational institutions are an arguably vital component to the well-being of a society; when resources dry up or go to waste, famine sets in. While the responsibility for the corruption and exclusion of the Western intellectual tradition in American universities falls squarely on the shoulders of postmodern theorists, queer theorists, and multiculturalists, the ultimate fate of the magnanimous Western intellectual tradition awaits the judgment of those future generations not yet indoctrinated into the cult of the modern American academy.
Philosophy Major 