On the New Scholarly Discourses

Looking through the Plate-Glass Windows at the Riches Within

One of the things that really bothers me about contemporary scholarly writing—and not just that—is that the authors of these works, though they often do have a sound grounding in the subjects they choose to discuss, seem to come at their material from somewhere way outside the heart of the culture that produced such things—literature, painting, historical documents, drama and music.  It is not just that they feel they must explain what any educated person should know about books, events and people who created the world we live in or that they use terms and concepts that are so far removed from these realities that such expressions miss the point, distort the truth or offer something completely inappropriate instead, but they seem to have no idea what actually motivated such experiences or what the implications are for the way everything has taken on a new complexion because of those actions.  It grates against my soul to see words like “kids” instead of children or “fun” instead of enjoyable in what should be serious texts.  More than that, it disturbs me deeply to find supposedly respectable scholars fumbling to grasp the purpose of classical painting or non-romantic poetry.   

What seems to have happened in the last fifty years, from the late 1960s onwards, that is, the student uprisings in Paris and in many other great cities of the western world, is that political correctness has deemed it almost mandatory for young scholars to approach the great heritage of civilization—and the mixture of the populations that this civilization has always experienced and often encouraged—as though they were “objective” outsiders: poor little victims—for they identify with the outsiders, the immigrants, the aliens, and the down-and-out “minorities”—staring through the plate-glass windows of an upscale (or any) restaurant, looking in, their noses pressed up against the panes, their tongues hanging out, yet their eyes, somewhat glazed and blurry, unable to see clearly what is within—what they think they see are over-stuffed patrons feasting on a rich diet denied to everyone on the outside.  Thus their approach to describing the goods set out on the table, the men and women gathered around that banquet and talking about their experiences comes set within a perspective that is at once blocked by jealousy, envy and resentment, and at the same time cloudy with misconceptions and couched in a language heavy with neologisms, malaprops, jargon and local patois and jabbering.

To be sure, everyone, when he or she comes into the world, comes to grow up in a texture of language, images, rituals and concepts that are in progress, that are, in other words, in the process of transforming from the way they used to be into what they are, as well as reacting, consciously or still unconsciously, to forms of reality that have not yet precipitated out of the flux and therefore have no clear shape or resonance.  But each of had to listen to what was being said around us, watch the way our elders were behaving, and study the books and other forms of cultural productions that expanded and illuminated what we ourselves could know only from our own individuality.  We grew up assuming that we did not know it all and that there was much to learn—much more than any one of us could accomplish in a lifetime; and therefore we had to develop proper skills, study basics, absorb what we could and follow the lead of our betters.  

At the same time, we also realized we had to become critical, questioning and somewhat sceptical of what we were told about the truth and reality, so that we could take in what was there to be learned and keep testing it against our own experience.  There had to be means of coming to trust authorities who knew more than we did in fields where we couldn’t become experts on our own. 

But the goal was to become part of the ongoing culture and civilization to which we belonged, at once guardians of its own historical integrity and expanders of its boundaries and providing increased depth to the total accumulation of this heritage.  Eventually, as we matured and proved ourselves in the system, we would become authorities too, with all the responsibility that honour implied.  All this meant hard work.  In fact, because the goal was so important, we knew it had to be hard to attain.