Thursday, April 07, 2005
- The Trouble With American Studies -- Reflections on the last two Presentations. By Agustin.
On March 21, following the presentation of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, our self-styled "anarcho-syndicalist" and "communist" colleagues made a number of comments that struck me as disgraceful. Children? They are "fuck--g children". Marriage? It's like "rape, and a concentration camp." And get this: American women were "thrown out" of factories when soldiers came back from the war in 1945!
Then, on April 4, the panel presenting Jürgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere handed out a comparison between Neoconservatives and ... Stalinism. That these guys know as much about history as I know about nuclear fusion is beside the point. After all, they can read Anne Appelbaum's Gulag: A History (New York: Random House, 2003), where the number of victims is estimated at well over 18 million (between 1929 and 1953.)
Is it about the sour taste of (electoral) defeat? In a sense, yes. My liberal friends are very fond of democracy -- only when they win. When they lose, America is not such a democratic nation after all. Interesting. But the problem, I'm afraid, runs deeper than that. I am beginning to suspect that the so-called "post-modern" culture is making destructive inroads into the minds of some of my younger colleagues.
If every opinion is a "construction" that can be "deconstructed", then there is little room for moral absolutes. Everything is relative. Anything compares with anything. Neo-conservatives, a group of brilliant, hard-working, honest intellectuals (**) are thus compared to history's bloodiest mass-murderer. The death of one terrorist who plots to massacre thousands of civilians equals the destruction of eigtheen million innocent citizens. Et voilà!
The fact that neo-conservatives were instrumental in promoting democracy in Afghanistan and Irak --with revolutionary ripple effects around the world, from Lebanon to Kyrgyzstan-- leaves my liberal colleagues completely indifferent. There is a whiff of ethno-centrism here, as if democracy in regions far from our civilized world should not be a concern to us. But let's tell it like it is: anti-democracy liberals are reactionaries; neo-cons are revolutionaries.
To sum up: the "fuck--g children" episode and the comparison "Stalin-Neocons" do worry me, because I have developed a sincere affection for UvA's American Studies Program. The risk is that the program becomes irrelevant. If the competition reads Huntington instead of Freud, my guess is that students will choose the competition.
(*) You can read the introduction here. Warning: this is not for the faint-hearted.
(**) The epithet "honest" does not apply, I am afraid, to Bill Clinton's friend Sandy Burglar.
On March 21, following the presentation of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, our self-styled "anarcho-syndicalist" and "communist" colleagues made a number of comments that struck me as disgraceful. Children? They are "fuck--g children". Marriage? It's like "rape, and a concentration camp." And get this: American women were "thrown out" of factories when soldiers came back from the war in 1945!
Then, on April 4, the panel presenting Jürgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere handed out a comparison between Neoconservatives and ... Stalinism. That these guys know as much about history as I know about nuclear fusion is beside the point. After all, they can read Anne Appelbaum's Gulag: A History (New York: Random House, 2003), where the number of victims is estimated at well over 18 million (between 1929 and 1953.)
Is it about the sour taste of (electoral) defeat? In a sense, yes. My liberal friends are very fond of democracy -- only when they win. When they lose, America is not such a democratic nation after all. Interesting. But the problem, I'm afraid, runs deeper than that. I am beginning to suspect that the so-called "post-modern" culture is making destructive inroads into the minds of some of my younger colleagues.
If every opinion is a "construction" that can be "deconstructed", then there is little room for moral absolutes. Everything is relative. Anything compares with anything. Neo-conservatives, a group of brilliant, hard-working, honest intellectuals (**) are thus compared to history's bloodiest mass-murderer. The death of one terrorist who plots to massacre thousands of civilians equals the destruction of eigtheen million innocent citizens. Et voilà!
The fact that neo-conservatives were instrumental in promoting democracy in Afghanistan and Irak --with revolutionary ripple effects around the world, from Lebanon to Kyrgyzstan-- leaves my liberal colleagues completely indifferent. There is a whiff of ethno-centrism here, as if democracy in regions far from our civilized world should not be a concern to us. But let's tell it like it is: anti-democracy liberals are reactionaries; neo-cons are revolutionaries.
To sum up: the "fuck--g children" episode and the comparison "Stalin-Neocons" do worry me, because I have developed a sincere affection for UvA's American Studies Program. The risk is that the program becomes irrelevant. If the competition reads Huntington instead of Freud, my guess is that students will choose the competition.
(*) You can read the introduction here. Warning: this is not for the faint-hearted.
(**) The epithet "honest" does not apply, I am afraid, to Bill Clinton's friend Sandy Burglar.
# posted by Agustin @ 7:13 PM 
