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What Was That?
Ah, George Will, taking to the pages of a major newspaper op-ed page to cast random allegations in the time-honored dispute of Harvard versus Yale. Beyond that, we're allegedly talking about postmodernism and why it's bad. Like most political columnists who wade into this stuff, it's pretty clear that Will doesn't know what he's talking about. The position he seems to be advocating -- that we need to histoiricize knowledge and practice actual reconstruction of our ways of knowing and doing rather than seeking timeless foundations grounded in first principles -- is a view associated with his erstwhile enemies in this dispute.
At any rate, I can assure any prospective students out there that Harvard University does, in fact, feature a History Department, contrary to the impression Will seems to have developed.
May 19, 2005 | Permalink
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» He wouldn't make it as a blogger from City Comforts Blog
Read this. All the way through. To the end.. Then tell me if you'd read this guy -- for free -- if he was a blogger. My own reaction? Not a chance. I read him now and then simply because he is a big-name columnist and not because he seems to have any p... [Read More]
Tracked on May 19, 2005 3:10:44 PM
Comments
I just want to take this opportunity to applaud your dedication as demonstrated by active blogging while hung over.
Posted by: liver | May 19, 2005 11:47:35 AM
What is particularly ironic about this piece of trash is that Will seems completely oblivious to the fact that Yale has always been far more sympathetic to the sort of thinking he denounces than Harvard (de Man, anyone?)
Posted by: David | May 19, 2005 12:06:57 PM
Wow, Donald Kagan teaches at Yale and therefore Harvard is teh suxors?
Posted by: praktike | May 19, 2005 12:10:34 PM
Harvard University does, in fact, feature a History Department
Do they teach about Harvard's founding slave-owners? Just curious.
Posted by: M | May 19, 2005 12:11:47 PM
Interesting that in a column advocating the use of history for dicovery of virtue, Will compares "the heroic construction of the Panama Canal and the debacle of Boston's "Big Dig" 100 years later", whereas, the cost of the Big Dig was almost entirely related to the goal of disrupting the locals as much as possible during construction, a lesser concern with the Panama canal.
Posted by: theCoach | May 19, 2005 12:14:42 PM
of course, by "disrupting the locals as much as possible" I meant as little as possible.
Posted by: theCoach | May 19, 2005 12:16:41 PM
In this graf--
Nearly three centuries ago Lord Bolingbroke said that "history is philosophy teaching by examples." However, at this American moment of mutual incomprehension and even contempt between theists and their postmodernist despisers, it is "transgressive" -- to purloin a bit of the postmodernists' jargon -- for Kagan to insist that there is a firm middle, or perhaps higher, ground for moral confidence
--we learn what kind of history Will prefers.
Posted by: Jackmormon | May 19, 2005 12:16:41 PM
Do they teach about Harvard's founding slave-owners? Just curious.
Isn't that a bit like asking if the Math department keeps the books for the alumni fund?
Posted by: Brittain33 | May 19, 2005 12:18:56 PM
"Compare, for example, the heroic construction of the Panama Canal and the debacle of Boston's "Big Dig" 100 years later."
Excellent! Once we foment a revolution to make Boston an independent country with a puppet government, we can get things rolling properly. Then, about 25,000 deaths later, we'll be done!
Posted by: Njorl | May 19, 2005 12:21:07 PM
Here is the Kagan lecture. Kagan is a neocon . If history is so fricking useful, why is Iraq such a fuck-up.
Posted by: joe o | May 19, 2005 12:26:31 PM
"This translates into a religious litmus test in politics -- only devout individuals should be chosen to lead societies."
Hell, why not take this on to the logical conclusion- only devout individuals should be allowed to vote.
Posted by: JR | May 19, 2005 12:26:35 PM
Will is truly a man of little brain.
He should stick to writing about baseball
Posted by: Scott McArthur | May 19, 2005 12:28:44 PM
Excellent! Once we foment a revolution to make Boston an independent country with a puppet government, we can get things rolling properly. Then, about 25,000 deaths later, we'll be done!
Wait a minute, you're trying to draw a moral lesson from the construction of the Panama Canal. That's exactly the sort of behavior that Will is decrying in his column. The Panama Canal, in the context of the times, was a virtuous, even heroic, undertaking which cannot meaningfully be extrapolated to today.
Oh, wait, Will favors the other side of the argument. Guess his head must be up his backside again.
Posted by: mds | May 19, 2005 12:30:10 PM
The irony is that Philosophy departments around the country are the most resistent to this post-modernist nonsense.
Want to find a group of people who don't believe in God but think that human reason can explain and justify objective morality, just look at the Harvard Philosophy department.
-Christine Korsgaard
-Derek Parfit
-T.M Scanlon
-Niko Kolodny
Each one could argue rings around Kagan.
Posted by: Patrick | May 19, 2005 12:32:58 PM
Matt, tell your crew at Harvard that, to paraphrase the Fresh Prince, if George Will's laughin, you don't need 'im, cause he's not your friend.
Posted by: Wrye | May 19, 2005 12:35:10 PM
Postmodernism is a poltergeist that one ascribes to the Other
- so as to exorcize it from them.
Then, through this, one is `clean' of it oneself - sanctimoniously clean.
So, no one really understands the meaning of postmodernism. There is no meaning. It's just used as a rhetorical device.
Posted by: RIPope | May 19, 2005 1:03:45 PM
it was Harvard degree and Yale education, no?
Posted by: Goldberg | May 19, 2005 1:09:49 PM
I believe that George Will taught a Government course with Harvey Mansfield and Michael Sandel at Harvard. Is George Will willing to implicate himself as a causal factor in Harvard's decline?
Posted by: Abby | May 19, 2005 1:14:01 PM
I guess it takes at least 30,000 dead (number killed building Panama Canal) to make a construction project "heroic" in a true historian's eyes.
If he's so upset by the Big Dig, I'd like to see Will take on Bechtel and the corporate corruption and lack of oversight on huge projects.
Posted by: Marysquito | May 19, 2005 1:47:01 PM
This is unreal. This column is such utter nonsense, but you have to have an awfully expensive degree to be able to say why.
Posted by: biztheclown | May 19, 2005 1:48:42 PM
"Some intellectuals today are know-nothings -- literally and proudly. They argue that objectivity is a chimera, that we cannot confidently know anything of truth..... Those who most confidently dispute this idea derive their confidence from religious faith..... "
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in saying that we have to choose between post-modernism and religious dogmatism, didn't this moron just forget the existence of the Math department, all of the hard sciences, the Med School, and very possibly some social sciences as well?
They all seem to deal in objectivity and truth with great confidence--when they don't have to waste time refuting Creationism for the umpteenth time.
Oh, you think he meant that the hard sciences don't deal with virtue and right an wrong an stuff?
Well, if he thinks that post-modernism's characteristic attack was limited to truths about *ethics*, then he is really showing how little he knows. The po-mos' attack was *much* broader than that. That's why the Rove/Bush/DeLay attack on *any* stable truth (say, about science, AIDS, global warming, WMD's, etc.) is so thoroughly in the po-mo spirit, as Josh Marshall has pointed out.
Finally, as Patrick pointed out, the philosophy departments around the country have had *no* truck with Po-mo nonsense, and have been confidently studying the objective truths about ethics and virtue all along--some of us in relation to theistic commitments, many of us without.
Talk about your defiantly proud know-nothings--Will is one of their know-nothings-in-chief.
Posted by: Tad Brennan | May 19, 2005 2:28:33 PM
you know, as a philosophy grad student engaged mostly with postmodern and/or post-structruralist thought (and korsgaard is not hostile to it, from what i can gather), i am often asked by my early-60s-educated father to explain some aspect or another of derrida, butler, et al. i am constantly amazed at how utterly ill-informed he is. this is a smart man, a federal prosecutor. and i frequently feel like i'm talking to a freshman.
then i read columns like this one -- by my fellow trinity alum and fellow former trinity tripod editor -- and it all starts to make sense.
does will ever cite or even begin to engage with any actual postmodern thinkers? nope. all kagan and mccullough.
does he ever explain why, say, truth becomes elastic with postmodernism (as opposed to facts and correctness -- a very, very important distinction made in heidegger)? nope.
does he ever even explain why 'postmodernity' has taken/been given the name it has -- as a response to, and a building on, modernity (that 'modernity' is a historical moment, and a moment that passed on some time ago) and is thus, in its understanding, extremely historical, more historical than modernity, which in many ways specifically denies history in order to be modern? nope.
so when someone this intellectually dishonest and incomprehensible is the main conduit from which someone like my father, who doesn't exactly have the time or inclination to reread the history of western philosophy (and i don't blame him), receives his information about postmodernism, i should probably just learn to be more patient.
Posted by: james | May 19, 2005 2:34:10 PM
I'll go one step further, James. Any person who talks about "post-Modernist" historians knows absolutely nothing about the subject. Post-Modernism is an architectural style and perhaps a mode of literary analysis. Most historians and social scientists who question the existence of a universal signifier are called post-structuralists, evoking both the structuralism of Saussure and its opposite, the structural-functionalism of 1950s sociologists and anthropologists.
The use of the term indicates that neither Will nor Kagan have actually read the folks they demonize. Their purpose is to attack academe itself, one of the few bastions beyond their effective control.
Posted by: AWC | May 19, 2005 2:58:20 PM
James,
While I am curious why you think that Korsgaard's work is amenable to postmodernism (you know, given that she thinks that human reason can discover timeless universal ethical requirements), but I would rather share the following story about Christine:
---During a faculty dinner,
Student: Perhaps you can help me, I have an interest in Foucault. What should I do?
Korsgaard: Find another interest.
Posted by: Patrick | May 19, 2005 2:59:34 PM
patrick:
as to the conversation, all i have to say is, what fool is going to even think about bringing up foucault in harvard's or any other ivy league's philosophy faculty? sit in on a class at bc. that's like me asking agnes heller where to start on my bertrand russell studies.
as to korsgaard, i haven't read too much of hers, so i'm really basing this on the two articles i've read and, more so, a really good lecture i saw her give at nyu last year on animal rights and the third critique.
let's see if i can get this right because i've lost the notes she gave out...but if i remember correctly she more or less said we can de-emphasize the side of judgments of the beautiful that rely on a certain, specifically human form of rationalism and up the emphasis on the play in the play of the faculties, we can begin to think of animals as having cognition -- a cognition different from our own, to be sure, but cognition nonetheless.
this struck me as much less radical, but formally similar to jay bernstein's, among others', readings of the third critique -- the upped emphasis for these folks would be the sublime, but the goal is in many ways the same: to shift or open up the definition or understanding of cognition on kant's grounds.
but, then, hopefully i haven't completely mangled my memory of her talk. although, if i have, maybe i have a paper of my own i can write.
awc:
first, i find the quibbles about what is postmodernism vs. what is poststructuralism really bloody tedious. generally speaking, most of the more interesting people do, yes, consider themselves poststructural, but one could also make the claim that saussure's linguistics are the pinnacle of modernity as an attempt to map out the structure of language as if it were an object, as if language were like 'the new world' or 'darkest africa'. but, in the end, i just find the whole series of back-and-forth accusations and hair-splitting to be an exercise in scholasticism.
second, i don't think you need to know what kagan and especially will's use or misuse of the term to realize they don't know what they're talking about. the sheer incoherence of will's column testifies to that. god bless that trinity degree and trinity education.
Posted by: james | May 19, 2005 3:45:42 PM
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