59 of 72 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Did you get the license of the truck that ran over you?, June 28, 2005
It's an old-time jest when somebody is blindsided, knocked flat, dazed and confused. That was my reaction entering a graduate school of education after 40 years in business. Foucault who?
It is a whole raft of PC truck and amazing license with the facts and the methodology of research, an immense gulf between theories of how people are and one's real-life experience. Ellis provides the service of describing, cataloging, and providing a history and analysis of the race-gender-class theories driving political correctness. My goal is to extract Cliff notes of the major concepts to share here and for my own reference.
The most fundamental dichotomy is between humanity and society. People and the institutions they have built. PC sides with Rousseau in believing that people in a state of nature are fundamentally good but that society has corrupted them. If "man is born free, yet everywhere in chains," somebody is to blame. Political correctness, like Marxism which preceded it, is a blame game. It theorizes that a conspiracy based on race (white), gender (male), sexual persuasion (straight) and class (the capitalists) to exploit, demean, and abuse everybody else. Mankind will only be free when the millennium arrives and these "hegemonists" and the societies they have built are swept away to be replaced by new, shining, ideal institutions.
Rousseau's view inspired the French and Russian revolutions. Hobbes, Locke and the other philosophers who inspired ours took the opposite view. They hold that man is inherently selfish, and that we need the social contract and governments to hold our worser nature in check.
Society is not and never will be perfect. Nonetheless, looking around one can see that today's European or American enjoys more opportunity, wealth, health and other good things of life than any of his ancestors or any other societies on earth. It isn't perfection, but it is also not to be lightly discarded, nor certainly to be despised for its putative failings.
Ellis blames careerism for the curious fact that literary critics now tend to propound theories in the realms of philosophy, psychology, political science and sociology, and at the same time appear to have become indifferent to the aesthetics of literature itself. Critics find little new to be said about world's body of great literature, which has been analyzed ad nauseam. On the other hand there are exciting things happening elsewhere in academia. An academic career has to be based on fresh ideas, and the only place to find them is outside the field. Ellis enumerates borrowings from physics, anthropology and elsewhere, the authors of which often disown the half-baked theories literary critics have spun from their research.
Careerism alone does not fully explain political correctness. There is the traditional distain of the academic for the common man, and the traditional ivory-tower intellectual's inclination towards radicalism. The softer side of academia is also prone to embrace intellectual fads. Communism, existentialism, Oriental religions, Leary's dope philosophy and Scientology held sway when I was at Cal in the `60s. Some stuff Ellis talks about, such as critical race studies, feminism and queer theory, are more recent.
Ordinary intuition tells you that there are logical flaws in the politically correct bilge coming out of the academy. Ellis' service is to apply a nomenclature to their pretentious nonsense.
The Genetic fallacy is the notion that one's genetic makeup affects external reality, as in, "It's a black thing... you wouldn't understand." It drives the notion that only women can be professors of Women's Studies, blacks of Black Studies, etc. Scholarship does not rely on its own internal consistency and being independently verifiable and reproducible -- Francis Bacon's ideas formalized by John Locke during the Enlightenment -- but on the genetic makeup of the researcher.
The Intentionality fallacy claims that a literary text does not speak for itself. Instead, it is the author's intent that matters. Needless to say this is taken as a license to practice retroactive psychoanalysis and discover -- O!, shock! -- that straight white male authors had none but despicable intentions and misogynistic views of women and gloated in their superiority over other races.
The Affective fallacy holds that what matters is not the text itself but the reader's affect upon reading the text. Since this will surely vary from reader to reader, the text itself therefore lacks any intrinsic qualities apart from the very words themselves. It is meaningless to look for a common interpretation of the text. Presumably by this reading even allegory, metaphor and imagery are ruled out; certainly some readers will be ignorant of the referents.
One of Ellis' recurrent themes is that the race-gender-class theorists are thoroughly inconsistent. On the one hand they agree with the deconstructionists that any text, any reality, can be only be studied as a collection of minute parts, the relationships among which disappear in the deconstruction. No relationships, no constructed meaning. Or conversely, all meaning is constructed, chacun à son goût, at the whim of the author. In any case there is no permanent, transcendent meaning to anything. Or morality or anything else. But yet, yet the race-gender-class advocates theorizes there are some eternal truths, among them the malevolent intent of certain types of people towards other types.
Ellis returns again and again to the Enlightenment. What is unique about Europeans is not that they practiced slavery - everybody did that and many still do. but that western societies were the only ones to abandon the practice, and they did it on moral grounds, against their own economic interests. Societies throughout history have attempted to dominate one another. Once again, it was Europeans and Americans, following Enlightenment philosophy, who abandoned their attempts to build empire. In fact, the value of equality that underlies race-gender-class theory is a direct product of the Enlightenment. The difference is only a matter of degree. Theory paints issues in black and white. They tolerate no gradual transitions or residual inequalities. Theory would sweep away today's society, despite the considerable advances over where it was, and its considerably more equitable treatment of racial, class and gender minorities than other societies, in the attempt to replace it with a radically new and improved society. The theorists have learned nothing from the French revolution, and are both tragic and comic in their attempts to explain away the failures of Marxism and Communism.
Employing a Hegelian term of which the Marxists are fond, Ellis says that the PC crowd preaches historically but judge ahistorically. They judge American actions at the 1789 Constitutional Convention in the light of modern PC standards. Yet they give the savagery of genital mutilation, slavery and intertribal genocide in today's third world a pass.
Theorists claim that the "truths" of the literature of dead white males are invalid. Ellis question is, "what truths?" He contends that literature does not attempt to express eternal verities so much as eternal questions. In doing so it is almost always regarded with suspicion by the powers that be. Literature such as Madame. Bovary, Candide, Gulliver's Travels, On the Road, Animal Farm, Huckleberry Finn and in fact almost any great work that comes to mind, tends to challenges orthodoxies more than establish them.
Tenaciously held theory supports action, not analysis. Action is antithetical to the purposes of the University: research and debate in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom. Activism implies dedication to a cause, hence an outcome, and hence rejection of research that doesn't support the activists' theses. Activists shout down their foes, subjecting them to withering ad hominem attacks rather than logically rebutting their points. Larry Summers treatment by the women of Harvard is a classic example.
Ellis concludes with the sad prognosis that the corruption is now so deeply engrained in the Universities, with whole departments dedicated to race-class-gender issues, that it will be around for a long time. I propose it is the AIDS of the meme community; it has compromised its hosts' defenses (American universities) to the point that they may never shake it. I shudder to imagine the consequences to the country when the United States loses its leading position within the global scholarly community.
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21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A book that does what it promises, January 18, 2005
It recent years there seems to have developed a cottage industry of books denouncing the latest academic fashions and trends- from PC to Postmodernism, all of which seem to originate in the
" radicalisms" of the 60's. What makes Ellis's book different from the rest is that he manages to refute a whole host of absurd notions and theories with strong logical and lucid arguments; while not merely having to resort to petty polemics and Ad hominem attacks- the kinds of "arguments" his targets in this work frequently use.
Ellis examins the history of political correctness, whoose origns he finds in the 18th and 19th century German Romantic exultation of the " noble savage" along with their doctrines of cultural relativism and primitivism. The book then engages and refutes the PC scholars all of whom are classed as " race gender and class critics " who all in one form or another seek to impose a political Schematism on all works of art.
The book ,however, is not without it's problems. The fringe ideas of the likes of Peggy Macintosh, whom Ellis refutes are hardly mainstream, and his dismissal of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine Mackinnon( while perfectly sound) are hardly neccessary- as these thinkers are scarcely
dominant in the field of liteary studies. At times it would have been nice to see Ellis look at the more moderate and sound scholarship of the various critical schools under attack.
Nonetheless, this is very worthwhile book, and ought to be read by all of us who care not only for Literature but for what is happening in our culture and society in general.
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31 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Thank You, Professor Ellis, April 20, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities (Hardcover)
My first exposure to the inanities of current trends among the 'soft science' literati was through the work of the incomparable historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, who eloquently describes the effects of these hate-filled trends on the study of History in the academy. Ellis presents a logical, simple, and scholarly expose of the racial and sexual hatred that has infested our Literature schools, first in the academies, and now filtered down to all areas in public high schools and elementary schools. Little wonder that race relations in the US have taken a turn for the worse, although most Americans are at a loss to explain why this has happened. Look no further than the extremists in the academy and their devastating effect on public education at all levels. Ellis elegantly exposes the lack of logical thought among these academics, but I found Chapter 9 also very enlightening in the presentation of reasons for the development of this sad state of affairs. You will recognize in this chapter what you have known intuitively, but have not put into words, particularly the sad attempt to achieve accolades on the part of mediocre and uncreative minds. Envy and self-loathing are powerful motivators. (Among other things, it is a sad legacy of the premature death of Martin Luther King, who stood for principles solidly in opposition to these hate-mongers.) As a woman in a technical profession, the notion put forth by extremist feminists that women can not think 'vertically' (as in math, science, logic) is particularly repugnant, and can only do great harm to young women seeking a profession. Yes, men may typically excel in 3-dimensional space concepts, and yes, women excel in language and communication. But to suggest that algebra and logic are symptoms of 'patriarchal' oppression and that women should shun them is false and harmful. In fact, it has taken women many years to get rid of this nincompoopery, only to have it revived by androgynists who claim to be speaking in the interest of women. If men had suggested this, they would have been bricked by vigilantes. Likewise, the notion that all heterosexual sex is 'rape' seems to be not only absurd, but pathological. Is it really doing women a favor to put loving, kind husbands and sexual sadists (rapists) in the same category? Why are these schools being funded by the public? Is it lawful to preach hate and stupidity on campus these days? Should the public be required to fund those who advocate the destruction of their country or their culture? Perhaps a mandatory period of live-in study in a non-Western country is in order for these armchair revolutionaries who are ruining our schools - somewhere like Afghanistan, Uganda, or Bosnia, with expenses paid by the academy, which will be much cheaper than paying them the much-higher-than-living wage of the Western culture they so despise. Sadly, parents who enroll their sons and daughters are generally unaware of the loonies who make a college education in the humanities a liability rather than an asset. Perhaps the students who have witnessed and experienced the intellectual brutality at the academy should write a guide for parents and those private organizations that fund grants and scholarships. They need only present exerpts from the writing of the extremists, including from the deans of the schools who support them. Copies of student polemical publications could also be an enlightening inclusion in such a guide. Students need help in finding the treaures offered by a traditional course in great literature, the type of course advocated by Ellis. One more thing. If, as the degenerate literati maintain, there is no such thing as truth or objective merit or value, and if, as they say, Vanna White's autobiography or porn films are as appropriate to teach as Shakespeare, then why have a humanities academy at all? Surely, the public can understand these without the high cost of marxist-gender-class interpreters. Little wonder that vouchers and private schools are proliferating. There's no other escape in sight.
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