L’hypocrisie est un vice à la mode, et tous les vices à la mode passent pour vertus.
—Molière, Dom Juan, ou le Festin de pierre (1665)
Might we be approaching a defining moment, a tipping point when liberal arts
education in America relinquishes any serious claims for beneficial utility or vatic clout
in the wider society and ceases to matter outside of a few ivy-walled redoubts? A number
of critics across the political and cultural spectra have recently suggested as much. If they
are basically correct, it might then be worth pausing a moment to consider precisely what
the defining terms for this unhappy occasion might be. From the vantage point of one
who studies and teaches humanism in the Renaissance—a time of vertiginous, nearly
apocalyptic changes and an intense interest in reviving the Republic of Letters—I would
like to put forth my nominations.
Without belaboring the point, an early modern perspective on how post-humanist
neoliberal higher ed tends to operate may be illuminating. Back then, printing
revolutionized communication, as digital media are doing now. At the same time, rulers,
intellectuals, and subjects confronted thorny real-world issues concerning legitimate
authority and its limits. Simultaneously, epistemological debates about the very nature of
Truth itself became highly contentious, with the New Learning and global exploration
challenging or overturning comfortable, established paradigms. Along with all that,
Reformation and Counter-Reformation dialectics turned brethren into implacable,
demonized foes. Universities themselves were caught up in these culture wars, becoming
breeding grounds for factional rivalries, schisms, and antagonistic diatribes. Meanwhile,
and just as contentiously, la querelle des femmes, “the Woman Question,” was
threatening to boil over, presaging contemporary feminist agitation and the #MeToo
movement.
So with those rough parallels in mind, let me pose the question: what rhetorical
devices best delineate the ethos of typical Humanities professors nowadays? The terms
hyperbole and irony would surely have their champions. With exaggeration running
rampant across campus, hyperbole would be an awesomely extra answer. From the
inflated grades handed out like Halloween candy to the ways that crowing faculty boast
about their impotent, inconsequential copycat works, puffery aboundeth. The kudos drift
down like glittering snowflakes in a romanticized snow-globe college wonderland, but
the quality of instruction and research has declined. It is like an ideal gas law for the
liberal arts: as the positive epideixis escalates, the actual value drops in inverse
proportion. Ergo, while students may walk away after graduation with shiny, gilded
transcripts, they remain academically adrift: unlettered, unskilled, clueless. These
infantilized millennials, coddled with trigger warnings and safe spaces, and taught to
privilege feelings over facts, are decidedly unwoke in many ways (Twenge, 2018). And
as for the so-called original scholarship of their teachers, what they boldly proffer as new
and true contributions to human knowledge is actually tepid, unadventurous pabulum.
Such publications function primarily as résumé-fillers and loyalty oaths of ideological
soundness—virtue-signalling pointed at PRT committees more than anything anyone will
actually read and learn from. For instance, one frequently encounters Ivory Tower
poseurs marketing their buzz-worthy novelties in Digital Humanities like this: “drawing
on crowd-sourced analytics, my current intervention seeks not only to map out how trend
X has gone viral online, but also to help curate the vital project of a neoteric poetics of X
in the public sphere of cyberspace.” Such extravagant embellishments, however, induce
massive amounts of irony: the hype is increasingly hollow.
While either of those words would fit well enough, I would hereby like to propose
their kissing cousin paradiastole as the trope du jour. Paradiastole is a concept from
classical oratory, revived by rhetoricians in the age of print, that means the redescribing
of vices as virtues. For instance, Greek dudes today might dub their drunken,
homophobic, misogynistically toxic fraternity “a brotherhood of good fellowship,” while
on the distaff side, young women might deem their catty, party-girl frenemies “beloved
sorority sisters.” Early Modernist Quentin Skinner (2007) has traced out this figure’s
ancient inception and sixteenth-century reappearance in an erudite article in the essay
collection Renaissance Figures of Speech. He shows that this exculpatory maneuver,
even more than most persuasive tricks, had somewhat sketchy, slimy connotations. It
reeked of the rationalizing of misdeeds, back-scratching, shystering, and the exoneration
of faults. In The Garden of Eloquence (1577), Henry Peacham called it an “instrument of
excuse serving to self-love, partial favor, blind affection, and a shameless person,” used
mainly for “the better maintenance of wickedness” (as cited in Skinner, p. 161). Then as
now, satirists condemned notorious deployers of paradiastole, mocking those sell-outs
who weaponized alternative facts to move ahead in the rat race. Henrician courtier Sir
Thomas Wyatt, for instance, presented a scathing indictment of such fashionable spindoctoring
in his Horatian satire “Myne Owne John Poyntz.”1 Unlike his dissembling,
dishonest peers at the Henrician court, Sir Thomas cannot “say that Pan / Passeth Apollo
in music manifold; / Praise Sir Thopas for a noble tale, / And scorn the story that the
Knight told” (as cited in Sylvester, 1984, lines 48-51). He is simply unable to lie—neither
about the aesthetic quality of the two divergent Canterbury Tales to which he alludes, nor
about more substantive matters of state. As he declares: “My Poyntz, I cannot frame my
tune to feign, / To cloak the truth for praise without dessert, / Of them that list all vice for
to retain” (lines 19-21). He means he cannot commend the immoral and iniquitous with
false flattery. For this policy of candor, unsurprisingly, he faced heavy corporal
punishment and was rusticated, time-honored outcomes for speakers of truth to power
(see lines 77-103). Paradiastole, though, does not always have to be so negative: Brutus
justifies the assassination of Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s tragedy (1599/1974) as the
purging of a tyrant infecting the body politic, not a straight-out murder. This remains a
debatable issue in those unfortunate places where democratic processes have broken
down and prescribed legal mechanisms for removing entrenched autocrats are
ineffectual—another illustration of the timelessness of our endangered humanities.
Paradiastole often occurs with its converse meiosis, which means a spiteful attack
or malicious attempt to diminish something or someone that is actually noteworthy.2
Cultural theorists shackled in Plato’s Cave who impugn, belittle, or slam consilient,
biocultural New Humanist interpretations, which are drawing from cognitive
neuroscience and Darwin’s enlightening discoveries to enrich our understanding of the
arts, as “reductive,” “essentialist,” “determinist,” or “imperialist scientism,” exemplify
this related practice (Carroll, 2011; Pinker, 2013). This is part of a broader War on
Science, an assault on reason in which universities have been complicit, with all that
entails.
When a close observer considers the state of the liberal arts at most campuses
right now, the burnished paradiastole seems well-nigh blinding. (And don’t even get me
started on Education programs!) Pedagogical and scholarly shortcomings have become
not embarrassing liabilities to hide, but rather strengths to humblebrag about. The ways
that derivative, trivial publications, embedded with clunky jargon and based on dubious
post-structuralist theories and fatuous identity politics—aka grievance studies—are
extolled as unprecedented, provocative, stylish contributions to knowledge, and therefore
cause for preferment, sound more like something penned by satirists such as David Lodge
or Jonathan Swift than like careful, rational appraisal.
More significantly, teaching has come to epitomize this reversal in meaning.
Humanities classes generally do not challenge pupils to think critically, read closely,
demonstrate mastery of course content, or otherwise foster intellectual growth (Arum &
Roksa, 2011). Nor are sharp, logical, in-depth written arguments, nor what was once
upon a time referred to as “the ol’ college try,” expected. Instead, most courses offer feelgood
politically-correct lite edutainment. However, those attributes make them fun,
popular, positive learning experiences as registered in student evaluation surveys, the allimportant
customer review of the satisfied consumer. A compelling body of both
quantitative and qualitative studies, however, has proven that such evaluations are
fundamentally worse than worthless; according to education expert Kevin Carey’s
summation (2013), they “provide little useful information other than an inverse
correlation to academic rigor” (see also Flinn & Crumbley, 2009; Johnson, 2003). In
short, sophistry, mediocrity, an absence of standards, and the adoption of faddish technogadgetry,
rather than deep learning or contemplation, have become the cardinal virtues of
the twenty-first-century corporate university (Berlinerblau, 2017; Deresiewicz, 2014;
Donoghue, 2008). In Alexander Pope’s terms from An Essay on Criticism (1711/1969),
“stale nonsense” has triumphed over “substance” (lines 411, 467). Lest we forget, the
pitiful thrivers exalting these traits are the ones serving as advisors, mentors, and role
models to undergraduates. But, by wholeheartedly embracing these new, improved,
sparkly values, utterly compromised teachers signal their “professionalism” and good
institutional fit, and thereby keep the enterprise running smoothly.
The long-gone taxonomists of elocutio were, by and large, committed to
encouraging informed debate in the agora or lecture hall for the benefit of the
commonweal. The Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophers they trained accepted as
axiomatic that reason and logic would lead to truth. Of course, as savvy as they were at
parsing verbal ornaments in Latin or Greek, or mooting utopian ideals, their lives were
spent ages before the development of modern data science or evolutionary biology, and
the concomitant transformation in our understanding of human nature they have led to.
According to the latest work in behavioral science, one take-away of this revolutionary
New Learning is that even very well educated people do not especially privilege veracity
or reality or some sort of absolute Goodness; generally even they are happier preferring
to believe what is most comforting or self-serving, howsoever mendacious or casuistical
the underlying reasoning (Kahneman, 2013). We can now see, then, paradiastole’s deep
roots in the psyche. Its epidemic manifestation amongst the literati should not really
surprise those aware that the default ground state of institutions is one where currying
favor, nepotism, dirty tricks, unprincipled careerism, callous office politics, dishonesty,
spineless conformity, and other habits conducive to a discourse of paradiastole flourish.3
My attempt here has been to explicitly describe academic fashion à la mode—this
season’s unveiling of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Somehow, it seems to me, humanist
higher education has become another bureaucratic entity largely defined by its
deficiencies. If one peers into its very core, one finds corruption and bad faith, worms
consuming the apple (on institutional corruption, see Thompson, 2018; Washburn, 2005).
Those actually promoting “traditional” humanism, in contrast, are barely subsisting in the
inhospitable hinterlands, fighting a losing, asymmetrical guerrilla war against the brute
imperium of market forces. At this moment, meanwhile, those calling themselves liberal
humanists have come to uncomfortably resemble many of the tainted apparatchiks within
organizations they ostensibly oppose and critique, like the scandal-plagued, destructive
“amateur” college sports industry, or the inherently sinful Catholic Church, or the posttruth,
illiberal conservative political party in America. Within the hallowed halls of
academe, the problems have become structural, ingrained in the very fabric of the
enterprise: not bugs but features. There is an almost Orwellian doublethink at play here, a
stiff-necked, neo-puritanical eagerness to point fingers while burying all consciousness of
one’s own fallibility or shortcomings. This precarious, uncomfortable situation is not
though really all that unusual: civilizations rise and fall, authority erodes, societies
disintegrate internally, things fall apart, the center does not hold. Why should higher
education be immune to such profligate decadence?
Sir Walter Raleigh, another Renaissance English polymath a bit later than Wyatt,
composed a timeless satirical poem about this state of affairs entitled “The Lie.” (Like
Wyatt, Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower at His Majesty’s pleasure; unlike Wyatt he
was executed there.) In “The Lie,” the speaker’s soul is sent on a “thankless errand”:
telling the smug and powerful that they are hypocrites (as cited in Sylvester, 1984). He
commences by taking on the bedrock foundations of early modern society: the royal
court, which was the seat of government and earthly authority, and the Church,
responsible for the spiritual welfare of the realm:4
Go soul, the body’s guest,
Upon a thankless arrant, [errand]
Fear not to touch the best,
The truth shall be thy warrant:
Go, since I needs must die,
And give the world the lie.
Say to the Court it glows,
And shines like rotten wood,
Say to the Church it shows
What’s good, and doth no good.
If Church and Court reply,
Then give them both the lie. (lines 1-12)
The expression “to give the lie (to someone)” means to accuse someone directly and
openly of being untruthful. Raleigh does not exempt educators from his charges: “wit”
excessively “wrangles / In tickle-points of niceness,” while “schools … want profoundness
/ And stand too much on seeming” (lines 43-44 and 63-64; “want” means “lack”).
Given both how much more is empirically known and potentially available in our age,
and how essential an informed citizenry be for a healthy democracy to function, this
systemic failure, this contemporary trahison des clercs, seems, if possible, even more
perilous now than four centuries ago.
This status quo can hardly be sustained indefinitely. Perhaps it is not too soon for
aficionados of classical genres to dig out their reed pipes in anticipation of the next big
thing: viz., pastoral elegy. Since like a train-wreck celebrity addicted to adrenaline,
danger, and drugs, the Humanities seem intent on willful self-destruction, it would only
be fitting, in the spirit of paradiastole, to chant a requiem of lamentation recounting how
they passed mildly away at a ripe old age.
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