I don't actually read the
National Review so I got
this from Matt Yglesias over at TPM.
National Review reporter John J. Miller gives us another of those compelling outside-the-box ideas that have made conservatism the dominant political force in America:
Instead of electing professors, how about deporting them? For every handful of immigrants we take in, we can send a professor packing. Maybe we can even sell it to the profs as multiculturalism. With any luck, we'll wind up bringing in computer scientists, engineers, and physicists -- and kicking out comp lit specialists.
[I know that this is "just a joke" but it's one of those jokes that isn't funny because it isn't a joke. It's a frivolous suggestion that nobody is actually advocateing as policy, but it does reflect a widely heald belief that academics are useless. One should note that the uselessness of academics in conservative eyes is in direct proportion to how much they disagree: truly an emlightened position.]
Obviously, as Matt pointed out, that there are in fact people who are both engineers
and professors. Like the ones
here, 10 minutes from where I'm sitting right now, deep in the heart of decadent, bluer-than-blue, Ann Arbor. And as of right now, those of us with humanites and social science backgorunds have yet to force them to convert to out perverted life of non-mechanical logic, queer artsy shit, and interest in the interstitial meanings of social texts. (Not yet, anyway. Those of you in The Cabal will be happy to know that the first phase of "Operation Liberal Arts" is beginning nicely--I personally have handed out 12 "Intro to Sociology: From Comte to Durkheim" textbooks to chemistry students, while our comrades in the Art History Department have already executed the first bits of the "Matisse Maneuver.")
But there are two other serious problems with Mr. Miller's little piece.
1.) It is a minor point, but nonetheless, the odd little bit about the exchange of "handfuls" of immigrants for professors is just creepy. It's like: "Well, if we
have to have immigrants, can they at least think exactly the same way I do, and not be poets or philosophers or anything."
2.) And what is with the anti-intellectualism of the right, I mean, I cannot get over how much they can't get over shit. Yeah, we get it, you don't like Lit Crit or feminism (or biology, or geology, or ecology, but soft my pretty!, we musn't explode the myth of conservative as hard-headed realists). But what's the threat? Seriously, so you took some lit classes in college and didn't like the fact that there might be more to reading a book than just reading it and your "easy A" in British Literature from 1616-1914 went down the crapper when you were asked to contextualize Milton in his times given his political activities, and you were asked what the implications of Burke's pro-Empire yet seemingly anti-Colonialist legacy was when all you heard from your John Birch masters was that Burke was on your side so he's okay to read. Is that it? Is the fact that Kant seemed complicated and Neitzsche said some impolitic things about Christianity enough to just make you hate modernity and the liberal arts? Just hate it, hate it, hate it, you-can't-make-me-you'll-see-I'll-be-a-writter-some-day [sobs]. And then you learned that Socrates liked dudes, and it all came crashing down. So now its all applied physics and engineering.
Well Oppenheimer was a hippie before there were hippies, Einstein believed in Spinoza's conception of the Divine (I assure you Mr. Miller, you don't), and the only physicist I know personally writes
this. So hell yeah, bring on the physicists and engineers.
Anyway, the idea that comparitive literature is useless is itself laughable. The humanities and social sciences are the basis of this Western Civilization that the conservo-croud keeps going on about. It's just kind of funny (and yet, strangely appropo) that these same people want to tear down the civilization to save it. One begins to think that the modern right is just a giant teenager who thinks that literature and science is gay anyway so its okay he got a C-. Always remember, critical thought is critical thought, regardless of context, gitting rid of lit crit profs won't be enough for these people, they will have to wipe it all out to save their souls, nothing will be safe. After all, it was that emminently practical discipline of architecture that gave us postmodernism.
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