evolution

every time i read the atlantic monthly, i read something new that blows me away. if the following passage from an article about harold bloom, yale university professor of humanities. if you went to an american university, you should be able to identify with this experience. here are professor bloom’s words, in part:

…Throughout the English-speaking world, the wave of French theory was replaced by the terrible melange that I increasingly have come to call the School of Resentment-the so-called multiculturalists and feminists who tell us we are to value a literary work because of the ethnic background or the gender of the author.

Feminism as a stance calling for equal rights, equal education, equal pay — no rational, halfway decent human being could possibly disagree with this. But what is called feminism in the academies seems to be a very different phenomenon indeed. I have sometimes characterized these people as a Rabblement of Lemmings, dashing off the cliff and carrying their supposed subject down to destruction with them.

Yale on the whole has held out against that better than Harvard and Princeton have. This university has so long and strong a tradition of real philological studies, a deep love of imaginative literature, that it has held up fairly well. But last spring a very charming young lady who was one of my research assistants came in here shaking her head. She said, “Harold, I’m rather stunned. I’ve just gone to my undergraduate seminar in American Studies.” I shivered, because of all the Yale departments that once would have been called humanistic, the one that has now given over completely to nonsense is, in fact, American Studies. She said, “We just had a lecture on Walt Whitman. The professor spent the entire two hours explaining to us that Walt Whitman was a racist.” In the face of that, my dear, I almost lose my capacity for outrage, shock, or indignation. Walt Whitman a racist? It is simply lunatic.

(full article)