COLLEGE AVENUE: Go Forth and Forget This School
Whalen, David
COLLEGE AVENUE DAVID WHALEN Go forth and Forget This Sch6o In the season of graduations, the following unlikely commencement address is offered as an antidote, a dream, a...
...There is no silliness beyond the reach of the arguments used to propound contemporary sexual ideologies, but you have been taught that such reasoning is sensitive, astute, the very mark of higher intelligence...
...With facts like these, fantasy is superfluous...
...Similar errors cheerfully clutter campuses, errors that enjoy a slow rate of decay despite being discredit-ed...
...Such a claim, of course, can justify anything...
...Sex is, as it were, all in the head...
...If someone is so foolish as to wonder if the body suggests anything meaningful, the answer is swift and censorious: Things don't have meaning...
...Many of you have probably had moments of doubt about such sexual doctrines...
...Indeed, the failures of the West are spectacular...
...How many times have you heard—from professors, administrators, fellow students speaking with self-important gravity—that gender is, essentially, "socially constructed...
...But has it said much about the aggressive imposition of progressive sexual ideologies, including population control, upon the undeveloped world...
...The modern academy tends to regard Christianity as a musty remnant of the past, and many of your professors are publicly committed to rooting out this religion among their students...
...ONORED GRADUATES, I hope you will pardon a departure from the routine...
...Relying on logic that could adorn the "fallacies" section of a dreary textbook, the argument is advanced that, because social practices encourage certain behavior in men and women, behold, those practices created the sexes...
...Not to mention bigoted...
...But these are not ordinary times...
...Secularism is as inevitable as gravity...
...For, my dear graduates, you have suffered a profound miseducation...
...No, the danger is that, more than representing just a waste of your time, money, and intelligence, your experience has rendered you a cynic...
...It has all the unthinking, pasDAVID WHALE N sionate excess that one associates with patriotism gone bad, especially in that it seems motivated by hatred rather than love...
...The bizarre behavior of the occasional penguin, triumphantly cited as dashing traditional notions of nature, may have failed to destroy your hunch about sex...
...Shrubbery...
...It is revealing to note, however, which of those failures attract notice and which are down-played...
...Such errors exist, of course, but the failure of your education has been systematic and consistent...
...a medieval poet you might, someday, read...
...This anti-Western prejudice is so powerful, it amounts to a reverse jingoism...
...The great danger in all these absurdities is not that you will be persuaded of much...
...THE DEATH KNELL of Christianity has been tolled again and again, yet like a certain famous plague victim, it keeps refusing to die...
...Never mind that most of humanity, regardless of sex, has been a stranger to these forms of public life, and never mind that, even now, people do not generally experience those activities as the heart of their "engagement with the world...
...That's Dante...
...You have rightly been taught the horrors of the Holocaust and the betrayals and bigotry witnessed in the West...
...I hope you did...
...Much of what you have learned is false, silly, and even dangerous...
...All the more surprising, then, that the West has seen slavery and bigotry gradually eliminated...
...Indeed, this is a curiously abstract doctrine for an era that prides itself on carnality...
...Or the parallel imposition of secularism upon developing countries with strong religious cultures...
...This bromide of modern academia is so wispy and insubstantial, even the word "false" seems to give it undue weight...
...This may be why such professors often roll out fanciful "facts" about medieval Europe: the existence of gay marriage ceremonies, absolute monarchies, and that perennial favorite, the imperialistic bullying of the first Crusade...
...Nonetheless, the clumsy doctrine persists: public life is the really important part, and one sex has had the market cornered...
...With tedious regularity, sexual practices that would startle a Caligula and social practices that would astonish a Kinsey are advanced as tokens of an inevitable progress...
...It has failed largely as the result of unreal ideologies, ideologies that exhibit everything from pathological self-hatred to grossly wishful thinking...
...We once thought spirits inhabited rocks and trees, we then came to think they inhabited the heavens, and soon we will have banished them from existence altogether...
...Add to this the momentous discovery that the behavior of men and women across different eras and places has varied, and there you have it...
...JUNE 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 57...
...This lapse in your education has not been the result of hapless misdirection or well-intentioned error...
...Constructions do...
...Or man and cabbage...
...But even that can be fixed...
...Ordinarily, I would be expected to drone harmlessly a while, and you would be expected to day-dream of whatever bacchanalian revels await you...
...natural in the sexes...
...All this you have learned...
...Around the world, meanwhile, ethnic cleansings and the subjugation of entire populations are the stuff of the daily news...
...When it comes to sex, "there is no there 56 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2005 there," nothing natural or given...
...Reality tends to invite itself to almost any party, so the twilight world of ideological fantasy, wishful thinking, and sad self-loathing is probably self-limiting...
...The Western world, one is taught, has a shameful record, even though those so regarding it teach from an institution—the university—which is one of the signal creations of that world...
...And, if this is not enough, the miseducation rests on rigorously lousy reasoning...
...Civil unions between man and beast...
...These errors are buttressed by another historical fancy, however...
...Parody is overtaken by the real...
...One may admire such missionary zeal, of course, but the easy presumption that intelligence and Christianity are incompatible is most unintelligent...
...The human body, you dared to speculate, might be more than a tabula rasa on which societies inscribe their crude and confining meanings...
...Cactus...
...It may have to wait, though, until you reach middle age and rediscover the drama of truth and beauty—just ask Dante...
...Slavery, bondage, bigotry of various sorts dog the human condition indeed, but these are presented as if they are particularly Western vices...
...You have dutifully learned that our practices, such as voting and writing, are surely the essence of meaningful participation in public life, and that women have not historically enjoyed them...
...You are all familiar with the commonplace notion that public life or "having a voice" has been the domain of men, not women...
...I point this out not to suggest that the West is an unspotted lamb while other cultures are alien, evil, or in need of a bath...
...Rather, you have seen it taught...
...A sufficiently jaundiced view of human nature would think such evils insuperable in any case...
...D-AN-T-E...
...Your education has likely trained you in the evils of imperialism, colonialism, or "globalization...
...In the darkest recesses of your musings, you might have wondered if all this is somehow unreal—perhaps, for all the historical and social variations, there really is something given or (dare we say it...
...The irony is that (at last check) it even required two sexes to create a "public...
...C O L L E G E A V E N U E D A V I D W HALE N Goforth and Forget This Sch6o In the season of graduations, the following unlikely commencement address is offered as an antidote, a dream, a provocation...
...That there is nothing really different about men and women, only perceptions created, perpetuated, and "valorized" by social expectations and conventions...
...Many of you, I am sure, smelling a rat and its nest of error have learned at least one lesson: play along, get the grade, but don't take anything seriously...
...Social institutions are, like men and women themselves, so much shape-less, damp clay to be molded according to the whim of the political moment...
...In blithe contradiction to a number of anti-Western notions, it is often assumed that man's history is a steady ascent out of error and into the light...
...At least this has a venerable history...
...In this context, the reductio ad absurdum becomes impossible...
...You have learned that, throughout its history, the West has careened from one form of oppression to another...
...To draw attention to them would seem to "pass judgment," something reserved for Western (and especially American) history and practices...
...Quaint local customs in such cultures attract due appreciation, but brutalities and flagrant illiberalities are politelyveiled...
...Environmentalism that looks suspiciously fashionable is, in a kind of eco-transference, predicated of any society that is either technologically primitive or fortunate enough not to be Western...
...Behold, then, the reductive conclusion is drawn...
...But at the same time, you have heard curiously little about the Soviet Ukraine of the 1930s, or the number of those slain throughout the 20th century in Communist regimes, many of which qualify as "Western" and ought, therefore, to be fair game...
...And yet the mat-ter is now a doctrine, denial of which is punishable by a poor grade or sensitivity training or both...
...But if you did, you probably kept such musings to yourself...
...c David Whalen is associate professor of English and associate provost at Hillsdale College...
...Why not "construct" multiple partner marriages...
...If silly sexual ideologies abound, then they are escorted by a host of other doctrines that seem almost pathologically self-loathing...
Vol. 38 • June 2005 • No. 5
