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Saturday, July 02, 2005
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LUXE, CALME... “There's a huge amount of intellectual, academic and literary company to keep, but politically, it's all axiomatically liberal. I don't mind that, but it's thought to be uncontroversial. As the '60s were winding down, and the revolutionary tone had gone, one of the things that came out was, "The personal is the political. I thought, 'That's it, it's over. It's all self-centered now.' The way things have gone, it's all nonjudgmental, "I'm OK, you're OK," no stress, noncombative, no unpleasantness. It's done untold damage,” says Christopher Hitchens in a recent interview. He’s talking about his time spent as a visiting professor at American universities, and he reminds us that many of the bad things University Diaries isolates about contemporary American universities take place as part of a larger “therapist” culture (as the authors of the recent book, One Nation Under Therapy call it) to which the university, which could have resisted it, has largely surrendered. On one level, Hitchens is noting what American as well as French political theorists have lamented - the transformation of serious, dialectical, impersonal social thought into narcissistic, undialectical, personalized emotivism. “The personal is the political.” “It’s all self-centered now.” This transformation has been particularly destructive to the university, which has historically been -- call it an ivory tower. It’s been a place apart, a highly critical space within a largely uncritical popular culture, a place where fidelity to dispassionate reason rather than passionate feeling has allowed people who enter it as students and instructors to escape the self-centered idiocies, laziness, and lies of the larger world. When the immediate context of that larger world is an enormously powerful, wealthy and self-indulgent country, when the resources available toward indulgence of the self are infinite, it’s all the more important that universities retain a certain stoical apartness -- a sense of limits, both material and moral, an insistence upon subjecting the orthodoxies of the culture to critique, and so forth. But because most colleges and universities have been seduced by therapist culture, they begin to look less like academic settings than Aveda spas. And, as in the larger culture, the fundamental animating assumption of this odd development is that all students are neurotic and weak and in need of massaging. What feeds this assumption? It’s kept going in part by a steady stream of studies that seem to prove runaway madness in the American public. In a result straight out of Alice in Wonderland (“We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.”), the latest high-profile psychological study of Americans reveals that half of us are or will soon be mentally impaired. One professor responds: "Fifty percent of Americans mentally impaired -- are you kidding me?" said Dr. Paul McHugh, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University. While the new survey was carefully done, Dr. McHugh said, "the problem is that the diagnostic manual we are using in psychiatry is like a field guide and it just keeps expanding and expanding. Pretty soon," he said, "we'll have a syndrome for short, fat Irish guys with a Boston accent, and I'll be mentally ill." The authors of One Nation Under Therapy note that Jim Windolf, editor of the New York Observer, tallied the number of Americans allegedly suffering from some kind of emotional disorder. He sent away for the literature of dozens of advocacy agencies and mental health organizations. Then he did the math. Windolf reported, 'If you believe the statistics, 77 per cent of America's adult population is a mess.... And we haven't even thrown in alien abductees, road-ragers, and internet addicts.' If we factor in the drowning girls, diminished boys, despondent women, agonised men, and the all-around emotionally challenged, the country is, in Windolf's words, 'officially nuts.' Once you convince everyone that everyone is clinically depressed or whatever, you justify the invasion of all American institutions by therapists and the therapeutic mentality. “Therapism tends to regard people as essentially weak, dependent, and never altogether responsible for what they do,” write the authors of One Nation. “Alan Wolfe, a Boston College sociologist and expert on national mores and attitudes, reports that for many Americans non-judgmentalism has become a cardinal virtue. Concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, are often regarded as anachronistic and intolerant. 'Thou shalt be nice' is the new categorical imperative.” Recall what the writer of the PBS series Declining by Degrees said about American universities to Tavis Smiley: “[T]here's kind of a nonaggression pact between an awful lot of faculty members and students, saying in effect, if you don't ask too much of me, if you don't bother me, I won't ask a lot of you. You'll get a good grade. I'll have time to do my research.” It’s not just that non-judgmentalism has inflated grades and deflated intellectual discourse. Therapeutic niceness has now morphed into cynical mutual exploitation. And really - when every other aspect of the American university setting - wellness centers, Starbucks, and the rest - is luxe, calme et volupte, how can we expect the classroom to be a holdout? “The popular assumption that emotional disclosure is always valuable, and that without professional help most people are incapable of dealing with adversity, has slipped its clinical moorings and drifted into all corners of American life.” It has already drifted into the personalized, emotionally disclosing classroom; and now this popular assumption has come after faculty themselves, as in mandated diversity summer camps of the sort the University of Oregon envisions. |