Language Log is doing the hard work of debunking a new conservative meme about Obama's supposed imperial arrogance.

When I say to my fellow academics “aim low” and stick to your academic knitting or counsel do your job and don’t try to do someone else’s or warn against the presumption of trying to fashion a democratic citizenry or save the world, I am encouraging (or so McLennen says) a hunkering down in the private spaces of an academic workplace detached from the world’s problems.

And when I define academic freedom as the freedom to do the academic job, not the freedom to expand it to the point where its goals are infinite, my stance “forecloses the possibility of civic engagement and democratic action.” (McClennen)

Somebody told Stanley Fish he's a neoliberal. He doesn't seem to like it much, but he presents no real argument that he isn't. I suppose he may be saving that for part two (about academic leftists boycotting Israeli academics, apparently, because that's the crucial site for neoliberal agon.) (Thanks, Russ!)

Let's close some tabs.

* Stanley Fish says academic freedom is dangerous. I'm beginning to think Stanley Fish is dangerous.

* Forced arbitration is one of our most unrecogized societal injustices. And the courts are complicit.

After nearly three years of harassment, abuse and long hours for little or no pay, Dantz finally decided that she’d had enough. She filed suit against her employer—and the court kicked her to the curb. Even though Dantz refused to sign the binding arbitration agreement, the court said that merely by continuing to work for Applebees, she was bound by its terms. Debbie Dantz’ employer illegally abused her for almost three years, and Dantz was powerless to hold it accountable.

What a horrifying story. Via MeFi.

* Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where Saved By The Bell, Rather Than Law And Order, Became The Dominant Television Franchise For A Generation.

* The Singularity is a myth. Pharyngula explains.

* Catholicism is a myth. Cynical-C explains.

* America loves Obama and hates the GOP.

* It looks like the stimulus package (tee hee) passes today. That's because we're all socialists now.

Via The Valve, Wilfred McClay responds to Stanley Fish's slacker "defense" of the humanities in Wilson Quarterly.

The humanities, rightly pursued and rightly ordered, can do things, and teach things, and preserve things, and illuminate things, which can be accomplished in no other way. It is the humanities that instruct us in the range and depth of human possibility, including our immense capacity for both goodness and depravity. It is the humanities that nourish and sustain our shared memories, and connect us with our civilization’s past and with those who have come before us. It is the humanities that teach us how to ask what the good life is for us humans, and guide us in the search for civic ideals and institutions that will make the good life ­possible.

The humanities are imprecise by their very nature. But that does not mean they are a form of intellectual ­finger-­painting. The knowledge they convey is not a rough, preliminary substitute for what psychology, chemistry, molecular biology, and physics will eventually resolve with greater finality. They are an accurate reflection of the subject they treat, the most accurate possible. In the long run, we cannot do without ­them.

But they are not indestructible, and will not be sustainable without active attention from us. The recovery and repair of the ­humanities—and the restoration of the kind of insight they ­provide—is an enormous task. Its urgency is only increasing as we move closer to the technologies of a posthuman future, a strange, ­half-­lit frontier in which bioengineering and pharmacology may combine to make all the fearsome transgressions of the past into the iron cages of the future, and leave the human image permanently ­altered.

The mere fact that there are so many people whose livelihood depends on the humanities, and that the humanities have a certain lingering cultural capital associated with them, and a resultant snob appeal, does not mean that they are necessarily capable of exercising any real cultural authority. This is where the second sense of burden comes ­in—­the humanities as reclamation task. The humanities cannot be saved by massive increases in funding. But they can be saved by men and women who believe in ­them.

So far so good—but it wouldn't be an article about the humanities or literature if literary theorists didn't get smacked in the face along the way.

It utterly violates the spirit of literature, and robs it of its value, to reduce it to something else. Too often, there seems to be a presumption among scholars that the only interest in Dickens or Proust or Conrad derives from the extent to which they can be read to confirm the abstract propositions of Marx, Freud, Fanon, and the ­like—or Smith and Hayek and Rand, for that ­matter—and promote the right preordained political attitudes, or lend support to the identity politics du jour. Strange, that an era so pleased with its superficially freewheeling and antinomian qualities is actually so distrustful of the literary imagination, so intent upon making its productions conform to predetermined criteria.

Isn't it time somebody wrote one of these articles about the dangers of reducing literary theory to "something else" through the same, endlessly recurring, prefabricated critique playing paean to the fantasy of an ahistorical and absolutely autonomous aesthetic realm? I think I might like to see an article do that.

The result is the story Cusset tells about the past 40 years. A bunch of people threatening all kinds of subversion by means that couldn’t possibly produce it, and a bunch on the other side taking them at their word and waging cultural war. Not comedy, not tragedy, more like farce, but farce with consequences. Careers made and ruined, departments torn apart, writing programs turned into sensitivity seminars, political witch hunts, public opprobrium, ignorant media attacks, the whole ball of wax. Read it and laugh or read it and weep.

Stanley Fish tells the story of theory in the New York Times. He tells it all wrong, of course—starting from his strange decision at the outset that the best adjective to put in front of theory is "French," a term that both levels all distinctions between Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze while simultaneously aligning Theory with a geographic location "over there," and then sliding into a bizarrely over-earnest claim that deconstruction can never be political—but as usual he's got a bajillion comments, with still more at MetaFilter.

Here are a few links for this lovely Tuesday morning, the last before I return to the theory-mines for another six months. This list pushes the link to the first of our "American futurity" culturemonkey posts way down the page, so please check that out if you missed it last night.

* Stanley Fish asks: Should we look to the humanities save us from ourselves?

Thrill to this picture of filial piety in the Aeneid and you will yourself become devoted to your father. Admire the selfless act with which Sidney Carton ends his life in “A Tale of Two Cities” and you will be moved to prefer the happiness of others to your own. Watch with horror what happens to Faust and you will be less likely to sell your soul. Understand Kant’s categorical imperative and you will not impose restrictions on others that you would resist if they were imposed on you.

It’s a pretty idea, but there is no evidence to support it and a lot of evidence against it. If it were true, the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts, and as someone who’s been there (for 45 years) I can tell you it just isn’t so. Teachers and students of literature and philosophy don’t learn how to be good and wise; they learn how to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge. The texts Kronman recommends are, as he says, concerned with the meaning of life; those who study them, however, come away not with a life made newly meaningful, but with a disciplinary knowledge newly enlarged.

* Living with a heart transplant isn't necessarily as fun as you might think. Via MeFi.

* Cynical-C has a link to the ugly biology behind high heels. Just a snippet from the whole chart:



* And Paleo-Future asks the question that's on all our minds: Will war drive civilization underground?