January 2002
Review of Graham Good, Humanism
Betrayed: Theory, Ideology and Culutre in the Contemporary University.
Montreal: McGill – Queen’s University Press, 2001.
Graham Good, a Professor
of English at UBC and a member of SAFS, has written an important, incisive,
and timely book. Humanism Betrayed is a tightly reasoned and spirited defence
of liberal humanism against the illiberal thinking that predominates in
significant portions of contemporary academic life.
Good practices what he preaches.
Having previously written on the essay as a literary form and on the clear
headedness of George Orwell, he has produced seven succinct and powerful
essays that provide much insight into the intellectual ills afflicting
our “inclusive” and “sensitive” universities.
The opening essay in the
book provides a penetrating analysis of the notorious McEwen Report of
1995 which purported to examine allegations of sexism and racism against
UBC’s Department of Political Science. Good demonstrates that this report’s
total disregard of normal standards of fairness and due process was no
accident; it was the logical consequence of an intellectual approach that
treats people as group members rather than individuals, regards truth as
an outdated concept, and sees a person’s credibility as being dependent
upon the status of his or her group.
In the subsequent essays,
Good dissects the many flaws, inconsistencies, and logical failings of
the various isms that bedevil us. He examines a wide range of current theory
including constructionism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism
as well as the ways in which the ideas of influential thinkers, such as
Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Geertz, and Foucault, have been appropriated to
fashion instruments of self-righteousness and intolerance.
The McEwen Report stands
as a peculiar low point in Canadian academic affairs. Remarkably, the one
hundred and eighty page report, despite being written by a lawyer, did
not consider it necessary to weigh and evaluate the responses of faculty
members to the sweeping allegations that were being made against them since,
in McEwen’s view, “racism and sexism are normal parts of the history and
traditions of the dominant (white male Anglo/European) social group,” a
group “who have been educated in the patriarchal and authoritarian traditions
of Western society.” In Good’s succinct words: “The idea of ‘systemic’
discrimination, unwilled by any individual, leads naturally to the idea
of collective guilt.”
Fortunately, administrative
practices have improved at UBC since President David Strangway’s panicked
implementation of the McEwen Report’s recom-mendations — without even
giving the Political Science faculty a chance to reply to it — lest he
be thought soft on sexism and racism. Perhaps he subscribed to the McEwen
Report’s insight that “the first symptom of racism is to deny that it exists.”
His more principled successor, Martha Piper, apologized to the Department
on behalf of the University in November 1998 for the inadequate procedure
that was employed and “the flawed report that emerged and the University’s
subsequent inappropriate action.”
If Graham Good’s hard-hitting
book, which focuses primarily on the intellectual sources of the new sectarianism,
rather than its past manifestations at UBC, receives the widespread reading
it deserves, perhaps the quality of scholarly discussion in the humanities
and social sciences will eventually improve as well.
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