The following is an excerpt from 'The Breakdown of Higher Education: How it happened, the Damage it Does, and What Can Be Done' by John M. Ellis.
One of academia’s most important contributions to society was its ability to set issues that arose in the narrow context of present-day political controversies in a broader context. We understand something happening in our own time far better if we know how it developed and how it played out in other settings. But when politicized professors abandon this habit of seeing issues in a wider historical context to elucidate them, they can say stunningly foolish things. One major example is their anachronistic search for racism on every page of American history when serious attention to historical context would put things in an entirely different light.
The first thing a serious historian needs to grasp is the Enlightenment’s crucial role in changing the way people think about each other. Up to at least 1800, the standard way of looking at the world was in tribal terms. People felt loyal to their local group, and didn’t worry too much about the welfare of other groups; it was the business of those others to look out for themselves. This was a natural attitude in a time before cars and trains, when most people would rarely have ventured beyond a limited area that included their own village and the few nearby towns that routine trading would take them to. Most would seldom have met foreigners, and few had occasion to mix with anyone not of their own race. It’s understandable that people would have put more trust in those they were familiar with.
A charge of “racism” made around that time would only have puzzled everyone. It would be silly to call people of that era racists simply because they were naturally wary of people who differed greatly from those they lived among, whether by skin color, language, or habits. In the absence of direct personal knowledge, people who never saw much beyond their own small geographical area were bound to resort to stereotypes, and those were more likely to embody fears and doubts than admiration and respect.
It was the European Enlightenment that began to cultivate a sense that we all share a common humanity, and this idea slowly replaced the tribalism of the past. A side effect was more sympathy for human suffering in general. The ingenious instruments of torture on display in the Tower of London shock the modern conscience, but the development of that conscience is part of the work of the European Enlightenment. If we want to make moral judgments about the behavior of people who lived hundreds of years ago, we must take into account the extent to which Enlightenment attitudes had penetrated that particular place at that time. If we don’t, then instead of judging individuals or even whole societies, as some might wish to do, we’ll really be judging the time in which they lived.
But surely the most important historical context that campus radicals miss is the way in which modern life developed in the last two hundred years, and in particular where its defining innovations came from. They talk accusingly of “white privilege,” meaning that whites have unearned advantages which they enjoy at the expense of others, and “cultural imperialism,” meaning that whites disparage other cultures when they try to make everyone else read and study aspects of their culture. But in using those terms as they do radicals show that they completely misunderstand the historical situation that they are in.
Throughout human history, major innovations have from time to time changed the way people lived. The inventions of the wheel and of agriculture are obvious examples. Those innovations had to start somewhere, among particular groups of people, and this means that the living standard of the innovators would suddenly advance beyond that of their neighbors. Naturally, the inequality in levels of development would soon vanish as the innovations spread to those neighbors.
Were other groups resentful about the “wheel people privilege” of the culture that first had the wheel? Did they resent the “cultural imperialism” of the innovators as they felt compelled to adopt the wheel themselves? It’s not too likely. They probably just got on with enjoying the advantages of the wheel; it would have been foolish not to. Complaining about the innovators whose inventions have benefited them so much would be absurd—but that is what present-day campus radicals essentially do with their complaints about “white privilege” and “cultural imperialism.”
The historical context of “white privilege” that must be understood is this: of all the innovations that have propelled human life forward, none have been so complex or far-reaching as the accelerating growth of science and technology since the late eighteenth century. And it is still unfolding. Change had come slowly for millennia, but suddenly it went into high gear. Rapid progress in scientific knowledge and technology led to the industrial revolution (including the steam engine, railways, and the internal combustion engine), electrical energy, modern medicine, and much more besides. These developments promptly began to change human life dramatically: average lifespans have now more than doubled; diseases that once devastated entire countries have been tamed; populations that were always on the verge of severe hunger became well fed; economies grew so strong that many now live as only a privileged elite did in the past; literacy became universal instead of being enjoyed only by very few; people who once would never have ventured beyond a small area could now travel widely and experience other cultures; individuals thousands of miles apart could communicate easily, and a great variety of entertainment and information became freely available to anyone through television and then the internet. Democratic government spread, and ease of travel led to a sense of a common humanity in place of the formerly ubiquitous tribalism.
But as always, this giant leap forward in human civilization had to begin somewhere, and in this case it was mainly among western Europeans and their North American cousins. Individual strands that fed into it came from other times and places, but this was where everything suddenly came together to set in motion the most profound change in human life that history has ever seen. It has already spread well beyond the innovators: lifespans have increased everywhere in the world, and European technology is now widely used.
Since this change started among Europeans, it is not surprising that they enjoyed its benefits first or that something of that initial advantage still lingers today. To call this “white privilege” is silly. It was neither unearned for the group that after all launched the changes, nor was it gained at the expense of others. On the contrary, other groups benefited as the innovations spread to them. History tells us that the initial gap that opens up between innovators and everyone else will close sooner or later. It has almost closed already as far as life expectancy is concerned. And, of course, nobody can know where the next major innovation in human life will come from.
Some minority groups complain when their traditional clothing is “appropriated” by Europeans, but those same people routinely visit dentists, board trains, switch on electric lights, and use iPhones—all of which constitutes a far greater “cultural appropriation” than the one they complain of. Even making the charge of “racism!” appropriates the Enlightenment values that began in Europe and conquered tribalism.
The accusations of “white privilege” and “cultural appropriation” are silly enough, but the fixation on “cultural imperialism” does real damage. For when a major civilizational advance takes place, the way forward for those outside the innovator group is clear: it is by assimilating the innovation and moving forward armed for better things. To judge by the disproportionately large numbers that get admitted to the University of California at Berkeley, Asian American students are not letting the silliness about “cultural imperialism” stop them from getting ahead. But the progress of other minority groups is being sabotaged by calls to resent the innovator group because of the temporary advantage that its culture’s far-reaching innovations gave it.
It doesn’t matter which group led the way to modernity, when it will soon belong to everybody. Only one group thinks otherwise: the angry political radicals who are at war with their own society’s success. Their political agenda and ideology compel them to disparage it, and so they try to get minority students to believe that mastering the thought and knowledge that played a large part in the development of modern life pays homage to some dead white males. But if you want to master modern life, you must read those who shaped it—those who led the way out of the formerly ubiquitous tribalism that radicals seem determined to lead us back into.
It’s true that Europeans thought rather well of themselves as their scientific and technological revolution started to put some distance between themselves and cultures that did not initially take part in it. But given the large discrepancy that suddenly arose between the levels of development of different societies, it was the most natural thing in the world that those who were leading the way to modernity would at first think of those who lagged behind as less accomplished than themselves. And it’s equally natural that this state of affairs would not last very long.
Why do the people who run our campuses consistently ignore the objections to what they say about American society that are suggested by even the most cursory look at historical context? The answer is probably that while they don’t like their own country’s success, they know that it’s enormously influential on the world stage, and so they are driven to look for ways to cut it down to size. When they see anything that might be an opportunity to do that, they don’t stop to make sure that it really makes sense. And the result is that they consistently end up saying things that are absurd. Their embrace of cultural relativism is certainly a case in point: they don’t seem to notice that it commits them to judging North Korea to be no worse than America. Robert Edgerton wrote an entire book on cultural relativism entitled Sick Societies in which he showed how appalling life can be in many of the societies on this earth. In the real world beyond the campus, there really are many societies that even campus radicals would not want to live in. The campus radical always faces a dilemma: if he wants to find fault with his own society, he has to invoke universal standards by which to judge it. But if he wants to cut America down to the size of all other cultures by appealing to cultural relativism, he has to abandon universal standards of judgment. You can hold one of those positions, but not both. The most discouraging thing about the modern campus is that people who hold professorial appointments, no less, don’t care one bit about this elementary self-contradiction. Anyone who points to it is ignored.
John M. Ellis is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UC Santa Cruz and the author of 'The Breakdown of Higher Education: How it happened, the Damage it Does, and What Can Be Done'.
