In the new Harvard Salient, Patrick T. Brennan has achieved the Platonic ideal of a Salient article: equal measures of pure arrogance, submerged racism, and exclusive affection for all things ancient.
The only way to appreciate this article is to quote some of the choicest sections. For example:
Americans of color have undoubtedly done some things of note, but their “encounters” and “experiences” are not of paramount importance to a university education. The ethnic studies movement is motivated by an attempt to direct more attention to a topic that deserves no more attention than it already gets, and probably a good deal less.
Sorry, Frederick Douglass, but you’re just not of paramount importance, not when there are lots of 2,000 year-old white guys we could be studying instead.
The necessary elements of an educated man’s curriculum have not changed much over two thousand years of Western education—the Trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and the scientific Quadrivium of geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy should still be the basic foundations of education.
If Brennan had his way, we’d still be studying the stars by cupping our hands over our eyes and squinting really hard. And practicing oratory by putting pebbles in our mouths. And we can have none of those so-called pianos! Real musicians play lyres!
Ironically, the first man to delineate officially the seven liberal arts, Martianus Capella, was from Roman Africa; he apparently did not feel his contributions to the world should be more or less important because of his Berber provenance.
I wonder… if a Berber was capable of doing that, is it possible that other Africans have made other significant contributions? Is it possible that we don’t know about them because of the dare-I-say-ancient prejudice that Africans were unsophisticated, ignorant, and primitive? Is it possible that the Ethnic Studies field might be designed to study the contributions of Africans (among others) precisely because they’re important, not because they’re African?
[S]tudying literature is not better than studying accounting if one is allowed, or even encouraged, to allot as much time to Latin American writers as to Latin ones.
No matter how much classicists like Brennan hate the professional disciplines, their true scorn is ever reserved for those who think that a brown person could have had anything interesting to say.
The standard work of ethics for nearly two millennia was Cicero’s De Officiis. The world has not changed enough in the past hundred years to justify its replacement with whatever pablum Michael Sandel wants to feed PBS viewers.
Good to see that Brennan is capable of snobbishness towards white people too. Funny how Michael Sandel’s philosophy could be aptly summarized by quoting Cicero himself: “we do not live for ourselves alone; our country, our friends, have a share in us.” What pablum!
On the most sympathetic reading, Brennan’s article could be understood as the cri de coeur of someone who wishes people didn’t give him funny looks when he says he studies Classics. Nobody deserves funny looks, and Classics is a wonderful field of study. I’ve taken a couple classes in it myself. But it’s not the only field of study, and it gives Brennan no special insight into the worthiness of other disciplines. If Brennan wants to resurrect the classics, it would be better done by showing how much modern philosophers like Sandel owe to ancients like Cicero, rather than scorning moderns for being born 2,000 years too late.
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