Leo Strauss says it best when he says the social sciences were the handmaiden of Philosophy. Today, philosophy has been abolished and the social sciences have been elevated to the place once held by philosophy, metaphysics more specifically. Yet, the foundation of the social sciences is clinical, statistical, and implements regression analysis to make meaningful sense of the world. This focus on the particulars over universal human values degrades our sense of self.
Abandoning a metaphysical tradition in literature vis a vis Marx abandons the human values that are at their core, literary values. Grace, the sublime, Beauty, the Good, the Just, and the Truth are the foundations of the human condition. Rejecting these principles rejects the corresponding aspects of our humanity that defines our personhood: creativity, rationality, conscience, free will. Without that definition of personhood, we are a matter of statistically defined attributes or identitarian elements.
Conversely, assuming that to study someone’s writing is a process of studying their humanity and their understanding of their personhood helps us become more humane. It should be no surprise that topics like anti-anthrocentrism - the rejection of a focus on humanity - has become a central theme of neo- and post-Marxist criticism. The rejection of man’s dominion over nature. And that using a Marxist lens for understanding literature would reduce the best conduit we have for understanding our and others personhood to merely an assessment of identity features.
To all who care, writers better take advantage of the opportunity to write frequently less in the not too distant future, it could become a crime as it has become in Germany. It's truly amazing what is considered "hate." Gossip, memes, practically anything anyone objects to, irrespective of how accurate. Scary stuff. The Germans have a terrible time finding the middle of the pendulum swing.
I suspect one reason why Marxist approaches to literature have become common while a Miltonian economic read of literature seems, as you wrote, "ludicrous" is because Marxism (and the other far-left ideologies you mention) is a totalitarian theory while Milton (and classical liberalism) is not. Marxism aims to remake all of society while liberalism is mostly about getting government out of the way so society can develop on its own. Liberalism doesn't care what kind of art you're making so long as you're free to make and sell it.
It's no wonder that college students can't read a novel or even understand literature. The Marxists have destroyed what's best about life—the pursuit of joy.
According to their professors, the point of reading a novel is to grade it on an ideological rubric so you can judge whether the author was an asshole. No wonder the students all decided they have better things to do.
"If we took Karl Marx, for instance, an economic theorist responsible for countless global ills,.. " Does that mean that Jesus is to be held responsible for the Spanish inquisition?
Literature is not written in a vacuum, but in a society, a culture, a place. Hence, it makes sense to apply many different lenses when looking at and analyzing literature. The real problem is when ideological, narrow-minded and dogmatic thinking is used to bypass serious reading and an open-minded discussion.
The examples you give are bizarre and horrendous, but the alternative is not to lock us up in an ivory tower.
The question as to why or how this has become pervasive in literature (and education in general) is best answered, in my opinion, via a satire written by George Orwell, where we saw the pig Napoleon take the puppies away to be cared and educated for their benefit and the benefit of Animal Farm. And what were the results?
I graduated around 2000 and all my professors were public artists and great lovers of English literature, and yet since then, they have grown increasingly quiet. They, either through necessity or complicity, tolerated the takeover of their departments by the theorists, the very same people they would laugh about over dinner in 2000.
I think that they strayed too far from the roots of their profession which is founded on a profound love. Any farmer in the nineteenth century could read Milton or Shakespeare or Dante, could read Keats and Wordsworth. We have not created better art since then, and yet modernism is strongly attached to difficulty, which in turn is attached to elitism, which gives the justification for an elite class. Professors.
Once the love of literature is degraded in that way, the rest of the takeover by language theorists and activists seems obvious. Great literature entertains all points of view, but we’ve stopped feeling it necessary to make literature that makes the reader want to read it, in fact, creating desire in the reader is often considered inauthentic. The only way back is through great books.
Marxism carries with it some fundamental beliefs. #1 - Its adherents believe that it is THE story, and THE ONLY story, that captures what it means to be human. Marx himself says that Communism is the riddle of history solved, and that it knows it is the solution. #2 - Marxism posits that its believers MUST become activists in order to help others achieve Critical Consciousness. #3 - Marxism posits that it, and it alone, will lead humanity to Utopia.
Therefore, once someone becomes a believer, there's no other possible outcome. All stories must be interpreted this way, and this way alone. And it must be shoved into everyone's face all the time. This is the only way to Utopia.
Great article. There’s a literary professor I really like who talks about this at length on YouTube — and posts his classes, which is fun —- named dr. Scott mason who I really like. I think this is an overlooked problem, literary theory is much more foundational to how we understand the world than people expect.
Marxism and its derivatives are simply another form of chattel slavery dressed up as a “science.” It is the mad dream of an earthly paradise based on envy.
I once took a lit crit class wherein one of the assignments required exploring Marxist critique. My response was that I had less interest in Marxist critique, an idea responsible for the deaths of at least 100 million people and possibly as many as 160 million, than I was in exploring Nazi critique.
The only reason Marxism isn’t treated with the same level of contempt as Nazism is that there were never Nuremberg type revelations of communist regimes when they collapsed.
Marxism/socialism is worse than slavery. Slavery was universal until serious abolition began a couple of centuries ago. But even slaves were individuals. Epictetus is a major example. Marxism/socialism treats human beings as interchangeable ciphers. The purging of whole classes and the quotas of Stalin are good examples. National Socialism likewise, with its Holocaust, reprisal massacres and imposed famines. As G K Chesterton said of G B Shaw’s socialism, such ideologues respond to the failures of socialism not by replacing the theory, but by replacing the populace. There are rigid religious monocultures too. The grey blob has many faces.
The world is and always was a shitty place. So far, the only kind of Marxism we’ve observed is the shitty, murderous, expansionist kind. I have no problem with little voluntary Marxist communes here and there, but I have a big problem when it tries to drag everyone into its rapacious grip. And of course, Marxism is all about the dialectical, so the synthesis of Marxist-Leninism is a feature and not a bug.
At least with the Crusades, most were defensive wars against a totalitarian aggressor who spread a particularly vicious strain of religion out of the Arabian peninsula, across North Africa, throughout the Spanish Peninsula and almost to Paris in the west. In the East, it fought its way through the Levant, into the Balkans and as far northwest as Vienna. After centuries of attacks against the eastern Roman Empire, when Constantinople was finally defeated, it spread east into Central Asia and as far as China. Whatever the sins of the Crusaders, it was better than the alternative we still live with today.
Most people blame expansionist Islam for Christendom’s defensive reaction after 500 years of Muslim conquests.
Authoritarian communism is the only kind of state communism we’ve seen, so I’m not sure why the ideas of Marx aren’t the ideological source for the deaths of a hundred million or more victims under state communist regimes.
Lenin invented the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat led by a revolutionary vanguard party to transition society from capitalism to communism. The violence of those communist regimes is his brain child, not Marx. Lenin's regime was violent to other Marxists that didn't fall in line, so there were obvious disagreements even within the movement. See the Kronstadt rebellion.
If you don't want to use the Levantine crusades as analogy then look at the Northern Crusades where pagans were forced to become Christians or killed. Or the Albigensian Crusade where Christians that were not someone else's idea of Christian were slaughtered when they refused to convert. Who is to blame for these events?
Hello. I am interested in learning more about literature and especially its analysis. However I have a hard time finding resources that don’t analyse classics or other works from a socio-political standpoint.
I’d be very grateful for anyone who has any recommendations, resources etc. for learning more about literature as an artform. Not only as a political instrument.
Art is not economics. Issues of class can certainly be addressed in a novel, but only through the action of compelling characters. Superimposing a Marxist lens on literature flattens great characters into tropes. Snooze. Thanks for writing this piece!
I'd say that Marxism secluded itself within the theoretical sphere due to a Freudian neurosis stemming from its refusal to accept the reality of the Soviet experiment, as its revelation shattered humanity's hope and trust like lightning piercing through the atmosphere.
Now that its original experience has faded from our collective memory, Marxism is rendered eternal—like faith in the Messiah after his death.
Oh, and another thing that happened is that we discovered the Internet, with postmodernism being the last intellectual event in our culture.
Althusser, Foucault, Derrida… they all eventually confessed their incapacity to read anyone but themselves, while enjoying the high status traditionally owed to sages in a world full of material riches—detaching philosophy from its Greek roots in the process.
We connected globally just as truth was being devalued.
I'm an old dude, so I remember when one out of ten Ivy undergrads was an English major, and the reading lists were just beginning to include some nonwhite authors or authors from cultures other than Europe and the United States. Women's Studies still had the "wet paint" sign on it.
Back then, the curmudgeons' complaint was that all these long-hair free-love kids had no work ethic (the one exception always being the engineering students) and wouldn't even have to learn Latin, much less Greek, so the diploma was gonna be useless.
We were the children of the men (and a few women) who crushed Hitler and Mussolini, and fought Emperor Hirohito's army and navy back to their home islands. My generation didn't fight that fight; we didn't have to lace up our boots and walk into global war every morning. We laced up our Adidas and put quarters in Missile Command and Space Invaders.
My literature classes were not full of -isms. There might have been a couple such classes in the catalog but they weren't required.
I do think students lose the opportunity to find their own passion for literature when they are asked, time after time, to read a book and write about how some -ism "informs" the book or its author.
As an adult I taught high school (now retired) and I tried for a simpler, broader, accessible path for literature exploration. I would tell students that writing a novel or play is a struggle for any author, so there has to be a powerful motivation to endure that struggle. Most novels, I would suggest to the students, were written for one of two reasons: the author believes passionately that something precious is threatened and needs defending, or the author believes passionately that something precious is broken and needs fixing. Then the students could decide on their own what the characters in Achebe or Faulkner or Morrison or Shakespeare were attacking, defending, breaking, or fixing.
This comment of mine is a little too long. Sorry! Thanks for your patience.
Yes! Andrew Breitbart nailed it before he mysteriously died. Politics is downstream from culture. Culture is how the communist left propagandizes young minds. Now we have a couple generations of young liberals who would have fit in with the Red Guards of China.
Leo Strauss says it best when he says the social sciences were the handmaiden of Philosophy. Today, philosophy has been abolished and the social sciences have been elevated to the place once held by philosophy, metaphysics more specifically. Yet, the foundation of the social sciences is clinical, statistical, and implements regression analysis to make meaningful sense of the world. This focus on the particulars over universal human values degrades our sense of self.
Abandoning a metaphysical tradition in literature vis a vis Marx abandons the human values that are at their core, literary values. Grace, the sublime, Beauty, the Good, the Just, and the Truth are the foundations of the human condition. Rejecting these principles rejects the corresponding aspects of our humanity that defines our personhood: creativity, rationality, conscience, free will. Without that definition of personhood, we are a matter of statistically defined attributes or identitarian elements.
Conversely, assuming that to study someone’s writing is a process of studying their humanity and their understanding of their personhood helps us become more humane. It should be no surprise that topics like anti-anthrocentrism - the rejection of a focus on humanity - has become a central theme of neo- and post-Marxist criticism. The rejection of man’s dominion over nature. And that using a Marxist lens for understanding literature would reduce the best conduit we have for understanding our and others personhood to merely an assessment of identity features.
To all who care, writers better take advantage of the opportunity to write frequently less in the not too distant future, it could become a crime as it has become in Germany. It's truly amazing what is considered "hate." Gossip, memes, practically anything anyone objects to, irrespective of how accurate. Scary stuff. The Germans have a terrible time finding the middle of the pendulum swing.
I suspect one reason why Marxist approaches to literature have become common while a Miltonian economic read of literature seems, as you wrote, "ludicrous" is because Marxism (and the other far-left ideologies you mention) is a totalitarian theory while Milton (and classical liberalism) is not. Marxism aims to remake all of society while liberalism is mostly about getting government out of the way so society can develop on its own. Liberalism doesn't care what kind of art you're making so long as you're free to make and sell it.
It's no wonder that college students can't read a novel or even understand literature. The Marxists have destroyed what's best about life—the pursuit of joy.
According to their professors, the point of reading a novel is to grade it on an ideological rubric so you can judge whether the author was an asshole. No wonder the students all decided they have better things to do.
"If we took Karl Marx, for instance, an economic theorist responsible for countless global ills,.. " Does that mean that Jesus is to be held responsible for the Spanish inquisition?
Literature is not written in a vacuum, but in a society, a culture, a place. Hence, it makes sense to apply many different lenses when looking at and analyzing literature. The real problem is when ideological, narrow-minded and dogmatic thinking is used to bypass serious reading and an open-minded discussion.
The examples you give are bizarre and horrendous, but the alternative is not to lock us up in an ivory tower.
The question as to why or how this has become pervasive in literature (and education in general) is best answered, in my opinion, via a satire written by George Orwell, where we saw the pig Napoleon take the puppies away to be cared and educated for their benefit and the benefit of Animal Farm. And what were the results?
The humanistic tradition is alive and well at my alma mater, Hillsdale College. I'm glad I found your substack, Liza.
I graduated around 2000 and all my professors were public artists and great lovers of English literature, and yet since then, they have grown increasingly quiet. They, either through necessity or complicity, tolerated the takeover of their departments by the theorists, the very same people they would laugh about over dinner in 2000.
I think that they strayed too far from the roots of their profession which is founded on a profound love. Any farmer in the nineteenth century could read Milton or Shakespeare or Dante, could read Keats and Wordsworth. We have not created better art since then, and yet modernism is strongly attached to difficulty, which in turn is attached to elitism, which gives the justification for an elite class. Professors.
Once the love of literature is degraded in that way, the rest of the takeover by language theorists and activists seems obvious. Great literature entertains all points of view, but we’ve stopped feeling it necessary to make literature that makes the reader want to read it, in fact, creating desire in the reader is often considered inauthentic. The only way back is through great books.
Marxism carries with it some fundamental beliefs. #1 - Its adherents believe that it is THE story, and THE ONLY story, that captures what it means to be human. Marx himself says that Communism is the riddle of history solved, and that it knows it is the solution. #2 - Marxism posits that its believers MUST become activists in order to help others achieve Critical Consciousness. #3 - Marxism posits that it, and it alone, will lead humanity to Utopia.
Therefore, once someone becomes a believer, there's no other possible outcome. All stories must be interpreted this way, and this way alone. And it must be shoved into everyone's face all the time. This is the only way to Utopia.
Great article. There’s a literary professor I really like who talks about this at length on YouTube — and posts his classes, which is fun —- named dr. Scott mason who I really like. I think this is an overlooked problem, literary theory is much more foundational to how we understand the world than people expect.
Marxism and its derivatives are simply another form of chattel slavery dressed up as a “science.” It is the mad dream of an earthly paradise based on envy.
I once took a lit crit class wherein one of the assignments required exploring Marxist critique. My response was that I had less interest in Marxist critique, an idea responsible for the deaths of at least 100 million people and possibly as many as 160 million, than I was in exploring Nazi critique.
The only reason Marxism isn’t treated with the same level of contempt as Nazism is that there were never Nuremberg type revelations of communist regimes when they collapsed.
Marxism/socialism is worse than slavery. Slavery was universal until serious abolition began a couple of centuries ago. But even slaves were individuals. Epictetus is a major example. Marxism/socialism treats human beings as interchangeable ciphers. The purging of whole classes and the quotas of Stalin are good examples. National Socialism likewise, with its Holocaust, reprisal massacres and imposed famines. As G K Chesterton said of G B Shaw’s socialism, such ideologues respond to the failures of socialism not by replacing the theory, but by replacing the populace. There are rigid religious monocultures too. The grey blob has many faces.
The world is and always was a shitty place. So far, the only kind of Marxism we’ve observed is the shitty, murderous, expansionist kind. I have no problem with little voluntary Marxist communes here and there, but I have a big problem when it tries to drag everyone into its rapacious grip. And of course, Marxism is all about the dialectical, so the synthesis of Marxist-Leninism is a feature and not a bug.
At least with the Crusades, most were defensive wars against a totalitarian aggressor who spread a particularly vicious strain of religion out of the Arabian peninsula, across North Africa, throughout the Spanish Peninsula and almost to Paris in the west. In the East, it fought its way through the Levant, into the Balkans and as far northwest as Vienna. After centuries of attacks against the eastern Roman Empire, when Constantinople was finally defeated, it spread east into Central Asia and as far as China. Whatever the sins of the Crusaders, it was better than the alternative we still live with today.
Blaming Marx for authoritarian communism is like blaming Jesus for the crusades. You want to put Lenin on trial, not Marx.
Most people blame expansionist Islam for Christendom’s defensive reaction after 500 years of Muslim conquests.
Authoritarian communism is the only kind of state communism we’ve seen, so I’m not sure why the ideas of Marx aren’t the ideological source for the deaths of a hundred million or more victims under state communist regimes.
Lenin invented the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat led by a revolutionary vanguard party to transition society from capitalism to communism. The violence of those communist regimes is his brain child, not Marx. Lenin's regime was violent to other Marxists that didn't fall in line, so there were obvious disagreements even within the movement. See the Kronstadt rebellion.
If you don't want to use the Levantine crusades as analogy then look at the Northern Crusades where pagans were forced to become Christians or killed. Or the Albigensian Crusade where Christians that were not someone else's idea of Christian were slaughtered when they refused to convert. Who is to blame for these events?
Hello. I am interested in learning more about literature and especially its analysis. However I have a hard time finding resources that don’t analyse classics or other works from a socio-political standpoint.
I’d be very grateful for anyone who has any recommendations, resources etc. for learning more about literature as an artform. Not only as a political instrument.
Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Northrop Frye, William Empson.
Thank you 🙌
Art is not economics. Issues of class can certainly be addressed in a novel, but only through the action of compelling characters. Superimposing a Marxist lens on literature flattens great characters into tropes. Snooze. Thanks for writing this piece!
I'd say that Marxism secluded itself within the theoretical sphere due to a Freudian neurosis stemming from its refusal to accept the reality of the Soviet experiment, as its revelation shattered humanity's hope and trust like lightning piercing through the atmosphere.
Now that its original experience has faded from our collective memory, Marxism is rendered eternal—like faith in the Messiah after his death.
Oh, and another thing that happened is that we discovered the Internet, with postmodernism being the last intellectual event in our culture.
Althusser, Foucault, Derrida… they all eventually confessed their incapacity to read anyone but themselves, while enjoying the high status traditionally owed to sages in a world full of material riches—detaching philosophy from its Greek roots in the process.
We connected globally just as truth was being devalued.
Hi Liza,
I appreciate your essays here.
I'm an old dude, so I remember when one out of ten Ivy undergrads was an English major, and the reading lists were just beginning to include some nonwhite authors or authors from cultures other than Europe and the United States. Women's Studies still had the "wet paint" sign on it.
Back then, the curmudgeons' complaint was that all these long-hair free-love kids had no work ethic (the one exception always being the engineering students) and wouldn't even have to learn Latin, much less Greek, so the diploma was gonna be useless.
We were the children of the men (and a few women) who crushed Hitler and Mussolini, and fought Emperor Hirohito's army and navy back to their home islands. My generation didn't fight that fight; we didn't have to lace up our boots and walk into global war every morning. We laced up our Adidas and put quarters in Missile Command and Space Invaders.
My literature classes were not full of -isms. There might have been a couple such classes in the catalog but they weren't required.
I do think students lose the opportunity to find their own passion for literature when they are asked, time after time, to read a book and write about how some -ism "informs" the book or its author.
As an adult I taught high school (now retired) and I tried for a simpler, broader, accessible path for literature exploration. I would tell students that writing a novel or play is a struggle for any author, so there has to be a powerful motivation to endure that struggle. Most novels, I would suggest to the students, were written for one of two reasons: the author believes passionately that something precious is threatened and needs defending, or the author believes passionately that something precious is broken and needs fixing. Then the students could decide on their own what the characters in Achebe or Faulkner or Morrison or Shakespeare were attacking, defending, breaking, or fixing.
This comment of mine is a little too long. Sorry! Thanks for your patience.
Yes! Andrew Breitbart nailed it before he mysteriously died. Politics is downstream from culture. Culture is how the communist left propagandizes young minds. Now we have a couple generations of young liberals who would have fit in with the Red Guards of China.
Childish dumbkins fortunately unread