And it is striking how much of Nisbet’s bill of accusations against the humanities, delivered in 1982, still applies very precisely, over four decades later: the domineering status of political ideology, obsession with questions of race and sexuality and identity, the steady preoccupation with oppression and marginalization and historical grievance, the celebration of the transgressive, the tyranny of overspecialization.All of this was firmly in place in the faculties of our “best” institutions during the Eighties.
I’ll return to Nisbet later in my remarks. But for now, let’s consider his plaintive question: “what the hell are the humanities?”
I did not grow up with dolls, which is odd given how much the women in my family—my grandmother, my mother, my many aunts—cherished girliness. Let me be clear: they did not value girls (“you feed girls only to give them away”); they valued girliness. Everything I knew about femininity—its modesty, its delicacy, its compliance, its dollishness—came from the real women in my life. The only doll I knew from childhood stood inside a tall glass case in the music room on the second floor of my grandmother’s house in Tainan. Her still face was made of porcelain, her body encased in a tiered, European gown of black and red lace, and I knew not to touch her. I simply did not have off-the-shelf toys the way my children in the United States did. (Was it the times? Were we that poor? Were my parents just strict?) My favorite plaything before the sartorial splendor that my father sent me was a thick stack of tear-away subscription postcards that I diligently collected from my mother’s women’s magazines. They were fabulous: they could be money when I played bank, or mail when I played post office, or secret papers when I played spy.
Two months after a storm that dropped a year’s rainfall in a single day, flooding roads, destroying trails and closing down the park, the national park’s Oct. 15 reopening revealed a strange place made stranger.