BULL’S-EYE!

Eric Larsen’s A Nation Gone Blind is a passionately argued, meticulously documented assault upon the culture of political correctness which has, Larsen argues, reduced the study of literature at the university level to politicized ritual. I cannot do justice to the elaborate case he lays out in each of these three essays, but he makes it clear that this is no arcane academic issue. He sees the abduction of the humanities by a generation of militant politicos (who, ironically, found their voices during the anti-war, anti-establishment sixties) as a manifestation of a pervasive blight within American culture. Our vitality as “free agents” has been sapped by group-think within the university and by obsessive consumerism and mass media mind-candy without putting our democracy itself at risk. Thus, with our long tradition of “intellectual liberalism” now comatose and a radical minority in power, it is no wonder that we tend to doze with the pack as folly after folly, from Washington to Baghdad, flashes across our screens. This is indeed a rarity—a book about ideas that manages to be a page-turner. It is as provocative, timely, and exhilarating as The End of Faith by Sam Harris—another essential read for those still paying attention.

Mr. Larsen is right. This Nation has been blinded by the white light (and made deaf by the white noise) of dogma, media, specious pedagogy. We’ve traded a goldmine of intellectual tradition left to us by Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, James, Gertrude Stein, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway etc. for “a handful of dust.”

By Lewis Lapham

During the same week that I was reading [Don] Watson's book [Death Sentences] I came across Eric Larsen’s equally fine A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit, which approaches its topic from the perspective of a college English teacher alarmed by the progress that the last two generations of his students have made toward the notion of the classroom as petting zoo. The young inheritors of the world’s supreme military and economic power apparently take it as an insult if anybody invites them to think. Why should they? Thinking isn’t advertised on television. This is America, where everything good is easy, anything difficult is bad, and the customer is always right.

Read as telltales in the prevailing wind of our multitasking systems of global communication, the books by Watson and Larsen point toward a world in which, as Simone Weil once noticed, ‘It is the thing that thinks, and the man who is reduced to the state of the thing.’ It’s conceivable that her premonition will prove well founded.

These are difficult times for people whose cast of mind is essentially religious, and by this I mean . . . people who crave the certainty, the set of definite answers to life’s large questions, that organized religion in its many stripes has long provided. . . .These are the people, the true believers, . . . who so vividly wander the groves of academe in Eric Larsen’s distressing new screed A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit. . . . Larsen is a longtime English professor [who is] . . . sharp on the intellectual dry rot that has spread through our universities, and when he deplores the totalitarian impulse of today’s feel-good, sanctimonious young professors who speak openly about “reshaping” the minds of students to make those minds ideologically acceptable, he is really describing a kind of quasi-religious indoctrination in which “right thinking” is valued and the habits of mind of the Enlightenment, of the Age of Reason—skepticism, empirical observation, the ability to accept multiplicity, paradox, and, yes, uncertainty without panicking—are not . . .