Victoria Cech
Greek
MSU-Billings
Here's Kopff's bottom line. American society and most of western society are evil, cut adrift from their Christian roots and Classical traditions, and are sunk in illiterate and degenerate habits, including drugs, pornography, and affirmative action. People are poorly educated, godless, egalitarian, democratic, and liberal (all of those terms are pejoratives, in case you're wondering). Here are the remedies: "I. Simplify the elementary school curriculum to concentrate on language and mathematics [particularly English and Latin]...II. Take teacher certification away from the schools of education...[and] III. America's churches should start teaching the Sacred Tongues [Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and German]" (289-295). More importantly, western culture must return to "the God of the Bible" (passim). The problem is, this is not an oversimplification of Kopff's argument; the link between the polemic and the palliative is not a great deal clearer than is set out above; and Kopff uses rhetoric to persuade rather than convincing evidence.
And what of the enticing title? It is based on a joke worth repeating, but that also betrays one of the book's central weaknesses. As Kopff recounts, "Ronald Knox, a wise and witty Catholic priest, when asked to perform a baptism in the vernacular, responded with what his biographer Evelyn Waugh described as 'uncharacteristic acerbity': 'The baby does not understand English and the Devil knows Latin'" (xv). Why, then, does America need the Classical tradition? Because the Devil knows Latin, and to defend against him so must we; because America has slipped away from the church and from the traditions among which the church is pre-eminent; and because Latin and Greek are the root languages of the most cerebral portions of our modern tongue.
Kopff has learned well Socrates' bad habit of leading one towards improbable conclusions by means of deft metaphor. Both try to slip claims past before the hapless interlocutor has time to sputter, "But, but, no! They're NOT alike! Run that past me again...wait!" I contend that the title is the first such sleight. The lessons and traditions of Christianity are not the same as those of the "Classical tradition"--whatever that monolith may be--and while they are linked in a progression of western thought, Kopff equates them in ways I believe are unconvincing.
Kopff's two deepest concerns appear to be (1) the dominance of Enlightenment philosophy, and (2) the separation of church and state and our resulting societal secularism. Kopff says of the Enlightenment, "in the eighteenth century, radical critiques of tradition favoring...general principles propounded by intellectuals and applied to the world from on high began to appear. These new disciplines had the impudence to call themselves 'sciences.' Near the end of the nineteenth century, classical philologist Fredrich Nietzsche brilliantly turned the tables on the Enlightenment Project by demonstrating the historical and cultural bases of what had become the Tradition of Anti-Traditionalism. Advocates of both the Enlightenment Project and the Nietzschean critique dominate intellectual discussions in the late twentieth century and often engage in pitched battles, but they agree on one thing: hostility to the traditional ideas of Western intellectual life" (70).
Of the separation of church and state, Kopff proclaims that "nowhere has the war on tradition been so open as in the area of religious tradition" (55). After adducing as evidence seven court cases enforcing separation of church and state, Kopff proposes that this separation is contrary to the intent of the nation's Founders and the nation's original public. He supports this contention with passages from writings by "the Founders," and states, "if Washington, Jefferson, and Tocqueville are correct, the success of the campaign against religion will mean the gradual disappearance of republican institutions--in John Taylor's words, 'slavery and ruin'" (60). "To stop this attack," he concludes (62), "we need to restore America's central traditions: republican institutions and a truly federal government founded on personalresponsibility, trust in the popular will, and faith in the God of the Bible."
Someplace in there I lost sight of the "Classical tradition," and I find it intriguing that Washington, Jefferson, and Tocqueville are cited as defenders of the faith against the encroaching hordes of Enlightenment thinking.
I have a similar sense of intellectual vertigo when Kopff offers perspectives on modern malaise. He champions the desires of good, honest Americans hungry for the re-establishment of the Vergilian mythology of excellence and achievement (it's a long story) rather than the pablum of equality and opportunity, as reflected in "Rambo." "The cries for equality and compassion that blare from the loudspeakers are being drowned out by a mob crying for excellence and victory, both personal and national. As yet, only popular art reflects this resurgence. Nevertheless, a satiated and sleeping elite may awaken one morning to discover that their cynical Vietnam misadventure brought on themselves a great popular revolution. "Sir," Rambo asks, "this time, can we win?" (226).
I've never before watched someone twist Vietnam around so that it was all the fault of the liberals. Because America needs the classical tradition (and I say that without sarcasm), I would urge those who aren't already doing so to mentally compare the above passage from Kopff with two from Thucydides: the Melian dialogue and the Mytilenean Debate. Both are subtler than the above, and both offer an instructive portrait of the naked pursuit of excellence and victory unaccompanied by cares for equality or compassion. The Mytilenean Debate is especially interesting in this context, with its contrast of Cleon's blatant demagoguery against the more reasoned discussion of Diodotus.
Kopff also (167) blames "mechanistic, Enlightenment thinking" for the horrors of the Second World War, including the use of poison gas. Only a culture which had abandoned its religion, moral grounding, and link with tradition, he reasons, could do such things. I am skeptical, recalling Tacitus' description of the Roman army levelling the farmlands of the conquered: "desertim fecint; pacem vocant" (they made it a desert, and they call it peace). If this is what they could do marching legions across fields on foot and sowing them with salt, in the name of the glory of their state, their gods, and their ancestors, one shudders to think what they would do with napalm. We are, pace Kopff, making progress.
But Kopff is correct that we are beset by social problems and often ignorant of our society's roots. What I'd like to ask Kopff is why, since ancient cultures obviously wrestled with the same problems we do (e.g., war, imperialism, barabarism) without solving them, he believes that wider knowledge and understanding of those cultures would elevate us from the mire in which we now wallow. That is not a hostile question; I too believe we'd all be better off if we understood and studied the origins of western culture more widely. It's just that when pushed to it, I can't find convincing ammunition to defend my belief.
Despite my conviction that Kopff is bolstering a statement of personal opinion with inappropriate comparisons and metaphors, and despite my strong disagreement with a few of the opinions themselves, I find myself in basic agreement with his initial premise--that Americans are ill-educated and have lost touch with many traditions which would enrich their lives. In the beginning of his twentieth chapter, he sets out a corollary to that premise which I can only applaud: "A nation lives by its myths and heroes. Many societies have survived defeat and invasion, even political and economic collapse. None has survived the corruption of its picture of itself. High and popular art are not in competition here. Both may help citizens decide what they are and what they admire. In our age, however, high art has given up speaking to the body of its fellow citizens. It devotes itself to technical displays that can appeal only to other technicians" (235). If the rest of the volume maintained that theme, I would be applauding heartily. But though Kopff identifies some real problems, his opinions about their causes and solutions are presented anecdotally and occasionally seem contradictory (as when the Founding Fathers are held up as champions against a destruction of tradition caused by the Enlightenment).
Many more of Kopff's central points are opined rather than demonstrated. For example, he avers often that ethics without religion is impossible, without really engaging any of the defenses for morality without deity that exist. In critiquing popular, urban, and godless culture, focusing particularly on current films, he claims that "all culture and creativity--I do not speak of productivity--are rooted in family, work, community, religion. To feel these things as alien, as many film people do, is to hate the human" (234). Not all "film people" are condemned by Kopff; some films, such as "Rambo," he believes have themes and messages that link them to western moral traditions. But his statement that to feel family, work, community, and religion as alien is to "hate the human," and such feelings cannot produce true culture and creativity, is to knock out a huge chunk of the canon, some of which I would think Kopff would hate to lose.
Kopff uses an excellent command of language and rhetoric to fight dirty. In condemning critical theory, for example, he writes that "We can speak of books and dictatorship and love in many tongues, for example, and--as those who had sex with Michel Foucault learned to their cost, the fact that the English call the disease AIDS and the French call it SIDA does not make it any less communicable or deadly. Nonetheless, the critical theorists made the leap from linguistics to ontology, and the intellectual nightmare unleashed by a misappropriation of Saussure's insights began to spread. The areas of human existence infected by the ideology of critical theory are numerous, but one of the most significant hosts for this deadly disease was the study of humanities..." (118). You get the idea. Would that Kopff spent as much time truly engaging the argument as he does simply making that point that he views critical theory as the plague of the humanities spread by a diseased philanderer.
I will make my final complaint by presenting a scattering of quotes. "It is not going to be easy to improve conditions for ordinary Americans. You and your wife are both working. Your consequently unsupervised children..." (83). "What is the feminist perspective on Shakespeare? (I think the more important thing is Shakespeare's perspective on feminism. Read The Taming of the Shrew)" (131). "First on the reformers' list of useless courses were the Latin and Greek. The twin results were more and more trained youth pouring into the workplace but fewer and fewer educated men entering the elite classes" (105-6).
There is a story, probably apochryphal, about C.S. Lewis which used to be repeated among undergraduates at Oxford. The myth has it that when women were first allowed to begin attending lectures throughout the University (not just at the women's colleges), Lewis bitterly opposed the innovation, and upon arriving in a lecture hall would address his remarks only to the men in the audience. As the term went on, the number of students in attendance inevitably dwindled (a problem Oxford has too!), but the women, being the first group to brave the new privilege, were the eagerest of bluestockings and kept faithfully attending. Finally one morning Lewis arrived to find only a group of earnest young women crowded into the front row. He paced at the front of the room, examining his watch in silence, for fully fifteen minutes, and at last gathered up his books and said loudly, but as if to himself, "What a pity no one came today" and strode from the room.
Being a great fan of C.S. Lewis, I have always reassured myself that this is a tale with no basis in fact. It is an interesting experience, however, to read a book by an author who clearly affirms the attitude imputed to Lewis. As a female reader, apparently excluded by Kopff from the discussion, I have the feeling that I am eavesdropping from another room, and the uncomfortable sense that I should muffle my explosions of outrage, since none of the argument was intended for a woman's consumption to begin with. Given Kopff's several sad allusions to the demise of the Confederate South and his praise for its brave defenders (e.g., his paean to Gildersleeve, the Latin scholar and "devoted son of the South," (101), I suspect there are several classes of readers who may have the same sense that they are not invited to the Symposium.
My summary of all of the above is that Kopff has identified some real problems, but under the guise of scholarships he asserts dubious causes and religious and avowedly elitist solutions which trouble me. Kopff has hidden faith and opinion behind a mask of reason, and while he may not have proved that the Devil knows Latin, he has certainly demonstrated that he can twist scriptures to suit his purpose.