Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education Book

"There is no greater threat to democracy than the unreflective, assertive citizen."

Martha Nussbaum's Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education is an inspiring guide to how to teach the liberal arts in a way that promotes critical reflection and stimulates sympathy for others. Nussbaum surveys various programs and profiles numerous educators to assess the state of Culture Studies in America. The results are mixed. Anyone teaching Culture Studies, whether in a formal program or simply as an integrated component of their existing curriculum, should carefully study Nussbaum's findings and consider integrating her suggestions for improving their pedagogy into their curriculum.

Many universities and colleges have initiated programs to promote a more diverse curriculum on their campuses; however, Nussbaum shows that their success (measured by student development of their critical and emotional faculties) is dependent on whether they are grounded on a world-citizen view or an identity-politics view. An identity-politics view sees the polis as a "marketplace of identity-based interest groups jockeying for power, and views difference as something to be affirmed rather than understood" (110). On the other hand, the world-citizen view aims for students to transcend differences via communication and dialogue and deliberation in a democratic process which promotes a more just and equal society (110). Identity politics under the guise of "multiculturalism" can be an anti-humanist view, especially when it asserts that "only female writers understand the experience of women" (111); or, that only Black writers understand the experience of Black people. Nussbaum refutes this notion by appealing to our common sense experience of simply being human and our capacity to imagine ourselves as other. Her citing of Ralph Ellison's self-proclaimed purpose of writing Invisible Man as being to reveal the human universals within a black American is particularly persuasive (110).

Nussbaum proceeds to identify the most common errors in Culture Studies programs: chauvinism, romanticism, normative chauvinism, and normative Arcadianism. Chauvinism occurs when one fails to appreciate the differences between one's own culture and the culture under investigation. However, when one focuses exclusively on the differences between one's own culture and another's, you are committing the error of romanticism. Normative chauvinism occurs when you use your own culture as the standard, the "norm", by which you evaluate other cultures. Finally, normative Arcadianism is viewing another culture as mystical, markedly spiritual, and pastoral. This particular error most frequently occurs when an investigator focuses on the culture's past instead of present. Cultures are plural and have a present as well as a past (127-8). A good example of how to do Culture Studies right is Daniel Bonevac's Beyond the Western Tradition: Readings in Moral and Political Philosophy; Derrida's discussion of Chinese culture is an example of the wrong way (see Zhang Longxi's critique of Derrida). Other examples include Herodotus' Histories, the right way; Tacitus' Germania, the wrong way. How do we do Culture Studies right? Focus on human problems. Examine how different cultures deal with our shared problems, and then critically evaluate their respective effectiveness.

Narrative prose is a particularly fecund way to examine our shared human condition. It bridges the gap between self and other: "By inviting the spectator to identify with the tragic hero, at the same time portraying the hero as a relatively good person, whose distress does not stem from deliberate wickedness, the drama makes compassion for suffering seize the imagination" (93). "The artistic form makes its spectator perceive, for a time, the invisible people of their world'at least a beginning of social justice" (94). For example, in the chauvinistic and misogynistic culture of classical Greece, the male "is brought up against the fact that people [barbarian women, for instance] as articulate and able as he face disaster and shame in some ways that males do not; and he is asked to think of that as something relevant to himself" (94). Of course, not all narratives are equal. Wayne C. Booth points out in his brilliant work The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, the necessity of asking: "How does the text invite us to view our fellow human beings; with cheap cynicism and disdain, cheap sensationalistic pleasure that debases human dignity, or with 'respect for the soul'" (100). Nussbaum's conclusion that "sympathetic and critical reading should go hand in hand" is an opinion that I fully endorse. George Eliot, my favorite author, defines morality as "a delicate sense of one's neighbor's rights, an active participation in the joys and sorrows of our fellows, a magnanimous acceptance of privation or suffering for ourselves when it is the condition of good for others'in a word, the extension and intensification of our sympathetic nature." Reading, if practiced with acuity, enlarges the soul.