The Books of My Life: The Opening of the American Mind

Lawrence Levine's The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999) is a rejoinder to the jeremiads of Arthur Schlesinger Jnr, George Kennan, Roger Kimball, and others, which bemoan the decline of America and American civilisation. It explores the culture war between polemicists and academics over the American past and over American identity.

This culture war, Levine argues, is not new and like culture wars over American history and American identity in the past, it is grounded in different approaches to the past in late 20th and 21st century American academic and intellectual culture. On one side, argues Levine, is the polemicist camp. The polemicists, Levine argues, are characterised by a selectively remembered past grounded in romantic and nostalgic ideologies.  On the other side, argues Levine, are those academics in the humanities and social sciences who utilise the latest in theoretical and methodological tools to understand more accurately the American past and, by extension, the American present.

Both of these approaches, Levine argues, are not simply about the past. They are also about the present. For the polemicists America was, is, and forever should be, Western. For the polemicists Americans were, are, and forever should be, culturally Western. For the new academics, on the other hand, America was, at its birth, diverse culturally and ethnically, and is even more culturally and ethnically diverse today. As a result of this difference, both camps do history in general and American history in particular, differently. The polemical camp, Levine rightly notes, are more ahistorical (and hysterical for that matter) than historical in approach. They defend, for example, what they see as a long academic tradition, the Western civilisation core curriculum in its American variant, without apparently grasping--or perhaps they are simply using this rhetoric for Machiavellian and manichean ideological and political advantage--that the tradition they are defending was actually an early twentieth century innovation in American higher education. The new academics, on the other hand, are historical and utilise the latest in historical methodologies to try to get at, as best as they can,  the political, economic, cultural, and demographic realities of American history. While both camps are polemical, the polemical camp believes America and Americans should be Western while the new academics believe Americans should recognise the positives of cultural and ethnic diversity, the new academic approach is grounded in sound historical exegesis and hermeneutics while that of the polemicists is not. This difference, to me, is important since, norms and values, if we want to pursue them, must be grounded in historical reality rather than in selective romantic and universalist ideologies.

While I found Levine's book an excellent introduction to the contemporary culture war over American history, culture, and identity, one has to wonder who the target audience of the book is. Though The Opening of the American Mind seems ostensibly, at least, to be aimed at the polemicists in the book reading audience, the fact that they are largely uninterested in historical accuracy and more interested in winning the latest political and cultural battle in the post-1960s culture war, would, seem to make this book, grounded as it is in primary research and call and response academic practise, irrelevant to them. Those who are more likely to pick up this book and read it, it seems to me, are those already convinced of the superiority of an inductive and descriptive rather than a deductive and normative approach to American history and American identity. And that, dear reader, seems to encapsulate in microcosm the reality of a divided contemporary America that is rent through with anti-intellectualism, anti-academicism, ahistoricism, and the ideological construction of an emotionally grounded mythic "reality".