With violence in the Middle East, American troops facing terrorist attack abroad and the strong possibility that the next president of the United States will be a man whose single greatest feat of foreign policy was trading away Sammy Sosa, now is hardly the time to fret about purely intellectual concerns.
Princeton, however, has seen fit to offer me a modest stipend provided that I agree to fret about purely intellectual concerns. And when the nation's best university — as determined by the nation's third-best news magazine — puts its money where my mouth is, who am I to argue? So let's talk about postmodernism.
Postmodernism, like many bad things, began in France. A decade or two ago, the French got their baguettes all in a bunch when Americans started thinking more interesting thoughts than they were thinking. This really bothered the French, who are convinced they can do everything better than the Americans, with the possible exception of making beer taste like seltzer and forming comedic partnerships with Dean Martin. Realizing that they were about to be outpaced in the thinking department as well, the French, with their infamous penchant for the au courrant (literally, "Oh! Currant!"), decided that thinking about things was terribly passé. Now, the really cool thing to do would be to think about thinking about things, and then hopefully come to the conclusion that actually thinking about things themselves is impossible or at least in very bad taste.
For some reason, American academics decided to go along with this idea, treating it as a precious gift from the French, akin to the Statue of Liberty or Laetitia Casta. Of course, it would have made more sense to see this as an unwanted and deleterious gift from the French, akin to Gerard Depardieu or Quebec, but academics can be rather impractical that way. As a result, the average seminar in the humanities or social sciences now spends a week or two at the beginning of the semester thinking about thinking about the purported subject of the class.
"Is it worth thinking about this sort of thing?" students are made to ask. "Can we ever hope to make heads or tails of it? Is it even something we, who have not only lived through the death of God, but also got a case of the runs from the herring those no-good discount caterers served at His funeral reception, are still capable of thinking about?"
There isn't really any room for debate here, appearances to the contrary. Were the answer to any of these questions ever to be "no" for any given seminar, it would reasonably follow that the course in question should be canceled immediately. There's no reason why we should waste our time with useless or impossible lines of intellectual inquiry when our minds could be devoted to the achievement of more important and accessible goals, such as the invention of new flavors of gourmet ice cream. This, however, would result in the number of classes offered by Princeton University declining by up to 50 percent two weeks into any given semester. Even if the faculty were perfectly happy with this result, the administration would certainly move to act against it, if only because it would be sure to upset Steve Forbes '70.
So, whatever happens during the postmodern discussions of the first week or two of a class, you're still going to have to think about things eventually. The end result is just two weeks of pointless navel contemplation twice a year. Over time, those weeks add up, so that soon you'll know the ins-and-outs of your own navel better than, well, the back of your own hand. Hell, it probably would have been better to spend all that time contemplating the back of your own hand anyway.
What, then, is the solution to the plague of postmodernism wreaking havoc on Princeton and other elite universities nationwide? Let me just say it involves lots of dialogical hermeneutics and anti-hegemonic paradigm shifting. The rest, mon frère, is up to you. Michael Frazer is a politics graduate student from Riverdale, N.Y. He can be reached at mfrazer@princeton.edu.
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