Ironically, she’ll be teaching this anti-American rhetoric for Macalester’s American Studies Department. More like Anti-American Studies?
Well, no; the business of analyzing anything is the business of breaking it apart. That is what the word "analysis" means.
1580s, "resolution of anything complex into simple elements" (opposite of synthesis), from Medieval Latin analysis (15c.), from Greek analysis "solution of a problem by analysis," literally "a breaking up, a loosening, releasing," noun of action from analyein "unloose, release, set free; to loose a ship from its moorings," in Aristotle, "to analyze," from ana "up, back, throughout" (see ana-) + lysis "a loosening," from lyein "to unfasten" (from PIE root *leu- "to loosen, divide, cut apart").
There's a Chinese critique of the Western way of learning that we study a flower by cutting it into its component parts, then studying each in turn to understand the whole. We generate a deeper understanding, but we also thereby destroy the flower and its beauty.
When I was studying at the University of Georgia, one of their lawyers told me that they got by far the most civil rights complaints from the Department of Religion, because students would take courses on their own religion and be deeply offended at the analysis of its core claims. Naturally a department of 'American Studies' is going to do the same thing for America.
You might say, "Well, Grim, what about the department of Women's Studies? Isn't that for promotion of women's interests?" "What about African-American studies?" Perhaps those departments are intended in that way; but look at the effect it has on the people who study them. The ones I know who've gone on to happiness have done so by walking away from the department's core claims and embracing a more traditional life at least in those core elements.
3 comments:
Good point. Sometimes the name we give to something is a cover. A Department of Christianity or Judaism might have its controversies and opposing camps, but neither would come out against itself as a whole. A Department of Religion would take on each in turn. Women's Studies has a lot of critically looking at men, but not so much themselves, and the same for African-American studies. Departments of Interpersonal Relations or Racial Studies would have to include Asian and New World populations or Intrasexual cooperation and competition, and we would get a whole new slant.
No, I think I disagree. I don't think the Macalaster professor wants to honestly understand America. She just hates it and wants it destroyed. Taking something apart is not itself analysis; hacking a person apart with a machete is not analysis of the person. She looks to Palestine, with the October 7 massacre, as her example of taking things apart; that's not analysis.
There was an old European objection to your example of analysis. In medicine, when some anatomists started cutting apart dead bodies to study them, others objected. If the goal of medicine is to understand how to sustain health, what can you learn by cutting apart a body that doesn't have health? Similarly, if the goal of medicine is to sustain life, what point is there in studying a lifeless body?
Well, of course, the dissection camp won the debate and we have indeed learned a lot of useful stuff from the dead. We have even taken it further, addressing the objection through vivisection.
However, there is only so much that can be learned about a flower that way. Now a huge amount of work in biology is put into studying ecosystems and how living plants and animals interact. A great deal of medical research is done on the living now because the amount of knowledge a dissected body can reveal is limited and we need to know more.
Indeed, how much can be learned about a person through dissection or vivisection? Can you understand another human being through cutting them apart and analyzing the parts? Why study philosophy or theology or psychology if dissecting bodies is the best way to understand people?
We can still analyze a living person, of course; the 'taking apart' can happen on an intellectual level without scalpels and saws being involved at all. There are many things about human beings that can only be understood with this kind of analysis, because studying life and behavior reveal things dissection of the dead cannot.
In the end, the Chinese and the European physicians and anatomists who objected to analysis were wrong on the small scale: We can learn some things by analysis that can't be learned otherwise. But they were right in the big picture: The big questions are best answered by studying the living.
I think you're disagreeing with her rather than me. I'm just pointing out that the method of analysis is dissection. Like any tool, it can be used well or badly, and for good reasons or for bad ones.
It may be true that it's not the only tool for understanding, and that it misses an important point. It may also mislead sometimes, as you say, especially on the point of how you maintain a living entity. It may also miss emergent qualities that are not apparent from the constituents (as wetness is a quality of water but not of its components oxygen and hydrogen in ordinary Earth-based conditions).
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