Postmodernism is devouring the liberal arts. Such a deeply entrenched cultural problem cannot be solved by top-down intervention. Rather, reform must come from the individual efforts of dissenting students and professors who presently remain silent for fear of being challenged by the orthodoxy of postmodern culture.

The ‘liberal arts’ were so named for their orientation towards free thought, and the foundational claim that they existed to enrich the lives of free people. They are, in other words, dependent on the open-mindedness of individuals wishing to develop their knowledge and understanding by exploring thousands of years of history and literature produced by human civilisation. Despite this, universities in recent years have seen a rapid decline in the reputation and value of liberal arts degrees. Whereas once an education in literature and philosophy was highly revered in academia, setting the world at its students’ feet, today a liberal arts education is widely regarded as a useless endeavour for aimless students, which offers no clear path for the future. This development can, in large part, be laid at the feet of the ever-increasing influence of postmodernism, a superficially attractive philosophy often used to promulgate political and cultural ideas. Courses that have embraced a postmodern viewpoint tend to harshly ostracise any conflicting perspective, thereby eroding the intellectual freedom upon which the liberal arts had hitherto relied.
Part of postmodernism’s allure is that it evades clear definition. Does it exist only in the realm of art and literary theory or is it also a social phenomenon? Like any cultural movement seeking to expand its territory, it seems to have designs on both. Postmodernism, in both the artistic world and the real worlds, is concerned with interpretation and subjectivity, and the deconstruction of overarching ‘meta-narratives.’ Its opposition to these meta-narratives, according to philosopher Stephen Hicks, can lead to a wholesale rejection of the Enlightenment’s salient ideas of reason, logic, knowledge, and truth. One of postmodernism’s most famous thinkers, Stanley Fish, has said of deconstruction (a postmodern technique) that “it relieves me of the obligation to be right…and demands only that I be interesting.”1 This is the essence of postmodern theory—you don’t have to be right, because right and wrong don’t exist.
Since universities are the home of contemporary philosophy, it should not be surprising that they are currently the main hub of contemporary postmodern thought. This manifests predominantly in liberal arts subjects, where postmodern subjectivity is often taught under the guise of ‘tolerance’ and ‘inclusivity.’ This is particularly evident whenever students are asked to analyse a work of art. Rarely are they encouraged to research the context in which the art was produced or to draw upon previous knowledge to uncover resonance and meaning. Instead, they are encouraged to fabricate interpretations based on their personal experience and feelings. Needless to say, I am not suggesting that contemplating and critically analysing art is an entirely objective enterprise. Artworks can yield multiple interpretations, and sometimes more than one of these interpretations will be equally valid. However, postmodern analysis takes this a step further; its rejection of grand narratives means it has no grounds on which to say that any interpretation is superior to any other. To say that one interpretation is better than another is not only to imply an objective standard, but also to ‘exclude’ or express ‘intolerance’ towards any interpretations that have been deemed inferior or less plausible.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, July 25, 2022
What is true in the groves of academe is even more powerfully true in our modern, technologized world. Western society is built on the myth that individuals are in charge of their identities. And when we are reminded that that is not the case, we tend to become rather angry. 

The sheer rage that has greeted the Dobbs decision demands reflection. The rhetoric regarding victims of incest and rape is powerful but hardly explains the anger, given that such cases are comparatively rare and exceptional. They make good material for emotional appeal to the populace, but are neither foundational to the philosophy of the pro-abortion cause nor the real source of the outrage we are witnessing. Nor do they explain the violence and vindictiveness now being directed at Catholic churches and crisis pregnancy centers, still less the weirdly passionate response of people in other countries whose laws are often no more liberal than the Mississippi legislation that drove the Dobbs case.
That abortion became the hallmark doctrine of modern feminism is itself fascinating, given that it requires a fundamental denial or repudiation of that which makes a woman a woman: a body formed around the potential for conceiving, gestating, and then bearing a child. Not all women can or do bear children, of course, but that does not mean they are not women in accordance with this biological definition. As Abigail Favale argues in The Genesis of Gender, to reject this definition on such grounds is to confuse act and potency. Therefore, a feminism that makes the destruction of the child a point of non-negotiable dogma is a feminism that rejects the very essence of what it means to be a woman. It is a perversion of what true feminism should be. This, incidentally, lies behind the current ironic and incoherent inability of those who are so passionate about women’s rights to define what “women” actually are.
And this gives us a clue to the outrage. The repeal of the right to abortion has two obvious consequences. First, it reasserts the importance of the physical body to female identity. Second, it strikes deep and hard at the idea that human beings are defined by their freedom and autonomy rather than by their dependency and obligation. In short, it contradicts two of the guiding myths of our contemporary culture, at least as understood by the elites. And when a culture’s guiding myths are challenged, one can expect those committed to them to be very angry and to hit back with force.
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“Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization” is the Shakespeare book we need in this age of abuse and hatred. We find love and wisdom through its marvelous pilgrimage. And we find the true Shakespeare who has been buried by “the scholars” because of their ideological prejudices.

We live in an age of hatred: hatred toward our cultural inheritance, Western civilization, and Christianity most especially. Shakespeare, the “principal poet of Western civilization,” is also guillotined regularly for his ties to all that is passé.
Postmodern critics condemn Shakespeare as guilty of the sins of the West, especially sexism, racism, and imperialism. R.V. Young, however, offers a spirited defense of Shakespeare from his anti-Western and anti-Christian critics in his new book, “Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization.”
Anyone who has traversed the halls of Western academic institutions knows the rot that permeates them. Take, for example, my own alma mater, Yale. One can now obtain a BA in English without ever having studied a single sentence of Shakespeare. Yale says it offers Shakespeare as an elective. But it is a gross offense to pass through four years of English literature without studying the great Bard.
This abuse in our education system is not new. Young reminds us, “During the past half century, however, Western civilization has been challenged as never before from within, by academics and intellectuals of an ideological bent.” And Young is far from some right-wing provocateur; he is a professor emeritus of English literature at North Carolina State University.
Shakespeare’s Modern Critics
There are two dominant strands of Shakespeare abuse that have occurred in the past half-century. The first is hard to detect. Harold Bloom is the shining representative of romantic Shakespeare abuse. Bloom, who is also deeply anti-Christian in his criticism, removes the religious significance of Shakespeare as well as the rich cultural well from which the greatest dramatist of the West drank. Bloom’s Shakespeare is a radical “genius,” a man who broke so thoroughly from the classical and Christian past he invented the modern human individual.
Bloom is challenging to critique because he was a soft defender of the Western canon. In the canonical battles over the future of the Western humanities, Bloom was a lonely voice articulating why Shakespeare should be required reading. However, Bloom’s defense of Shakespeare rested on his personal need to strip Shakespeare of his Christian heart and soul and create a secular romantic individualist. Young doesn’t let Bloom off the hook.
The other dominant strand of Shakespeare abuse is best represented by Stephen Greenblatt and Karen Newman, the celebrated literary critics and Shakespeare scholars who both embody the worst of postmodern ideological enslavement. Postmodernism’s Shakespeare is guilty of all the sins the contemporary woke zeitgeist identifies with every stratum of Western civilization. The postmodern Shakespeare, so seductively and cruelly peddled by Greenblatt and others, transforms from eminent dramatist and poet into a mouthpiece of sexism, racism, and colonial imperialism.
Shakespeare on Love
The postmodern critics claim that Shakespeare promoted sexism and enslavement through his idealization of femininity and chastity. Far from their interpretation or the Shakespeare of Bloom, Young reads Shakespeare as he is: someone who critiqued “self-absorbed [romantic] individualism” and reminded us that love in its fullest and freest sense entailed sociality and bonds of duties to others and not to our mere sentiments.
Shakespeare’s luminous writings on love cover the totality of the human condition: jealousy, anger, lust, gentleness, and wisdom. Love is difficult, but also transformative. The highest expression and triumph of love is in marriage, friendship, and community. In other words, Shakespeare’s sexual freedom—understood in the classical and Christian sense of human flourishing and not mere choice—is found in the exact opposite of modern sexual ethics: duty, perseverance, and chastity. Shakespeare is excoriated for these views, though they are informed by two millennia of philosophy and theology.
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