No matter the offense, anyone who demands this style of apology—in which the one apologizing i

No matter the offense, anyone who demands this style of apology—in which the one apologizing is made to bow and scrape, to cringe and grovel, and generally to divest herself of her dignity—is not running a liberation movement, they’re running a cult. It’s too bad they’ve been permitted to run one in academia. But this stops when people begin saying no. No position or paycheck any institution could offer would be enough to make me abase myself like this, helplessly spewing out mindless jargon, to anyone on earth. Pay me, I’ll write you a statement in under a minute:

We here at [X] journal rejected Dr. [Y]’s review because it contained unsubstantiated assertions and ad hominem polemics that do not meet our standard of scholarship. We stand by this decision.

Ironically, even 15-20 years ago I thought of medievalism as the one English-department period specialization that still harbored right-wingers, but obviously no more. (Though the issue in question is a cross-disciplinary medievalist controversy, including but not confined to literary studies.) This may not be as paradoxical as it seems, however. The Catholic reactionary and the Maoist revolutionary have a similar complaint against the epoch of the bourgeoisie and therefore a similar interest in burnishing the reputation of the Middle Ages against which this bourgeois modernity defined itself. 

By the way, I do take for granted that much of what we inadequately caption “wokeness” as distinct from other forms of liberalism and Marxism is just recrudescent Maoism, hence the struggle-session style of abject contrition that the movement mercilessly exacts. This is not a hyperbolic comparison, but an assessment of the actual intellectual lineages involved; see, e.g., Richard Wolin’s The Wind from the East. Le pensée soixante-huit, which is behind so much of this, modeled itself substantially on the Cultural Revolution:

This notion of power as ubiquitous and its corollary notion of dispersed and local resistance were by no means Foucault’s discovery alone. Such precepts were central to the ethos of post-1968 gauchisme. In the aftermath of the May events, the student activists became convinced that there was no such thing as second-order, or lesser, political struggles. The fight for sexual liberation and for freedom of expression in the high schools and universities, the struggles against racism, discrimination, and homophobia—each and every local struggle against oppression was central to the fight against late capitalism as an oppressive and totalizing mode of domination.

[…]

This situation helps to explain why in the post-May period Mao’s notion of a cultural revolution resonated so deeply with student radicals. In traditional Marxist thought, culture had always been regarded as epiphenomenal: a pale reflection of society’s socioeconomic base. Mao’s doctrine of cultural revolution, conversely, postulated that the arrows of causality linking “base” and “superstructure” could also be reversed. Culture represented an intrinsically legitimate locus of revolutionary struggle. The gauchistes still believed that proletarian revolution was a sine qua non for the creation of a socialist society. They continued to organize in the factories to prepare the workers for this eventuality. On the other hand, following Mao, they also believed that socialism could not be realized without a sweeping transformation of bourgeois values and mores.

Therefore, forcing one’s colleagues to humiliate themselves on Twitter is radical praxis. One of my own professors, admittedly broadening the context from Maoism to Leninism tout court, of which Maoism was a local adaptation, wrote of his own capture and then emergence from this ideology:

It was at this moment, a moment of deep undergraduate disillusionment, that I started attending seminars on European realism by a young lecturer named Stephen Heath. His lectures were underpinned by what, in retrospect, can be called an alliance between poststructuralism and leftism, but which, at the time, presented the analysis of culture, and particularly of modernism now stretching from Mayakowsky to Benjamin, from Brecht to the surrealists, as a crucial political task. The focus of this understanding was the journal Tel Quel, during the period from 1969 to 1971. The exemplary text was Barthes’s S/Z, published in 1970, and the promised analysis can be seen in Kristeva’s mammoth La Revolution du langage poetique of 1974. This was a defining moment in my intellectual life.

I use the words political task both advisedly and ironically, because what came with this position was the full panoply of Leninism, and in particular the notion of the party as the union of theory and practice, which would transform and liberate the world. It is no part of my purpose today to analyze Leninism; suffice it to say that it is now my opinion that it was the most disastrous and evil of the fruits of German idealist philosophy and that its contribution to history—from its slaughter of the most advanced and progressive capitalist class in Europe, to the formation of fascist parties in both imitation and opposition to Bolshevism, to its perversion of Third World liberation struggles according to the tenets of Stalinism—was overwhelmingly negative. 

What I do want to stress is that Leninism and the discourse of the Third International provided a rationale for one’s work and study. One was not a literary critic mired in a socially useless liberal humanism but a historical materialist providing elements of the theory of ideology, which Althusser so persuasively argued had been missing from the perversion of Stalinism. I have no wish to rehearse the exact stages of my disillusion with the faith; certainly when I read Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind, in the early eighties, I wondered how on earth I had avoided reading it earlier, or how I would have dismissed it on an earlier reading. Suffice it to say that my reading of [Doris] Lessing and science fiction meant that the literary component went very early, and events in Portugal, France, and Italy meant that the Leninist politics that Althusser argued for so ably when I studied with him at the École Normale Supérieure in the early seventies seemed barren and worthless by the late seventies. It is still worth noting, in this context, that the rapid ideological collapse of Bolshevik power in the early nineties might suggest that the Leninist regime was profoundly illegitimate, from the very moment of the storming of the constituent assembly. It is also worth noting that this discourse of the Third International, long dead on any political level, still animates much, if not all, of the ‘‘politics’’ of contemporary literary criticism.

He wrote that final sentence over 20 years ago! On the other hand, where did Maoism come from? I’m no political scientist, historian, or Sinologist, but I do recall that one of Mao’s own favorite books was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. So much for “the wind from the east.” Fears of foreign influence, as ever, prove inadequate; maybe we’ve never left Massachusetts Bay after all. To quote a later and better novel about some of the same themes as Stowe’s, “Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy.”