大学和媒体每况愈下时
2022-03-30 10:21阅读：
然而，童话故事里总有一个大救星，正派的统治者或天真的孩子——在安徒生更为人所熟知的童话故事里，这名孩子大喊着大人们不敢说的事情，皇帝没穿衣服——恢复了常识和文明行为，摒弃芸芸众生的愚昧。
When universities and media go down the
drain
It all happened before, and was presaged by Andersen's
fairytales
By REUVEN BRENNER
Who knew that Hans Christian Andersen's 19th-century fairytales
would anticipate 20th- and 21st-century issues about groupthink,
media, education and envy and mob rules, Harvard and Yale
included?
Alexander Gerschenkron (1904-78), a Russian-born Harvard economic
historian, did.
On April 11, 1968, Gerschenkron delivered a lecture at the
university in which he quoted at length Andersen’s The Most
Incredible Thing in explaining a campus riot two days earlier
&n
dash; relevant for both the Harvard students’ recent demand about
closing down a police station, and the Yale law students’
intolerance toward a debate in a recent session organized about
debating … free speech, that both would make Russian President
Vladimir Putin proud.
On April 9, 1968, hundreds of students and professional activists
carried “Fight Capitalists – Running Dogs” banners, shouted “Sieg
heil,” demanded the abolition of the Reserve Officers’ Training
Corps (ROTC) program, occupied University Hall and renamed it “Che
Guevara Hall,” and shoved faculty and administrators down stairs
while shouting expletives.
Harvard’s president called the local police. The mob ignored their
warnings and attacked officers, who made 200 arrests at University
Hall.
Those events prompted an emergency meeting of the Harvard faculty,
where Gerschenkron delivered his unprepared speech, which was
broadcast uncensored on the radio.
“Force and crime must be met by force,” Gerschenkron said, giving
full support to Harvard’s president and the police.
“I hear all this talk about the imperialist war machine, but any
man in reasonable possession of his reasonable powers must
understand that this is all bunk, this is mendacious low, political
talk….
“This faculty is not the proper guardian of academic freedom….
Sixteen, 17 years ago, when academic freedoms were threatened
brutally and viciously” by Senator Joe McCarthy, “it was not the
faculty who stood up against the threat. The faculty was subdued,
scared.
“There are many reasons for that,” he continued. “Let us take once
a candid look at ourselves, at this faculty.”
Some are buried in research and don’t want anything to do with the
wider world. But “there are the middle-aged popularity kids who
have done considerable damage to the university. In addition to
popularity seekers, they are fearers of unpopularity,” especially
“in the atmosphere of terror – fear of boycotts, of reduction in
election in their courses.”
These harsh words were only the introduction to the most
devastating part of his speech, in which he cited Andersen’s The
Most Incredible Thing tale.
The story is about a king’s promise that whoever does an incredible
thing will win his daughter’s hand in marriage and half his
kingdom. The contest’s judges, ranging from children to old men,
promptly agree that a young, decent entrepreneur had earned the
prize by devising a clock that had 12 different performances, one
for each hour.
The 12 performances reminded the audience about the myths and
foundations of Western civilization, from Moses’ commandments to
Christianity and basic pleasures of everyday living.
As the prize is about to be awarded, a new young man appears,
swinging an ax and smashing the clock. By so doing, he claims, he
has done the most incredible thing. The judges and the people
agree, and award the princess and half of the kingdom to the
lout.
But this is a fairytale, so it has a happy ending. On the wedding
day, the clock reappears. The characters in the 12 performances
come to life and send the lout into oblivion. The innovative, good
young man gets his rewards.
Andersen optimistically concludes that a work of art doesn’t die.
Its solid incarnation may be shattered, but its spirit can’t be
broken.
Although the people at the wedding declare that they lived to see
the most incredible thing, the story ends with an observation about
what made the ending of the tale incredible (though Gerschenkron
omits mentioning this ending). The most incredible thing was that
nobody in that crowd was envious of the young man who built the
clock and married the princess.
As Gerschenkron observed, “the spirits of the faculty will [have
to] rise and smash up all this criminal nonsense that is going
around in this country.” The university, he added, is a fragile
creation that can be destroyed by louts as the clock was destroyed
in Andersen’s story. Sometimes it takes a fairytale to remind us
how thin is the veneer of civilization and how delicate the complex
of institutions that uphold it.
This is not the only Andersen tale that resonates strongly these
days. Others shed light on features of the society within which
such academic complacency happens – the media no longer being a
reliable source of information in particular.
The Snow Queen starts with the devil inventing a mirror which, when
looked at, reflects everything good and beautiful as being
ugly. Beautiful landscapes look like wrinkled spinach and
the best people appear hideous monsters. The devil’s disciples
trained in using the mirror infest the land and turn people’s
hearts into lumps of ice, preventing justice from being done.
This tale too has a happy ending – but it is conditional on a
skeptical ruler’s intervention, about whom the tale says: “In the
kingdom where we are now, there is a Princess who is uncommonly
clever, and no wonder. She has read all the [infected] newspapers
in the world and forgotten them again – that’s how clever she
is.”
In 1968, a century after publication of this tale, in the midst of
Europe’s youth rioting and the timing of Gerschenkron’s speech,
Rudolf Augstein, the founder of Der Spiegel, made observations
similar to Andersen’s, noting: “I feel that the confidence in the
institution of the ‘press’ is decreasing.
“If my fears are justified, then this crisis is worse than a crisis
of parliament; because it is simpler to reform parliament – a
clearly outlined institution – than to reform a system of
information that is as diffuse as society itself.”
Augstein added: “The crisis of newspapers and magazines is nothing
but the emergence and consciousness of the crisis of the democratic
system itself.”
Fifty years later, it does appear that history is rhyming.
Whereas in fairytales a deus ex machina, a decent ruler or an
innocent child – in Andersen’s better-known fairytale about this
child shouting what no adult dared to that the emperor wore no
clothes – restore common sense and civil behavior, discarding
crowds’ follies.
Although my historical detective work suggests that only when
society is being leapfrogged by others and on the edge of default
are commonly held bad ideas more likely be discarded – though not
without some tragic bumps in the roads.
I say “more likely,” since such events can be “stepmothers of
deception” too, and not only mothers of invention – as Western
Europe’s history over the last century, including these days’
conflict, so clearly demonstrate.
