Black Athena and the Fabrication
of the Rhetorical Tradition
James Arnt Aune
Texas A & M University
Perhaps the most chilling moment of Martin Bernal's Black Athena occurs in Chapter IX,
where he reviews the history of anti-Semitism in Northern Europe and North America,
especially in colleges and universities. He cites a letter found in 1980 on the desk of Harry
Caplan of Cornell, "who was for many years the only Jewish tenured professor of the
subject in the Ivy League":
My dear Caplan:
I want to second Professor Bristol's advice and urge you to get into secondary teaching.
The opportunities for college positions, never too many, are at present few and likely to be
fewer. I can encourage no one to look forward to securing a college post. There is,
moreover, a very real prejudice against the Jew. Personally, I do not share this, and I am
sure the same is true of all our staff here. But we have seen so many well-equipped Jews
fail to secure appointments that this fact has been forced upon us. . . . I feel it is wrong to
encourage anyone to devote himself to the higher walks of learning to whom the path is
barred by an undeniable racial prejudice. In this I am joined by all my Classical colleagues,
who have authorized me to append their signatures with my own to this letter. (signed)
Charles E. Bennet, C.L. Durham, George S. Bristol, E.P. Andrews
[27/3/1919] Ithaca.
Bernal probably doesn't know or care about the rest of the story here, but I take some
comfort in the fact that not only did Caplan not "get into secondary teaching," but became
an instructor in the department of Public Speaking at Cornell from 1919 to 1923, at which
point he was actually able to join the Classics department.
It is possible, of course, to make too much of this incident, but it seems strangely
appropriate for beginning a paper on the implications of Bernal's book for rhetorical
studies. Black Athena makes the bold claim that the "paradigm" that classical scholars and
classics-inspired scholars have used to discuss both the importance of Greek civilization
and its origins has been directly and indirectly influenced by racism and European
chauvinism. The ancient Greeks themselves believed that their culture had arisen as the
result of colonization, around 1500 B.C.E., by Egyptians and Phoenicians who had
civilized the native inhabitants. This belief, which Bernal calls the "Ancient Model," was
displaced after the 18th century by various versions of what he calls the "Aryan model," in
which Greek civilization was seen as the result of an invasion from the North that had
taken over the local "Aegean" or "pre-Hellenic" culture. Egyptian influence was denied,
and Greek civilization was seen both as the finest moment of human achievement (itself a
relatively new cultural valuation) and as the product of the mixture of the
Indo-European-speaking Hellenes and their indigenous subjects. This denial of Egyptian
influence on Greek civilization went hand in hand with the general devaluation of Egypt.
The most surprising aspect of Bernal's history of the Ancient and Aryan Model is his
documentation of the prestige of Egypt among such diverse groups as the Cambridge
Platonists, writers of the Italian Renaissance, and the Freemasons.
The "Aryan model," is not only wrong, on archaeological and linguistic grounds, as further
volumes of Black Athena will attempt to demonstrate, but it is also wrong for a reason.
The Norwegian political philosopher Jon Elster has pointed out that a distinctive feature of
modern discussions of political and social theory is its obsession (derived from Marx) with
identifying not only mistaken political and social beliefs, but with explaining why those
mistaken beliefs have emerged. It is useful to locate Black Athena within the tradition of
Marxist historiography, and to note that it represents a (oh, how I hate this word)
postmodern Marxist attempt to place racial issues at the center of explanations of
oppression. Bernal, whose father J.D. Bernal was one of the great "scientific Marxists"
along with J.B.S. Haldane in England (and an unrepentant Stalinist as well), rather
refreshingly helps us locate his project within his own life history. A one time Maoist who
made his scholarly reputation in Chinese and Vietnamese history, Bernal appears to have
had a mid-life crisis connected with the collapse of the Chinese revolution in the 1970's.
Like many left academics, he has not abandoned the view of historical explanation he
found in Marx, but has attempted to balance discussions of class with discussions of race.
The story of the rise of the Aryan model reads a bit like a detective story (Murder on the
Orient Express comes to mind as an alternative subtitle) in which the list of murderers
includes anti-Semitic German university professors, Romantic racists, and the usual
upper-class British imperialists. Capitalism does not really appear in the book, but it is an
interesting exercise to read Bernal's book side-by-side with Terry Eagleton's new book,
The Ideology of the Aesthetic, which traces the relationship of modern aesthetics to
capitalism during the same periods covered by Bernal. Bernal usefully draws our attention
to the relatively new character of racism and anti-Semitism as products of the
Enlightenment and the Romantic Movement, but he may miss the extent to which the
dissociation of sensibility wrought by industrial capitalism created psychological
conditions in which a search for a lost cultural wholeness in ancient Greece was inevitable.
More generally, even if one rejects both Bernal's use of racism as an explanatory principle
or the more classical Marxist use of capitalism as an explanatory principle, Bernal helps us
see more clearly the social forces that underlie the revaluation of civilizations, periods, and
texts. Discussions of the nature of the "canon" in literary studies and the by now
wearisome debates over the undergraduate core curriculum indicate that we are once again
at one of those significant points in the history of Western culture that Bernal so
unforgettably documents in the case of the "fabrication of ancient Greece."
The rise of the Aryan model and search for lost cultural unity are of particular significance
for students of rhetoric, for whom scholarship is inevitably an exercise in nostalgia. The
purpose of this paper is to discuss Bernal's book in the context of certain key problems in
contemporary rhetorical studies, especially the vexing issue of how to write the history of
the Western rhetorical tradition and how to talk about the legitimacy of the classical
rhetorical tradition in an increasingly multicultural university climate. I intend to range
rather widely across Bernal's work in the hope of stimulating conversation and research
into its implications. I will begin by locating some key issues in contemporary rhetorical
studies, then discuss the scholarly reception of Bernal's work, and conclude by suggesting
how his work might solve the issues with which I began.
In Search of Ariadne's Thread, Revisited
In 1978 Michael Leff published an essay that traced certain emerging patterns in rhetorical
scholarship after the breakup of neo-Aristotelianism and the rise of social-scientific views
of communication. He found a unifying theme in the notion of rhetoric as a way of
knowing. Things have changed considerably in twelve years. Although rhetorical
scholarship is arguably in a more secure position, both within the Speech Communication
Association and in the academy generally, than twelve years ago, any attempt to discern
patterns, much less consensus, among rhetorical scholars seems impossible. The mania for
specialization that long ago led to the split between speech and theater and later between
rhetorical studies and communication studies has occurred within rhetorical studies as well.
Speculative rhetorical theory, seemingly a growth industry in the heady days of the early
1980's, has ceased to be of interest to most students of rhetoric, even though the
opportunity to make connections with similar developments in literary studies was missed.
Instead, public address studies is the subject of almost all the important book-length work
in our field, some of it from university presses that ten years ago would not have touched a
manuscript from a "speech" person. Although some theoretical self-consciousness is
present in the recent turn to close readings of public address, that self-consciousness is
probably at its lowest point in the history of rhetorical criticism, a sign perhaps of
increased disciplinary maturity. Where theoretical terms are used, the best critics seem to
do so in the spirit of Levi-Strauss's bricoleur, borrowing a term from Cicero here, and
Foucault there. The history of rhetorical theory has emerged as a distinctive subfield, with
the founding of the journal Rhetorica, although that journal quite rightly operates under
more rigorous and largely atheoretical standards appropriate to its audience. A more
interdisciplinary group of scholars who began as students of argumentation and debate
have developed a full-fledged movement in the rhetoric of science and the rhetoric of
inquiry. Other developing interest groups include women's studies and performance
studies.
All this diversity of interest is exciting, although it makes for confusion when people in
smaller colleges and universities search for a sense of self-definition or have to justify their
existence in terms of core curricula. My own college is currently going through a
curriculum review in which it is difficult to explain where "speech" courses fit within
normal patterns of distribution requirements. We are in a Fine Arts division and our
courses currently fulfill that requirement, but "real" Fine Arts people (in art, music, and
dance) understandably resent the fact that, say, small group communication falls under the
heading of the Fine Arts. Virtually everyone at my institution understands that rhetoric is a
central part of the liberal arts tradition and that public speaking is a "useful skill," but it is
virtually impossible for anyone, least of all me, to figure out where our department should
fit within the divisional structure of the college. Another way in which the increased
scholarly prestige of rhetorical/communication studies may have unintended consequences
is that not only is it very difficult for small colleges, even those like mine with fairly
stringent research expectations, to attract top candidates for positions, but it is very
unlikely that those top candidates could be trusted to teach a beginning public speaking
course with even a minimal level of competence. We are now approaching the situation of
English as a discipline, in which the radical separation of training in writing and in
teaching literature has existed for several years.
Now these are very practical questions, and they seem to fall very far afield from Bernal's
book, but in a way they do fit in with this discussion. Before the Fall (by which I mean
1965, when Edwin Black's Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method was published, and
the first major burst of the social-scientific assault began), it was relatively easy to defend
"Speech" within the two premises that defined American college education. Those two
premises can be summarized under the names Aristotle and John Dewey. Rhetoricians
could have it both ways. That is, the democratic (some would say levelling) impulses of
Dewey's education for citizenship authorized debate programs, courses in group discussion,
and courses in persuasion. The liberal arts (some would say elitist) tradition justified
courses in rhetorical criticism and public address. The notion that there was perhaps some
tension between these two traditions of education seldom occurred to speech people before
the Fall, but the tension came out most clearly when interpersonal communication, later
organizational communication, began to edge out the earlier, dare I call it, Ancient Model.
It is utterly unclear, given both the increased fragmentation of rhetorical studies and its
increased detachment from its Deweyan roots, what the organizing principle, paradigm if
you will, for rhetorical studies is. Despite the occasional nod to Chinese or Indian or
Arabic rhetoric, we have not really systematically questioned either the continuing use of
the classical rhetorical tradition means as a legitimating device or how well it continues to
function as a vocabulary for teaching critical or performance skills. There is an odd
humility to the title of Thomas M. Conley's book, Rhetoric in the European Tradition, but
that book, like almost all recent discussions of the broad sweep of "the Tradition" (which
as I get older sounds more and more like F.R. Leavis' "Great Tradition" and sounds equally
mythical) does not address the question of the Tradition's origins or continued legitimacy.
It remains to be seen how the field of communication will be reconfigured after the
curricular wars have died down. My own instinct is that we are collectively in search of
what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., calls a search for a "myth of origins," and that myth of origins
can no longer usefully be described in Greco-Roman terms. It is not clear, however, that
"multiculturalism" in its current forms has a clearly articulated myth of origins, either, save
a radicalized view of New Deal interest group politics. A more anthropological view of
rhetoric and communication, based on the complex relationship between orality and
literacy, and examining the social forces underlying shifts in rhetorical theory and practice,
seems to me to provide a way of linking together the fragmentary impulses that we know
as rhetorical studies, performance studies, cultural studies, and communication studies.
Such an anthropological view also seems more congenial to the Deweyan, democratic
strain in American rhetorical studies that provided the foundation for the best of our
pedagogy, if not, finally, our research.
It is in light of these reflections on the fragmentation of contemporary rhetorical
scholarship, the search for an appropriate "paradigm" for rhetorical studies, and the largely
ignored issue of rhetorical pedagogy that I now wish to turn to the scholarly reception of
Bernal's work.
In 1978 Michael Leff published an essay that traced certain emerging patterns in rhetorical
scholarship after the breakup of neo-Aristotelianism and the rise of social-scientific views
of communication. He found a unifying theme in the notion of rhetoric as a way of
knowing. Things have changed considerably in twelve years. Although rhetorical
scholarship is arguably in a more secure position, both within the Speech Communication
Association and in the academy generally, than twelve years ago, any attempt to discern
patterns, much less consensus, among rhetorical scholars seems impossible. The mania for
specialization that long ago led to the split between speech and theater and later between
rhetorical studies and communication studies has occurred within rhetorical studies as well.
Speculative rhetorical theory, seemingly a growth industry in the heady days of the early
1980's, has ceased to be of interest to most students of rhetoric, even though the
opportunity to make connections with similar developments in literary studies was missed.
Instead, public address studies is the subject of almost all the important book-length work
in our field, some of it from university presses that ten years ago would not have touched a
manuscript from a "speech" person. Although some theoretical self-consciousness is
present in the recent turn to close readings of public address, that self-consciousness is
probably at its lowest point in the history of rhetorical criticism, a sign perhaps of
increased disciplinary maturity. Where theoretical terms are used, the best critics seem to
do so in the spirit of Levi-Strauss's bricoleur, borrowing a term from Cicero here, and
Foucault there. The history of rhetorical theory has emerged as a distinctive subfield, with
the founding of the journal Rhetorica, although that journal quite rightly operates under
more rigorous and largely atheoretical standards appropriate to its audience. A more
interdisciplinary group of scholars who began as students of argumentation and debate
have developed a full-fledged movement in the rhetoric of science and the rhetoric of
inquiry. Other developing interest groups include women's studies and performance
studies.
All this diversity of interest is exciting, although it makes for confusion when people in
smaller colleges and universities search for a sense of self-definition or have to justify their
existence in terms of core curricula. My own college is currently going through a
curriculum review in which it is difficult to explain where "speech" courses fit within
normal patterns of distribution requirements. We are in a Fine Arts division and our
courses currently fulfill that requirement, but "real" Fine Arts people (in art, music, and
dance) understandably resent the fact that, say, small group communication falls under the
heading of the Fine Arts. Virtually everyone at my institution understands that rhetoric is a
central part of the liberal arts tradition and that public speaking is a "useful skill," but it is
virtually impossible for anyone, least of all me, to figure out where our department should
fit within the divisional structure of the college. Another way in which the increased
scholarly prestige of rhetorical/communication studies may have unintended consequences
is that not only is it very difficult for small colleges, even those like mine with fairly
stringent research expectations, to attract top candidates for positions, but it is very
unlikely that those top candidates could be trusted to teach a beginning public speaking
course with even a minimal level of competence. We are now approaching the situation of
English as a discipline, in which the radical separation of training in writing and in
teaching literature has existed for several years.
Now these are very practical questions, and they seem to fall very far afield from Bernal's
book, but in a way they do fit in with this discussion. Before the Fall (by which I mean
1965, when Edwin Black's Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method was published, and
the first major burst of the social-scientific assault began), it was relatively easy to defend
"Speech" within the two premises that defined American college education. Those two
premises can be summarized under the names Aristotle and John Dewey. Rhetoricians
could have it both ways. That is, the democratic (some would say levelling) impulses of
Dewey's education for citizenship authorized debate programs, courses in group discussion,
and courses in persuasion. The liberal arts (some would say elitist) tradition justified
courses in rhetorical criticism and public address. The notion that there was perhaps some
tension between these two traditions of education seldom occurred to speech people before
the Fall, but the tension came out most clearly when interpersonal communication, later
organizational communication, began to edge out the earlier, dare I call it, Ancient Model.
It is utterly unclear, given both the increased fragmentation of rhetorical studies and its
increased detachment from its Deweyan roots, what the organizing principle, paradigm if
you will, for rhetorical studies is. Despite the occasional nod to Chinese or Indian or
Arabic rhetoric, we have not really systematically questioned either the continuing use of
the classical rhetorical tradition means as a legitimating device or how well it continues to
function as a vocabulary for teaching critical or performance skills. There is an odd
humility to the title of Thomas M. Conley's book, Rhetoric in the European Tradition, but
that book, like almost all recent discussions of the broad sweep of "the Tradition" (which
as I get older sounds more and more like F.R. Leavis' "Great Tradition" and sounds equally
mythical) does not address the question of the Tradition's origins or continued legitimacy.
It remains to be seen how the field of communication will be reconfigured after the
curricular wars have died down. My own instinct is that we are collectively in search of
what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., calls a search for a "myth of origins," and that myth of origins
can no longer usefully be described in Greco-Roman terms. It is not clear, however, that
"multiculturalism" in its current forms has a clearly articulated myth of origins, either, save
a radicalized view of New Deal interest group politics. A more anthropological view of
rhetoric and communication, based on the complex relationship between orality and
literacy, and examining the social forces underlying shifts in rhetorical theory and practice,
seems to me to provide a way of linking together the fragmentary impulses that we know
as rhetorical studies, performance studies, cultural studies, and communication studies.
Such an anthropological view also seems more congenial to the Deweyan, democratic
strain in American rhetorical studies that provided the foundation for the best of our
pedagogy, if not, finally, our research.
It is in light of these reflections on the fragmentation of contemporary rhetorical
scholarship, the search for an appropriate "paradigm" for rhetorical studies, and the largely
ignored issue of rhetorical pedagogy that I now wish to turn to the scholarly reception of
Bernal's work.
Responses to Black Athena
Molly Meyrowitz Levine, in the introduction to a special issue of Arethusa devoted to the
book, summarizes Bernal's argument very well: "We, it is claimed, owing to residual
racism, anti-Semitism, sheer scholarly inertia, and/or exaggerated respect for authority,
have suppressed or ignored the weight of what Professor Bernal considers to be
overwhelming evidence for substantial Semitic and Egyptian roles in the development of
Greek language and civilization." This thesis contains two different claims. The first is that
we have good reasons to believe that there was substantial Semitic and Egyptian influence
on the development of Greek language and civilization. Contained in this first claim is a
much more controversial one, bound up with the title of the work. To argue for substantial
Semitic and Egyptian influence is not the same as labeling that influence as "black." The
African-American classicist Frank M. Snowden, Jr., has disputed this claim, and Bernal
himself admits that it would be more useful to title the work "African Athena." The
response of right-wing periodicals has tended to focus on the African side of Bernal's
argument, a response that confirms his view of the racist assumptions of contemporary
proponents of "classical education," even if his larger argument might need to be modified.
Although this paper is intended to focus more on the second claim, that racism,
anti-Semitism, and imperialism directly and indirectly affected Altertumswissenschaft in
the West, it would be useful to see how Bernal's first claim has fared thus far in scholarly
discussion. We need, I think, to dismiss the response of right-wing periodicals to the book.
National Review, for instance, mentioned the book in an editorial note, and somehow
concluded that Bernal was "a black professor of government at Cornell." The New
Criterion, which now devotes each issue to a hatchet job on a prominent left-wing
academic, simply dismissed the possibility of Egyptian influence on ancient Greece, and
characterized Bernal's work as analogous to Lysenko's genetics.
There have, however, been far more serious criticisms of Bernal's work. These include,
first, the argument that Bernal's etymological analyses are unscientific. That is, he provides
no set of rules that could explain the presence of Semitic roots in Greek. Gary Rendsburg,
a specialist in Semitic languages at Cornell, explains that it is possible to generate specific
rules that would account for Bernal's findings, specifically that Greek words without an
Indo-European root would be a logical place to start, and concludes that there are very few
of Bernal's etymologies that aren't borne out. Second, there may be other explanations for
the popularity of the "ancient model" in Greece. Jasper Griffin argues that Greeks used the
Egyptians as "a stick with which Greeks beat other Greeks." Herodotus, for instance, "who
gaily grants so much to the Egyptians, preferred to do that rather than give any credit to his
Greek forerunner Hecataeus." Other writers, such as Tamara M. Green, are equally
skeptical about the possibility of assessing the validity of ancient Greek views of cultural
origins, because we operate according to canons of scientific historiography that are simply
meaningless in an ancient context. Nonetheless, considerable support for Bernal's thesis
has emerged among classical archaeologists, and it will be interesting to see how the
debate continues as the years progress. Sarah P. Morris, while sympathetic to Bernal's
thesis, points out an important fact that is obscured by Bernal's book: the reason why the
Aryan model was easily disseminated after the 18th century is that the Aryan model itself
had classical roots.
Although my concern in this paper is with the racist underpinnings of later classical
scholarship, I do want to note a few research questions that emerged in my reading of the
debate over the question of African/Semitic influences on Greek civilization. I vividly
remember some discussions I had with people after the first issue of Rhetorica appeared
some years ago, and how remarkable (not to mention eccentric) it was that someone was
actually studying Egyptian rhetoric. One question that is almost never discussed in
standard histories of rhetoric--and I am thinking of Kennedy's and Conley's here in
particular--is the question of the origin of rhetoric as a self-conscious practice. Kennedy
simply dismisses the question of rhetoric's origins in a footnote in The Art of Persuasion in
Ancient Greece. His comparison of Greek "rhetorical consciousness" with that of other
cultures simply assumes both the uniqueness of the Greek view and, somewhat
paradoxically, its universal applicability. His justification of a classical-rhetorical analysis
of the Christian biblical writings is a case in point. What one sees operating in Kennedy,
and in virtually every standard account of Greek rhetoric such as Corbett or The Rhetoric
of Western Thought is a remarkably sanitized version of ancient Greek culture. Fredric
Jameson characterizes the alternative view of ancient Greece that has emerged from
twentieth-century classical scholarship inspired by anthropology in this way, as "a culture
of masks and death, ritual ecstasies, slavery, scapegoating, phallocratic homosexuality, an
utterly non- or anti-classical culture to which something of the electrifying otherness and
fascination, say, of the Aztec world, has been restored." Yet this alternative view of ancient
Greece has yet to be integrated significantly into the study of classical rhetoric. There are
some interesting speculative attempts to account for the origins of rhetoric--Vincent
Farenga's wacky Derridean/Girardian article is one and Jacqueline de Romilly's is
another--but none seem to raise the question of Egyptian influences. I have always
suspected that there is a direct connection between the wisdom tradition of the Egyptian
courts and its further elaboration in the "Wisdom" literature of the Hebrew Bible (Proverbs,
for instance) with classical rhetoric than is usually discussed. Yet the peculiar isolation of
students of classical languages from the study of Hebrew and other Semitic languages
makes it difficult to explore those links. I wonder, too, if Egyptian ceremonial magic might
not underlie some of the traditions de Romilly explores.
John O. Ward has recently drawn our attention to the complex relationship between
rhetoric and magic from classical times through the Renaissance. He analyzes the social
forces underlying the conception of rhetoric as control and rhetoric as magic, a conceptual
split that may parallel Paul de Man's useful but undeveloped characterization of rhetoric as
suspended between trope and persuasion. A closer attention to the relative prestige of
Egyptian, Greek, and Roman texts in any given period in the history of rhetoric might help
us explore more completely the complex dialectic identified by Ward. A good example of
how ignoring Egypt may lead to misleading conclusions is the recent study of classical
republicanism in American history represented by the works of Wood, Bailyn, and Pocock.
Despite their persuasiveness, these works really do not engage the significance of
freemasonry for the republican tradition of the American framers.
Another recent example of how a Hellenocentric view can distort intellectual history
comes from recent scholarship in Judaica. Gershom Scholem, whose pathbreaking work on
Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah has been admired for years, and who has indirectly
had influence on contemporary literary and rhetorical theory through the work of Harold
Bloom, argued that Kabbalah was imported into Judaism from Greek and other Gnostic
sources, and that Kabbalah as we know it does not really date much before the early
Middle Ages. Moshe Idel, however, has demonstrated rather painstakingly that we have
good reasons to believe that Kabbalah is of ancient origin, and that it may be more accurate
to say that the mystical strain of ancient Judaism influenced what was to become
Gnosticism rather than the other way round. Idel does not say so, but is it possible that
Scholem, so ingrained with the spirit of German scholarship, tended to slight the
possibility of religious innovation in Judaism?
To summarize, not only does Bernal help draw our attention to the way in which rhetorical
scholars have ignored the question of the origins and legitimacy of Greek rhetorical
consciousness, but he helps us see that ignoring this question goes hand in hand with
devaluing the mystical, magical, and irrational side of the rhetorical tradition, a side that
the rationalistic view of rhetoric could so easily consign to the dark and savage realm of
the "Oriental."
I want to turn next to Bernal's second claim, that not only do we have good archaeological
and philological reasons to believe that the Ancient Model is valid, but that those good
reasons were systematically ignored or repressed by the racist, anti-Semitic, and imperalist
assumptions of German and British scholarship from the the 18th century onward. The
most persuasive arguments against Bernal's second claim come from Frank M. Turner,
whose work on the Victorians and ancient Greece is an important source for Bernal's work.
Turner's doubts center on the following arguments: First, despite the veneer of scientific
objectivity in Bernal's work, he is just as tendentious as the earlier scholars he criticizes.
Turner puts it this way, "Professor Bernal's work stands in the longer tradition of engaged,
polemical classical scholarship within which consideration of the ancient world is
subordinate to or at least on an equal level with a modern political or religious concern.
George Grote might not agree with Professor Bernal, but he would understand the nature
of the product." Second, Bernal's readings of classical scholarship rely too heavily on
secondary sources. We do not know enough about 18th century classical scholarship to
know if the Ancient Model really held sway until then. Bernal does not do enough
primary-source based, particularistic readings of, say, Niebuhr, really to justify his broad
claims. Instead we get ism-based explanation, whereby things called romanticism and
imperialism are used to explain historical processes, without enough attention to the
individual sources themselves. If we turn to the individual sources, we find relatively little
attention paid to what, for Bernal, is the central issues: the origins of ancient Greek culture.
Only five pages of Grote, for instance, deal with the issue. Third, it is possible to devise
other explanations for the ascendency of Greece during this period, explanations that have
little to do with racism, anti-Semitism, or imperialism. These explanations are twofold:
A. the contemporary concern with the fate of democratic regimes, and
B. the attempt to cope with the decline of biblical salvation history as a master narrative for
the West.
Turner points out that the chief concern of the British classicists, and British intellectuals
generally, in the 19th century was with democratic politics--whether democracy in itself
was the best regime and whether democratic regimes could control empires. "The political
character of ancient Egypt more than anything else excluded it from serious consideration
in terms of its relation to Greece. . . .It was not a polemically useful subject." In fact (and
here we are closer to a topic of interest to rhetoricians), even "more impressive than the
demise of Egypt from European discourse about antiquity was the demise of concern about
republican Rome." Turner also writes that the new prestige of the Greeks had much to do
with the rise of Darwinism and the decline of the Christian religion. The classicists sought
to find "an alternative history for the development of humankind to that recorded in
Hebrew scripture," as a way of escaping from the moral confines of Christian theological
anthropology. Neither of these arguments is to deny the influence of racism and
imperialism on 19th century British scholarship, but Bernal may err in attributing them
centrality. Bernal, in fact, according to Turner, may be missing the point by assuming a
higher level of professionalism in 19th century classical scholarship than actually existed.
Scientific consensus among 20th century archaeologists and classicists is a different animal
from the loose gentlemanly consensus of earlier "scholars."
Turner's criticisms are not really adequately responded to by Bernal in the APA paper
published in Arethusa, but I think there are some provocative implications raised by the
exchange that I wish to pursue here. First, how do we account for shifting fashions in
classical and philosophical and rhetorical scholarship? I know, for instance, that when I
was in graduate school Aristotle was required reading in classical rhetoric, but Cicero
tended to be read in selections only, and was never taken seriously as a theorist. Things
have changed considerably in recent years. Michael Leff has pointed out that even the
recent Aristotelian revival, by Beiner and others, is a heavily Ciceronianized Aristotle.
Thomas Conley persuasively points out in his recent history of rhetorical theory that
twentieth century rhetorical theory may be seen as a recovery of the Ciceronian more than
the Aristotelian tradition. We know that at some point "neo-Aristotelianism" took hold in
American speech scholarship, but it is still somewhat confusing when or how that took
place. The supposed founding document of neo-Aristotelianism, Wichelns' classic essay on
the literary criticism of oratory, only mentions Aristotle once, and is generally more
Ciceronian in spirit than Aristotelian. Thonssen and Baird's 1948 Speech Criticism is
explicitly Aristotelian. It is probably no accident, that as the more "liberal artsy" members
of the speech profession sought legitimation for their work there was a tendency to locate
authority in Aristotle rather than in Cicero. There may have been other dynamics at work
as well. Bernal's rejoinder to Turner points out a pattern in the political underpinnings of
scholarly admiration for particular societies: "The Enlightened scholars of the 18th century
admired big stable empires like Rome, Egypt, and China (these three went together), just
as the Romantics loved small and dynamic--unstable--societies like Greece and
Switzerland.
The history of rhetoric would provide an interesting test case for proving or disproving
Bernal's claim about the increasing influence of racism and anti-Semitism on 19th-century
classical scholarship. If Turner is correct that we need more individual case studies of the
period, then people like Whately or Grote might illustrate subtle shifts in the image of
Greece during this period. Mary Rosner's recent discussion of the reception of Cicero's
work in the nineteenth century suggests that matters may be considerably more
complicated than either Bernal or Turner realizes. Neither Turner's book nor the vastly
more entertaining but "anecdotal" Richard Jenkyns' The Victorians and Ancient Greece
discuss the fortunes of rhetoric and oratory during this period. It would be an interesting
exercise to trace the history of British attitudes toward classical rhetoric and its relationship
to contemporary political oratory in the 19th century. For our purposes, it is enough to note
that Bernal provides an explanation for the Aristotelian cast of Whately's Elements of
Rhetoric; although Whately's views were far more traditional than others, what has
remained unexplained until this point is why Aristotle's rhetoric became more influential in
the 19th-century than it ever had previously. A discussion of the shifting definitions of
logic as well as rhetoric in the nineteenth century would also be a useful research task
inspired by Bernal's thesis.
A final point concerns the relationship between the decline of rhetoric and the romantic
view of ancient Greece in the 18th and 19th century. Where I may part company with the
others on this panel is in my insistence that the best part of the Greco-Roman rhetorical
tradition was largely overturned precisely by the forces Bernal identifies. Although
certainly no Tory, Bernal does draw our attention to the degree to which racism and
anti-Semitism are essentially products of the Enlightenment. The rejection of the Jewish
and Christian notion of monogenesis of the races in favor of the more "scientific"
polygenesis illustrates how supposedly enlightened positions can be reactionary politically.
Similarly, the rejection of rhetoric went hand in hand with the Romantic racist emphasis on
ethnicity. The most significant passage here in Bernal comes during his discussion of the
Romantic concern, beginning at the University of Gottingen, with the history of peoples
and races and institutions: "A race was believed to change its form as it passed through
different ages, but always to retain an immutable individual essence. Real communication
was no longer perceived as taking place through reason, which could reach any rational
man. It was now seen as flowing through feeling, which could touch only those tied to
each other by kinship or 'blood' and sharing a common heritage." It is this racial focus that
was ultimately bound up with the displacement of rhetoric by something called "literature,"
especially the importance of a national literature in the England and the United States.
Terry Eagleton has demonstrated, persuasively I think, the deep interconnection among the
rise of literary studies, capitalism, and the decline of rhetoric. There was always a
clear-sighted focus on the reality of power and politics in the rhetorical tradition, however
reactionary its social uses, and this was something, especially given the decline of revealed
religion, that endangered the legitimacy of the capitalist state. Similarly, there was a
universalizing tendency in the argumentative side of the rhetorical tradition that was hardly
compatible with Romantic racism. I do believe it is possible to defend both rhetoric and
logic as formal systems of thought independent of particular cultural traditions, and I am a
little concerned about recent attempts, notably by post-structuralist feminists, to undermine
them.
This last comment leads me to the larger question of the canon and curricular reform with
which I began the paper. I am not comfortable with the attempts of some left academics to
brand either Bloom or Hirsch as at best ethnocentric or at worst racist--their own personal
histories on the issue of race are impeccable (we tend to forget that both are social
democrats politically). If one wants to see really racist accounts of the canon and curricular
issues one need only pick up a copy of the magazine Chronicles, where Paul Gottfried and
others have attacked even Bloom for not being sufficiently conservative. But where I do
believe that Bloom and Hirsch are caught up in the Romantic and Enlightenment currents
of racism is in their steadfast rejection of any attempt to think of education in formal rather
than content based terms. Cultural Literacy is caught up in one massive contradiction that,
to my knowledge, no commentator has noted. When, after an indictment of any notion of
formal or skills-based learning, Hirsch tries to provide an example of a work that illustrates
his principles of cultural literacy at work, the example he chooses is, of all things, Blair's
lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres. Bloom, equally a foe of anything resembling
formalism, at least recognizes the existence of significant tensions within Western culture,
notably the famed Straussian tension between Athens and Jerusalem, but there remains the
dogged emphasis on Socrates as the heroic figure in Western culture, an emphasis that,
despite Bloom's Straussian rejection of historicism, can finally be explained only in
historicist terms. I recently had the opportunity to look at a syllabus from the now
notorious Western Culture class at Stanford University, which my nephew took a few years
back. There we find the obligatory reading of Aristotle and Plato, but there is nary a
mention of Cicero nor any study of classical oratory. I fear that, racist-inspired or not,
"classical education" remains as much a myth now as it was in the nineteenth century.
I have tried to suggest some directions of conversation and research inspired by Bernal's
book. If we can ever transcend the current lack of civility in discussions of curricular
matters, Bernal helps us ask questions about the myth of origins underlying our study of
rhetoric, about directions in which that study might proceed when it has been divested of
European cultural arrogance, and about proper modes of explanation in writing the history
of European rhetorical theory. I would add, by way of a conclusion, that Bernal makes his
arguments in a way that should satisfy even the most committed partisan of the rational
side of the Western rhetorical tradition. After all, he is merely trying to help us makes good
on Western culture's claim to promote rationality and justice.
Originally presented at the Speech Communication Association
annual convention, Chicago, Illinois, November 1990. © 1996
James Arnt Aune. All rights reserved.
[Fragments Note: Aune taught at St. Olaf College when this
essay was written ]
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