Laying the Ladder Down: The Emergence of Cultural Holism (Critical Perspectives on Modern Culture) - Softcover

Craige, Betty Jean

Softcover

ISBN 10: 087023806X ISBN 13: 9780870238062

Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992

Synopsis

This timely and provocative book examines a fundamental shift in contemporary Western thought: the replacement of the traditional dualistic and hierarchical model of reality by a holistic one. Betty Jean Craige traces the emergence of this new paradigm to Charles Darwin, whose evolutionary theory exploded the idea of a fixed natural hierarchy and opened the way for a more egalitarian vision of human society as an evolving system of interdependent individuals and cultures.

Since Darwin's time, Craige argues, there has been an ongoing struggle in the West between these two conceptions of order, a clash that in recent years has manifested itself in volatile debates over sexual and racial equality, censorship, multiculturalism, "political correctness," the undergraduate curriculum, and the environment.

Craige analyzes each of these controversies and shows how they are at root reflective of the intellectual revolution that began more than a century ago. In one chapter she discusses the fundamentalist assault on Salman Rushdie; in another, the quarrel involving Robert Mapplethorpe and the National Endowment for the Arts. In still another she explores the powerful conservative backlash against the perceived threat to Western values, comparing it to the creationist attack on Darwin in the late nineteenth century.

About this title

About the Author:

Betty Jean Craige is professor of comparative literature at the University of Georgia. Her most recent book is Reconnection: Dualism to Holism in Literary Study.

From Publishers Weekly:

This provocative but incomplete study takes off from Darwin's theory of evolution to show how notions of inherent natural social hierarchies are giving way to a ``holistic'' theory of equal and interdependent cultural and social groupings. These competing claims are at play, according to Craige, in such current controversies as those about racial equality, multiculturalism and the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. Craige ( Reconnection: Dualism to Holism in Literary Study ) is on sure ground when addressing the past, showing how Matthew Arnold's hierarchical concept of culture reinforced the political status quo or how the approaches of Virginia Woolf to sexism and Martin Luther King to racism reject ``the concept of social order as naturally vertical.'' When contemplating the present, however, Craige becomes fuzzy, failing to fully address, for instance, why radical feminists and black nationalists reject their liberal forebears. She criticizes Allan Bloom and William Bennett for upholding the traditional curriculum of Western classics, suggesting that cultural holists should ``educate for the appreciation of cultural diversity.'' But she fails to consider how Western Enlightenment ideas might inspire non-Western cultures.

Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 087023806X
• ISBN 13: 9780870238062
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200