Lunar Perspectives: Field Notes from the Culture Wars

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

What are the facts behind the current slogans concerning political
correctness, the decline (or collapse) of the culture upholding Western
civilization, the attacks on our universities as hotbeds of dangerous
political challenge? These are the questions that Michael Keefer, a
professor of English at the University of Guelph, attempts to answer
from a perspective that is removed from the brouhaha of immediate
gut-reaction and from the sensationalism of newspaper headlines—from
the distance of, say, the moon. Hence his title.

Keefer, from what it is fair to describe as a left-of-centre viewpoint,
is particularly concerned to counter the more extreme charges of
neoconservative ideologues. He brings cool arguments and hard facts to
bear on their exaggerated claims, and has little difficulty in disposing
of them. The real enemies, he asserts reasonably, are political
demagogues who are eager to control universities for their own
dangerously prejudiced ends. But—and I write from a more conservative
position than Keefer (though not a neoconservative one)—it would be a
mistake to assume that no better evidence can be assembled for cultural
crisis.

Keefer writes nobly in defence of universities and the importance of
free inquiry. He ranges widely from discussions of Platonic philosophy
to the motives behind recent wars and violences. But Keefer himself is
not, I think, as free from bias as he would have us believe. He is
certainly less rigorous in scrutinizing the arguments of his own side
than those of his opponents. Thus one would never guess from his
approving reference to Stephen Greenblatt as “one of the most
distinguished of contemporary Shakespearean critics” that Greenblatt
had been subjected (by Brian Vickers in Appropriating Shakespeare, for
instance) to just as devastating an attack as Keefer metes out to the
neoconservative Allan Bloom.

That reservation aside, this is a deeply sincere, cogently argued, and
admirably courageous book. It needs, however, to be read in the same
“spirit of ‘intellectual scepticism’” that he recommends for
books like John Fekete’s Moral Panic. And the movingly personal
dimension that makes it so impressively human a statement proves by the
same token that his perspective is decidedly not lunar.