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Respect is Goodby STEPHEN J. POPE · Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Respect: An Exploration. Reading, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1999. 230pp.+notes. $23.00 (cloth). Professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot is a sociologist and Professor of Education at Harvard University. She is the author of many works on education and related matters and is a recipient of various academic awards, including the prestigious MacArthur Prize. This latest contribution brings together various themes found in her other works. It is written for an educated audience of nonspecialists and would therefore be helpful in undergraduate ethics courses, especially as she always connects abstract principles to concrete people, stories, and actions. The general theme of the book is that respect is a necessary component of the good life, including its dimensions as personal, interpersonal, and communal. We see clearly that terrible results follow actions that do not show respect, but we can also see the moral necessity of respect for any humanly decent relationships. Lawrence-Lightfoot rejects what she terms the "traditional" notion of respect that accords esteem with rank and social status, often of an inherited sort. She desires to "shape a new view of respect" that is egalitarian, that generates equality between people, mutual empathy, and connections of solidarity. She never actually defines clearly or offers an explanation of the conceptual core of the idea of respect. In any case, the book tries to dismantle hierarchies and other forms of domination -- e.g., between teacher-student, nurse-patient, etc. -- and to put in their place a sense of shared humanity, compassion, and equality. Lawrence-Lightfoot believes that respect has six "qualities": empowerment, healing, dialogue, curiosity, self-respect, and attention. She devotes one chapter of her book to each of these qualities. The strength of the book lies in the way it interprets these qualities through concrete narratives, and I would suggest that this book is best read as a popular meditation on various virtues. Lawrence-Lightfoot writes in an attractive, breezy style that is not too taxing. She illumines empowerment by talking about Jennifer Dohrn, a nurse-midwife; healing through the actions of pediatrician Johynye Ballenger; dialogue through the work of teacher Kay Cottle; curiosity in light of Dawoud Bey, artist and photographer; self-respect as expressed in the dignity of law professor David Wilkins; and attention as exhibited in the pastoral care of Episcopal priest Bill Wallace. The narrative focus of the book, however, also brings with it certain philosophical liabilities. Contrary to the expressed wishes of the author, it really offers nothing new concerning the notion of respect. Through striving for a kind of simplicity of theory, she never shows philosophically what respect itself actually means nor how its various "qualities" are coherently related to one another. She seems to want to say that respect gives rise to attention, which of course is true, but so do a lot of other motivations that run a spectrum from the desire to manipulate to the simple assent to contemplative awe. Lawrence-Lightfoot would have gained immensely from the writings of Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch on attention, but they are not consulted. Paying attention is quite difficult in many circumstances: after all, how attentive can one be to the human beings flooding through Grand Central Station at 7:30 a.m. on Monday morning? Respect ought to also lead to dialogue, but so can other attitudes -- e.g., compassion or spiritual training in religious communities -- and they cannot all be reduced to one megavirtue called "respect." Part of the difficulty that confronts Lawrence-Lightfoot is her reliance on a loose method of common-sense phenomenology. She works with the premise that respect is the primary virtue of the moral life in our society, and so finds everything good -- from curiosity to healing, from dialogue to attention -- to be somehow or other a reflection of respect. This leaves her with a problem, though, which is that there seems nothing left for the other virtues to do. What happens to the cardinal virtue of temperance and its distinctive attributes, norms, and subsidiary virtues? Or the virtue of courage? Or even justice, for that matter? Throwing different "angles of vision" on experience is fine, but it does not help to do so only through the narrow lens of one virtue or moral attitude. Lawrence-Lightfoot would have been able to avoid this difficulty by giving serious attention to at least a little of the philosophical literature on her topic. Self-respect, and respect for persons generally, has been treated in great detail by neo-Kantian philosophers like Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Alan Gewith, and Onora O'Neill. The same is true of the writings of Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch on attention, Martin Buber and Emmanuel Monier on dialogue, etc. Unfortunately, then, the book, while interesting and perhaps a light read for a class of young students, does not fulfill its stated objective of providing a new theory of respect. STEPHEN J. POPE Acting Out Realities· Alvin Kernan, In Plato's Cave. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. 309pp. $14.95 (cloth) "This is all much more fun in remembrance than it was in fact," Alvin Kernan admits in the middle of this captivating intellectual memoir (93), but even the memories come with a certain pain that pushes beyond nostalgia and into the realm of anguish. The anxiety is both personal and professional, the former centering on doubts of a garlanded niche in the temple of America's great intellectual leaders, the latter focusing on the worrisome structural change in higher education. Vacillating between Hector and Jeremiah, Kernan entertains while he laments, confides while he ridicules. The mix is heady soap opera, at times, amazingly blunt and insightful philosophical history, at others, and always an intellectually stimulating read. This is an important book at the close of the millennium, since it offers an insider's view of the American system of higher education and takes no prisoners in its assault on the personal politics and careerist posturing of colleagues who have left Kernan marveling that anybody who passes through America's schools can recognize the shadows on the wall as something less than Reality. The narrative follows the author's life, showing his impressive rise from a boyhood in Wyoming, through lots of elbow grease and some fortunate breaks, to his present position as senior advisor in the humanities at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The principal topics originate in Kernan's engagement with ideas, and he charts the age in which he has lived by describing the influences that shaped his now rather conservative views. Beginning at Columbia University, which he did not like and where he remained only one year, Kernan comes alive at Williams College (1946-49). We are offered brief mention of sexual escapades and a marriage, but the life of the book is in the world of ideas. Thus, he reads Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture and remarks that it "changed [his] entire way of understanding human culture during an evening's reading" (1). The change is from an enlightenment concept of a universal human type to a phenomenological recognition of wildly varying cultures -- "Apollonian Zunis alongside the Dionysiac Dobu and the paranoid Kwakiutl, each acting out a different reality" (22). It is an observation that readers of his book do well to recall, as he moves on to two years at Oxford, graduate school at Yale, and then to academic and administrative positions as Yale and Princeton. The fascination with diversity that informed his early years seems gradually to be replaced with dread and annoyance, even if couched in resigned tones of inevitability. In a nutshell, his book is an attempt to demonstrate, in a very personal way, his contention that "democratic tendencies in higher education, while praiseworthy in many ways, have gone too far" (299). The "different realities" that, first, various writers seem to be envisioning and, later, various ethnic and "politically correct" groups intensely champion, before long seem to keep him awake at nights not by their mind-expanding challenge to accepted paradigms, but by their troublesome naivete, ineptitude, unfairness, and tendency to successfully browbeat Kernan's employers. "Multiculturalism and ethnicity were already slouching toward New Haven" (86). Kernan's description of these rough beasts (to complete the Yeats reference) and of others of their ilk is graphic and fair, but always lurking in the air is the whiff of something fascinating that has left the room. It is all couched in facts: between 1960 and 1995 college enrollments soared from 3.5 million to 12.25 million; women's share of the total number of enrolled students increased from 37 percent to 55.5 percent, and minorities from 12 percent to 25 percent; etc. By 1990 university presses sold only about 500 copies of new monographs, and these mostly to libraries. Something like 60 percent of adult Americans never read a book of any kind. In this process of educational change, ivory towers have been transformed into expensive trade schools; Eurocentrism has been upended; teaching and research are now "politicized and treated as instruments of popular reform" (xv). Little wonder that he quotes with relish from David Lodge's hilarious academic novels, Changing Places and Small World, which skewer the preeners and the pulers in the ivied halls. But Kernan demonstrates that reality is just as delicious as anything Lodge could invent (though, in one of the delights of Kernan's own book, he lets us in on the roman a clef and reveals who's who in Lodge's novels, and in others of the sort). Plato's cave, in Kernan's fortunate and graced life, is peopled with scintillating thinkers, and the pages of his book provide an impressive Who's Who in academia in the last thirty years -- and he knew them, studied with them, debated them. So his method of contending with the issues in his book, while incorporating statistics where appropriate, is to give a thumbnail sketch of an individual's theories (Foucault, Derrida, Bloom, deMan -- you name it) that is marvelously clear, and then to show how someone else took a bit from here, a bit from there, and moved "forward" (though the reader is often left wondering about the direction, as Kernan wishes). In Plato's Cave is especially compelling for those in literary studies, who may know many of the principals who have the misfortune to draw Kernan's fire: Tom McFarland, Maragaret Doody, Stanley Fish, Stephen Greenblatt, and the occasional benighted grad student. His biggest regret, judging from this study, is the fact that contemporary education reflects the contemporary scene, where relativism has taken such a strong stand against received truths. In the days of Northrop Frye, Talcott Parsons, Margaret Mead, B. F. Skinner, et al., there was, he remembers, "an enormous optimism that energized the entire academic enterprise" because "it was possible to do something meaningful, to understand the totality of things. That feeling of great achievement is gone now, almost without a trace, disappearing into its own impossibility" (272). Such a description, and of himself as a "quite ordinary professor" (258), suggest that he recognizes the limits of that earlier age, but wishes (in a personal way forgivable in a memoir) that such a Camelot might have lasted. STEPHEN J. POPE is Associate Professor in the Department of Theology at Boston College. Copyright of Cross Currents is the property of Association for Religion & Intellectual Life and its content may not be copied without the copyright holder's express written permission except for the print or download capabilities of the retrieval software used for access. This content is intended solely for the use of the individual user.
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