Letter to the Editor: “Amherst Isn’t as Left as You May Think” — What Would Cervantes Say?

To the editor,

Managing Opinion Editor Caroline Flinn ’28’s March 4 piece, “Amherst Isn’t As Left as You May Think,” was like a protest song whose lyrics are always relevant because they carry a ring of truth that seldom changes with the passage of time. Students she describes as “politically noncommittal” and who “value ... balancing a condemnation of injustice with a reluctance to alienate friends,” who balance “abstract commitments to equity with an aversion to social conflict,” and who always seem to “keep things low-stakes and polite” represent to me the hypocritical genteel American type that Samuel Clemens made fun of in “Huckleberry Finn,” the ones whom Herman Melville raged against in “Moby-Dick,” and are no different from those tepid, gray souls he once described as solemn members of “churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.”

When Flinn adds that “a shocking number of students aren’t political at all — which, in a place that prides itself on intellectual seriousness and moral awareness, feels far more jarring ... than any opinion [she] could happen to disagree with,” I relate so strongly that when I think of that level of pre-larval blindness, especially when combined with the sheer stupidity and bottomless greed that sustains our current political and corporate world, it makes me so nauseous I want to move as far away as possible, and not just to another country but to another planet altogether (anywhere, that is, except Mars)!

As to her suggestions that students “align” their “stated values with” their “behavior,” and that “if you believe something is unjust, ask what you are willing to do about it — beyond discussing it,” I completely agree.

At the very least, I would hope that a growing number of Amherst College students adopt the dialectical style of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, who literary critic Harold Bloom describes as engaging in “playful” and “often humorous conversations,” that involve vigorous debates where “no thought on either side goes unchecked or uncritiqued.” For Cervantes has created two immortal amigos whose world views could not be more different and yet “mainly by courteous disagreement — most courteous when most sharply in conflict — gradually establish” an area of playful improvisation that the rest of us can “ponder” and enjoy.  

Jim Knight ’69

From “The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages” by Harold Bloom