ABSTRACT
It is customary to begin essays of this kind with an arresting quotation from an eminent source, a practice that both displays the author’s ostensible erudition and covertly betrays his need to draw on an external authority to support the argument he is about to make. In order to remain true to this time honored convention, I have chosen as my opening text the following passage from Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, written in 1966:
In short, to put it even more bluntly, the Holocaust has finally and irrevocably exposed the lie that supporters of culture and the humanities have promulgated for centuries in order to justify their existence: the claim that the pursuit of what we usually call “high culture” is somehow a humanizing endeavor, nurturing what R.S. Crane once called “the virtues and knowledge that separate men most sharply from the lower animals.”2 The harsh truth, acording to Adorno, is revealed instead in what he called a “magnificent line” of Bertolt Brecht’s: “the mansion of culture is built of dogshit.”3
