Intellectuals in America part 4

I told you I would get back on track, but then, fearless reader, I'm sure you believed in me.

This post is in response to Martha Nussbaum, whose original essay in Dissent is relatively inoffensive, if also not particularly original. There are a few interesting points here, most of which I agree with.

Nussbaum first addresses the relationship between the intellectual and popular culture. She goes for the nuanced approach - saying that that popular culture can't be ignored, but also can't be embraced. After all, popular culture is anti-intellectual and just looking at the new media (ie - blogs), she makes a claim for reading books, with which I am whole-heartedly in agreement. My favorite line: " . . . thinking is slow and rigorous and . . . does not always go well with the fast pace and the flash of popular culture." Amen.

Next, Nussbaum makes a case for the protections of the academy. Here, I think she is on shaky ground - the academy is the state. Intellectual activity that happens within the academy is therefore suspect by the disenfranchised, even when it makes a claim to represent the interests of the disenfranchised. She wonders, "how much more [John Stuart] Mill could have written had he not had a day job." I wonder if Mill would have written the same stuff had he been a part of the power structure (even in opposition).

She makes a claim for intellectuals engaging in the broader society through thinking, writing and teaching, but how much intellectual work filters through? Is that really engagement, I don't think so. She rightly questions the wisdom of getting involved politically in administration (citing a friend's experience in the Obama White House), but there seems to me that political involvement for intellectuals can be a lot more than working for politicians.

In fact, this is the big blind spot that I think we have - Left-wing intellectuals have cultivated an elitist detachment from society, while assuaging any guilt about this through intellectual pursuits that claim solidarity with working people. But when it comes down to it, political involvement no longer involves getting down and dirty with the masses. That possibility is never entertained - the ivory tower is isolating and narrows the sorts of ideas that intellectuals see as meaningful.

Nussbaum also takes a stab at the citizenship question, and I pretty much agree with her here as well. She says she is a world citizen first, but recognizes that the concept of the nation can be a powerful force for good in the world. She paraphrases Mazzini, "patriotism of the right sort is an essential source of political stability and, ultimately, of global concern." Essentially, the point is that the nation is an idea that most people can understand and rally around - the concept is an effective tool to unity. World citizenship is very much a passionless idea - who gets excited about being a citizen of the world? It's not distinctive. Of course, when people see the distinctions between nations as real differences, that passion can be dangerous. Nussbaum then references Nehru's "Tryst with Destiny" speech as exemplifying the kind of national feeling that can be deeply moral. I was not familiar with the speech before, but it really is quite powerful.

The implication of this line of thinking is that we can't be scared of nationalism - it is a tool for unity, and ultimately it is something that will exist whether we want it to or not. Rather, we should get on board and celebrate our nation and use that unity to promote our values. Although the Left is more or less culturally ascendant (and has been - even in the Bush years) the Left has purposefully made itself politically irrelevant by rejecting the idea that American nationalism can be a positive force. This would go a long way towards explaining why the Right continually wins politically by exploiting people's cultural fears.

The Truth

The plan was to go straight through all of the Dissent pieces on "Intellectuals in America" without interruption, but I'm sorry. I've been procrastinating and pre-occupied and then I came across this gem while reading the Boston Globe online. I promise, I'll be back on task in the relatively near future.

I swear it all started with a Globe blog comparing TX and MA on progressive criminal legislation - apparently Texas has nixed their life without parole laws for juveniles, while MA has 57 lifers doing time for crimes they committed when younger than 18.

Anyway - apparently Paul Pierce of the Celtics also blogs - under the tag-line "Boston Celtics captain speaks The Truth and nothing but"

Before I get started - the easiest and perhaps most unfair critique is to point out the irony (hypocrisy?) that at the end of each post on The Truth is a small byline reading: "As told to Globe Reporter Julian Benbow", which means that Mr. Pierce cares so much about the The Truth, he can't be bothered to write it himself.

If you haven't figured it out by now, I'm not such a fan of celebrity culture, but I was interested in exactly what Truth Mr. Pierce claimed to be espousing. It turns out The Truth isn't about class war or racism or environmental degradation or health care or, you know, the issues that one might call important. No, our latest Truth is about how much Paul Pierce is looking forward to proving his skills in the 3-point shootout. Damn, I'm glad I got that dose of Truth. Perhaps I'm jaded and old (or maybe those are true, but irrelevant) but I sort of thought the Truth could be powerful. As in - people risked their lives "speaking Truth to Power".

To be fair, his prior post is about Haiti and I suppose I can concede that there is some merit to his linking of tragedy from the general: Haiti, New Orleans, to the specific: his being stabbed. But my problem is that he misses a larger opportunity to talk about The Truth. Hundreds of thousands died in Haiti because of the earthquake and we talk about it being a natural disaster. But Chile experiences a bigger quake and the number of deaths are a fraction. The tragedy in Haiti has a lot less to do with the natural disaster than most people think and a lot more to do with the history of American imperialism, Cold War politics and racism than most people are willing to admit. That, fearless reader, is The Truth.

Intellectuals in America part 3

Jackson Lears submission to Dissent's symposium is laudable for the primacy he places on the role of the intellectual (though as you probably can guess by now, I have qualifications - as in, we need more than just intellectuals). Intellectuals have their role - especially in challenging the status quo, but if that is all, then intellectuals end up self-marginalized. Especially if intellectuals get lost in their own complexities.

Lears' praise of his professors' ability to "foster a critical spirit in their students" hints at perhaps a further problem - fostering a critical attitude is not the same as building a movement. A critical attitude is important, but if all you can do is criticize, what good are you, exactly? I'm currently also reading John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society (incidently, the origin of the phrase "the conventional wisdom"), which in part reviews the history of economics as a discipline. Galbraith points out that one of the original economists, David Ricardo, pointed out the problems of capitalism, but maintained that it was inevitable - human nature. His theories are not hopeful, they're pretty depressing actually. Life sucks and then you die type stuff. If leftists want to move beyond that, it needs to be something deeper than a critical attitude, it needs to be a reformist attitude, or a progressive attitude, or a movement attitude, or something. If everybody's a critic, who's making the movie?

Lears goes on to ask the questions the Left has generally been asking since the end of the counter-cultural movements in the late 60s, early 70s - what went wrong? How did the counter-culture become mainstreamed? The "hippies" of today aren't challenging the status quo - neither the old fogies who have acculturated to the mainstream, or their youthful counterparts who see hippie-dom as a cultural choice of "free expression" and not the challenge to capitalistic norms that many purported it to be. And I think the crux of the questions is there - for some sub/counter cultures are about challenging the system at its cultural root, but for the vast majority of people, those alternative cultures are just a means of expression - an opportunity to "rebel" on the surface, a pose, a posture, but no deeper identification with the politics of revolution. This goes for every subculture - beat, hippy, punk, hip hop. Once corporate America understands that they can make money off of marketing a particular "style", it is all over. From my perspective, once punk stopped being diy and was something that you could purchase at Newbury Comics or, even worse, Hot Topic, I knew that was the death of punk. The movement ceased having any real meaning as a socio-political-cultural critique of the capitalistic mainstream and instead had become merely about how one dressed, what music one listened to - a cultural marker that was all surface.

Lears continues with an explication of Gramsci's impact - the analysis of cultural hegemony (perhaps this is what compromises every counterculture movement . . .) and the realization on the Left that the people aren't literally brainwashed by the obvious, but that it is about culture - what is accepted (or unaccepted). Here, I think Lears misunderstands the nuance of the position he states, for he seems to blame the media - it's the media that creates the culture. But no, the media only reflects the culture in which it is created. Sure the media is important, but so are the churches, the politicians, the schools, and maybe most importantly, your friends and neighbors. The problem is much more complex than people are willing to give credit for. We want easy answers - or easy boogeymen. If only the media reported things differently, it would be a Brave New World. Or not. If the media reports things contrary to what the culture finds acceptable, it only means that the culture rejects the media as a source of credible information. Look at the Right's treatment of mainstream media today. Culturally, what the media reports makes no sense - never mind the Truth.

Where I think that Lears is spot on, is his assertion that the Right has learned the lessons of Antonio Gramsci better than the Left. On the one hand, some might argue that the Left, of course, is at a disadvantage by definition. The Right wants to keep the culture the way it is (more or less), the Left wants to change it. This means that the Left is in the business of cultural creation, while all the Right has to do is defend what already exists. Unfortunately, the Left seems to think they can cherry-pick their causes, or to put it another way, the Left seems to think they can work within the system, when what they really are trying to do is reinvent the system.

On the other hand, America seems to have a contradictory set of values and perhaps the Left just needs to do a better job of living up to/disseminating/what have you, the values that it emphasizes. Of course, this is made only more difficult by the "critical attitude" which tends to reject everything.

Lears goes on to point out the limits of identity politics, while at the same time acknowledging the understandability of the movement in that direction. The obvious limitation being the fragmentation and ultimately, what Tony Judt might see as an anti-humanitarian streak - the tendency for cultural studies to devolve into the study of us by us, which creates a lack of understanding among peoples. Lears uses a turn of phrase to describe another issue with where this led: "a kind of left-wing Reaganism" that celebrated the cult of the individual, at the expense of community and what the Left would describe as social-consciousness.