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.