culture wars « YDS: The Clare Spark Blog

July 15, 2010

Index to Black Power blogs

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarespark @ 9:33 pm
Tags: identity politics, culture wars, Ralph Bunche, whiteness studies, Martin Luther King, Jr., Pacifica Radio, Black Power, Judith Bernstein, NEH, NEA, state worship

: Judith Bernstein’s allusion to Black Power

Illustrated is an invitation to feminist artist Judith Bernstein’s new exhibition of work not seen since 1973. Her work was famously censored by the Philadelphia Museum of Art because it was seen as incendiary and a representation of black (phallic) power.

What follows is an index to blogs dealing with source materials that demonstrate the upper-class enabling of the black power movement, thus co-opting the integrationist civil rights movement. It is worth noting that when Ralph Bunche was on the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation, he suggested a pilot program that would begin to break up urban ghettoes by gradually integrating them into small towns and cities. If memory serves (I refer to Sir Brian Urquhart’s biography), the Rockefeller Foundation did nothing and Bunche resigned.

It is also important that the Bunche Center at UCLA has predictably become an advocate of separatism, with Charles Henry, UC Berkeley professor and keynote speaker at the conference I participated in (2004), insisting that Bunche had converted to black power at the end of his life. There is no evidence for that in Bunche’s papers: quite the contrary. Was he angry at the slow pace of progress? Yes. Did he renounce integrationism? No. Would he approved of the term “African American”? No way: he was a proud American who believed that blacks had helped build this country and wanted no other label than that of “American.” His biographer understood this and subtitled his life of Bunche with this: “An American Life.”

http://clarespark.com/2009/08/18/storming-pacifica-revising-my-view-of-pacifica-history-july-22-1999/

http://clarespark.com/2009/09/26/nea-neh-and-cultural-freedom-not/

http://clarespark.com/2009/10/05/arne-duncans-statism-part-one/.

http://clarespark.com/2009/10/05/arne-duncans-statism-part-two/

http://clarespark.com/2009/10/09/conflict-resolution-ralph-bunches-nobel-prize-3/.

http://clarespark.com/2009/10/10/ralph-bunche-and-the-jewish-problem/.

http://clarespark.com/2009/10/19/finians-rainbow-washes-out-red/.

http://clarespark.com/2009/10/22/identity-and-race/

http://clarespark.com/2009/10/26/answer-to-a-comment-from-a-pacifica-producer/

http://clarespark.com/2009/10/31/the-offing-of-martin-luther-king-jr-and-ralph-bunche/

http://clarespark.com/2009/11/02/a-ride-through-the-culture-wars-in-academe/

http://clarespark.com/2010/07/04/pacifica-radio-and-the-progressive-movement/.

http://clarespark.com/2010/07/18/white-elite-enabling-of-black-power/

Comments (1)

January 2, 2010

Jottings on the culture wars: both sides are wrong

Filed under: 1 — clarespark @ 9:55 pm
Tags: Adorno, culture wars, Gramsci, Locke, Lukacs, Marcuse, Marx, New Left, Robert Filmer

Ad, Harvard Magazine, Nov.-Dec. 2009

[This blog should be read along with http://clarespark.com/2009/12/18/assimilation-and-citizenship-in-a-democratic-republic/.] It is true that politics are messy, by contrast, sociology as the product of German Idealism, is not. Look back to Herder, Goethe and their successors who promoted a rooted cosmopolitanism. Their identity politics are tied to the utopian longing for stable national (or international) identity where its mosaic bits assume a beautiful pattern, stretching and yawning perhaps, but not confused, not switching, not turning on each other. With the mosaic in place (i.e., all “ethnic” groups embraced and expressing themselves, but monomaniacs/socially irresponsible capitalists cut out), hostility/prejudice will become irrational: “inclusiveness” and state regulation will have removed rational sources of disaffection. [1]

The identity that matters to enlightened “moderates” equates “totalitarianism of the Left and Right” leaving pluralistic “liberal” democracy as the emancipated, yet irrationalist, alternative. However, the antifascist pluralism they represent is not the liberalism of the revolutionary bourgeoisie but a shattering of what is stigmatized as the Egotistical Sublime (Ariadne’s enthusiasm for labyrinths, or the long view of history.). Following conservative sociologists (e.g., Max Weber, a German patriot and supporter of the Weltkrieg), their social world is packed into separate categories: political, economic, and the cultural, yet the latter has a life of its own that cancels the politics and economic interest; human competence is dissolved into Negative Capability, at best, grasping only fragments. The New Pluralism-without-Snakes-and-Spiders merges the individual with its “ethnic (multicultural) communities”–all joyously “fused” in the state (or is it the Great Chain of Being? or nowhere at all? is the state both there and not there?): a totally mystical “public interest” in societies with antagonisms between the owning classes and those dependent on them, the latter with nowhere to go. This corporatist liberal “web and woof” is the spiritual hammock supporting us against “totalitarianism” of both the Left and Right. Where do the left-populists and social democrats fit in? How can there be anti-racist politics while thinking in racialist terms?[2] All the questions I have raised are intertwined with the larger debate over epistemology: Heraclitus vs. Bacon and the empiricists. How do ordinary people, responsible for exercising the duties of citizenship, relying upon observation, study, and experience, know that their actions and judgments are not the products of a flawed methodology?

This blog, like others on this website, addresses the contemporary crisis in the humanities, a feverish condition said by some Rightists to have been imposed by Gramsci, Lukács, Frankfurt School critical theorists such as Adorno and Marcuse, and New Leftists who have taken the strategic heights in education and social policy. With the ascendancy of Reagan republicanism, revisions of the literary canon and the history curriculum generated by multiculturalism, feminism, and black nationalism have been seen by some conservatives as mindless new developments leading to resurgent antisemitism and neofascism. I share their concerns, but many conservatives cannot defend their own records nor can they reform the reformers, for they have not situated curriculum reform within the problematic of “democratic pluralism” and its vicissitudes, a venue created by “pragmatic” conservatives long before the “tenured radicals” of the 1960s generation began their “Left” stampede.[3] As an artist and scholar familiar with some of the history of antidemocratic propaganda, psychological warfare, and censorship, I am disappointed and impatient with the scholars who have taken part to date. I see mostly polarization and self-righteousness, little self-criticism or generosity or insight: more feints among different factions of counter-Enlightenment vying for the vanguard position, each waving the banner for humanitarian values and methodological sophistication. I see little robust intellectual confrontation between radicals, liberals and conservatives. And the wars rage on and on, spurred by the dubious appropriations of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and chaos theory.[4] Underneath the chatter and jargon and ad hominem insults to colleagues and to humanity at large, the questions of greatest importance to our survival lie buried; no reform strategies can be formulated without answers, and the questions are susceptible to empirical investigation: Is there or is there not inevitable class exploitation in bourgeois democracies? Can social democratic reform remove what the revolutionary left insists are structural antagonisms? Are contracts between persons, corporations, and nations contracts at all if one party is coerced by the other? And who shall adjudicate disagreements if the weaker party balks? If many people are oppressed, how shall they organize themselves to redress grievances, or should we breed a race of supermen? Are modernization and industrialization really destroying the planet? If so, what, if any, mass activity could halt or reverse the destruction? What are the responsibilities of families, schools, corporations and the media in providing the critical and emotional tools to understand and ameliorate our worsening condition? Have they ever done so?

Here come the masterless men. As hitherto orchestrated and conducted, the culture wars have diverted attention from these life-and-death issues, as perhaps they were intended to, as they have always done. Nor have conservatives admitted the source of their anxieties: the tender moment of late adolescence when young people are separating from families of origin and lacking family responsibilities that later on might discourage political radicalism. Conservative social psychologists applying the lessons of psychological warfare are alert to the power of modern fiction in making subversive notions attractive and acceptible. Take the case of Herman Melville and his “elusive” or “ambivalent” texts, which though apparently conservative or reactionary, have aroused the energies of expert propagandists of the Right who fear his effect on young readers. For instance, some noted psychological warriors have explained how radical messages may be smuggled into harmless appearing fantasies, making stressed readers more receptive to new ideas, ideas they would normally reject as alien if encountered in an explicitly political context:

”…Of crucial significance may be those who are under strain, ambivalent, at once torn between loyalty to patriotic values and to the new values being offered by the communicator. Such a segment may be a crucially important target, and it is necessary to understand the nature of its ambivalence and the implications for psychological warfare possibilities. While such a segment is drawn to the new values, its allegiance to the old is made more compulsive by guilt feeling evoked by its attraction to the new. Among such a population we should expect strong ritualistic conformity which would serve to deny evidences of hospitality to the alien values. Beneath this ritualism, however, we should also expect to find the repressed side of the ambivalence, the side which represents a disposition to espouse the new values.

Research is now needed on the readiness of individuals under strain to accept communications which represent both the expressed and the repressed sides of their ambivalence. It has been suggested that such individuals will reject any overt statement of the repressed side; but that they may pay attention if the repressed value is expressed in fictional form, so that it may be received on the level of fantasy, thus protecting the receiver from the need to decide whether or not he believes, or is willing to accept, such a conflicting value. It is our belief that research along lines such as these would have far reaching operational usefulness for psychological warfare.” [5]

Such sophisticated machinations at the highest levels of government suggest why apparently harmless cultural artifacts as the novels students read in high school and college can fluster vigilant ideologues.

Blunted tools have brought us to the current impasse over teaching methods, curriculum, and standards. We are besieged by crazy-making, historically incorrect specters of our own fully feeling, fully thinking selves: The modern artist as slipping Titan, the obsessive Faustian autodidact, the obsequious romantic lover, the miscegenating rootless cosmopolitan, the vindictive muckraker. Their unpardonable sin is the bad news that uncontrollable curiosity and unbalanced temperaments have shoved in our faces: there are or may be class antagonisms that cannot be reconciled by conservative reform, i.e., by negotiation and adjustments that do not severely threaten the economic interests of ruling classes. So the hyperindividualistic bad Jew is converted to “the new historicism”and disappears into “community” as defined by others; the judenrein center finds itself ensconced in the administered state.[6] 1930s intellectuals sometimes called this condition fascism; today it is more benignly labeled ‘multiculturalism,’ and is touted as the remedy for prejudice, scapegoating, and intolerance. As social policy its longevity has been guaranteed by state, foundation, and university funding. To speak against it incites accusations of Right-wing racism and worse. Don’t bother applying for a CPB grant or a job in public broadcasting if you disdain the multicultural narrative of world history as racial/ethnic conflict, the genocide and ecocide perpetrated by “white males” or “the West”–a sad story that new textbooks, curricula, and television or radio programs celebrating “diversity” will bring to a happy end.

Although “Left” and “Right” have been internally at loggerheads over this social policy, all parties agree that insurgent blacks, women, and gays of the New Left initiated and now preside over the new wave of reform. Before that (the early 1970s), an unbroken, unchallenged master narrative of Western progress is said to have reigned in academe and the media. For the hard Right, the narrative was rational, unified and benign; for the hard Left (including anti-imperialist whites, people of color, and women, but not materialists), the narrative was entirely malignant; for the “moderate” critics straddling both positions, the narrative was contradictory and ambiguous, but would be resynthesized with the vigorous new blood and perspectives of the hitherto excluded, the better to launch a really Enlightened non-Marxist New New Left.[7]

My work takes none of these idealist positions, but seeks to document some of the major thinkers and social movements that promoted cultural policies coinciding with their perceived class interests. No materialist has publicized the history of multiculturalism or “identity politics,” a history which cannot be deciphered without recalling competing prewar definitions of fascism, protofascism, and antifascism. Hence I reject as ideologically distorted previous attempts to periodize the culture wars. I suspect that the media, publishing, and academe are structurally precluded from describing the origins of this dispute for fear of damage done to the reputations of most postwar “liberal” intellectuals, whether positioned on the Left, Right or Center. Nobody wants to say he has been successful by conforming to pseudo-democratic institutions, in some ways indistinguishable from their analogs in Germany and Italy before 1945; nobody wants to admit he is suffering from a massive failure of nerve.

So-called multiculturalism is a reactionary ideological offensive that confused individuals with groups and suppresses economic explanations for conflict and change in favor of cultural anthropological ones.[8] As a manifestation of German Romanticism, it was an aesthetic theory buttressing a political structure: an irrationalist völkisch “aristo-democracy” (Herder).[9] The German Romantics and their popularizers in England and America, men like Carlyle and Emerson, waved their supple poetic individuality, unique, yet imperceptibly diffused into race and nation and time itself as Schlegel had advised. The aristo-democrats were the blooming correctives to the dessicating “mechanical” rationalism and universalism that had undergirded popular sovereignty for the seventeenth-century political theorist of constitutional democracy, John Locke. In the eighteenth century, Piranesi would visualize this Lockean world in a series of engravings, his nightmarish urban spaces/prisons. Lord Byron counterattacked with Lockean Prometheans, images of indomitable humanity: fatherless, yet kind, ameliorative and intellectually fortified. In the later nineteenth century, Piranesi’s desolate, gigantic scenes of torture would reappear in James Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night, the City ruled by numeracy and literacy personified in Melencolia, the Queen patterned after both Dürer’s famous image of writer’s block, and George Eliot, Thomson’s contemporary, the realist novelist, author of Felix Holt, Radical.

I have mentioned just a few instances of cultural conflict over accountability: the culture wars are fought over you and me, non-experts in an advanced, complex, and hierarchical, yet “democratic” industrialized society. Confident in the capacity of ordinary people to test their betters, Locke, like ourselves, was up against centuries of conservative antidemocratic propaganda on behalf of a tribal or feudal order where either Nature or arbitrary authority were taken for granted as immovable. Not surprisingly, social obligations (contracts) were vertical, links in the Great Chain of Being, not horizontal agreements between equals, each party theoretically free to walk away from a bad deal. Locke’s antagonistic contemporary, the proto-Tory Robert Filmer (d. 1653) summarized centuries of antidemocratic wisdom in his Patriarcha:

[Filmer:] I know not how to give a better character of the people than can be gathered from such authors as have lived among or near to popular states. Thucydides, Xenophon, Livy, Tacitus, Cicero and Sallust have set them out in their colours. I will borrow some of their sentences.

‘There is nothing more uncertain than the people: their opinions are as variable and sudden as tempests: there is neither truth nor judgment in them: they are not led by wisdom to judge of anything, but by violence and rashness, nor put they any difference between things true and false. After the matter of cattle they follow the herd that goes before: with envious eyes they behold the felicity of others: they have a custom always to favor the worst and weakest: they are most prone to suspicions, and use to condemn men for guilty upon every false suggestion. They are apt to believe all news, especially if it be sorrowful, and, like Fame, they make it more in the believing: when there is no author, they fear those evils which they themselves have feigned: they are most desirous of new stirs and changes, and are enemies to quiet and rest. Whatsoever is giddy or headstrong, they account manly and courageous, but whatever is modest or provident seems sluggish: each man hath a care of his particular, and thinks basely of the common good: they look upon approaching mischiefs as they do upon thunder, only every man wisheth it may not touch his own person. It is the nature of them: they must either serve basely or domineer proudly, for they know no mean.’ Thus do their own friends paint to the life this beast of many heads. Let me give you the cypher of their form of government. As it is begot by sedition, so it is nourished by arms: it can never stand without wars, either with an enemy abroad, or with friends at home. The only means to preserve it is to have some powerful enemy near, who may serve instead of a king to govern it, that so, that they have not a King over them, for the common danger of an enemy keeps them in better unity than the laws they make themselves. [10]

The foil to all this irrationality is of course the reformed queen/king; the paragon of moderation has renounced absolutist, arbitrary rule for a limited, constitutional monarchy: one that protects the body politic from combative and divisive “special interests.” Unlike the Cool Head with the Warm Heart, Filmer’s “people” are the locus of selfish individualism; the people are incapable of solidarity without an external enemy; the ever-befuddled people lack the self-control to separate inner voices and impulses from the outer world; the people have no self-respect: they may be servile or, given a measure of authority, they will whip their charges to extract obedience; i.e., the barbaric, headlong people have neither the taste nor the capacity for gentleness or politeness. Let them have outlets for their characteristic sadism and masochism, as Geoffrey Gorer proposed in 1934; ‘tis better than the trap of romantic love. After the war Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism popularized the notion of protofascist “mob society”–both cynical and gullible–in terms that echoed Filmer. Similarly, Todd Gitlin has claimed that the mounting Right-wing critique of the new curricula is best understood as a frenzied hunt for new scapegoats after the Cold War was won in 1989; Gitlin asserts that the presence of the Other provides the only source of “national identity.”

Return now to the seventeenth century. Responding to the autocratic Filmer, John Locke adumbrated his concept of legitimate authority. In the Second Treatise on Civil Government, Locke argued that monarchs were not beyond criticism, nor were the people so unbalanced that they could not assess their own interests and the performance of their protectors:

[Locke:] The end of government is the good of mankind; and which is best for mankind, that the people should always be exposed to the boundless will of tyranny, or that the rulers should be sometimes liable to be opposed when they grow exorbitant in their use of power, and employ it for the destruction, and not the preservation, of the properties of their people?

Nor let anyone say that mischief can arise from hence as often as it shall please a busy head or turbulent spirit to desire the alteration of the government. It is true such men may stir whenever they please, but it will be only to their own just ruin and perdition. For till the mischief be grown general, and the ill designs of the rulers become visible, or their attempts sensible to the greater part of the people, who are more disposed to suffer than right themselves by resistance, are not apt to stir. The example of particular injustice or oppression of here and there an unfortunate man moves them not. But if they universally have a persuasion grounded upon manifest evidence that designs are carrying on against their liberties, and the general course and tendency of things cannot but give them strong suspicions of the evil intentions of their governors, who is to be blamed for it? Who can help it if they, who might avoid it, bring themselves into this suspicion? Are the people to be blamed if they have the sense of rational creatures, and can think of things no otherwise than as they find and feel them? And is it not rather their fault who put things in such a posture that they would not have them thought as they are? I grant that the pride, ambition, and turbulency of private men have sometimes caused great disorders in commonwealths, and factions have been fatal to states and kingdoms. But whether the mischief hath oftener begun in the people’s wantonness, and a desire to cast off the lawful authority of their rulers, or in the rulers’ insolence and endeavours to get and exercise an arbitrary power over their people, whether oppression or disobedience gave the first rise to the disorder, I leave it to impartial history to determine. This I am sure, whoever, either ruler or subject, by force goes about to invade the rights of either prince or people, and lays the formulation for overturning the constitution and frame of any just government, he is guilty of the greatest crime I think a man is capable of, being to answer for all those mischiefs of blood, rapine, and desolation, which the breaking to pieces of governments bring on a country; and he who does it is justly to be esteemed the common enemy and pest of mankind, and is to be treated accordingly. [11]

Yes, Locke says, there are demagogues, but they would have no credibility were it not for the excesses of the rulers. Taken with his statements on natural law it is clear that Locke is not protecting private property as unlimited personal aggrandizement, but the confiscation of lower-class property and labor by tyrannical rulers–a crucial distinction for those who view Locke as an image of Filmer’s people: the possessive individualist par excellence. The radical liberal ideal of one set of rules for rich and poor alike and the assumption of rationalism upon which the rule of law depended was a radical innovation; it remains an advanced position and belongs in the democratic tradition, notwithstanding efforts to brand Locke as a hypocrite.[12]

Tories and Whigs crucially differed on the educational potential of “the people.” If Nature’s God was a democrat for the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century progressive bourgeois, organic conservatives reclaimed Nature for the aristocracy. In antebellum America, Filmer’s good fathers were models for socially responsible slaveholders contrasting their benevolent paternalism with the cruelty of northern laissez-faire capitalism and class struggle. Indeed, the distinguished historian of the South, C.Vann Woodward, a participant in the Martha’s Vineyard conference on “Racism and Education” revived the southern apologist for slavery George Fitzhugh to lobby for organic conservatism as antidote to today’s mass society.[13] Filmer’s image of “the people” would be indistinguishable from “the unconscious” in the social psychology espoused by many in the twentieth-century Progressive movement–conservative reformers responding to the rapid growth of industrialism and class warfare that Northern victory in the Civil War facilitated. Mass “irrationality” remains the argument for the eternal rule of philosopher-kings operating “in the public interest” in bureaucratic collectivist societies. While Lockean ideas of the common good have been co-opted, Filmer’s theory shades upper-class secret machinations from the blazing eyes of the lower orders. The unresolved debate between Filmer and Locke frames this essay; our models of human capacity determine our politics as we face “the mischief…grown general” on our endangered planet.

Are we coping with the decadence of ‘late capitalism’ (as I thought when I began graduate school in 1983) or are we living in societies that remain dominated by pre-modern social relations, and that have not made “the transition from feudalism to capitalism” (as Marxists formulate the problem)? Is Marx more accurately seen as a product of German Romanticism, left-sounding, but right-wing and reactionary in his organic social model? The American Progressives/progressives were conservative reformers whose English counterparts were Burkean gradualists and social democratic Fabians. In all my published work, I have taken Marxists[14] and progressives to task for ignoring a feature of modernity, the double-bind, that could have helped them to explain and combat racism, antisemitism, and the social forces that have led to mass death. The double-bind is omnipresent in the modern family and the university, both pseudo-liberal socializing institutions in a muddled society.[15] I suggested that class-conscious double-bind theory is more relevant to the appeal of Nazism than social psychological concepts of “scapegoating” or projective identification so reminiscent of Filmer’s ostensibly objective portrait of “the [socially irresponsible] people…fear[ing] those evils which they themselves have feigned”; then I applied “the switch” (or is it the magic wand?) to the cases of utopian reformers and disillusioned radicals.[16] Elsewhere on this website, I reviewed some influential definitions of antisemitism, suggesting that we refine our understanding of the processes that legitimate mass death.

As the alternative to völkisch social psychology and the non-explanatory “empiricism,” “functionalism,” or “theory” it has spawned, I propose a return to individual biography but with greater attention to historically specific psychodynamics, archival research, and close reading than, to knowledge, has been applied, not only with regard to the actors we study, but to our own defenses as we distance ourselves from “extremists” like Hitler. My work as a whole is an attempt at a materialist psychoanalysis, one inseparable from an intellectual and social history of institutions, movements, and individuals; like Freud in The Future of An Illusion (1927), forthrightly rejecting the “humanist” idea that science and religion can peacefully coexist, that science and history are branches of literary theory, cultural anthropology, or comparative religion (though religion may provide the vocabulary with which political conflict is described). Above all, I emphasized that the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century spawned an inductive method of investigation, an entirely open-ended journey, a leap into the unknown. It is specious to claim, as various political factions are wont to do, that “the Enlightenment” necessarily leads variously to fascism and genocide, or social democracy, or unregulated capitalism or socialism. Such narrow politicking proceeds with a deductive method that cannot co-exist with science or humanitarian values: most particularly for our purposes, with God-like confidence the (moderate) conservative reformers pronounce their grand principle: The Jewish God is bigoted, YAHWEH’s effluent, bourgeois society, is bigoted: let there be Multiculturalism, let the Crumbs drop from Massa’s Table.

NOTES.

[1] For cultural nationalists, the mosaic represents “self-reliance” as expressed in economic autarky, the unit being the ethnic nation. Such organization would make it difficult for workers to unite across “ethnic” or “cultural” lines. By biological determinism, I do not mean that the followers of Herder had a materialist understanding of the natural sciences. As John Crowe Ransom or Eric Voegelin understood the völkisch idea of a national culture, there would be a spiritual uniformity in a people who had interacted for a lengthy period with their specific material environment, evolving into a balanced relationship with nature and each other. This was the point of T.S. Eliot’s famous remark (1933) about limiting the number of freethinking Jews in the interest of local stability. See Ransom’s crucial essay “The Aesthetic of Regionalism,” AR Vol. 2 (Jan 1934): 290-310, for an elucidation of scientistic localism that infuses contemporary concepts of multiculturalism and compare to Herder’s concept of nationality as described by Eric Voegelin, The History of the Race Idea (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989).

[2] Until I read the political sociologist Eric Voegelin on the history of the race idea, I did not understand this point. Voegelin rejected the concept of “race” as too materialist because of its biological implications. Instead he embraced Herder’s seminal idea of cultural nationalism.

[3] See the tone set by Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Education (N.Y.: Harper and Row, 1990): “…the men and women who are paid to introduce students to the great works and ideas of our civilization have by and large remained true to the emancipationist ideology of the sixties” (xiv)…a new form of thought control based on a variety of pious new-left slogans and attitudes (xvi)…The denunciations of the “hegemony” of Western culture and liberal institutions that are sounded so insistently within our colleges and universities these days are not idle chatter, but represent a concerted effort to attack the very foundations of the society that guarantees the independence of cultural and artistic life–including the independence of our institutions of higher education (xviii).” The radical canon includes Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche (7); quoting Schiller, Kimball praises dissent and complains that the tenured radicals now occupy the moderate center (188-89).

Few have challenged Kimball’s periodization of the “P.C.” debate, nor are the “radical” challenges to the canon seen as élite initiatives, in which a folkish idea has been co-opted and nervously managed by the corporatist liberals on behalf of social stability. See for instance Gregory S. Jay, “The First Round of the Cultural Wars,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/26/92, B 1-2: The move toward multiculturalism emanated from academic “have-nots” after the 1960s. Also the militant Heterodoxy, edited by David Horowitz and Peter Collier, Vol.1, #1, “PC Cover-Up,” which argues that left-over Stalinist progeny, 1960s veterans of the New Left, are fighting a rear-guard action which “must be fought to conclusion”: the future of America hangs in the balance. The writers decry the apocalyptic mentality of “the Left,” chiliastic originators of twentieth-century brutality. [added 1/5/2010: since I wrote this note, I have tended to share the Horowitz-Collier sense of urgency, especially after studying the vogue for Maoism on the Left and chiliasm on parts of the Right.]

A similar urgency informs a more recent debate on PBS (McNeil-Lehrer, 10-26-94) between Lynn Cheney, former head of NEH, and Professor Gary Nash, director of the UCLA National Center for History in the Schools which has produced a curriculum guidebook for grades 5-12 (flexible and adaptable to local conditions and preferences, according to New York Times, 10-26-94, B-8). Cheney charged that the forces of political correctness have triumphed in the historical profession, and are destroying belief in a flawed, but on balance, great nation; Nash defended his guidebook as “a revolution” in the teaching of history, which will deemphasize “dates, facts, and names” in favor of critical inquiry into an evolving history which is always “provisional and contingent,” sensitive to the presence of women and minorities (labor not mentioned in the TV program, though Nash’s Urban Crucible celebrates the role of radical artisans in the American Revolution). When charged by Cheney with denigrating all wealth (but not that of an African king) Nash contrasted Carnegie with Rockefeller. Both Cheney and Nash say they want a critical approach to US history; both agree that a revolution is in progress. Joyce Appleby, president of the American Historical Association sees the culture wars as the chief struggle of our times (conversation with the author).

[4] See Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994) for a spirited attack on such appropriations and all anti-Enlightenment tendencies in the humanities. The authors (who seem sympathetic to sociobiology) suggest that scientists may go their own way, teaching the humanities themselves if the present situation is not remedied.

[5] John W. Riley, Jr. and Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr., “Research for Psychological Warfare,” A Psychological Warfare Casebook, ed. William E. Daugherty and Morris Janowitz (Johns Hopkins U.P., 1958): 543.

[6] I am adopting the formulation of generic fascism as a centrist social movement that has obliterated liberalism, forcing agreement between the goals and interests of capital and labor, as suggested by David Stephen Lewis, Illusions of Grandeur: Mosley, Fascism and British Society 1931-81 (University of Manchester Press, 1987).

[7] For the latest example of the moderate position, see Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars (N.Y.: Henry Holt, 1995).

[8] If ethnic and gender studies were organized to deal with populations as they have been historically defined by others and often themselves, then there would be no objection from anti-racists. Such programs need not ignore class issues, nor need they mythologize in search for glorious ancestors. However, these programs were institutionalized in response to status group politics, and tend to reinforce biological determinism by their very organization. As I have argued at public meetings, the separation of gender and “racial” issues in special programs has served as an excuse for “regular” curricula to ignore the needs expressed by previously excluded groups to see society and history as a whole. See David A. Hollinger, “Postethnic America,” Contention 4 (Fall 1992): 79-86, for an interpretation that superficially resembles my own; however, he does not look to the possible structural incapacity of our society to respond to the social democratic reforms he proposes, or the structural antagonisms that make “common ground” a utopian wish or a tactical compromise.

[9] F.M. Barnard, Herder’s Social and Political Thought From Enlightenment to Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965): Chapter IV. J.G. Herder (1744-1803) is credited with the founding of social psychology, cultural anthropology, and comparative literature in various interpretative works (see above).

[10] Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and other political works, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949): 89-90.

[11] John Locke, Two Treatises of Civil Government (London: J.M. Dent, 1955): 233-34 (Part II, sections 229, 230).

[12] See Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (Princeton U.P. 1993). The high point of popular sovereignty was attained during 1643 in the rising of London radicals in the English Civil War. The radical puritans were defeated by the Independents or oligarichic republicans; the voice of the people (vox populi)was replaced by the (returning) voice of public safety or public health (salus populi). Locke would seemingly conform to the latter, but as Brenner states, the Independents’ politics, with all their limitations, were more progressive than anything preceding or following in England. David Hume considered Locke a troublemaking Whig. See Robin Blackburn [Caribbean slavery] for a more critical assessment of Locke’s politics.

[13] George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters, ed. C. Vann Woodward (Harvard paperback, 1960): viii, xiv. Woodward sees Fitzhugh’s critique as relevant to societies which, although rejecting Communism, suffer from “mass production, mass organization, and mass culture”; Fitzhugh is linked to “Young England, Disraeli, and Tory socialism.”

[14]I am trying to distinguish between those aspects of Marx’s thought that were original, and those that were already part of the critical apparatus of Western thinkers. Vico for instance, recognized the importance of class conflict as the engine of history; see Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder . Once Marx’s contributions are historicized, what is left apart from a cyclical view of history with elements of classical and Christian thought? The old order is doomed, like all social organisms, it must decay. The antithesis of the bourgeoisie, the increasingly desperate and immiserated working class, naturally free of the corruptions of money, will be the reinvigorator of society. The State will wither away once money has lost its power to pervert the body politic. What if Marx did not stand Hegel on his head?

[15] See my article “Who’s Crazy Now? An Essay Dedicated to Christopher Hill,” UCLA Historical Journal Vol.10, 1990; Enter Isabel: The Herman Melville Correspondence of Clare Spark and Paul Metcalf, ed. Paul Metcalf (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991) for more substantial explorations of double-binds in Melville’s family and in the discourse of progressive reformers, most recently in declassified documents from the Psychological Strategy Board, 1951-53. Double-bind theory was used by Gregory Bateson and R.D. Laing in the 1950s and 1960s, but limited to the instance of the schizophrenia-inducing, cold/seductive mother sending mixed signals to sons. See Carlos E. Sluzki and Donald C. Ransom, editors, Double-Bind: The Foundation of the Communicational Approach to the Family (N.Y.: Grune and Stratton, 1976): 11. Conducive to schizophrenia is “the absence of anyone in the family, such as a strong and insightful father, who can intervene in the relationship between the mother and child and support the child in the face of the contradictions involved.” With Melville’s guidance and the experience of years in “alternative” journalism, then my graduate education, I have applied it to all liberal institutions caught in the uneven transition between hierarchical and egalitarian social relations.

[16] Cf. Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1987): 17. Muller argues that disillusioned Nazis continued to be skeptical of the Enlightenment, whereas ex-communists became liberals and social democrats. I argue that “late capitalism”squashes its democrats (left-liberal materialists), producing conservatives who claim the scientific openness and objectivity of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, but do not necessarily practice it.

November 2, 2009

A Rough Ride Through The Culture Wars

Filed under: 1 — clarespark @ 8:58 pm
Tags: Foucault, culture wars, Peer Gynt, critical theorists, pluralism, the uncanny, Martha's Vineyard conference on race and education, Alan Bloom

Pierrot Escapes by Jaques Lipchitz (1927)

Materialists without materials

. Within corporatist liberalism two varieties of “pluralism” (superficially similar either to Federalism or Jeffersonian republicanism) are deployed in fights over the curriculum. Although they bitterly oppose each other neither faction questions organic formulations of society by positing the legitimacy and value of the dissenting, creative individual above their undefinable, indescribable, irreplaceable “group cohesion”; therefore neither can fully explain either antisemitism or fascism although they may be obsessed with issues of “control.” For the culture warriors, “the Enlightenment,” like “the world community” or “the West” or “the spirit of an age” is an integrated whole, angelically pure and healthy, or diseased, depending upon its designated genealogy:

[Aase:] Peer, you’re lying….

[Peer Gynt:]…Downward rushed we, ever downward.

But beneath us something shimmered,

Whitish, like a reindeer’s belly.–

Mother, ‘twas our own reflection

In the glass-smooth mountain tarn,

Shooting up towards the surface

With the same wild rush of speed

Wherewith we were shooting downwards…

[Aase:] Yes, a lie, turned topsy-turvy,

Can be prinked and tinselled out,

Decked in plumage new and fine,

Till none knows its lean old carcass.

That is just what you’ve been doing,

Vamping up things, wild and grand,

Garnishing with eagle’s backs

And with all the other horrors,

Lying right and lying left,

Filling me with speechless dread,

Till at last I recognised not

What of old I’d heard and known!

[Peer:] If another talked like that

I’d half kill him for his pains.

[Aase:] Oh, would God I lay a corpse;

Would the black earth held me sleeping.

Prayers and tears don’t bite upon him.–

Peer, you’re lost, and ever will be!

[Peer:] Darling, pretty little mother,

You are right in every word;–

Don’t be cross, be happy—

[Aase:] Silence!

Could I, if I would be happy,

With a pig like you for son?…

[Peer Gynt:] Shall I write my life without dissimulation,–

A book for guidance and imitation?

Or, stay–! I have plenty of time at command;–

What if, as a travelling scientist,

I should study past ages and time’s voracity?

Ay, sure enough, that is the thing for me!

Legends I read e’en in childhood’s days,

And since then I’ve kept up that branch of learning.–

I will follow the path of the human race!

Like a feather I’ll float on the stream of history,

Make it all live again, as in a dream,–

See the heroes battling for truth and right,

As an onlooker only, in safety ensconced,–

See thinkers perish and martyrs bleed,

See empires founded and vanish away,–

See world-epochs grow from their trifling seeds;

In short, I will skim off the cream of history.–

I must try to get hold of a volume of Becker,

And travel as far as I can by chronology.–

It’s true–my grounding’s by no means thorough,

And history’s wheels within wheels are deceptive;–

But pooh; the wilder the starting point,

The result will oft be the more original.–

How exalting it is, now, to choose a goal,

And drive straight for it, like flint and steel!

[With quiet emotion.

To break off all round one, on every side,

The bonds that bind one to home and friends,--

To blow into atoms one’s hoarded wealth,--

To bid one’s love and its joys good night,--

All simply to find the arcana of truth,

[Wiping a tear from his eye.]

That is the test of the true man of science!–

I feel myself happy beyond all measure.

Now I have fathomed my destiny’s riddle.

Now ‘tis but persevering through thick and thin!

It’s excusable, sure, if I hold up my head,

And feel my worth, as the man, Peer Gynt,

Also called Human life’s Emperor.–

I will own the sum-total of bygone days;

I’ll nevermore tread in the paths of the living.

The present is not worth so much as a shoe-sole;

All faithless and marrowless the doings of men;

Their soul has no wings and their deeds no weight;–

[Shrugs his shoulders.

And women,--ah, they are a worthless crew!

[Goes off....

[Solveig:]…The boy has been sitting on his mother’s lap.

They two have been playing all the life-day long.

The boy has been resting at his mother’s breast

All the life-day long. God’s blessing on my joy…

I will cradle thee, I will watch thee;

Sleep and dream thou, dear my boy! [Ibsen, 1867].[1]

[Three Foucauldian feminist social theorists, 1992:] “…events in America and throughout the world have made the body a very contemporary issue. New medical technologies have made state regulation of the body a pressing concern and raised serious ethical questions for scientists and humanists alike. In many countries, politics has been reduced to a question of “image,” that is, the most “effective” presentation of a political figure’s body in the media. In other countries, governmental policies (enforced sterilization, torture and genocide) attack the body and with it, individual freedom. AIDS, overpopulation, and world hunger all raise difficult political issues involving the body and its protection.

Such ethical and political issues all have their origins in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. This period witnessed the creation and elaboration of a host of cultural and political practices which are still with us. For example, the absolutist courts of the seventeenth century established new norms for bodily behavior, stressing restraint and civility over medieval impulsiveness and spontaneity. At the same time, philosophers rethought the relationship between the mind and body and created a new epistemology based upon reason and bodily sensations, that is, observation. With the scientific revolution, biology and psychology emerged as distinct disciplines, and thinking about the body had to be revised. Twentieth-century discourses on race and gender find their roots in this critical period, and so too does modern political theory. The emergence of more democratic forms of government opened up new questions about the appropriate extent and nature of the state’s control over the body. As citizens replaced subjects, individuals wondered how they were to “embody” their new enfranchisement, how they were to act on the new-formed political stage. The developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries–the scientific revolution, the emergence of the modern state, the birth of political democracy–created new ways of thinking about and experiencing the body.” [2]

How do we know when we are not fascists? Or pluralists? It has been my contention that the scientific revolution bequeathed a method of investigation, not foreordained conclusions about the goodness and suitability of any particular economic system; moreover that the radical puritan (“Hebraic”) interpretation of the Old Testament insisted that each individual had worth and was a potentially rational, creative, and moral creature, capable of self-knowledge and self-management. I have also argued that the German Romantics and their inheritors appropriated the scientific search for truth and turned it to the service of reaction with the propagation of ethnopluralism and the concept of “the-individual-in-society” seeking equilibrium (a return to the cradle or Momma’s lap?), not enlightenment. Thus in speculating about reform it behooves the political dreamer to start with the ideal of the freely developing, cherished individual, then to imagine alternative social structures capable of serving everyone without destroying excellence. Meanwhile, Adam Smith or Hayek and the Progressives continue to confront one another. For today’s canon warriors the Enlightenment is part of their arsenal; you will find no racists among them, but neither are there many free-wheeling artists, the poet-type that Plato banished from his Republic and that Budd Schulberg evoked in his novel The Disenchanted (1950).

He’s not “our” Hitler. The cultural pluralists are class-conscious organic conservatives promoting “diversity,” creatively coping with “mass society” and its kitsch-culture, and opposing nationalism and racism as obstacles to the global integration of money and markets.[3] For this group there was one, unitary Enlightenment; it proved that capitalism was rational and politically correct, and they are its inheritors, whereas Hitler, a proto-New Leftist, is their antithesis: like other German Romantics (including Marx), Hitler simply opposed modernity and its intellectual tools. For Alan Bloom, who assimilated Locke to the idealist tradition, the Enlightenment carried the rationalism ascribed to Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Kant and Goethe.[4]

Other “anti-racists”–the “anti-pluralist” cultural relativists, New Left multiculturalists, critical theorists (followers of Adorno and Horkheimer), libertarian socialists and the Foucauldians–are the idealist descendants of Herder and other German Romantics. For them there was one, unitary Enlightenment and bourgeois, materialist, “extraceptive” Hitler and other Western imperialists, similarly agents of state repression, genocide and ecocide, were its logical culmination.[5] Thus pluralists and anti-pluralists alike would tend to see Nazi antisemitism as a form of irrational racism and hypernationalism/chauvinism produced by their rivals: for the neoliberals, German Romanticism, or, for some multiculturalists and even poststructuralists, a congeries of Enlightenment philosophers.[6] For the corporatist liberal social educators/policy-makers I have studied, Nazi antisemitism functioned as “scapegoating”: a projection of exclusively inner conflicts upon the outside world by petit-bourgeois “respectable” authoritarian personalities. Nazi antisemitism rarely was understood to function as outright robbery, as professional rivalry, or as a pseudo-classical response to fear of the mob. [7]

Stalinist ideologues, whose vile authoritarian ways were ostensibly rejected by critical theorist “Western Marxists” and “libertarian socialists,” have equated “existing socialism” with its antithesis: “bourgeois society” run by sneaky Zionists/Jews/rootless cosmopolitans that were strangling “the peoples” with their octopus grip. Zionists were perpetuating commercial fraud and consumerism, the illusion of American exceptionalism, and the Amerikan Big Lie of a Soviet military threat that had pointlessly militarized consciousness by advancing a cynical policy of thoroughgoing mind-control identical to Hitler’s. For one powerful Soviet general and tactician, the late Dimitri Volkogonov, Nazi antisemitism was totally invisible: Hitler and his imperialist allies were hung up on anticommunism. There was one Enlightenment, and the peace-loving, tolerant Soviets and their anti-imperialist Third World allies were its sole legatees. This could be Hitler talking; the Zionists control everything:

[An example of official Soviet propaganda, written by Volkogonov before his conversion:] “The capitalist mass media are greatly influenced by the Zionist circles. For example, Zionist organisations in the United States control half its magazines, more than half of its radio stations, and a large number of press and radio bureaus abroad. In other capitalist countries the picture is very much the same. In addition to that, various Zionist organisations run more than a thousand publications in 67 countries. This is where the military-industrial complex draws its ideological support.

The capitalist mass media spread outright lies about socialism, create a climate of fear for the future, of gloom and doom. The main idea of this vast system of disinformation is to prove that “socialism is bad” and the “free world” is good.

This is how the capitalist mass media are waging the psychological war against the Soviet people, also against their own people whom the bourgeois radio centres feed with disinformation. This is how opinions in the West are shaped when people are unable to understand the true state of things, when they think and act only under the influence of the extraneous forces that manipulate them. ” [8]

And yet, like poststructuralists or new historicists who reject “totalitarian” objectivists, Stalinists were appalled at the idea of an intelligentsia claiming authority while standing apart from state or faction: what middle-class conceit! We may rest assured that Volkogonov was not a fascist because he says so.

[At Martha’s Vineyard, 1968, Kenneth Boulding, Professor of Economics and Director, Program in Social and Economic Dynamics, Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorador, Boulder, Colorado brainstorms racism and educational policy with other liberal leaders: [9]] “…I must confess that I am deeply, intensively bored with the subject of race. I think it is the most boring subject in the world. Unfortunately, we have to go on talking about it.

My own hunch is that the main problem in this country is not race at all but class. And we are extremely unwilling to admit this because our ideology says that ours is a classless society. The brute fact is that we ain’t. We are a society for the middle class, of the middle class, and by the middle class, and we don’t really care much for the lower class…Talking about attitudes, the main attitude I think we have to change is that of the good liberal white. I must say that I have been observing with a little sadistic pleasure a number of white liberals exhibiting catatonic culture shock because of the black-power types and the brown-power types–the brown-power types in our part of the country are much more fun than the black-power types….(30,31).

[Emerging from this conference, a concluding “Agenda for Action”:]“…we recommend…that college and university teaching and research in the social and behavioral sciences, history, the humanities and the arts, and research be made more vital in terms of contemporary social issues and problems, in terms of the need for effective social action and democratic social change. The concern of the present generation of American college students that their education be made more relevant to society and to racial and social justice should be mobilized in behalf of such a strengthened program…[“Dangers” are noted:] 1. Racial segregation in schools may be temporarily or permanently increased through adoption of tactical and interim efforts to increase quality of education for minority-group children. 2. Compensatory and enrichment programs could obscure the basic issue of the incompatibility between high-quality education for all children and the existence of segregated schools. 3. Decentralization of schools could reinforce the neighborhood-school concept, which is related to the perpetuation of a segregated school system. 4. Remedial and special-admission programs could perpetuate double racial standards for judging academic performance of minority students, thereby reinforcing racial stereotyping and racism in education (158-159).”

Gemeinschaft vs. Gemeinschaft? Perhaps the culture wars are something of a tempest in a teapot, a generational conflict, a distinction without a difference, the younger generation acting out the primitivist holidays forbidden to their staid predecessors. What they share is a view of the Enlightenment and the West as a unitary phenomenon transmitting “rationalism,” an organic entity to be either revered or toppled. Neither side is capable of a materialist history, hence cannot and will not historicize “fascism,” and unlike some 1930s left-liberals or Trotskyists, neither side distinguishes between organicist and materialist intellectual traditions; instead they blame each other for autocratic behavior. Modern artists, scientists, and other materialist intellectuals are unsafe in either camp.

The older pluralists (defenders of The Great Tradition) want to protect their national culture from the assaults of New Left postmodernist crypto-fascist crazies. The democratic pluralists do not ignore class conflict, do not mystify class with “race”; rather, following Aristotle, Montesquieu and Mosca, a plurality of economic interests are said fruitfully to clash, check and balance each other; its free-for-all unmasking operations leading to truth, rational compromise and thus “equilibrium.” Democratic capitalism, paradise to the clear-eyed middle-class, offers equal opportunity. Failures have no one to blame but themselves or utopian romantic rabble-rousers slandering an imperfect but solid system triumphally arched by the neutral state. Thus revolt can only be diagnosed as an irrational “acting out” or “deviance” or “sentimentality,” the stubborn refusal of adjustment “essential to the maintenance of dynamic democracy imperative for humanity and national stability.”[10] Of course this same generation of intellectuals (many of whose most articulate representatives are former 1930s Jewish Marxists) supported the war in Vietnam and other imperialist adventures; moreover to 1960s student radicals they seemed unmoved by urban squalor, the nuclear threat and a dangerously degraded environment. Thus 1930s “scientific” Marxism, purging opposing voices on the Left, soft on the domination of nature and lacking respect for “traditional” cultures (flaws which are conflated in the imaginations of primitivist “deep ecologists”?) seemed part of this tainted “modern,” “Hebraic,” “Western” heritage to the children of 1930s radicals and 1950s conservatives alike.

The maturing academics who entered the professoriate after their baptism in tumultuous 1960s social movements, movements without linkage to the disorganized and quiescent working class whose members were often understandably resentful of privileged “draft dodgers” and “anti-Americans,” responded indignantly to the claims of “equal opportunity,” the pride of upwardly mobile urban ethnics embracing the tradition of Jackson and Lincoln. Since women and non-whites were so obviously underrepresented in university faculties and curricula, and since many 1960s veterans were sympathetic to black power and other national liberation movements (viewed as responding to internal colonialism and imperialism), some insurgents accounted for the absence of women and non-whites in leadership positions as symptoms of “white male” or “patriarchal” intolerance/hegemony. The “multiculturalists” did not argue that the position of women/non-whites in the family and labor force precluded the lengthy period of leisure, privacy, travel and acculturation anyone (including working-class white males) needed to become a scholar; rather their “difference” made their cultures of “the Other” unfathomable to transparently obtuse white males. The new pluralists settled into ghettoized ethnic studies and women’s studies programs which, by virtue of their particular institutionalization in response to the 1960s black power and radical feminist movements suggested ethnic and gender difference as the most relevant variables, the engines of history for non-whites and women (however often “class” might be dropped into the mix of “class, race, and gender”). As was feared by the conservative liberals at Martha’s Vineyard promoting the coöptation of black nationalism, race (and gender) had virtually erased class as an objective category. Not surprisingly the dissenting individual also went the way of all flesh, collapsed into a notion of “individuality” as a feature of groups (race or ethnicity).

Fitting neatly into the idealist counter-Enlightenment which had promoted the concepts of racial, ethnic and national character, many theorizing young scholars, adopting a pseudo-Marxist, pseudo-Freudian rhetoric and, following the subjectivism, irrationalism, and group-think of Herder and Kant , defined themselves as revolutionary postmodernists, declaring that the categories of race, class, and gender, like literary taste, were all “socially constructed,” historically rooted, and thus “radically Other,” i.e., resistant to empathic readings or universal standards of truth and craft. These anti-pluralist pluralists, champions of diversity and tolerance, have not been promulgating “hegemonic” Enlightenment or Victorian notions of species-unity (other than Herder’s international yet localist crazy quilt); they have mostly attempted to demolish the rationalism and universalist ethics spawned by the radical Reformation and scientific revolution then borne by the philosophes, “Old Jewry”–radicals like Price and Priestley as they were characterized by a hostile Edmund Burke–liberal feminists, and anti-slavery men or “Black Republicans” like Charles Sumner.

The underlying unity between generations is illustrated by their common periodization of Cold War-style repression of civil liberties in “McCarthyism.” Little attention is paid to centuries-old élite resistance to mass literacy and numeracy and the torrent of democratic ideas that followed. After the brief hiatus of the Nazi-Stalin Pact (1939-1941), American Stalinists dropped that short-lived campaign against American warmongers, once more supporting corporatist New Deal policies against the assaults of “fascist Republicans” or “monopoly capital.” The prolific Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation and foe to racism and censorship, was impressed by the methodology of Talcott Parsons and other “moderate” top-down planners who, after the war, opposed the arms race as an excessive drain on the welfare state. Like many of the other corporatist thinkers described here, McWilliams was a regionalist and a populist; whether or not he was a member of the Communist Party as charged, he was certainly never a materialist. His papers from the 1930s (at UCLA) suggest that he was following the Communist line, switching from a view of the New Deal as “social fascism” to best friend of the working class during the Popular Front (1935-1939). Like other New Deal social democrats, he wanted to strengthen capitalism by bringing good labor unions and racial minorities into the system to stabilize the base. After the war, “McCarthyism” was bad because it confused conservative reformers like himself with real communists.

Writing in the late 1960s, political scientist Michael Rogin denied that populists were antisemites, as neoconservative Richard Hoftstadter had charged in his Age of Reform (1957). McCarthy was not a populist, Rogin argued, but a spokesman for traditional conservative élites, the selfish laissez-faire crowd of materialists participating in the (bad) American Lockean consensus. Denouncing white supremacy (hitherto an emblem for Wall Street and the power of Jewish money), proto-New Left radicals like McWilliams and Rogin internalized the Soviet-Tory terror-gothic scenario for the history of the last five centuries: Frankenstein monsters, the unique progeny of crazy scientists, Victorian prudery, and “the culture of narcissism” i.e., the ever unitary Jewish West, have produced genocide, exploitation of the Third World and the colonization of domestic minorities, mind-control by the mass media and CIA, urban snobbery, reification, commodification, luxury, and consumerism. The radical scholars apparently hate money (commercialism) more than they love the creative, questing individual. Do these populists resist the market as a coercive, brutal mechanism or, like displaced feudal clerics and aristocrats, would they ban the site of judgment by upstart “consumers” they cannot control? Or, as anticapitalists and anti-imperialists, have they carved out their own super-moral niche on the market while apparently rejecting it?

[Kenneth Boulding:] “Suppose we do something like this: We go to a voucher plan. You give every child $500 to $1000 a year, and he can spend it any way he wants. And give every Negro child $1500.

[Jerome Wiesner:] But that’s racism.

[Kenneth Boulding:] But I mean I am in favor of racism. I think racism is important. Well, they call it discrimination–not the same thing as racism at all. These are two quite different subjects. If you want to introduce some kind of counterweight to discrimination, this is where the federal government comes in. We may see the federal government, the whole taxing-and-subsidizing business, as a total picture weighted toward correcting some of these ills of society. This seems to me to be its major function (32).

[Christopher Edley, explaining that his support of black power in the 1950s and 60s did not entail a belief in racism:] Now some excesses have come to the fore. There is a danger of black nationalism, there is a danger of black separatism that goes beyond the temporary withdrawal to recoup our strength, to regroup and to seek out the powers that we want–the economic and social powers that seem to be attainable for us as a group only through the use of black identity. Now I think there are roles that Negroes have to play. It seems to me that the power structure has only responded to the excessive demands that have been made in the Negro community, and that there are certain Negroes who because they are bold and courageous, because they have little to lose, must demand things of the power structure which are excessive. And I think that if we–the Ken Clarks and the Chris Edleys and perhaps the Lisle Carters–have a role to play, it is to capitalize on the softening up process that results from the excessive demands… [Black identity and race pride] will enable [students] to band together to overcome the obstacles. I think that subconsciously they are seeking to get into the melting pot and the mainstream of American life. I don’t believe that black nationalism will be the major thread…I don’t think that we need condemn [black-power studies], and I think many of us get caught in the situation where we have to think as Americans, as Negroes, and perhaps as something in between. And I think it is possible to identify rationally the roles that people are playing and to realize that really in the long run they complement each other rather than being antagonistic to each other (71-72).”

So much for checks and balances. In all cases, the Romantic Wandering Jew (the Byronic hero, Ahab, Peer Gynt as historian, myself) and our critical apparatus curse the strange diagnostics of democratic pluralists and anti-pluralist multiculturalists alike; s/he totes “the melting pot”[11] that jams Durkheimian solidarities too close to bad Jews, the latter identified in the nineteenth century by one republican theorist with “the moral nature of Anglo-Saxondom, with its virile instincts of right, freedom, and humanity, defending our cause against all comers, with indomitable courage and constancy of faith.”[12] Such troubling figures were revising and reconfiguring the past and present to produce what the “pluralists” regard as protofascist anomie, the alarming switch from homey, heimlich Gemeinschaft to intrusive and alienating, unheimlich Gesellschaft. [13]

[Untitled poem submitted to London Mercury by an Englishman, Lawrence Binyon (a William Blake reviver of the 1920s):] From the howl of the wind/ As I opened the door/ And entered, the firelight/ Was soft on the floor;/ And mute in their places/ Were table and chair/ The white wall, the shadows,/ Awaiting me there./ All was strange on a sudden!/ From the stillness a spell,/ A fear or a fancy,/ Across my heart fell./ Were they awaiting another/ To sit by the hearth?/ Was it I saw them newly/ A stranger on earth? [14]

My estranging romantic Lockean psychodynamics or history would achieve a provisional “balance” through 1. experience and achieved understanding, learned afresh in each generation, not through the inheritance/quick fix of acquired characteristics; 2. tracking the history of the imagination, not völkisch instincts or the stamp of “material culture”; 3. recognition of the historical specificity of “roles” and conflict while comparing analogous structures and processes in other societies; 4. application of universalist ethical criteria, like Freud in The Future of an Illusion, not site-specific opportunism in evaluations of protest movements and tactics; 5. affirmation of species-unity and interdependence with humanity and nature in the never-finished search for truth and justice (legitimate authority), not ethnic or gender “identity,” as the basis for solidarity; 6. comprehensive, detailed description of controversial individuals, societies and policies without the use of buzz words like “moderation,” “excess,” or “extremism” ; and 7. preservation of the achievements of the past without ancestor-worship. Nor would our “Captain Ahab” admit to (fatal) “subjectivity” as a “participant-observer” or “new historicist” while conducting our sleuthing expeditions, as if “bourgeois” historians/artists had never thought about their biases, welcomed “diversity” or attempted to restore the context of the facts they discover in archives or in other societies and sub-cultures.

[1] Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, Theater Guild Edition, transl. William and Charles Archer (N.Y.: Scribner’s, 1923): 37, 41, 43, 44, 215-216, 320-321.

[2] Ann K. Mellor, Kathryn Norberg, Sara E. Melzer, “Constructing The Body,” Clark & Center Newsletter 22 (Fall 1992): 2. A recent Clark Library conference on “Vitalism and the Enlightenment” (January 1994) continued the anti-empiricist tendency, attempting to rehabilitate German idealism by reversing the usual association of “mechanical materialism” with the Left and vitalism and organicism with the Right.

[3] See Lewis Coser, “Europe’s Neurotic Nationalism,” Commentary, June 1946, 58-63: “Cultural pluralism–the right of each people to its own culture–is perfectly compatible with unification on the economic and political plane, and it is absurd to pretend that those who favor such unification call for the standardization of European culture. On the contrary, a diversified European culture is no longer possible except through political and economic integration. “Balkanization” will mean not only material, but cultural poverty. The only political, economic, or cultural hope of the peoples of Europe lies in an over-all community that goes beyond the separate nation.” Coser’s cultural pluralism was asserted against “totalitarianism” resulting from nationalism (gradually transformed from democratic revolution to racism and imperialism). These thinkers are vigorously “anti-racist,” but have substituted ethnicity as the category to study “the problems of group adjustment” and “real group differences that are the soil and raw material of democratic society.” See Melvin Tumin, “The Idea of “Race” Dies Hard,”Commentary, July 1949, 80-85. Cf. the Progressive A.A. Berle, Jr., “The Rise and Fall of Liberal Democracy,” Democratic Pluralism and the Social Studies, ed. James P. Shaver and Harold Berlak (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968): Scorning the “Jeffersonian” sentiments of New Left framers of the Port Huron statement demanding participatory democracy, Berle explained to high school teachers that participation could not exist in a scientific, bureaucratic culture (143); however, “democracy” was time-tested: “Throughout history democracy has been the most effective device for complex societies to coordinate the action of masses of people performing a large variety of complex functions (142).”

If constitutional checks and balances are obsolete, then there is no basis for unity in this country other than the organic solidarity promised in ethnicity; perhaps “multiculturalism” is a way for technocratic élites to micro-manage “group” (but really class and institutional) conflict. Ritual obeisances to the Founding Fathers would be used then to create the illusion of popular sovereignty; i.e., both Federalism and Jeffersonian republicanism are obsolete for technocrats.

[4] Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, 1987). Note the organicist title; however Bloom distances himself from “the progressives of the twenties and thirties” whom he blends with Stalinists (32) and New Leftists. For an example of the tug-of-war for the Enlightenment, see Roger Kimball’s review of Todd Gitlin’s book (cited above), “Whose Enlightenment Is It?” New Criterion, April 1996, pp. 4-8. Kant is favorably cited, suggesting that the neocons are closet German Romantics. But see F.A. Hayek, Individualism: True and False (Blackwell, 1946). Hayek places the German Romantics with jacobins, utilitarians, and Marxists in the category of totalitarian thinkers. His preferred lineage for the true individualist includes Locke, Mandeville, Smith, Hume, Ferguson, Burke, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton. Anyone who claims to grasp the big picture is arrogant and deceptive. In a fragmented world, only experts can judge other experts. The placement of Locke in this pantheon is curious since Hayek has rendered rationalism (Locke’s contribution to popular sovereignty) as hubris.

[5] Cf. Milan Hauner, “The Professionals and Amateurs in National Socialist Foreign Policy: Revolution and Subversion in the Islamic and Indian World,” The Führer State: Myth and Reality, ed. Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker (Stuttgart:Klett-Cotta, 1981): 305-327, for a discussion of anti-imperialist proposals supported by aristocrats in the foreign service, with similar efforts (1914-18) predating Nazism and opposed by inexperienced Nazis. (The targets were the imperialist West; Cf. Lukács, 1952).

Should some of today’s postmodernists and New Leftists be seen as anticapitalist/ anti-statists similar in outlook to the prewar Right (for instance, the Catholic Distributists Belloc and Chesterton, or T.S. Eliot)? G.C. Webber calls the type “the aristocratic backwoodsman”; his classification of the interwar British Right could be useful today. Rejecting the Fascist vs. right-wing Conservative division as too crude and non-descriptive, Webber suggests four categories: anticapitalist antistatists, anticapitalist statists (reactionary Tories), capitalist statists (managing capitalism like FDR’s New Deal or Mosley’s BUF), and capitalist anti-statists (like today’s New Right); all were to the Right of the liberal conservatives and of course Liberals and socialists. See G.C. Webber, The Ideology of the British Right 1918-1939 (London: Croom Helm, 1986).

Frankfurt School theorists reject (bogus) pluralism (as in Marcuse’s theory of repressive tolerance):”pluralism” masks a totalitarian (but fragmented) U.S.; Fredric Jameson argues for an overarching Marxist dialectic as the umbrella to local Marxisms (as there are national variants in late capitalism); this seems to me to be “rooted” cultural relativism, an apology for cultural nationalism; similarly other “historical materialists”/”cultural materialists”/postmodernists are idealists. See Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, Cornell U.P., 1981): 31-32, 54, 74, 86, 87; Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of “late capitalism”(Durham: Duke U.P., 1991): xx. Cf. Ralph Bischoff, Nazi Conquest Through German Culture (Harvard U.P., 1942): 3, who writes “[Following an argument for unconditional victory as prelude to peace:] It is the thesis of this book that the march of National Socialism to power was in part due to the inborn cultural and blood nationalism of the German people, and the ability of their leaders to reawaken, reemphasize, and re-form certain characteristic traditions and faiths already existent in Germany and other German communities.” (This book was part of the Harvard Political Studies series). Are these irrationalist portraits veiled arguments for total victory (or defeat), not negotiated settlements?

[6] See for instance Richard Popkin, “The Philosophical Basis of Eighteenth-Century Racism,” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, ed. Harold E. Pagliaro, Vol.3 (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve, 1973): 245-62. Locke is mentioned 245, 254, without citation for racist statements (as opposed to affiliations). In any case, the racism charge is present-minded. Locke is included with Berkeley, Hume, Voltaire, Franklin, Jefferson, and Kant. Popkin’s standard for anti-racist philosophy seems to be “egalitarianism and relativism.” I read Locke as opposed to the identity politics I am criticizing here; see Christopher Fox, “Locke and the Scriblerians,” Eighteenth Century Studies, Vol. 16 (Fall, 1982): 1-25. For Locke, identity was fluid and based on (learned) “consciousness,” not (inherited) “substance.” The violence of rude and barbarous peoples is not inscribed, but learned. Relativism is supported in recent research supported by the Clark Library (UCLA); see Mario Biagioli, “Civility, Court Society and Scientific Discourse,” Clark & Center Newsletter 21 (Fall, 1991): 2-3: “…what we see emerging from very recent historical work is that the acceptance of the new science rested largely on the ways in which the practitioners managed to present themselves, their theories, their discoveries, their arguments and disagreements, and their experimental practices as fitting the proper cultural (and behavioral) codes. In short, to gain acceptance and credibility, the practitioners of the new science needed to present themselves as fitting the codes of those who had the social status and power to legitimize their knowledge–that is, princes, aristocrats, and gentlemen.”

See also Michael Denning, “The Academic Left and the Rise of Cultural Studies,” Radical History Review 54 (Fall 1992): 21-47: “The roots of United States cultural studies lie in the pioneering work in the 1930s and 1940s of such figures as Kenneth Burke, Constance Rourke, F.O. Matthiessen, Oliver Cromwell Cox, and Carey McWilliams…they shared socialist or leftist social-democratic politics, an interest in the popular arts, a desire to rethink notions of race and ethnicity and nation and people, and a concern for social theory.” But neither Matthiessen nor McWilliams was a materialist; Denning’s imprecision in describing what were many distinct and embattled left and liberal tendencies during this period is typical of the vagueness, organicism, and anti-intellectual populism of the “radical” scholars I am criticizing. Denning even cites the attacks upon 1890s populist social scientists, etc.”…which grew into the postwar “McCarthyist” purge of the universities.” (33) Cf. Stalinist accounts of fascism: there was no populist (petit-bourgeois) movement or working-class support, solely the big bourgeoisie, inevitably fascist in decadent late capitalism; both Matthiessen and McWilliams agreed with this formulation.

[7] See Samuel Gringauz, “Anti-Semitism in Socialism,” Commentary, April 1950, 371-373, misleadingly titled since the author denies that antisemitism is intrinsically found in socialism or any other ideology; it is rather a flexible weapon to be opportunistically wielded against one’s political competitors. Gringauz follows Hermann Rauschning in viewing Nazi antisemitism as “the product of cold calculation,” relying on Hitler’s alleged admission, “The Jews are a valuable hostage given to me by the democracies. Anti-Semitic propaganda in all countries is an almost indispensable medium of the extension of our political campaign.” My reading rests on the assumption that a coherent case for madness can be drawn from Hitler’s writings; however I cannot tell conclusively if Hitler was sincerely antisemitic or a complete cynic; perhaps he veered between these two positions. The aristocratic Rauschning’s testimony should be viewed with a grain of salt.

[8] See D. Volkogonov, The Psychological War (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1986): 125. Emphasis in original. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the late Volkogonov, suddenly a Yeltsin supporter, Bukharinite and Menshevik, exposed the horrendous careers of Stalin and Lenin.

[9] Racism and American Education, A Dialogue and Agenda for Action, Introduction by McGeorge Bundy, Foreward by Averell Harriman (N.Y.: Harper and Row, 1970). Excerpted also in my Pacifica memoir.

[10] Racism and American Education, 159. Cf. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees. Mandevillle was an eighteenth-century freethinker who explained that the vices of human nature, eternally the same in all societies, could be switched to the cause of productivity, that the alternative to robust empire was an elusive Golden Age that would contain only material deprivation, that “eutopian” fantasies/self-denial/altruism were only covers for self-love. The Mandeville was republished by London’s Wishart (publishers of Gorer’s De Sade, excerpted above) and annexed to the Left in 1934 by editor Douglas Garman. As an influence upon Adam Smith and as a precursor to Freud, his contributions need to be reassessed.

See Richard Bernstein, Dictatorship of Virtue (Knopf, 1992) for a typically anecdotal attack on multiculturalism. Bernstein, a Harvard graduate and New York Times reporter, traces the intolerance of the revised curriculum to Jacobin terror, while not criticizing the fundamental assumptions of ethnic studies; i.e., he is writing in the pluralist tradition of the 1968 conference on racism and education: the strategy has gone sour and the revolution is eating its children. The “Marxist” multicultural movement is said to emerge both from New England Puritanism and the degradation and disillusionment of the 1960s counter-culture. Bernstein favorably cites Joseph Campbell and uses Jungian organicist categories throughout while appearing to defend liberalism and the Enlightenment; Washington, not the invisible Jefferson, is the exemplary Founding Father. While arguing for accurate history, civil rights, individual freedom, individual responsibility and development Bernstein never differentiates between the libertarian political thought of Western Europe (England, France, and Holland) and the rest of the continent. Others in this faction include Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Nathan Glazer.

[11] The particular menace of the melting pot is made explicit by the Catholic, Irish Nationalist, pro-Nazi James Murphy, Adolf Hitler, The Drama of His Career (London: Chapman & Hall, 1934): 120-121. Catholic Centre coalitions with godless Prussians and socialists promoting a secularising Jewish press were similarly disasters for the simple, insightful peasants Murphy defends throughout. He cites and recommends Hans Ehrenberg, Deutschland im Schmelzhofen (“Germany in the Melting Pot”).

[12]See Charles Sumner: An Essay by Carl Schurz, ed. Arthur Reed Hogue (U.of Illinois Press, 1951):97. Schurz was referring to the Englishman John Bright, linking his character to Sumner’s.

[13] See Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, ed. Jose Harris, transl. Jose Harris and Margaret Hollis (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 2001. Originally published in 1887, Tönnies’s book is considered to be a classic work of sociology, but not until after the first world war (xxviii-xxviii) was it canonized. At first seen as a “communist tract,” it was taken up by German “ultra-nationalists,” and in America during the 1930s was read as “an essay in consensual structural functionalism.” The editor of this edition seems favorably disposed to this elusive and mysterious work. Tönnies was the son of a merchant banker, and given his hostility to modernity, one wonders how much of his disgust with the modern world was intertwined with his feelings about his father. In 1892 he “helped found Society for Ethical Culture, the vehicle for his life-long involvement in various co-operative, social reform, and self-improvement movements.” (xxxi-xxxii)

[14] Lawrence Binyan was an English Blake scholar, and a key figure in the William Blake promotion that followed World War I; the poem is in the J.C. Squire Papers, UCLA Special Collections

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September 9, 2009

Preventive Medicine and Preventive Politics

Filed under: 1 — clarespark @ 7:56 pm
Tags: cortisol, culture wars, harold lasswell, hatred, preventive medicine, stress-reduction

Tonight the President will say something about health care reform, hoping to rescue the Great Overhaul from what he and his supporters take to be the lies and growls of selfish individualists– the militaristic menagerie of what is called “the Right” by right-on lefties and left-liberals. I don’t know how this fight will be ended, if ever, but today’s blog will comment on the dangers to health of 1. Excessive alienation ; and 2. Polarization and hatred of the other side. Consider this brief statement to be a contribution to preventive medicine, specifically the reduction of cortisol excretions from the adrenal glands that, if secreted too often, lead to lowered immunity from infectious diseases and a multitude of dangerous inflammations.

As I showed in a prior blog, “Preventive Politics and Socially Responsible Capitalists, 1930s-1940s,” (READ IT) the social psychologists, sociologists, and cultural anthropologists centered at Harvard University, faced with the challenge of attractive and dynamic ideologies of either fascism or communism, were not concerned with optimum mental health, understood today to be the capacity for rational political participation, love, work, and empathy. No, they were chiropractors of the psyche, bent on achieving “social cohesion” or “equilibrium” by subtly disciplining bright students who might become radicalized, and then go on to become an internal Fifth Column as these best and brightest would undoubtedly rise to the top of every American institution. That such a discipline devoted to “adjustment” (not innovation) might curb the creative contributions of their students and of other Americans treated similarly was not their problem.

One of their colleagues, Harold Lasswell (of the U. of Chicago), political advisor to the newly formed Committee For Economic Development (founded in 1942 and adopting Keynesian economics; thank you spirit of Hyman Minsky for telling me about them), actually favored the formation of a national board that would assess would-be leaders, using Henry A. Murray’s Thematic Apperception Test, a test that was presented deceptively to its client users. Lasswell’s biographer credited him with the invention of “preventive politics,” a concept meant to be attached to the beneficent strategy of “preventive medicine.”

Preventive medicine is extolled in HR 3200, but not defined, and the only Obama reference to it that I heard was a mention that diabetics should lose weight to avoid amputations of their feet (and he linked this point to a larger argument that doctors were avoiding such advice in order to enhance their income through profitable amputations). [In tonight's speech, he gave the example of mammograms and colonoscopies, i.e., screening. C.S. 7:30pm PT.] Neither he nor any other politican has dwelled upon a broader approach to preventive medicine as a cost-saving approach to health care, and I count on my friends and other readers to tell me whether or not the media punditry has explained what they take preventive medicine to mean. [Think of smoking, obesity, and alcohol as the three chief causes of preventible death: all linked to depression.]

The Over-alienated and under-educated. It should be obvious that the intense polarization of the “culture wars” and the deterioration of civility as many opponents confront their “enemies” cannot be good for stress-reduction. As I have argued here before, there is a broad consensus regarding the need for both a private and a public sector: reasonable people can argue about the efficacy of tasks better undertaken by market competition or state regulation and investment. Those on the “progressive” or “communitarian” side who see “the Right” as a monolith of buccaneering laissez-faire capitalists, protofascist or fascist and irrational, are necessarily mobilized for combat 24/7. While those on the Right who see all programs of public health as proto-fascistic, statist infringement of personal liberty and local control, produced by the secret machinations of mad scientists in cahoots with Wall Street, are similarly over-agitated, to their own detriment. For this reason, I have emphasized here the study of history,* mathematics, political theory, economics, and all the sciences in the schools, for such subjects, properly taught (that is, without indoctrination), can enable citizens not only to read legislation and analyze specific policies with greater competence: An informed electorate, truth-seekers all, should be able to empathize with those who in reality share many, if not every single social and personal goal. And empathy reduces hatred and keeps the fight-and-flight mechanism working to preserve a good life. Question for the Left: do you really want everybody to be poor, backward, and under the thumb of bureaucrats?

*History is not a science, but a set of competing theories about the past. Anyone who teaches it as uncontroversial and settled is miseducating the students and setting them up for a lifetime of distorted perceptions. One way to sublimate rage (for instance in response to Obama’s speech) is to identify his misrepresentations, convenient ambiguities, and downright errors, then publicize them. I suppose that is why I blog.

Added after Obama speech to joint session of Congress, 9-10-09. Upon reflection, it was an appalling performance, filled with switches. But the well-meaning liberal may not see what I did. Briefly, Obama, taking the tone of the impassioned black preacher in pure revivalist mode, placed himself on the side of the angels and the beloved community. That is, he would not be partisan but would embody the civility (i.e. Christian charity) I mentioned above, with utopia just around the corner. Not long after that he condemned his Republican opponents as liars irresponsibly disseminating erroneous claims about the legislation. First he took credit for rescuing Americans from economic disaster, then came on as a compassionate centrist, who would have to give up a single-payer plan (or anything else that the far left-wing of his party was demanding?). With no tentativeness, he promised that his plan would be paid for through eliminating fraud and waste in Medicare, though the cost would be 900 billion dollars. On tort reform, he began by hinting that it would now be included in the next draft of legislation (gaining applause: would he be dissing the trial lawyers?), but then handed it off to a cabinet secretary for experimental study in selected states, as if the data were not already clear enough. Finally, after annexing the sentimental feelings about the death of Edward Kennedy, he ended with an apocalyptic view of failure should his legislation not pass. Throughout he took the tone of the good father who had been tested beyond all endurance by the evil cable and radio commentators, the town-hall meetings, and any other opposition. He was generally vehement and accusatory to my ears. I find it personally very dispiriting that the authoritarian posture and rhetoric are not seen by my friends who are left-liberals and who will agree with Harry Reid that the speech was “a game-changer.”

Let me now merge yesterday’s blog on “taking responsibility” for one’s education and the implications of his speech and its silence on the prerequisites for good health (what I have been calling preventive medicine). The limited view he has displayed so far on this question is worrisome and even bizarre. How can we “take responsibility” for our health if we don’t have clean air, clean water, and clean food? How can we “take responsibility” for our health if children are not taught from early childhood on such basic questions as enhancing their body’s resistance to disease, eating correctly, and avoiding unnecessary stress to bones and muscles (add your own preventive measures here), while strengthening bodies and brains with appropriate activities, such as dance, low-impact athletics, and the arts in general? In other words, the study of human physiology and the preservation of the body (along with the enlargement of the imagination and of inter-personal skills) must begin as soon as the child can process the instruction. Whether the federal government or schools and parents (armed with good science) alone should be overseeing such enhanced education is a matter for public debate: my own preference lies with market competition, although I am also in favor of state investment in science, medical research, and education, for state sponsorship does not necessarily entail state control of laboratories or schoolrooms. But then I may be among the last of the puritans, or maybe the Greeks: a sound mind in a sound body. Or, faced with the ambiguous statism of this administration, are we hovering on the brink of a new majority? If that majority is anti-science, then our country will face stagnation and terminal decline.

September 7, 2009

Melancholia as a way of life

Filed under: 1 — clarespark @ 7:09 pm
Tags: antimodern narrative, cubism, culture wars, David Brooks, David Cronenberg, Herman Melville, Labor Day, mysticism, public intellectuals, The Fly

This week the President will be offering his own version of health care reform, a subject that I have been addressing in all my recent blogs, though usually through the prism of intellectual history, rather than medical economics or legislation (subjects in which I am not competent). And today is Labor Day. I am almost at a loss for words.

I am wondering if our “public intellectuals” (including political journalists, some blogging academics, media pundits, teachers, movie reviewers, and more) have anything constructive to say about “labor.” Are those workers who provide the material basis that gives us the “leisure” to read and make pronouncements about reality, history, antidemocratic propaganda, and so on, being served or betrayed by the current “culture wars?” I confess to deep anxiety about 1. The growing numbers of Americans on antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication, whose physicians or therapists are undereducated with respect to the political, economic, and institutional causes of their clients’ fatigue and withdrawal from an active (but fully informed) engagement with either public or private affairs; and 2. The increasing stridency and polarization as opponents dig in their heels and hurl epithets at “liberals” or “conservatives,” eschewing careful, detailed historical analysis of rhetoric and ideology, while conspiracy theories proliferate like cartoonist Al Capp’s shmoos, giving only imaginary succor to the perplexed and overwhelmed escapee to this or that elite-hating populism, and many of the latter could hail from the ranks of labor, but who counts them nowadays?

Death Valley. In today’s blog (September 7, 2009) I offer one possible explanation for the immobility and escapism, not to speak of hard-heartedness, that has afflicted our society: the antimodern narrative, perpetrated by some artists and intellectuals who are false friends to labor (labor, big or small, needs all the science and education it can get). Before the second world war, labor’s false friends were widely recognized as reactionaries; today, not so much: just look at the apocalyptic “Red-Greens.” The antimoderns included such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, William Butler Yeats, and a host of followers in the humanities who, in turn, influenced manufacturers of popular culture. Their common enemy, the free-thinking scientist or “mechanical materialist” whose cultural practice mocks organic conservative formulations of society and nature. The “materialists,” seen through the eyes of their critics, turn gardens into wastelands, while “Americanization” signifies total renunciation of beloved ancestors and the loss of “individuality” as we are turned by “Fordism” into cogs in a machine.* (Does not the S-M ritual attempt to reverse this process, of course never succeeding in reinstating the lost paradise?)

FLASHBACK

“The fact is, we have all been a good deal puzzled because the affair is so simple, and yet baffles us altogether.”

“Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thing which puts you at fault,” said my friend.”

“What nonsense you do talk!” replied the Prefect, laughing heartily.

“Perhaps the mystery is a little too plain,” said Dupinstein.

“Oh, good heavens! who ever heard of such an idea?”

“A little too self-evident.”

“Ha! ha! ha!–ha! ha! ha!–ho! ho! ho!–roared our visitor, profoundly amused, “oh, Dupinstein will be the death of me yet!” [1]

Sweet Mystery of Life. The antimodern narrative is frequently transmitted in popular culture but rarely identified. For instance, the critically acclaimed film, The Fly (1986, directed by David Cronenberg), carried a blatantly reactionary message, yet no one seems to have noticed; instead The Fly has become a cult favorite, its ads telling viewers to “Be afraid, very afraid.” Here is the plot: Seth Brundle, a bug-eyed brainy Jewish-looking physicist employed by Bartok Industries (a company linked to abstract modern art in the opening scene) is having a problem with his computer program that is to “change human life as we know it” through a new technology called “teleportation.” The object to be transported is disintegrated in one “telepod” (which resembles a high-tech phone booth) and reintegrated in another. One baboon has already been reduced to a red mess; the scientist (a “systems manager” who does not fully understand his project because of the divided labor which has conceived it) solves his problem with the knowledge of the flesh provided by an ambitious, liberated, sexually assertive female journalist (Veronica, a brow-wiper, but androgynously nicknamed “Ronnie”).

While drunk (Ronnie seemed to have abandoned Seth, and this dependent type can’t handle alcohol, he is so Jewish), the scientist tests the new computer program on himself after a second baboon survives the teleportation. But Brundle fails to notice the fly buzzing around the telepod; he ends up “teleported” (transported, Americanized?), but spliced genetically with the fly’s chromosomes. Soon Brundle talks like Hitler (enunciating cruel, brutal and uncompromising “insect politics”); he is sexually insatiable and superstrong, then begins loathsomely to degenerate, drooling nauseating and lethal bodily fluids, getting redder by the minute. At the climax, there is a near parricide: the Fly’s milky fluids dissolve the hand of Ronnie’s bossy editor (holding a rifle intended to kill the Fly and rescue his defiant employee, now impregnated with Fly-semen). After failing to trap Ronnie into bonding her (and her foetus’) genes with his to save him and create a new superbeing in the telepod, the all-Red Fly’s mournful eyes plead with his terrified but ever-sympathetic, contaminated girl friend, “Please shoot me.” She picks up her boss’s rifle and fires. Euthanasia (to be followed by a therapeutic abortion) has restored order.

Teleportation may be compared to Romantic Captain Ahab’s red flag of revolt[2]; while Seth Brundle’s fatal hubris linked to transformative technology, recalls the cataclysms generated by Melville’s character Margoth, an apostate German-Jewish geologist who desacralizes the Holy Land of Palestine in Melville’s late poem Clarel. The opposition between (disruptive, death-dealing) critical thought and (stabilizing, liberating) mysticism is one which fans of The Fly may apprehend as distinct, but in all candor, I cannot point to an individual, society, or social movement as all Head or all Heart; I see “Reason” and “Feeling” as interpenetrating, but not as a feature of the unchanging human psyche. Rather, defending our socialization in societies moving from tribalism or feudalism to capitalism and beyond as we either tweak capitalism or formulate alternatives, we may be torn between a darkening romantic conservatism and a motion toward the light. Growing up may not remove the contradiction, but it should alert us to the ways in which the imagos of childhood (which we may take to be accurate representations of social reality, since they are reinforced in popular and high culture), drag us backward toward hierarchy and despair. Melville has dramatized this tension with cubist clarity and poignancy; the grieving Isabel’s long black hair “arbored him with ebon vines” in the last sentence of Pierre; at the same time the black mask protects his privacy and the vulnerable body. But critics have generally lacked (or refused) the social imagination to bring his “religious” or “sexual” conflicts home to politics.

This is scary, because the institutions and social processes that produced Melville’s sometimes violent rebels are related to those that exterminated other surrogates for capitalism and its allegedly cruel, brutal and uncompromising market forces. Mystical thinkers want capitalism without tears; mystical thinking produces moralistic social criticism and the obligatory purge. Critical thought does not identify the source of evil in the Devil, in “human nature” or in whatever group is designated as the enemy, but recognizes the abstract and impersonal institutional rules and relationships that structure and limit moral choices; critical thinkers propose either structural or incremental reforms to transcend the limitations of capitalism (as we know it), one which points us toward true liberalism and goodness, however imperfectly. Critical thinkers would never acquiesce to negative reference-group politics as an inevitable feature of the landscape of pluralism: That we may grow only by fits and starts, need not be an occasion for despair, but a warning against complacency and sectarianism.[3]

* “At the end of the issue [National Affairs] Leon R. Kass delivers an unforgettable article on why he decided to give up a career in the sciences to devote himself to the humanities. It nicely captures the spirit of the magazine — the fierce desire to see the human whole, to be aware of people as spiritual beings and not economic units or cogs in a technocratic policy machine.” –David Brooks, NYTimes, 9-8-09. Dear reader, don’t say I didn’t warn you. C.S.

[1] This is a rectified readymade gleaned from Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter.” C. Augusta Dupinstein is one of Dr. Etta Enzyme’s alter egos.

[2] Naive historians who believe there is an author behind the blankness of “the text” are linked to Ahab in David Harlan’s article in American Historical Review 94, p. 592. On Ahab’s red flag: I interpret it to mean the romantic gesture of piercing through the mask of imposed neoclassical pictures of “things as they are,” not only to reconfigure the real world, but to re-imagine human possibilities for constructive change.

[3] For instance, Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell U. P., 1985): 240.

YDS: The Clare Spark Blog

July 15, 2010

Index to Black Power blogs

January 2, 2010

Jottings on the culture wars: both sides are wrong

November 2, 2009

A Rough Ride Through The Culture Wars

September 9, 2009

Preventive Medicine and Preventive Politics

September 7, 2009

Melancholia as a way of life

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