Letters
Proving Orwell Right Editors: Richard Wolin's interesting review of my book World Orders, Old and New (Dissent, Summer 1995) arrived, fortuitously, just after an interview with a Greek...
...Be it noted that it was not the atomic bomb but air attacks on cities and their noncombatant inhabitants that set new "standards" of warfare in World War II...
...To show that the thesis means its negation, and that in "nonmetaphorical description of the United States my only hesitancy is whether it is "totalitarian" or "fascist," Wolin quotes the conclusions drawn (accurately) from several illustrations of Orwell's observation...
...Like a lot of left-liberal people looking for 558 • DISSENT Letters illumination in dark times, I count on Dissent for intelligent, incisive commentary on culture and politics...
...Note that he quotes only the conclusions about "voluntary" treachery that so horrify him, scrupulously avoiding the evidence on which they rely...
...Rather than seeing the atomic bomb as severed from all other events, including the saturation bombing of cities that became more or less routine during World War II, we must analyze atomic weaponry as part of that history, not apart from it...
...No nuclear weapon has been unleashed during the half century since World War II despite numerous occasions...
...Wilentz...
...More recently, an incumbent Republican president was voted out of office less than two years after his so-called job-approval rating had crested at around 85 percent...
...But as long as we're policing the territory, what would Macdonald have to say about a descant as shoddy as Wilentz's, I wonder...
...but my point was precisely that Trilling and West may be comparable in terms of sales and influence...
...I then quote Dewey making a similar point, along with others who emphasize that the "new technique of control" by "manufacture of consent" is of particular importance in democracies where "the public must be put in its place" as "spectators," not "participants" (Harold Lasswell, Walter Lippmann, and others...
...Accusing me of "liberal racism" in this regard is simply outrageous— and, as I say, downright fraudulent...
...Walzer seems by the way to be blissfully ignorant of the fact that the educational argument for the bombing was adduced not merely after the fact but during the crucial deliberations of the Interim Committee, which was set up to decide whether and how the atomic bomb should be used...
...That Hiroshima and Auschwitz have become horrific symbols is true...
...q FALL • 1995 • 557 Letters Forget the Honor Editors: My goodness...
...For a large portion of the last two millennia, most of international culture has been Western culture—in part because other societies were enclosed...
...What's interesting about Wilentz's anxiety of influence is that it accounts for the smugness and self-satisfaction that runs through Wilentz's piece...
...Listen...
...He notes that "it was not the atomic bomb but air attacks on cities and their noncombatant inhabitants that set new 'standards' of warfare in World War II...
...With these presuppositions, Bell can hardly give an adequate answer to the question, "Will the twenty-first century be the Pacific century...
...Wilentz writes: "Even more invidious is the liberal racism that lurks within the celebrations—nothing as sinister as outright racism, but a distortion that grows from a fixation on race...
...A few days later, the Times Higher Education Supplement quoted my description of the United States as "the most free and democratic society in the world...
...More, I hope it would be obvious that in comparing bell hooks's books to Bruce Springsteen's albums, I was indeed being ironic...
...even to him, sometimes, in his comment about "soft" and "hard" totalitarianism, which, though muddled, suffices for self-refutation...
...Wilentz writes: "Well outside the celebrity mongers' gaze, [West] has also tried to open up lines of reasonable conversation where practically none exists anymore, or where the lines have become frayed— between black churches and elite universities, the democratic left and the U.S...
...First Wilentz cribs my line on West and company, that "black public intellectuals are doing their work—at colleges, in churches and on cable TV—at a time when the very idea of 'the public' has become nearly unthinkable in rational politics...
...In the book under review, the brief discussion opens with Hume's maxim that government is founded on control of opinion, from the "most despotic" to "the most free and most popular"—where "state controls are rarely exercised directly," my comment adds...
...Wilentz writes: "Berube compares Comel West's collection of popular essays, Race Matters, to Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination, not because of their respective merits or arguments, but because of how many copies they sold, how influential they have purportedly been...
...Now in place of Macdonald there is Michael Berube celebrating Race Matters and works by the other new black intellectuals—a case of misjudgment, no doubt, but also a sign about more general trends in intellectual reportage...
...Another useful device...
...Jean Bethke Elshtain Replies: I appreciate H. Brand's comments, but 1 fear he misunderstood my argument...
...There is now extensive documentation substantiating Orwell's charge with regard to "the most free and most popular" society—what Wolin derides as an "Orwellian vision" of the free societies, in an interesting choice of phrase...
...WILLIAM SWEET Brooklyn, N.Y...
...q Skewed Worldview Editors: In "Will the Twenty-first Century Be the Pacific Century...
...I know you can do better than Wilentz's work—the rest of your Summer issue is testimony to that...
...However, notwithstanding the effort of numberless scholars, Auschwitz will not be integrated in history—it will not be "situated...
...The text then turns to Orwell's observation in his introduction to Animal Farm that "the sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary...
...However, artistic products cannot and should not be looked at as industrial products, although works of mass culture have become a sort of industrial product...
...Of all the arguments adduced for the bombing this has always struck me as not merely the worst but as no argument at all...
...The destruction of noncombatant populations and their habitats was unprecedented in scope and intensity...
...Thus Berube informs us, with no trace of irony, that another black writer publishes her books 'in apparent accord with the Bruce Springsteen approach to product placement,' that she drives a BMW, and that she now holds the same title that Irving Howe once held at the City University of New York...
...Bell has a picture, which is similar to W. E. B. Du Bois's in his essay "The Conservation of Races," that nations appear upon the stage of world history with their unique contributions to world civilization...
...This borders on intellectual fraud...
...West merits the kind of treatment I've given him...
...Elshtain writes that "stripped of their situatedness in time and place, terrible happenings become awfully abstract...
...q Corrections There were some copyediting errors in Jeffrey Scheuer's piece "The Television Thing" (Dissent, Summer 1995), which we regret and wish to correct...
...The reason has been Hiroshima—a symbol indeed, a dire warning of the bounds that military action must not transgress...
...But then, American writing has also diminished in the past two decades...
...More protest...
...That was precisely my point...
...YANG XIAO Elmhurst, N.Y...
...So it proceeds, useful perhaps as an illustration of Orwell's observation, hardly otherwise...
...and in the last sentence on that page, "the imminent powers of video, hypertext, and interactive CD-ROM" should read "the imminent powers of video, computer games, and online services...
...Finally, I leave it to Chomsky's own conscience and intellect to reconcile his freely admitted use of Orwellian concepts with the remark of the occasional journalist to 556 • DISSENT Letters the effect that the MIT linguist views the United States as "the most free and democratic society in the world...
...Wilentz is also being ironic...
...But much of this has been dimmed...
...Then he declines to discuss my critique of Race Matters' treatment of the black underclass, just as he declines to discuss the proposition on the table, namely, the question of how (as I put it in the same paragraph) things like public housing, public education, public health, public ownership, and public welfare can be re-legitimated by socalled public intellectuals on the left...
...It should be obvious that if I were writing a monograph instead of a review essay, I might have been able to go into some detail about The Liberal Imagination...
...The Strategic Bombing Survey conducted shortly after the war found that air attacks had not significantly impeded the warmaking capacity of the enemy...
...I charge him and other writers not with "racism" but with "racialism!' The distinction is important, as I explained in my original comment...
...Yes, the cities have been reconstructed, new generations of people live in them, memories fade...
...and (3) the way that certain national cultures or enclaved cultures became taken up and influenced other modes and styles, such as my illustration of Japonisme on Western painting and printmaking at the turn of the century...
...I'm beginning to feel as if I've become an honorary member of the Dissent family...
...Truncated as it may be, this is the basis of the last two-thirds of my essay, where I take up (among other things) the cultural influence of Malcolm X, the ascendancy of the New Right, and the academic left's fixation on cultural politics and relative neglect of public policy...
...Thus, as far as what Bell calls the second dimension of culture (or what he calls "high culture") is concerned, it seems to me that the question becomes, "Will the Pacific countries alone create unique artistic products of high culture in the twenty-first century...
...Bell says,"Historically, as nations have emerged upon the world scene, this has been accompanied by an upsurge in creativity...
...Chomsky chooses to emphasize the monolithic nature of opinion formation in these societies, which accounts for his frequent use of such adjectives as "fascist," "totalitarian," and so on to describe their impregnability...
...I wonder whether this is a good question to ask...
...First, as to matters of emphasis and tone...
...Walzer's short article in your summer issue represents to my way of thinking a radical lapse from his usual legal and moral reasoning, which I have always found to be informative and indeed exemplary...
...Hiroshima cannot be compared with the firestorms visited by Allied aircraft upon Tokyo, Hamburg, Dresden, even if it be true that loss of life turned out to be less...
...The use of one airplane dropping a comparatively simple device to destroy a city and its populace denoted an economy in the deployment of military resources and an efficiency of delivery that sundered the limits, the wide limits made possible by the full-scale industrialization of warfare...
...And, as noted, this remains true, if on a lesser scale of conceptual complexity, for Hiroshima...
...Otherwise, readers can judge for themselves the merits of his allegations and insults...
...In 1963, it was possible to open the New Yorker and find Dwight Macdonald there descanting thoughtfully and at length about The Other America...
...Senate, blacks and Jews...
...Looking at the same material, Wolin fumes that my "familiar stump speech" is "fifty reasons why we live in a totalitarian society," a thesis that he magisterially refutes by "point[ing] out the obvious": that the CIA doesn't cart me off to the Gulag...
...The work of both the New Yorkers and the younger black writers, for example, has a tendency to interpret politics in cultural ways and culture in political ways, a tendency that has been limiting as well as illuminating...
...Third, allow me to address the charge of racism...
...later in the paragraph, the phrase "multiple spheres and layers" should be "multiple spheres and layers of causality...
...q No Justification Possible Editors: I was surprised and a little shocked to see Michael Walzer refer to the non-use of the atomic bomb since 1945 as a "justification," however "retrospective," for the bombing of Hiroshima (Dissent, Summer 1995...
...I'm writing, then, in the hope that you'll allow me a brief reply to Mr...
...Bell, thus, might have concluded that there has been notably little impact on Western culture...
...Early in his piece, Mr...
...Because Sowell was drawing on intelligence research with which I am intimately familiar, I aimed to show how Sowell's data contradicted both Sowell's and Murray's proposals for dismantling what remains of the welfare state...
...The brunt of the question I asked is whether the Asian nations, now becoming strong industrially, will also become more creative in the arts...
...I devoted but two paragraphs of my essay to Sowell's Race and Culture, and I concentrated on Sowell's chapter on "Race and Intelligence" I wanted to show how Sowell rejects the Herrnsteini Murray "genetic" explanation of IQ differentials among races even as he endorses their conclusions in the realm of social policy...
...But Sean Wilentz's little screed on black intellectuals is sorry fare for a forum of ideas—half potshot, half rehash, wholly inadequate to the task...
...Despite the considerable political and cultural means at the disposal of opinion makers and politicians, most citizens remain, contra Chomsky, surprisingly capable of penetrating the veils of deceit and making up their own minds...
...In fact, his letter constitutes an attempt to come to grips—historically—with Hiroshima...
...H. BRAND Bethesda, Md...
...Army at the time of Hiroshima, and neither I nor those of my colleagues who reflected on the matter, nor my friends in the socialist movement (who never cease to reflect) were able to "situate" the nuclear destruction of the city amid the immense course World War H had taken...
...Spring 1995), Daniel Bell claims that culture can be looked at in two different dimensions, and he defines the second or artistic dimension as "the 'expressive' products in the arts and literature and styles of a society that display its creative' contributions...
...And so on, throughout the world...
...This held as true for Harry Truman and for many of his associates...
...That this makes them somehow beyond analysis, or understanding, is not...
...After all, if the powers that be are as impregnable and monolithic as Chomsky suggests, what else is there for us to do but sit back and adapt...
...Well, all right...
...This is not an unseemly point to make in a magazine article...
...Michael Walzer Replies: William Sweet's analogy between Hiroshima and the Holocaust is not a good one, since it seems radically unlikely that anyone else would have murdered six million Jews had Hitler and the Nazis not done so, and virtually certain that someone else would have used the bomb had we not done so...
...The details maintain the standard...
...Deriding me as a mere "celebrity monger," Wilentz, like Adolph Reed before him, has managed to write an essay whose only intellectual "substance" lies in the charge that other writers on black intellectuals have lacked intellectual substance...
...Last, I ask how Wilentz can pose as Cornel West's lone defender while he opportunistically castigates me for "celebrating" Race Matters...
...Yang misreads me and conflates three different issues: (1) almost every nation or civilization has had periods of efflorescence of creativity: the Renaissance in Italy, Al-Andalus in Spain, the Heian period in Japan, and so on...
...No mystery there: like all review essays, it was assigned—in this case, assigned to someone more knowledgeable than fellow New Yorker contributor Sean Wilentz...
...He even indicates his source, while omitting my one relevant sentence: free societies are "quite different" from those that use force, relying rather on means for "shaping" opinion to give "a certain perception of the world" (M...
...All of which suggests that Chomsky's Orwellian metaphors are seriously misplaced...
...Richard Wolin Replies: As should be evident from my review and other writings, I would be the last to deny that democratic societies have a vested interest in shaping public opinion...
...It is true, of course, that the Nazis deployed a mechanized death machine, driven by purposes of profound evil...
...MICHAEL MEUSE Urbana, Ill...
...FALL • 1995 • 559...
...There could never be a rationale for it, moral or otherwise...
...At least Oliver Conant's article on Teachers for a Democratic Culture (Spring 1995) was smart and original...
...Proving Orwell Right Editors: Richard Wolin's interesting review of my book World Orders, Old and New (Dissent, Summer 1995) arrived, fortuitously, just after an interview with a Greek journalist who opened with a standard question: why do I stress so insistently that the United States is so free and democratic...
...Although processes of opinion formation may well initially transpire within wellcircumscribed boundaries, such orchestration is no guarantee of the way in which the majority of men and women will choose to interpret the data and arrive at independent decisions...
...He says, "In the post-World War II period, Japanese culture made a dramatic impact on the West, as great perhaps as the period a hundred years ago when Japonisme, particularly the Ukiyoe prints, had a major impact on the style of Degas, Whistler, Vuillard, and other Western artists...
...Culture when it is creative is also syncretistic, as with Picasso's absorption of African forms in his painting and sculpture...
...In fact, there are two questions...
...And it was precisely the schoolmasters—James Conant of Harvard and Arthur Compton at the University of Chicago— who argued that the bomb would be used as a warning to mankind...
...On page 300, in the right column, top paragraph, "more-or-less complex view" should be "a more or a less complex vision...
...2) the question of why such efflorescence occurred at the time it did: such as the replacement of Paris by New York in painting after World War II...
...Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without any need for any official ban," yielding outcomes not unlike those of the totalitarian sate he satirizes...
...As it is, I think that in Japan, the country I know best, the "great" period of novels (Tanizaki, Kawabata, and others) flourished before the period of its economic peak...
...Two consecutive issues of Dissent in which I appear in an unfair and most unflattering light...
...By Wolin's reasoning, Orwell condemned free societies as totalitarian...
...This has usually been called the realm of 'high culture,' and Japan provides a bright illustration of it...
...and beware of intellectuals...
...q On Hiroshima Editors: This is to comment on some aspects of "50 Years After Hiroshima" (Dissent, Summer 1995...
...In fact, the descriptive use of such metaphors is conducive to furthering the levels of social atomism and passivity that the very opinion makers Chomsky derides seek to foster...
...NOAM CHOMSKY Cambridge, Mass...
...Hiroshima sticks out in memory like another, equally inassimilable event: Auschwitz...
...I'll tell you what...
...One might just as well argue that the Holocaust was justified because most Jews living today are living amid less anti-Semitic prejudice and much more safely—as indeed they are—because of the abiding horror the Final Solution inspired in all decent people everywhere...
...I did not presume a causal relation between the two, but in the past, wealth and patronage have been conditions of cultural creativity (if only, at times, to attract artists from other countries to the centers of wealth...
...To take just one: Wolin asks with a sneer how the analysis of the media that Edward Herman and I presented could deal with a "genuinely dissident opinion" by Walter Cronkite in 1968...
...Daniel Bell Replies: Mr...
...To find out, he has only to turn to the book to which he refers, which discusses this very case as a clear example of "voluntary" subordination to doctrinal orthodoxy,as indeed it is (Manufacturing Consent, p. 322...
...If you publish an essay that takes up the question with which I ended my essay—namely, the role of the "public intellectual" at a time when the idea of "the public" is itself under siege—then I'll stop wondering how Sean Wilentz's piece managed to slip into your pages...
...But I did not mean to accept this "justification" for Hiroshima...
...To discuss, say, the work of Thomas Sowell, as Berube does, with only a perfunctory reference to his links with his white conservative colleagues is fundamentally to distort the context of his work and theirs...
...Wilentz spills way too much ink fretting over how my article "turned up in" and "managed to slip into" the New Yorker...
...However, his conclusion is that "there has been notably little impact on world culture by other Asian countries, with the small exception of some of the newer films from China...
...Is it a deal...
...I began my piece by saying that the bombing was wrong...
...Sean Wilentz Replies: Michael Berube misquotes me...
...Intellectuals everywhere, beware...
...My point was rather that Americans who do accept it can find no moral comfort in it...
...The air attacks were a desecration of the human heritage...
...Along the way I pointed to Sowell's links to non-black conservatives not once but twice...
...As far as economics and development are concerned, one may ask, "Will the Pacific countries alone create the most industrial products that will have a dramatic impact on the West...
...When I read these words, I thought Bell was using the words "a nation's creativity" in the way we usually do, that is, "having created unique products in the arts and literature having an impact on the nation itself or/ and the rest of the world (including, of course, the West...
...And Auschwitz to this day burdens the conscience of the Germans immeasurably more than Hiroshima could ever burden ours...
...There are indeed a few ideas in Wilentz's essay, to be sure, but sharp-eyed readers have already seen them treated in greater depth in the New Yorker and the Atlantic...
...This is a meaningful, empirical, and answerable question...
...Achbar and P. Wintonick, Manufacturing Consent, p. 134, film script...
...Historically, we have seen countless instances of this phenomenon at work: from the antiwar protest movements of the 1960s to Watergate and Iran-contra...
...It was not assimilable...
...Yet, powerful reminders remain, none more so perhaps than Picasso's "Guernica," a wrathful protest but also a beseechment, futile as it turned out, but never to be forgotten...
...The point that Wolin labors not to understand is clear, unambiguous, and obvious to all but the most dedicated ideologue...
...I can only hope that in his apparent outrage at my noting that a prominent black feminist now holds the same academic rank once held by the august Irving Howe Himself, Mr...
...Second, there's the matter of giving credit where credit is due...
...However, when Bell goes on to use the example of Japan to illustrate his point, "creativity" turns out to mean simply "having an impact on the West...
...So, for Bell to get his conclusion, he has to presuppose that Western culture is world culture and world culture is Western culture...
...Wilentz writes that there are "likenesses" between the New York intellectuals and contemporary black writers "which neither Berube nor [Robert] Boynton examine...
...Jean Bethke Elshtain essentially argues that "Hiroshima and Nagasaki must inevitably become reinserted in the warp and woof of history, not viewed as symbols hovering above the bloody ground that was World War It is not a persuasive argument...
...What is more interesting to me is the ways in which they fail in this endeavor...
...I was a soldier in the U.S...
...Then he calls my essay a "case of misjudgment," even though he's just argued that Come...
...I do hope—sincerely, not ironically—that Professor Berube will cease being merely an honorary member of the family by sending Dissent his best writing, and for pages other than this one...
Vol. 42 • September 1995 • No. 4
