Blue Jay Way: Where Will Critical Culture Come From?: Responses
Delbanco, Andrew
SUSPECT WE all share Marshall Berman's craving for a "critical culture . .. that struggles actively over how human beings should live and what our life means." But when he laments "the...
...It lets us off the hook...
...Through our youthful chanting and heckling, we nevertheless listened (or half-listened) to voices from our parents' youth—to witnesses who spoke about the Great Depression, the wars against fascism, and the longdeferred struggle for civil rights...
...it says that we children of the sixties need not take the blame for the terrible war that turned us into ironists and soured us on virtually all institutions...
...The institutions we created or inherited—political parties, publishing houses, universities, magazines, corporations— all participate in the profit-maximizing, celebritycrazed, consumer-glutted society we decry...
...Eldridge Cleaver...
...Thirty years later, the Civil War (itself a crusade with revivalist elements) was fought by those renegades' children...
...The fact is that jaytalk today is everywhere—and, therefore, nowhere...
...In fact, there has never been a hotter market for jaytalk than there is today—a victory, to be sure, for tolerance and free speech, but one with insidious consequences for the real critical culture that we all want to revive...
...In some respects, it is (like Berman's essay) an exculpatory account...
...Then, after the customary lag, there arose the two-stage critical culture of the 1920s and 1930s (a first phase of exile, irony, and artistic and sexual experimentation, followed by a second phase of radical and reform politics...
...Perhaps this is because of the comparable lag between the age when one is most likely to be fruitfully insolent (one's teens and twenties) and the coming-of-age of one's children...
...One conspicuous reason that the next wave of critical culture has been indefinitely postponed is that while there may be a rising level of chronic anxiety in contemporary America, SYMPOSIUM there appears to be no acute feeling of urgency of the sort our parents experienced in the panic of the Great Depression or from some sudden foreign menace, or of the personal sort we felt from the military draft during the Vietnam War years...
...ANDREW DELBANCO's most recent book is The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope...
...It seems to me that jaytalking has become as widespread and safe as the misdemeanor from which he derives the term—crossing the street against the light—an act that almost never gets one in trouble (even in the reign of Rudy) unless one is very unlucky in traffic...
...In its failure to renew itself in the 1990s, 36 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 the so-called counterculture of the sixties has proven to be historically distinctive...
...Our troubadours— the Weavers, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie—connected us, at least tentatively, to what we regarded as an interrupted tradition we wanted to embrace and revive...
...As the economist Robert Frank has pointed out, the prospect of costly illness—even for many of the millions without health insurance—seems a theoretical threat...
...Berman mentions Lenny Bruce...
...But I wonder if he isn't swayed into expectancy by a certain uncritical nostalgia for the 1960s, when, he says, the world was full of "intense people" ready and able to "walk and talk through the night, and maybe to grope and love...
...Some of us even found exemplary virtue in figures (Churchill, Roosevelt) who commanded state power when our parents were young or who challenged power from within the political sys tem (Norman Thomas, Henry Wallace...
...After the victory of big-business Republicanism in the wake of that war, there came the progressive and populist revolts of the 1890s...
...Finally, our own so-called counterculture of the 1960s arrived—and turned out, as Berman notes, to be the running out of the tide...
...But when he laments "the amazing lack of jaytalking" in contemporary America, I demur...
...What comparable witnesses do we present to our children...
...DISSENT / Winter 2000 n 37...
...As guardians of the critical culture, we failed...
...Until now, critical culture in the United States has tended to follow something like a thirty-year rhythm of ebb and flow...
...History has judged that they—we—did not do a very good job of transmuting this narcissistic intensity into durable forms of productive social action...
...It is still up to us to hold ourselves to account by making visible the possibility of a society more inclined to justice and mercy than the imaginatively straitened culture in which we now live, and which many in our generation have willingly embraced...
...But we should not be so easy on ourselves...
...Berman wants to believe that we are living through a prelude to some sort of revival of the real thing—and who can blame him...
...Historians have long sensed a continuity—though they still argue over just what it was—from the Great Awakening of the 1740s, to the American Revolution of the 1770s, to the Jeffersonian "revolution" of 1800...
...A A NOTHER REASON we are still waiting for the tide to come back in is that we have not been adequate exemplars to our children...
...Do tragic liberals like Hubert Humphrey or Lyndon Johnson mean anything to anyone in America under fifty...
...We are more likely to feel kinship with the abolitionists, proto-feminists, transcendentalists, and "free-love" experimentalists who rattled America in the 1830s...
...Abbie Hoffman...
...A case could be made (Morris Dickstein did so implicitly in his book on the sixties, Gates of Eden) that our earliest counterculture was the wave of religious revivals that periodically swept the American colonies— outbursts of resistance to prevailing dogma and established churches, often led by young ministers who belonged to the lineage of oppositional intellectuals whom Michael Walzer described in his book on English Puritanism, The Revolution of the Saints...
...But who are their heirs today...
...SUSPECT WE all share Marshall Berman's craving for a "critical culture . .. that struggles actively over how human beings should live and what our life means...
...It has been co-opted and commodified, as Lionel Trilling (a jaytalker himself, despite his donnish decorum) foresaw nearly forty years ago, when he noticed the beginnings of the "acculturation of the anti-cultural, or the legitimization of the subversive...
...T T 0 MOST OF us today, these "jaytalkers" seem remote and alien...
...Posturing professors who hold forth in a "transgressive" academic subculture that has almost no salutary impact on society at large, and professional foulmouths like Howard Stern and Al Goldstein, who sometimes jaytalk with charm, but mostly do it for money, and thereby become heroes of metropolitan life...
...In the past, jaytalkers paid for their candor with public shame and broken careers...
...The fact is that we baby boomers have not sufficiently resisted the brute marketplace values that now overwhelm every aspect of American life...
...I realize there is more than a whiff of determinism in this highly schematic and reductive account of the career of critical culture in America...
...The collective concerns of most prosperous Americans today are abstract and deferrable: environmental degradation, future attrition of Social Security benefits, the occasional act of terrorism close to home...
Vol. 47 • January 2000 • No. 1
