George Scialabba's What Are Intellectuals Good For?

...True, a democratic transition to modernity in Europe would have taken centuries longer, and might not even now be consummated...

...All governments will act in this way...

...Scialabba on Randolph Bourne and Dwight Macdonald and other twentieth-century intellectuals is inspiring (the essay on Isaiah Berlin is a minor masterpiece...

...It is not enlightenment but memory, not breadth of sympathy but intensity of identification, that makes for inner strength...

...In that hothouse environment, almost everyone’s judgment was skewed: Scialabba, along with social democrats like Todd Gitlin and Richard Rorty, was labeled a right-wing deviationist and cast into the outer darkness, while on the other side, a lot of otherwise perceptive people succumbed to the delusion that Camille Paglia deserved serious attention...

...I recall one that Freud used to tell us around the campfire, about how the brothers all banded together, killed the father, and then felt really guilty about what they’d done...

...Too much Lasch, and one becomes too fond of worrying that we’re headed straight to hell in a modern handbasket (indeed, Scialabba gives in to the temptation, once or twice, to blame Saturday morning cartoons and/or the Internet for the sorry state of society today...

...too much Rorty, and you run the risk of blithely dismissing all those humans who aren’t fully secular (yet...

...The review thus winds up reading as, “Willis, X; however, Lasch, Y. Thus, Y. QED...

...Thanks to Scialabba’s extraordinary analytical skills, I now understand the appeal of the Laschian narrative as never before...

...Thanks to the publication of What Are Intellectuals Good For?, people like me—who came across Scialabba’s work randomly and irregularly, whenever and wherever his byline appeared—now have the opportunity to go back over those culture-war essays and discover that Scialabba was one of the very few left intellectuals whose judgment on such matters followed no party line whatsoever...

...By and large, they were bulldozed...

...I do not always find it possible to share Scialabba’s enthusiasms, even when What Are Intellectuals Good For...

...and whereas I’m willing to attribute Bourne’s antiwar position to his sagacity, I’m inclined to attribute Macdonald’s to his idiosyncrasy...

...regardless of where I agree with him or why, his essays offer an answer to the collection’s titular question...

...BOOKS Declarations of Independence MICHAEL BÉRUBÉ What Are Intellectuals Good For...

...Scialabba insists instead—and this is central to his critiques of capitalism and of the many conservatives who underemphasize or ignore the corrosive consequences of capitalism—that we cannot live wisely or well if everything solid melts into air...

...This is one of the themes of Scialabba’s take on the culture wars: that they allowed academic leftists to rationalize their avoidance of everyday democratic activity on the self-exculpatory grounds that, through their rigorous deconstruction of the liberal bourgeois imaginary of Martin Chuzzlewit, they already gave at the office (in Richard Rorty’s famous phrase, which Scialabba cites twice...

...But that reaction, as Scialabba’s eloquent and provocative essays patiently demonstrate, was precisely what was wrong with the culture wars...

...In the classical account, science, democracy, market relations, and ethical individualism were born and grew up together, the offspring of modernity...

...unlike the detractors of the academic Left, he admired and ably defended the work of Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish...

...And more: he showed that it was the advent of wage labor and mass production, which removed the father’s work from the child’s experience, thereby drastically altering his role in the child’s psychic development, that has produced the characteristic neurosis of our time, along with a culture of consumption...

...Both insights help reduce him to human size in the child’s psyche...

...But the logic of the lesser evil did not appeal to Macdonald...

...They’re good and crisp and impeccably well-written, yes, even where I (still) disagree with them...

...Scialabba’s encounter with Ellen Willis is, appropriately, one of the more vexing and revealing essays in the book...

...For Rorty, the primary problem with the Enlightenment was that it didn’t go far enough...

...And an important form of rootedness is our internalization of the Word in one form or another: sacred scripture or poetic tradition or civic mythology or family lore...

...one wonders whether an updated account of Cockburn’s work would take its distance accordingly...

...who believe in something beyond themselves...

...Had I been a black child in the Deep South in the 1940s, I probably would have been waiting impatiently for that centralized, interventionist state to show up and desegregate my community with all deliberate speed, and I wouldn’t be particularly impressed with my white neighbors whose resistance to the Leviathan was rooted in their traditional folkways...

...It must have been something in the socially constructed water...

...But I suspect that Lasch’s tale, like Freud’s, is ultimately all about boys...

...I like a good yarn as much as the next fellow, as long as we all know we’re dealing in yarns...

...And while Scialabba is surely right to applaud Randolph Bourne’s lonely opposition to World War I, which even his friends at the New Republic would not countenance, I find it hard to put my hands together for Dwight Macdonald’s opposition to American participation in World War II...

...too much Rorty, and one becomes a bit too complacent about the achievements of bourgeois liberal democracies...

...The trick lies in devising a kind of modernity that doesn’t involve the creative destruction of the planet...

...As it happens, Richard Rorty’s late-fourteenthcentury counterpart was muttering pretty much the same thing...

...Once we were unshackled from the correspondence theory of truth, however, we could look back on the past few centuries and, with a casual Rortyan shrug of the shoulders, wonder why it took us so long to extend the idea of universal human rights to every actually existing human being...

...But I’m not so sure about 1943...

...Where tradition was, there shall reason be...

...A good many people still seem to believe in a peculiar kind of democratic and antiseptic war...

...it still contained a few residues of metaphysics, from which William James and John Dewey could help us wriggle free...

...and Scialabba on modernity—that is, on the transformations of the past five or six hundred years or so—is the kind of writing that changes minds if not lives...

...I still believe, nonetheless, that one can take the full measure of the depredations of modernity without wholly subscribing to that narrative...

...In 1943 he left the magazine, and the next year, with his wife, Nancy, he started his own magazine, Politics...

...In The Culture of Narcissism and The Minimal Self, Lasch argued that to achieve secure selfhood an infant must experience love and discipline from the same source...

...Horrified as I am by the firebombing of Dresden and the nuclear devastation visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I don’t believe support for the Allies is well captured by the phrase “the logic of the lesser evil...

...allows me to inhabit them the way Scialabba craftily inhabits the work of every thinker he discusses...

...The opening essay, for instance, acquaints us with Scialabba’s admiration for Chomsky and for Alexander Cockburn...

...One is not surprised, then, when one finds that women on the Left—many of whom found Lasch’s work problematic—tend to be somewhat more sanguine about the way modernity busted up those traditional communities and sold us on an ideology of progress...

...Rather, he makes the subtle argument that the politicization of culture leads not only to bad art but also to bad politics: “Attempting to turn one’s professional enthusiasms and expertise to political account can distract from—can even serve to rationalize the avoidance of—everyday democratic activity, with all its tedium and frustration...

...For the most part,” he writes in the collection’s final essay, “the people of Europe did not make their own painful way beyond village, kin network, handicraft, and local religion into a brave new world of mobility and rationality, city and factory...

...For once the babes and sucklings seem to have been wiser than the children of light...

...and the centralized, interventionist state, overshadowing and sometimes replacing parental authority, complicated maturation still further...

...Willing war means willing all the evils that are organically bound up with it...

...by George Scialabba Pressed Wafer, 2009, 252 pp., $15, paper I made my first acquaintance with George Scialabba’s work under unfortunate circumstances...

...Michael Bérubé is Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Pennsylvania State University and the author, most recently, of The Left At War (NYU Press, 2009...

...But subsequent developments have not been altogether satisfactory, notably environmental spoliation, advanced weaponry, totalitarian social organization, the destruction of peasant societies and folk cultures, widespread anomie, and an altered rhythm of daily life that has arguably produced toxic levels of stress and epidemic psychopathology...

...Family, ethnic, regional, and religious loyalties are something we’re supposed to grow out of, or at least subsume in a wider sympathy...

...For Rorty was, among George’s whole world of heroes (the book is dedicated to him, to Lasch, and to Noam Chomsky), one of the cheeriest and least ambivalent advocates of modernity...

...And I fondly imagine that my latefourteenthcentury Italian counterpart would have been itching to get away from his little community and his dysfunctional birth family, muttering to himself, “Dang, I hope mercantile capitalism shows up soon—I can’t wait for this place to be atomized and dispersed so I can start enjoying some of that rootless cosmopolitanism I’ve never heard of...

...In that case as in this, the transition was shaped and paced, though not entirely motivated, by the needs of elites...

...The cornerstone of this argument can be found in Scialabba’s magisterial essays on the work of Christopher Lasch, for whom Scialabba expresses a profound sympathy (calling Lasch “our premier social critic” and The True and Only Heaven “a landmark work of social and cultural criticism”) tempered by a sense of regret that the prophet is, as ever, dishonored in his hometown...

...What are intellectuals good for...

...Unlike the partisans of the academic Left, he was willing to try to take Edward Said down a notch while offering a few words of praise to the likes of Hilton Kramer and Victor Davis Hanson...

...it is as if he thinks, hell, somebody’s got to crash the party, and if he decides that figures like Edward Said, Martha Nussbaum, or Isaiah Berlin are overpraised, he’ll be happy to do the job himself...

...But Scialabba’s contributions to the debates of the 1990s are not, finally, the best feature of this book...

...I like my heroic left intellectuals to be a tad more resolutely antifascist...

...Now, I have nothing against ambitious psychosocial, Marxist-Freudian explanations of world-historical transformations, but this benevolent-father-in-the-toolshed raises my hackles...

...In his review of Against the Grain, for example, Scialabba is not taken in by the New Criterion’s politics...

...That is to say, things were done because they had been done before—an efficient, though not infallible, way to achieve organismic and societal stability...

...People simply chose sides: everyone who wasn’t a paid-up supporter of the academic Left (all of it) was objectively reactionary, or, everyone who was a paid-up supporter of the academic Left (any part of it) was either a nihilist relativist multiculturalist (to critics on the right) or a jargon-spewing organization man (to critics on the Left...

...we can turn away from terrestrial pain toward political truths inscribed in the heavens or in our inmost nature...

...it is a trick we are still trying—when we feel like it, which we often don’t—to learn...

...My friend was stunned that Scialabba appeared to come down on the Dark Side of the culture wars: “In its crusade against the politicization of contemporary culture, the New Criterion is—on the whole, in the main, and not to put too fine a point on it—right...

...Late in the collection, Scialabba cites Leonardo Sciascia’s response to the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini: “Pasolini ‘may be wrong,’ Sciascia replied, he ‘may contradict himself,’ but he knows ‘how to think with a freedom which very few people today even aspire to.’” That’s my response to Scialabba as well...

...Throughout his essays, Scialabba stresses those subsequent developments, gradually building a case against modernity as we know it...

...Scialabba’s solution, at the end of his essay on Rorty, is to see Rortyan irony as the basis for Rortyan solidarity: “Rorty’s accomplishment has been to help liberate us from the illusion that...

...As it is, we are merely being distracted from them...

...Only rootedness makes sustained resistance to the modern Leviathan—state, corporations, and media—possible,” he writes...

...And surely, Bourne’s warnings were worth heeding in 1963 as in 2003...

...Time and again, What Are Intellectuals Good For...

...moves me to wonder how much our susceptibility or resistance to such narratives stems from our accidents of birth, from the details of our lives...

...We can be thankful that Scialabba’s never does...

...Don’t get me wrong...

...gives the impression— gradually, essay by essay—that these figures constitute the yin and yang of Scialabba’s thought, each complementing and checking the other...

...Scialabba insists that he remains “unconverted” by Lasch, but he nevertheless takes a great deal of Lasch’s critique on board, as here: The ideology of progress assumes that maturation involves moving away from narrow and particular affections toward abstract and universal ones...

...The pacifists opposed the war because they knew this was an illusion, and because of the myriad hurts they knew war would do to the promise of democracy at home...

...I’ll admit that I laughed at the time—and that I didn’t like the review any more than my friend did...

...otherwise the child, and eventually the adult, will feel for everyone in authority the same combination of rage and terror that the infant feels for whoever it depends on...

...It was the fall of 1995, and a colleague e-mailed me to complain about Scialabba’s review of Roger Kimball’s and Hilton Kramer’s Against the Grain: The New Criterion on Art and Intellect at the End of the Twentieth Century, which had just appeared in these pages...

...The parallels to the war in Iraq are obvious, and Scialabba—in what must be an interpolated parenthesis, since his essay on Bourne was first published in 1985—explicitly notes them...

...Benign cultural evolution, genuine emancipation, would lead us to work through such traditions, preserving even while going beyond them...

...But then, Scialabba has an abiding and infectious fondness for the lone dissenter, the vox clamantis, and he gets suspicious whenever he hears everyone cheering for the same side...

...Too much Lasch, and you run the risk of believing that certain freedoms for women are bad for society...

...for although Scialabba’s sincere admiration for Willis’s “extraordinary dialectical skills” is evident in every line, his critical response to Willis’s brand of cultural and sexual liberalism winds up being a rehearsal of Lasch’s major concerns, right down to the bit about how “the displacement of household production by mass production drastically altered the child’s relation to its father...

...The first modern generations looked upon what these phenomena had wrought, pronounced them good, and called for their indefinite continuation and extension...

...It is only “liberal” naiveté that is shocked at arbitrary coercion and suppression...

...For thinking, like George Scialabba, with a freedom to which very few people aspire...

...and second, that he possesses important and satisfying skills, which he is able and willing to pass on to the child, thus earning its gratitude...

...Though the language here is gender-neutral, that “child” in the father’s work environment would most likely have been male...

...For Lasch, this devaluation of the local and traditional is a radical error...

...the most democratic as well as the most autocratic...

...for some curious reason, girls weren’t as often the beneficiaries of their fathers’ important and satisfying skills...

...Here’s Scialabba on John Gray’s Enlightenment’s Wake: From time immemorial the prime agency of individual and social reproduction has been inertia, the biological form of which is instinct and the cultural form, tradition...

...It is hard to imagine an intellectual disposition to which both Rorty and Lasch are congenial—or it would be, if we did not have the example of George Scialabba...

...Scialabba was, and remains, unpredictable: a very good thing in the world of ideas, so long as one’s unpredictability does not generate into knee-jerk “contrarianism...

...So Scialabba on the culture wars is bracing...

...Dissent and Commentary have merged to form Dysentery...

...The tradition of all the dead generations of philosophers weighs a little less on those who have read Rorty’s books, which free us to turn toward those who need a more than philosophical liberation...

...Modernity is, in one of its numerous definitions, the progressive attenuation of inertia by consciousness...

...Looks like the old Woody Allen joke has finally come to fruition,” my snarky colleague said...

...but it was written in 1987, well before Cockburn devolved into full-bore crankdom and “contrarian” skepticism about climate change...

...and we usually assume that the more intense one of these particularistic commitments is, the more likely it is to be dangerously exclusive...

...But it would not have given rise to the twin spectres of antimodernist fundamentalism and postmodernist nihilism...

...What Are Intellectuals Good For...

...Bourne, knowing that war is the health of the state, wrote in 1917: War determines its own end—victory, and government crushes out automatically all forces that deflect, or threaten to deflect, energy from the path of organization to that end...

...It is as if, by sheer force of will, Scialabba manages to hold Lasch’s indictments of secular modernity together with Rorty’s attempts to persuade us to become a bit more secular and more modern...

...but the most impressive thing about Scialabba as a writer is that his work gets better—tighter, more rigorous, more thought-provoking—the larger its canvas...

...When such loyalties are exclusive, we call them “chauvinistic” or “fanatical...

...Here’s how Scialabba describes Dwight Macdonald’s lonely opposition: “When World War II broke out, the other editors of Partisan Review supported American participation and tempered their radical opposition to capitalism and bourgeois society...

...Scialabba emphasizes that father again in “A Whole World of Heroes,” a stunningly effective account of Lasch’s career, when he writes, “When the child is part of the father’s work environment, it observes two things: first, that he is fallible...