Introduction
Tanenhaus), Editors (Michael Eric Dyson, Jean Bethke Elshtain and Sam
Intellectuals and Their America Last fall, we invited a number of prominent American intellectuals who are not editors of Dissent to participate in a forum about the culture and politics of our...
...That’s more than academic...
...It never came into existence...
...As to the benefit or liabilities of the academy, there is a famous story about the inimitable Flannery O’Connor...
...Sure, a lot of black folk aren’t feeling the need to engage in such criticism, but it’s an intellectual’s job to point out why that needs to happen and why it’s good for all of us, and ultimately, the president too...
...that’s a matter, often, of life or death...
...I can identify at least three: the first sees mass culture in its various incarnations as an instrument of the powerful who are out to manipulate public opinion and “mass” tastes everywhere...
...The third position is a sic et non, yes and no that assesses the productions of mass culture with reference to stated ideals: freedom, equality, justice, decency, protecting privacy, promoting social change, and so on...
...It was intellec 46 DISSENT SPRING 2010 tuals who contrived cold war nuclear strategy with its models based on game theory, who explained the strategic necessity of the Vietnam War, and who then calculated the “rational expectations” that resulted in the Iraq War...
...And they’d have a point, too, because such work (caricatures aside) is quite valuable, but it isn’t the only kind of work that now matters for a respectable intellectual...
...I am entirely disinterested...
...in the vivid criticism of Randall Jarrell and Alfred Kazin, which drowned textimprisoned ironic asperities in a tide of (highly rational) exuberance...
...Intellectuals should never assume they have some privileged entrée to political knowledge that is wanting among the citizenry more generally...
...How, then, should American intellectuals participate in politics...
...But art, first preceding politics, was soon engulfed by it: Pound by fascism, Eliot by royalism, Hemingway and Dos Passos by communism...
...If 42 DISSENT SPRING 2010 what we’re saying or doing in the academy is to make a difference, we’ve got to be able to make it make sense in the world that needs our brains...
...How clearly it echoes the evasions that Niebuhr, writing all those years ago, identified with the “socalled men of affairs, whether in business or government, [who are] inclined to be more complacent, whether because preoccupation with practical affairs prevents critical thinking or because their interest creates an ideological stake in the status quo, or because practical experience endows men with wisdom proving the tenets of the critics abstract and illusory”—with the difference that it is Cassidy’s interviewees who (with one or two laudable exceptions) dwell in their own world of abstract illusion...
...it includes independent intellectuals as well...
...and they can write esoteric books and thump their chests in pride that they’re pursuing lines of inquiry that are too important to be trusted to the newspaper or the daily blog...
...And many of its members, by no means estranged from power, move easily—all too easily—within its inner sanctums...
...for the masses, it might be a hot book or a pop film speaking to their existential and romantic quagmires, like comedian and radio talk show host Steve Harvey’s phenomenal bestseller Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, or Tyler Perry’s gutbucket gospel stage play, later turned into a film, I Can Do Bad All by Myself...
...So, no “should...
...My point is that intellectuals are not a special, rarefied group that participates in a way that distinguishes them from ordinary citizens...
...For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume that those who make a living using pen and voice to make arguments in and for the “public square” and do so from a variety of starting points—political theory, ethics, sociology, economics, on and on—are properly identified as intellectuals...
...My point is not that intellectuals are to blame for the dismal condition of our country, but only that the question of their relationship to it is no longer open to hypothetical speculation, because ours is a culture not of “attitude” (in PR’s original formulation) or “participation” (Dissent’s...
...At least that is now Reinhold Niebuhr described them in “Liberals and the Marxist Heresy,” an essay published in 1953...
...Another magazine, Dissent, was born instead...
...SYMPOSIUM: PART II JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN I doubt there is a “should” here anywhere...
...Some will participate in an ongoing manner...
...This can be overstated, of course...
...It would be good to “stifle” this sort of thing and to build up an authentic “culture of democratic argument,” as my late friend, the maverick historian Christopher Lasch, put it shortly before his untimely death...
...for the first time, capitalism has become an entirely global system, but its fruits are, as always, distributed unequally, in the United States as well as abroad...
...But as one who has held teaching positions at three major universities, public and private, over the past thirtyfive years, it seems to me true in general...
...Even better to spar with Charlie Rose or Tavis Smiley in a civil manner where ideas are taken seriously...
...in the poetry of W. H. Auden, wedging Anglo perspective into American idioms (the celebrated “dives” on Fiftysecond Street...
...That’s the kind of critical patriotism that has been practiced by American heroes like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King and like Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer...
...Pushing such a requirement would defeat the purpose of an independent intelligentsia...
...This group extends beyond the world of the professoriate...
...But there was work to be done...
...To revisit these questions today is to detect a latent ambiguity in the original formulations of 1952...
...Nonetheless, Philip Rahv SYMPOSIUM: PART II and William Phillips, presiding over the period’s premier “little magazine,” sensed a new era of reconciliation...
...Both U.S...
...These malign ascendancies prompted one of the period’s most gifted commentators, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to draw up plans for a new magazine, The Critic, that would seek to disperse the darkening clouds of conformism...
...Today it all looks very attractive, as well it should...
...Those who dare to write or speak in an accessible fashion are still too often looked at sideways by academic purists who poohpooh the value of scholars’ opening our mouths in earshot of American society or forming our thoughts in eyesight of popular culture...
...They include the scholars and professors interviewed by John Cassidy in a recent issue of the New Yorker—denizens of the Chicago School, several of them Nobel laureates, the high priests of “the efficient markets hypothesis” and “rationalexpectations theory” that laid the groundwork of our current economic ruin...
...I refer to Harold Rosenberg, who in 1948 characterized the contemporary academy as “the herd of independent minds...
...Second, this recent history reminds us how much the world has changed...
...Certainly the academy does too little to stifle the reproduction of the same ideas over and over again, and so it promotes an intellectualism that incessantly insists on its own originality when it could scarcely be more conformist...
...Lasch had a tendency to overstate his case, but I have 44 DISSENT SPRING 2010 little doubt that he had a solid case to make...
...We who reap the fruits of America’s “institutions” and its “culture” cannot meaningfully detach ourselves from either...
...ST is editor of the New York Times Book Review and the author of The Death of Conservatism...
...This by no means concludes the argument...
...JB E is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago and the author, most recently, of Sovereignty: God, State, and Self, her Gifford Lectures...
...First, because it is our inheritance and infuses the questions put to Dissent’s symposiasts, who in many cases remain unreconciled to America, “a nation they do not necessarily hold close to their hearts...
...In the culture as a whole, we tended to overpersonalize political questions, confounding what was appropriately political and what was not...
...I assume, too, that we’re way past the time when intellectuals have to apologize for listening to music that wasn’t made by Europeans a couple of centuries ago or going to movies that aren’t art house staples, although even that bit of snobbery was hard earned because the medium itself was doubted for its intellectual vitality by some of the nation’s brightest lights and biggest mouths...
...Of course, race is the last thing Obama wants to discuss, because it upsets the thin ice on which he skates in the white mainstream in a kind of implicit racial bargain he struck (and here Shelby Steele is right in discussing the bargain, though I disagree about its implications): if whites won’t remind him he’s black, then he won’t remind them that they’re white...
...But what has been grist for the scholar’s mill can also churn in the nation’s collective unconscious and appear on silver screens or in hiphop albums...
...Whether measured in sound bites or megabytes, the voices of smart folk who study one thing or another for a living are too much a treasure to be artificially restricted to the academic arena...
...It seems a good time for such a discussion...
...Better that intellectuals announce that they are partial to one position or policy or to one candidate and then offer a reasoned argument that invites affirmation or disagreement...
...It is rather a culture of complicity...
...it creates and satisfies artificial appetites...[and] has grown into a major industry which converts culture into a commodity...
...If it’s anywhere near true that most young folk turn to cable television’s Jon Stewart and not network anchor Brian Williams to satisfy their news jones (and that’s already a comedown for those who think they should get it only from the New York Times), then like Jesus and the woman at the well, you’ve got to meet folks at the symbolic level of their unspoken need—for the Jewish prophet’s needy female protagonist, it was a water bucket standing in for her spiritual thirst...
...Unfortunate, but there you have it...
...How one responds to the first query will turn, in part, on whom one places within the category “American intellectuals...
...Intellectuals and Their America Last fall, we invited a number of prominent American intellectuals who are not editors of Dissent to participate in a forum about the culture and politics of our country...
...MICHAEL ERIC DYSON There may have been a day when American intellectuals had the luxury of thumbing their noses at pop culture: magazines and journals devoted to serious reflection enjoyed healthy circulations...
...O’Connor’s response: “To the contrary, I don’t think it stifles enough of them...
...This is, needless to say, the more stimulating option...
...This is a foolish delusion, but at times intellectuals embrace it: “I am above the fray...
...The race to get to the White House may be over (well, alright, the race started again as soon as it was over), but race itself can’t be disposed of that easily, and that needs to be said among the majority (of) folk who may disagree with that proposition on behalf of the minority (of) folk who know in their guts it just ain’t so...
...SYMPOSIUM: PART II Depending on your view of these issues, the standards of intellectual work have either been thrown out the window or the snooty gatekeepers of knowledge have lost the battle to silence folk from whom we wouldn’t otherwise hear...
...For the record, I’m an unreconstructed Luddite when it comes to the disappearance of the traditional book...
...They shouldn’t make Delphic pronouncements from the heights of abstraction, but they should engage wholeheartedly in political debate and political life...
...I have said this is new, but it is new only in its excess...
...She asked for questions and one student raised her hand and intoned breathlessly: “Miss O’Connor, don’t you think that college stifles young creative writers...
...In the end, everything came down to the point of “me...
...According to Lasch, a kind of therapeutic mentality had overtaken us, so that students were invited to be “comfortable” (or not) with arguments and to avoid those that disconcerted them...
...What a looming paradox that begs for clarification among the masses...
...3. How should American intellectuals participate in American politics...
...and it discourages authentic and deep disagreements within its own ranks...
...The first set of answers ran in our Winter 2010 issue...
...I understand that the academy’s selfimage takes a hit when professors take to the small screen in shouting matches where we’re paired up with hacks from either end of the political spectrum and end up looking like the buffoons we seek to expose...
...That circumstance begged for historically sophisticated commentary by smart black folk and white allies—though the allies often got a crack at explaining black culture by proxy more than black folk themselves got the chance, as any cursory look at the Sunday morning news show will prove, which is when people are even asked to speak on race...
...in the early years of the cold war, many even agreed that America had “become the protector of Western civilization, at least in a military and economic sense...
...In such a climate intellectuals can follow one of two paths...
...True, you’ve got to take the good with the bad in such a world, but at least as you pan for intellectual gold you can navigate gigabytes quicker than you can wade through papyrus...
...This had already become the project of the most fertile minds associated with PR—in novels like Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March and Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, with their mythic homeland quests and demotic citysidewalk prose...
...These intellectuals, in their proximity to power, seem to have adopted all the prerogatives of politics and to have reversed the classic definition of the intellectual, most unsparing of himself, devoted to selfexamination, repelled by the tonics of selfjustification...
...They should be participants, first of all...
...politics and culture are arenas of great tension—whether the strains portend national renewal, decline, or more of the same...
...And there was, of course, the incursion of émigrés— Arendt and Chiaromonte, Schlamm and Strauss—who brought sour news of the Old World...
...Each writer could choose to respond to one or all of them...
...but if doing so makes us seem like we’re putting the guild at risk or relinquishing our duty to be above the fray, then that’s downright comic, but tragically so...
...The need for just such minds was never clearer than when, during the ’08 presidential campaign, Obama was pelted by conservatives and others as being a communist, a socialist, and a traitor to America for his refusal to wear a lapel flag pin, and honestly, for others, because of his color...
...Too often the academy pushes a dominant point of view...
...4. Do you consider yourself a patriot, a world citizen, or do you have some other allegiance that helps shape your political opinions...
...Instead we have the economist who borrows the vocabulary of cablenews debate, telling Cassidy, “My attitude is this: If you are getting attacked by [Paul] Krugman, you must be doing something right...
...It was attractive then, too...
...A lot of deep thinking goes into JayZ’s lyrics about hustling and fatherless black homes, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy, well at least the first two films, wrestles brilliantly with the role of respect and outlaw behavior in ethnic communities...
...digital technology has altered the ways most Americans inform and entertain themselves and communicate with others, but many worry that it also trivializes all forms of expression...
...Even the laziest intellectual and the most uninspired thinker can summon enough opportunism to exploit these artifacts of pop culture in the classroom or on television as a talking head...
...And compact disc doesn’t exactly solve the problem either in this age of digital downloads...
...Estrangement was a habit of mind rooted in a legacy of disenchantment that predated the economic and political crises of the 1930s...
...Today the relationship of the intellectuals to “America and its institutions” is no longer a matter of conjecture, but of fact...
...Thus we prove at once that we’re loyal to the nation in the same way we prove our loyalty to our tribe and vocation: by rigorously examining our practices and ideals in the light of our best thinking on pressing issues in service of humanity...
...These facts, so familiar today, were not yet quite visible in 1952...
...America might be potentially embraceable, could become “Our Country and Our Culture”—and not exclusively theirs (that is, the philistines’)—but only if its hidden virtues could be uncovered or reimagined...
...Rarely taken up is the question of whether a crude leveling of opinion follows perforce and blunts our capacity to make necessary judgments about a whole range of phenomena...
...He lamented the foreclosure of “spaces” for democratic contestation and worried that we were not forming citizens eager for the contests...
...It’s long since time for intellectuals to, well, get over ourselves and, as legendary Motown crooner Marvin Gaye implored, “come get to this—” and if that’s not quite the Kantian thing in itself, Ding an sich, it is at the very least the cultural thing in itself: a novel, a video, a song, anything that represents the good or ill of our society and what it’s wrestling with at a given time as we seek to illumine the culture with our insight and analysis...
...The nation’s small class of intellectuals consisted of the quarterly’s own contributors and also its readers, who must now acknowledge their misreading of the previous decades—the death struggle of competing tyrannies, the specter of a warruined Europe— and overcome their estrangement from to embrace opinions that are partial and particular...
...The words “Our Country and Our Culture” imply not so much a patriotic reconciliation as, perhaps, an ambitious assertion of dominion (“our country, not yours...
...In reality there were fresh grounds for estrangement in 1952, the year the public elected by landslide a general (Eisenhower) enamored of business tycoons instead of a hyperliterate reformer (Stevenson), and the year in which Joseph McCarthy, thanks to the era’s first “hot war,” in Korea, secured his place as the secondmostpowerful man in America, and the secondbestknown beyond its borders...
...The need for bright minds and gifted pens, or cursors, is heightened in our current political climate...
...Let’s not pretend that quarantining the life of the mind to the academy hasn’t at times made the rest of the culture sick...
...It is far from clear what part American intellectuals—in and outside academia—play, or wish to play, in understanding and dealing with these issues...
...it lopsidedly consists of professors who embrace identical political opinions and identifications...
...Lasch was known for his feisty contributions to political debates and for the urgency of his conviction that such debates are central to the wellbeing of our civil society...
...American intellectuals can still take refuge in obscure journals that thrive on abstract jargon...
...Its purpose, wrote the magazine’s editors, was “to examine the apparent fact that American intellectuals now regard America and its institutions in a new way...
...But it was twinned with disappointment verging on despair...
...politics, but a new liberal era has not yet begun...
...It originated in an earlier protest, the Modernist rebellion against “the genteel tradition” that disgusted heartland Americans—Pound and Eliot, Hemingway and Dos Passos, all of whom fled to Europe—and also gave us the comic fury of Mencken and the cosmopolitan literary researches of Edmund Wilson...
...These giants, antiromantic in their aesthetic, succumbed to a destructive romanticism in their politics...
...2. Does the academy further or retard the engagement of intellectuals with American society...
...Most writers who advocated socialism during the 1930s no longer saw themselves as “rebels and exiles...
...These are our new elite—policy intellectuals, economists, physicists, and mathematicians...
...But it is primarily the unnuanced positions— either total negation or enthusiastic embrace— that garner the lion’s share of attention...
...The third stance should be preferred...
...For that matter, being the first black president is a big deal too, even if that president thinks he can’t say so except in passing, and even when the dominant culture has bet its bottom dollar that electing a black president means that race is officially over...
...There’s a long history of black folk loving America enough to tell the truth of how we were willing to lift the nation’s flag high on foreign soil and die in its name even as we were denied our rights back home...
...But anyone who pursues it should keep in mind that the price is steep, to the intellectual and to the country, whether or not one holds it close to the heart...
...This ambiguity was almost certainly intended, reflecting as it did the anxiety any small class of people in a large sprawling democracy is likely to feel if the work they do exists apart from the central, driving concerns of that democracy’s public life, which in America have usually been the concerns of commerce...
...weighty thinkers won notice for their big ideas rather than their tony digs or cushy university perches...
...Immanuel Kant once opined that moral philosophers are members of an “objective” class that could never do anything so tawdry as SAM TANENHAUS The editors’ question about how intellectuals should “participate in American politics” highlights (for me, at least) how the meaning of the word “intellectual” has expanded since 1952, when the editors of Partisan Review organized the famous symposium that has inspired this new one...
...That’s the kind of patriotism that most of us black intellectuals have practiced, too: our willingness to criticize the nation is an index of our healthy love for America, not the blind adoration of country that passes for loyalty...
...The reason The Critic foundered was that Schlesinger and his gifted recruits, who included Mary McCarthy and Dwight Macdonald, were prospering mightily in the very culture they accused of being so inhospitable to them...
...But I hope that there is some wisdom to be found in the arguments of those who see themselves as citizens who have embraced a particular sort of responsibility in and for public life...
...But few intellectuals extended their new optimism about the nation to mass culture...
...The discussion continues here...
...In 1952, Partisan Review, then near the apex of its influence, held a similar symposium, entitled “Our Country and Our Culture...
...And by the way, I do mean uncomfortable for everybody, even the black folk who love their first black president and don’t want to offer him even legitimate criticism (they don’t want in any way to look like the Tea Partyers or bother him with just demands for representation that any constituency that helped someone get into office has a right to claim...
...In the 1960s “action intellectuals” devised the programs of the New Frontier and the Great Society...
...Can you even say album any more in this largely postvinyl era...
...We asked four questions: 1. What relationship should American intellectuals have toward mass culture: television, films, massmarket books, popular music, and the Internet...
...Why replay this ancient history...
...Conservatives no longer dominate U.S...
...Tellingly, it was apolitical practitioners of the word—Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Stevens— who helped revive an authentic literary romanticism despite the debility of their presumed “false consciousness...
...If intellectuals have any purpose at all, it is to help us to think of relevant distinctions for the purpose of analyzing and criticizing political life...
...and the lines between high and low culture weren’t nearly as blurred as they are now...
...But that doesn’t mean that there’s not value to weighing in on important social and cultural matters in a medium where millions of eyeballs are glued...
...Others will get engaged at particular moments depending on the issue at hand...
...But there is no monistic stance that “ought” to be taken by this diverse group...
...Crucial ideas are at stake, but so are the lives of millions who will never get the opportunity to speak for themselves about how those ideas affect them...
...Mass culture is an instrument in the hands of venal private interests...
...The alternative is for intellectuals to seek to enlarge their particular identity qua intellectuals, making knowledge or habit of thought the basis for special claims of authority in the hope of somehow shaping, influencing, or interpreting events...
...They can decide to separate vocation from the duties of citizenship and acknowledge that they are simply a few among the many millions who enroll in the party of their choice, vote for their preferred candidates, pay their taxes, find their preferred diversions and entertainments...
...Miss O’Connor, as she preferred to be known, had just completed a lecture at a college she was visiting...
...Meanwhile, Richard Hofstadter, the most intuitive of modern historians, realized that the truest “dynamic of dissent” had shifted rightward, the breeding ground of the radicalism still with us today...
...American Empire is a big deal these days, especially as it’s being played out in the mouth and mind of the nation’s first black president...
...America and its institutions” and perhaps even embrace “Our Country and Our Culture...
...This was the case in the early fifties, too...
...In that peak year of the cold war, intellectuals were presumed to be people who trafficked in language—“the more articulate members of the community, more particularly those who are professionally or vocationally articulate, in church and in school, in journalism and the arts...
...Its tendency,” the editors of PR complained, “is to exclude everything that does not conform to popular norms...
...My hunch is that the preponderance of American intellectuals who speak of mass culture fit within this broader and more nuanced category...
...We have felt the political influence of academic scholars during the past eight decades...
...Consider the range of possible stances taken by American intellectuals...
...EDS...
...Our intellectuals constitute a much larger class than in 1952...
...A second position is to embrace popular culture as inherently democratic or populist—the Internet especially, which is said to open the universe of public opinion to everyone without distinction...
...M ED is a sociologist, author, and radio host...
...What intellectuals can and should do is to help clarify the issues we face and help figure out how best to face them...
...It’s bad enough to be deemed inferior for wanting to talk to more than a narrow cloister of academic colleagues...
...My view is similar: perhaps the academy does too little to “stifle” certain engagements of intellectuals with American society...
...Our era cries out now more than ever for bright black minds to tell uncomfortable truths about race...
...I inhale like an addict the dense odor of literacy that comes from leafing through books on library or bookstore shelves as I’m hijacked by serendipity and fix on volumes I wouldn’t have known existed had it not been for the visceral pleasures of browsing...
...That’s good news if you’re a fan of historical amnesia and political cowardice, but it’s bad news for the those of us who must wrestle with the consequences of race among the masses of black folk who’ll never get to visit with, or walk in the shoes of, the most famous black occupant of public housing in the nation’s history...
...The editors of Partisan Review began with the same premise...
...The old debate of access versus quality doesn’t hold as much sway as before because some of the smartest thinkers have taken to cyberspace to air their views to an increasingly paperless nation...
...There is no reason to presume that political wisdom is the singular property of intellectuals...
...In our own uncertain era, it is useful for women and men with a reputation for thoughtfulness and creativity to reflect on issues that bear profoundly on both their craft and their country...
...Twenty years before the editors of PR organized their cenacle, intellectuals (the “brain trust”) gave us the New Deal...
...These are wobbly claims...
...Not that the old alienation could simply be whisked away...
...His most recent book is Can You Hear Me Now...
...And that’s the same kind of loyalty to social and political ideals that black intellectuals must show in our willingness to criticize Obama, especially as he tries to wiggle free of a conversation on race that his election benefited from and can potentially spur...
Vol. 57 • March 2010 • No. 2
