Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, editor, and multimedia
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September 13, 2007
Twenty years ago this fall, the intellectual and cultural historian Russell Jacoby lit a lamp in broad daylight, rushed into the marketplace, and shouted, "The Public Intellectual Is Dead!"
Like the madman in Nietzsche's "Gay Science" (who cries incessantly, "I seek God!"), Jacoby's 1987 book "The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe" asked, "Where are the younger intellectuals?" And like the madman, Jacoby was greeted with scornful laughter. Not from conservative intellectuals (who, as Jacoby pointed out, continued to write for a general audience, which might explain the 1980s), but from postmodernist professors who felt no nostalgia for the sort of universalist, utopian thinker and writer who'd loomed large in midcentury America. Utopian thinking is proto-totalitarian! We were well-rid of ideology-mongering "New York, Jewish, and Other Intellectuals," as one of Jacoby's chapters described the likes of Philip Rahv, Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, C. Wright Mills, and Dwight Macdonald.
As for Jacoby's accusation that intellectuals no longer criticized the status quo in a manner accessible to the educated public, it was "glib, superficial, and oracular," as one reviewer put it. After all, there were still plenty of journals and other periodicals for smartypants -- like October, Cineaste, and the Voice Literary Supplement -- right? And what about the "tenured radicals" we'd all heard so much about from conservatives?
Remember, though, how Nietzsche's so-called madman -- whom we ought to regard as a public intellectual, really -- responds to the jibes of his sophisticated peers. "Whither is God?" he cries. "I will tell you. We have killed him -- you and I." As Scott McLemee points out in a fine essay in the current issue of Bookforum, Jacoby's polemic wasn't romanticizing the intellectual scene of the 1950s. Instead, he was accusing his contemporaries and peers -- ex-utopians and activists who'd come of age in the '50s and '60s -- of having allowed themselves to be absorbed comfortably into the rapidly expanding postwar academy. It was very tough to be an independent thinker, and to survive as a freelance intellectual, in the '50s, according to Jacoby. But in the '80s it was even tougher to think and write like an intellectual should, because the putative heirs of the "last intellectuals" were almost entirely preoccupied (a term Jacoby uses as though it's synonymous with "possessed") by "the academic idiom, concepts, and concerns."
Tenured radicals were, after all, professional academics, and professionalization takes its toll: Jacoby accused his former comrades of having withdrawn their "intellectual energy from a larger domain to a narrower discipline." Never mind how subversive their ideas supposedly were: No one could understand them! The fact that the post-last intellectuals had all moved to the suburbs didn't help. As for October, Cineaste, and the Voice Literary Supplement, in his preface to the 2000 edition of "Last Intellectuals," Jacoby merely names these periodicals, refusing to dignify them with insults.
At the end of Nietzsche's parable, the madman gives up on trying to persuade his contemporaries, saying: "I have come too early, my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men." What of Jacoby's juniors, then? Did we get the memo? When "Last Intellectuals" appeared, were we busily breaking free of academe and doing intellectual work in the public square?
Jacoby didn't think so: "Younger intellectuals, whose lives have unfolded almost entirely on campuses, direct themselves to professional colleagues but are inaccessible and unknown to others," he scolded. Alas, he lamented, there were few American critics or thinkers under the age of 45 writing with vigor and clarity. If anything at all interesting was happening in the late '80s, according to Jacoby, it was in the pages of "little, little magazines" -- which those of us who were in our 20s then called zines. But even zines "seem to have lost their zeal and direction," Jacoby couldn't resist adding; unlike, say, Partisan Review, which addressed itself not only to aesthetics but to the burning political and philosophical questions of the day, most zines stuck to fiction and poetry.
Twenty years later, Scott McLemee -- who was in his 20s in 1987, and who describes himself elsewhere as "a perpetual student who does a lot of independent reading but isn't seen in public, let alone at any university, all that often" -- doesn't disagree that "the material conditions sustaining the possibility of an unattached intelligentsia" didn't exist when "The Last Intellectuals" was published. And in the '90s, he says, things got even worse: "Academic professionalization... went into overdrive," sucking young thinkers ever deeper into the "institutional machinery." Shades of Herbert Marcuse's "one-dimensional society," in which criticism and activism isn't outlawed, but instead becomes obsolete because the critics and activists are too well-integrated, too happy!
However, McLemee is not devoid of hope. He concludes:
Under the circumstances, any notion of a public-intellectual sphere functioning apart from institutional machinery seems preposterous.
Unless, of course, that machinery accidentally re-creates some of the constitutive elements of the old cultural order: a body of surplus intellectuals who are not very well integrated into the system. Who have (for example) full access to the range of questions and ideas debated within scholarly networks but cannot find full-time employment in academic institutions -- the products, but also the victims, of a system of higher education that is ever more dependent on a parttime labor force....
Such people, finding themselves excluded, might in time start wanting to "exclude the excluders." Then the tenor of intellectual discourse might change, and public life with it; and a space for discussion might appear in which it would be possible to move in more than one dimension.
Adjunct professors, over-educated bloggers, and freelance book reviewers unite! La lutte continua!
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 01:12 PM
September 13, 2007
"Do treaties change what states do?" That's the big theoretical question the University of Michigan political scientist James D. Morrow sets out to answer in the latest issue of the American Political Science Review. [$] Specifically, treaties governing the laws of war.
Foreign-policy realists argue that treaties are largely irrelevant, because with or without parchment agreements, states will pursue their own interests, bound only by their own codes of morality (or lack thereof) and the balance of power. In contrast, liberals believe treaties can restrict the behavior of nations and foster new norms of international conduct.
Morrow analyzes historical data on wars from the Boxer Rebellion, at the turn of the 20th century, through the first Gulf War -- data that includes information on the use of chemical weapons, treatment of POW's, protections granted noncombatants, and similar subjects -- and concludes that treaties do, indeed, shape the behavior of states to some extent. But the overall picture is messier than any one overarching theory can explain, he concludes. Treaties, norms, and power considerations all play parts in encouraging or discouraging atrocities.
Morrow finds, for example, that democracies that ratify war-crimes treaties do tend to refrain from the acts they have prohibited, even when they go to war with nations that have not ratified those treaties. (Democracies, however, will respond in kind if the other side violates international law -- no turning of the other cheek, here.)
On the other hand, the behavior of non-democracies is constrained by treaties only when the non-democracies fight mutual signers of those agreements. When non-democracies war with states that have not signed the treaties, they don't follow the rules. They have not absorbed the parchment "norms."
Surprisingly, Morrow finds that the worst violators of specific rules of war turn out to be democracies that have declined to sign the relevant treaties. That category of nations is followed "by non-democracies regardless of ratification status, with democracies that have ratified having the best record."
Adherence to war-crimes laws varies significantly according to the offense: bans on chemical weapons are widely followed, while few states, regardless of regime type, protect noncombatants to the extent they have pledged to.
Realists can point, for justification of their worldview, to some conclusions Morrow reaches: the stronger the nation that violates the rules of war, the worse the violation will be. And the bloodier the war, the higher the odds the rules will be torn up. Liberals, however, can point to the non-trivial effect that treaties themselves have -- especially on democracies.
Slobodan Milosevic on trial, 2001
Posted by Christopher Shea at 12:54 PM
September 13, 2007
No, I haven’t yet mingled with the throngs of shopperazzi celebrating the arrival of Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus at the newly upscaled Natick Collection, formerly Natick Mall. (That’s why we have the Stylephile crew). But I’ve been monitoring the excitement in my own sedentary, text-centric, nitpicking way.
The first language oddity came in a mailing from Nordstrom, inviting me to enjoy the rewards of using a Nordstrom credit card. The (modest) perks escalate, of course, as the outlay does: To hit the top level, you need “a minimum annual net spend of $20,000 at Nordstrom on your Nordstrom card.”
No doubt the lawyers are responsible for all the preemptive redundancy. But what’s with the “net spend”? That’s not English -- at least, not everyday consumer-friendly American English. The Nexis news database found the phrase only 13 times (over 30 years) in US papers, and five of those were in the trade-oriented Variety.
It’s not that spend can’t be a noun, of course. But net spend is budget jargon; in an invitation aspiring to stylishness, it clashes like a cheap handbag.
But wait, there’s more: Next came a newspaper insert from Neiman Marcus, offering free treats at its opening. In honor of the store’s 100th birthday, visitors were invited to sample “one of those infamous chocolate chip cookies you’ve heard about.” I didn’t bite; I don’t know how a cookie achieves infamy, but I can’t say I’m eager to find out.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 12:47 PM
September 11, 2007
An article by Benjamin Wittes, at the New Republic online, makes in greater detail an argument I only gestured toward in my recent item about Jack Goldsmith's new book, "The Terror Presidency": Goldsmith is not quite the liberal hero he's being painted as in profiles of him and reviews of his book.
Yes, Goldsmith thought the Bush Administration Justice Department produced two terrible "torture memos" and overreached in defending executive power. But don't forget, writes Wittes, whom Goldsmith consulted while writing "The Terror Presidency," that on
the merits of many disputed issues, Goldsmith is far closer to the administration he criticizes than to his fellow critics. He decries ... the legalization of warfare and the application of criminal statutes to foreign policy decisions, describing "a paralyzing culture of risk-averse legalism in the military and, especially, intelligence establishments before 9/11." He defends the decision to hold Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters as "unlawful enemy combatants" and the legal propriety of military commissions. While he considered the torture memos legally unsupportable and withdrew them, he offers no objection in principle to highly-coercive interrogation, writing that he had "very little basis for second-guessing my superiors' judgment that certain detainees should be questioned as aggressively as legally possible." He also "shared many of the White House's concerns with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)," the same law over which he and others were prepared to resign in order to force the administration to comply with it: "It seemed crazy to require the Commander in Chief and his subordinates to get a judge's permission to listen to each communication under a legal regime that was designed before technological revolutions brought us high-speed fiber-optic networks, the public Internet, email, and ten-dollar cell phones." Goldsmith criticizes liberals for not taking the terror threat seriously and not taking the conflict with Al Qaeda seriously as real warfare.
No one who watched a gleeful Bill Moyers interviewing Goldsmith on Friday night, on PBS's "Now," would have any idea of where the Harvard law professor stands on such issues. Moyers embraced Goldsmith as a fellow anti-Bush crusader -- he urged "all Americans" to read "The Terror Presidency," as I recall -- but the worldviews of interviewer and interviewee could hardly be further apart.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 10:52 AM
September 10, 2007
Alas, few magazines, newspapers, or websites offer RSS feeds dedicated to my favorite journalists and writers. (Alex Beam is an exception.) So I troll the Interweb for their bylines, an imprecise process. Still, my efforts usually pay off. Here are a few recent essays worth reading:
Michael Agger writes about Wikiscanner, for Slate (Aug. 24): "It's not news that Wikipedia is occasionally incorrect. It's also not a surprise that tobacco companies, the Mormon Church, and Scientology are altering pages to promote their products and worldviews. More interesting are the small fry who were also caught in the Wikiscanner net. Someone with a New York Times IP made a crucial edit to the Condoleezza Rice page, altering 'pianist' to 'penis.' A Greenpeace IP sniped at Ted Nugent (the Nuge is a prominent pro-hunting spokesman) by claiming that he once had a 9-year-old Hawaiian girlfriend. A Republican Party IP ruined the sixth Harry Potter by blanking the entire entry and adding a spoiler."
Annalee Newitz also opines about Wikiscanner, for AlterNet: "It's not a mean dude with a grudge who is spreading lies on Wikipedia but rather a member of the federal government or a journalist at The New York Times. Cultural anarchy online is coming not from the hordes of scribbling bloggers but from the same entities that have always posed a danger to culture: corporations and governments who refuse to take responsibility for what they're doing."
Jason Zengerle writes about Mitt Romney for Boston Magazine (September 2007): "With most flip-floppers, we assume they've abandoned some core belief for political gain. With Romney, there may be no core to abandon. And whether in business or in politics, that has served him well. The question as he makes his run for president is how much longer it still can."
Zengerle also writes about the New Hampshire primary's exalted position as first in the nation, for The New Republic (Sept. 10).
Joe Keohane gripes about Boston's student population, in Boston Magazine (September 2007): "That’s not to say it’s necessarily the kids’ fault, not when you consider they’ve been incubated in a culture bent on simultaneously narcotizing them, infantilizing them, and artificially ballooning their self-esteem to head off the sort of crippling, corrosive self-doubt that plagues their parents. But it does raise the question of to what extent colleges will choose to follow the rest of society down this bottomless, if extremely lucrative, well. For a high school to spit out graduates with a mental age of 13 is one thing. For a college, it’s a gross abrogation of duty -- one keenly felt in a city whose population nine months out of the year is nearly a quarter students."
Douglas Rushkoff, responding to the question "Is Conservative Judaism suffering from malaise?" writes, in The Forward (Aug. 29): "I see Conservatives as the nerds of Judaism in the best sense the people who actually read Torah, understand it, and thoughtfully apply its teachings to their daily lives in the quest to make the world a better place.... If Conservatives surrender, as did their sister movements, to the seemingly pressing but ultimately transient matters of racial fidelity and international politics, they will have abandoned the true calling of this movement, and left the rest of Judaism to flounder."
Mark Kingwell, writing in The Toronto Globe and Mail (Sept. 1), explains how our leisure time has become increasingly meaningless: "Why was Mr. Galbraith so off about this trend when he was otherwise so right about the pathologies of the luxurious society? One reason is that his suspicions about affluence did not extend far enough. For instance, he was highly critical of advertising -- then a nascent art, at least in terms of mass media -- because it stimulated artificial desire. But he could not have predicted how pervasive, and acceptable, such stimulation would become, the very cultural air. Nor could he, or anyone, have predicted that the final triumph of an affluent society is not mere consumption of goods but a total identification between consumption and the self in the form of the consumer."
Jonathan Lethem writes about his dance moves, his record collection and his obsession with the Fifth Beatle in The Guardian (September 1): "John explained bitterly that he wrote the hook to 'Taxman', George's 'best' song, just as Ray Davies was quick to note he helped his brother with 'Death of a Clown,' Dave Davies's greatest hit. So the sham notion of a 'democracy of talent' within these great groups, with its analogous utopian implications for collective action, could dissolve into sour cynicism: the presiding genius probably could have done just as well with any other supporting cast."
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:37 AM
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