On Cornel West
Cornel West—Princeton professor, recording artist, motion picture star—advertises himself as one of the world’s most influential intellectuals–and it’s almost certainly true. But what kind of intellectual is he and why is he important? I don’t mean to ask “are his views correct?”, “is his net effect positive?”, or “does he deserve his success?”. Many think no; I’m inclined to think yes. But whatever; important as they are, those aren’t the issues I’m interested in. What I’m interested in is taxonomy, not assessment—less evaluation than finding appropriate criteria for evaluation.
The urgency of this project comes from the fact that intellectual is not a unified phylum. It’s a catch-all, a more or less arbitrary classification useful for tax purposes but little else: call someone an intellectual and all you’ve really said is that he or she has a byline but no real job. Intellectuals as a class share neither a common ancestor nor a common morphology nor a common niche. There are, in Isaiah Berlin’s famous (and intentionally silly) cartoon, hedgehogs who know one big thing and foxes who know many little things. In addition, there are entrepreneurs and professionals and laborers; there are artists and artisans; there are builders, renovators, and demolition men; there are judges and advocates. Some are showmen, some are collectors, some are priests, some are scribes, and some are guerrillas. All of these roles have places (not necessarily equal) in the universe of public discourse, and each comes with its own criteria for success. To tag someone with one of these labels isn’t automatically to appraise him or her. It’s simply to set the criteria by which he or she should be appraised.
So what kind of intellectual is Cornel West?
Going by his book Democracy Matters, he’s a pedagogue, a PR man, a mediator, a guru, a synthesizer, a traditionalist, and a true believer. Whether he therefore belongs to an existing genus or whether a new one should be invented for him, it’s unclear. What is clear, I think, is that he’s not what people sometimes mistake him for. He’s not an innovator or a very substantive thinker. He’s neither a radical, a scholar, nor an activist. He’s more an umpire than a player.
As the title suggests, the fountainhead of West’s thought is the idea of democracy. But this is less a political concept than a moral one. If anything, the legitimacy of political democracy is merely the reflected glory of moral democracy. Moral democracy is less an institution than a fact: that we are all moral equals, equally deserving of justice and respect regardless of class, color, creed, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
This egalitarianism leads West into an admirable but unexceptional political agenda. He’s against unchecked capitalism (Enron), militarism (the Iraq war), and authoritarianism (the Patriot Act). Each violates our underlying moral equality, and politically each is the result of the concentration of power in the hands of elites.
Fortunately, West also has a plan for how to rid ourselves of these elitist evils. In a word: dialogue.
There is certainly something democratic about dialogue. Conversing with a partner is in some way treating her as an equal: you need recognize her right to speak, listen with an open mind, and be willing to work toward mutual understanding. If you don’t at least make an effort to do these things, you aren’t having a conversation. West takes this parallel and runs with it: dialogue is inherently democratic and democracy is dialogue is the solution to democracy’s political problems. It gets us to open up to the moral equality of others, to see them as equally deserving of justice. From this meeting of the minds a just political consensus is supposed to emerge.
Dialogue can be hard, but again West has an answer: we need to hone our skills through liberal education focused on a canon of “democratic” artists. Reading Emerson, Melville, Chekhov, Baldwin, and Morrison is both an exercise in dialogue and an instruction manual for it.
West has an expansive, unified vision. It stretches almost the full breadth of American life, from popular music to religion. It enshrines a single value, democracy, as the guide to politics, art, education, and moral life. This gives it a sort of Manichaean simplicity. There is a primordial struggle with democratic ethics, politics, art and education presenting a unified front against their elitist counterparts. Nevertheless, it’s a welcoming vision. Democratic dialogue has no ideological preconditions; the only people who are excluded are those nihilists who refuse to join in and so exclude themselves.
If West’s vision is grand, it’s also airy. There are no concrete policy proposals. He’s more concerned with changing hearts than minds. His analysis of the Israel-Palestine conflict is basically this: both sides need to put dogma aside and embrace democratic dialogue with one another. This won’t offend anyone. It may inspire some, and that’s valuable, but it doesn’t address the question at the heart of the conflict, namely “Whom does Palestine belong to?”.
West says some controversial things, but nothing remotely incendiary. Sometimes he even comes across as timid. Reagan, for example, gets off lightly in comparison with his acolytes. He is “a masterful conservative communicator and true believer in the rightness of America’s might.” West never condemns the Iraq War; he just advises cultural sensitivity: “We will likely stoke more resentment in the Middle East than fires of democratic passion if we are not sensitive to the special characteristics out of which democracy must evolve there.” Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is anti-Semitic “in its effect, not in his intention.” For all the talk about the importance of prophetic utterance, there’s precious little of it.
You get the sense that he sees himself primarily as an evangelist for dialogue and not so much as a participant in the dialogue, unless of course it’s a dialogue about dialogue. He stays above the fray and doesn’t dirty his hands with details. He’s more or less content to point out cases where the dialogue’s grounds rules have been violated. Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, for example, are insufficiently honest: they “cannot manage to speak with full candor or attack the corruptions of the system at their heart.” West sometimes casts himself in the role of Socratic gadfly, but nowhere is there anything as detailed as Plato’s plan for ideal Republic.
Faith in the power of dialogue to resolve political problems is reassuring, but there’s also something worrying about it. Honesty, openness, and good faith are important, but surely they’re just the first step. The hard work begins only after such preconditions have been met. Two equally honest, open, and faithful sides can still disagree, and then what do we do? Surely part of politics, though certainly not the prettiest or most inspiring part, is a matter of managing cases where there are no sanitary moral options.
Forget this and you risk making conflicts worse. If you think that dialogue alone is enough to resolve any conflict, then behind every intractable conflict you’ll find a treacherous interlocutor. That’s often the case. Indeed, West is at his best when calling out policies and institutions that are transparently corrupt. But often it’s not.
West sees himself as a spiritual warrior for the soul of America. He’s a sober and openhearted warrior, but ultimately politics happens in the realm of things, not spirit.
Those dirty populists
David Brooks has terrible new column where he argues basically as follows: “populism and elitism are bad and divisive; the Democrats’ economic policies are populist, therefore, they’re bad and divisive.” But are Democrats’ economic policies populist in the negative, resentment-and-class-warfare sense Brooks has in mind? They’re certainly more egalitarian, but are they really more populist? By the same token, mightn’t the Republicans’ economic policies be–gasp!–elitist?
In reality, as Brooks himself seems to grasp, the populism-elitism distinction simply isn’t very useful for thinking about American politics. Which side of the divide one falls on is more a matter of style than substance. Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are populists, but so was John Edwards. Populism is a less a political principle than a rhetorical device that can be used to argue for a wide range of principles. It’s less a matter of which policies you hold and more a matter of how you sell them. The other reason populism and elitism are not very useful categories is that they’re very often used with a negative connotation: a populist or elitist is often someone who has no principled argument for her policies other than mere preference for one class over another. Calling someone a populist or elitist is, in effect, refusing to take their arguments seriously.
Of course, lurking in the background of the populism-elitism divide is a substantive debate about what economic justice looks like and how it should be achieved. But this issue is only obscured by thinking about it in terms of populism and elitism. If we should be talking about how much economic equality there should be, then let’s talk about that instead of who’s punishing whom. Brooks is doing everyone a disservice by writing things like this:
They [populists] can’t seem to grasp that a politics based on punishing the elites won’t produce a better-educated work force, more investment, more innovation or any of the other things required for progress and growth.
If Brooks is so anti-populist, he should really devote equal time to criticizing pro-economic elite populists like Palin and Beck. And of course, the real issue isn’t whether the elites should be punished–of course they shouldn’t–but rather what constitutes punishment and what constitutes doing their fair share.
I love the ’00s!
Admittedly, summing up the past decade in world historical terms is hard, but even with a generous handicap John Gray does a bad job of it. He complains that the two biggest fiascos of the last ten years–imperial overreach in Iraq and the failure to prevent worldwide economic collapse–were based on delusions: respectively, that democracy would magically take root in Iraq and that financial markets would magically regulate themselves. That’s hard to argue with, and anyone with a newspaper would admit as much. Indeed, the more honest among the responsible parties already have. The problem is that it’s basically just a statement of fact and not really an analysis of the failure. That They got things wrong is obvious; we want to know what and why precisely.
Gray does have something of an answer, but it’s pretty facile. It obscures more than it clarifies.
It is not often that large scale crises are due to intellectual error, but a single erroneous belief runs through all of the successive delusions of the past decade. With few exceptions, both right and left seem to think that history is a directional process whose end point–after many unfortunate detours–will be the worldwide duplication of people very like themselves.
This is the kind of sweeping statement that soothsayers specialize in. It rolls nicely off the tongue but the clarity it provides is only momentary and ultimately illusory. Having been riled up by a catalog of failures, we are eager to be told that there’s a single root to the manifold evil. As with fortune-tellers, the problem is not so much that the answer is demonstrably wrong as that it’s almost vacuous and in a way that’s suggests some misleading illusions.
Let’s take apart Gray’s statement bit by bit.
“It is not often that large-scale crises are due to intellectual error…” Taken literally, Gray can’t be serious. Historians of the World Wars will be shocked! Show me large-scale crisis and I’ll show you intellectual error. In fact, show me any crisis at all, and dollars-to-doughnuts I can show you intellectual error. Of course, Gray probably means just that large-scale crises are not often due to intellectual error alone. That’s true, and unfortunately for Gray it’s also true of the crises in question. In Washington, in Baghdad, and on Wall Street, there was certainly more than just intellectual error involved. Worse, Gray’s statement encourages us to focus on the intellectual errors to the exclusion of the others.
“…but a single erroneous belief runs through all of the successive delusions of the past decade.” This makes it sound as if all the various delusions have the same one underlying cause–dig it out and you’ll rectify everything in one fell swoop. Literally, of course, the statement is much weaker. It just says that all the delusions incorporate a single erroneous belief. But that belief might play only minor role in bringing about the delusions, or indeed no role at all. Even if Gray succeeds in isolating a common thread among the delusions, it may not be a very interesting or important discovery.
“With few exceptions, both right and left seem to think that history is a directional process whose end point–after many unfortunate detours–will be the worldwide duplication of people very like themselves.” Look, people have theories about how the world works. Those theories are often wrong, and people are often way too confident in their (usually wrong) theories. So there are two questions: “what’s wrong with the theory?” and “why are people so unduly confident in it?”. The important thing to notice is that Gray’s answer focuses entirely on the second question, the question about overconfidence, when in fact it’s the first question, the question about substantive theory, that is arguably more important. By doing so, Gray actually understates the extent of the errors involved. It’s not just that Bush, Greenspan, et al. were too confident in their own ability to discern the correct theory. They also just had the wrong theories, and even about the people who were like them! Moreover, this was often for reasons, like incompetence and a preoccupation with bureaucratic power struggles, only tangentially related to overconfidence.
This confusion leads Gray to end on unproductively pessimistic note:
Unreality is the defining features of the ideas that have been in vogue over the past decade. The grandiose delusions with which the new century began have not been abandoned. Instead, they have been shrunk to a size at which they can still be maintained. The small world of British politics provides many examples of this tendency. Rather than acknowledge that neoliberalism has failed, politicians in all three main parties are seizing on a succession of intellectual gimmicks for solutions to the problems that the ideology has created. Gladwell’s blink, Sunstein and Thaler’s nudge, the wisdom of the crowds–these and other ephemera of the airport bookstore are being taken up, promoted and then forgotten in the floundering attempt to deal with a crisis that is only in its early stages. [my emphasis]
So politicians, it seems, are doing precisely what they should be doing: shrinking and modifying their commitment to capitalism in light of its past failures. Indeed, this seems to be the lesson Gray himself draws from the rise of Chinese capital: in the future there will be many different varieties of capitalism including distinctively non-western ones. To be charitable, the social science popularized in the airport bookstore arguably contains important lessons about what a reformed (Western) capitalism will look like. You can argue that the politicians are going about this reform all wrong, but accepting that there are other kinds of capitalism is no reason for abandoning the reform of your own.
Two quotes
Sam Tanenhaus’s book The Death of Conservatism has some really killer quotes in it. Here’s an excerpt from Whittaker Chambers’s review of Atlas Shrugged:
At first, we try to tell ourselves that these are just lapses, that this mind has, somehow, mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in time of the difference between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive. Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house.
I had no idea Chambers had such a sharp critical eye. And this stopped me cold:
Our earth is the home of revolution.
That’s the opening line of a speech Lyndon Johnson gave at the 1965 Howard University Commencement laying out his Great Society agenda.
Chambers’s review and Johnson’s speech are both well worth reading in full, as is Tanenhaus’s book.
Jay Leno and Martha Coakley
Ridiculously, Matt Bai thinks Jay Leno is the reason for Martha Coakley’s loss in Massachusetts. He ties Coakley’s loss to the idea that 60-year majorities like FDR built are a thing of the past, and that to our increasingly frenetic way of life:
In an accelerated culture, our loyalties toward just about everything — laundry detergents, celebrities, even churches and spouses — transfer more readily than our grandparents could have imagined. Now we dispose of phone carriers and cash-back credit cards from one month to the next, forever in search of some better deal. Forget the staying power of an institution like Johnny Carson; when Jay Leno starts to feels a little stale, he is shifted to prime time, then shifted back to late night. It was probably never very realistic for modern political thinkers of either party to dream of a 50-year reign. This century’s tectonic realignment is more likely to last 50 months or maybe 50 weeks, depending on how long it takes voters to seek out the latest offer or the newest best deal.
Yes, Coakley lost and, yes, Obama’s coalition almost certainly won’t last as long as Roosevelt’s, and, yes, we suffer from cultural ADD. You can try to explain each of these, but when you try to tie them all together in a quick way, as Bai does, you end up explaining nothing. For none of them really explains any of the others.
There were plenty of reasons Coakley lost besides confidence that the Democrats had history on their side. Even if anyone seriously believed this, its effect on the campaign was probably negligible, and Bai gives no reason to think otherwise. Does Coakley’s loss show that Obama’s coalition won’t last decades? Well, it probably won’t last that long, but again, there are lots of other reasons for that. At every level, beginning with the economic, our society is much more complex than it was in the middle of the 20th century. And our fluid consumer loyalties may be a symptom of this larger change, but it’s doubtful that they’re actually driving it.
Bai’s most basic point is that politics is like the weather: constantly changing and ultimately unpredictable. That’s true, but completely trivial. No one ever went wrong emphasizing the short-term unpredictability of things: we simply can’t ever know what tomorrow will bring. But sometimes we are interested in the long-term trend, in the climate instead of the weather, and on that matter Bai’s sophomoric message is this: the only long-term trend is that there won’t be any long-term trends. We expect more from our meteorologists and climatologists, and we should expect more from our political pundits.
Theodicy and Haiti
Like me, Leon Wieseltier is skeptical of the view that the Haiti earthquake is a special, if painful opportunity, a gateway to a new era when things will be different…for real this time. He rightly worries that this kind of overambitious thinking can turn quickly to despair, exhaustion, and cynicism, which then become pretexts for inaction. The better attitude is compassion with commitment but without illusion, either positive or negative:
…we must learn to distinguish between meliorative action and millennial action. The struggle against suffering should take place soberly, grimly, with what the poet called a heart for any fate, because it sets out from the prior actuality of suffering. It is born disabused, or it is a misunderstanding.
We arrive at this commonsense conclusion in a roundabout way, via a reflection on theodicy. (Theodicy is the attempt to reconcile the existence of evils, like suffering of innocents, with the existence of God.) Wieseltier submits, quite plausibly, that the earthquake and the ensuing suffering teach no lessons about whether or not God exists. Moreover, the attempt to divine such lessons only distracts from the real issue: suffering, the relief of present and the prevention of future. In the same way, then, relief efforts should proceed with a clear-eyed agnosticism about Haiti’s ultimate destiny.
I agree with each point taken individually, but tying them together is unhelpful and rather confusing. You don’t need to invoke theodicy to argue for aid with realistic aims. Wieseltier makes the interesting, mostly implicit suggestion that the millennial rhetoric is a kind of displaced, secularized theodicy, but whether it is or not is irrelevant to the real case against millennial illusions, namely that they’re counterproductive and dangerous. Most of all, I think that we needn’t hold theodicical thinking wholly apart from our response to Haiti. This is because any theodicy worthy of the name begins in outrage. The suffering of innocents is an obscenity, a deep affront to any reasonable moral order, whether you put God or Human Rights or the Principle of Utility or something else at its center.
Looting after disasters
This is a great essay by Rebecca Solnit in which she discusses the media’s lurid and unfair depictions of “looting” in Haiti:
Personal gain is the last thing most people are thinking about in the wake of a disaster. In that phase, the survivors are almost invariably more altruistic and less attached to their own property, less concerned with long-term questions of acquisition, status, wealth, and security, than just about anyone not in such situations imagines possible. (The best accounts from Haiti of how people with next to nothing have patiently tried to share the little they have and support those in even worse shape than them only emphasizes this disaster reality.) Crime often drops in the wake of a disaster.
Some of her other rhetoric is overheated, but her basic point is completely compelling: people shouldn’t be criminalized for preserving human life at the comparatively miniscule expense of property.
I only wish she had said more about how news of “looting” changes the response to disasters. I suspect it creates a situation where aid becomes conditional on law and order being re-established first, when in fact things are the other way around: aid is a precondition for any formal order.
Fake memoirs
In The New Yorker, Daniel Mendelsohn wonders about the recent proliferation of fake memoirs. He points to the rise of confessional talk shows and reality TV, which exist at the margin between real and fake, and to the rise of electronic social networking, which blurs the related distinction between public and private. Those are certainly both factors, but there are some others that he doesn’t mention. A lot of it is simple economics. Memoirs are popular and they’re much easier to write than novels, so there’s bound to be heavy competition, which gives memoirists a big incentive to juice up their stories. It’s also how books are promoted nowadays. The author interview, in whatever medium, is incredibly important. My sense is that it’s more important, and more prevalent, than ever before. And on average, amazing true-life stories make for better, higher-rated interviews. Finally, memoirs generally excuse the reader from having to puzzle over the author’s intent or search for some unifying aesthetic vision. The memoirist shapes preexisting material; the novelist invents out of whole cloth. As such, events in a memoir are not aesthetic choices in the way that events in a novel are–they’re there more or less because life simply happened that way. The impulses behind memoir–to record, to share, to instruct–are far easier to understand and express than the impulses behind fiction.
Creationist fantasies
Vanity Fair has a short article about the Creation Museum near Cincinnati. The article is not at all insightful, but when you read about creationists who believe that fire-breathing dinosaurs survived into the Middle Ages, you’re struck hard by the fact these people are quite literally just making things up. Pseudoscience should at least be principled pseudoscience. It’s one thing to believe the Bible is inerrant, all scientific evidence to the contrary. It’s another thing to believe that plus a bunch of other things that are consistent with the Bible (i.e. fail to contradict it) but have no basis in science or indeed in the Bible itself. The Bible may be the product of fantasy, but nowhere does it license fantasy as way to answer those questions, like the fate of the dinosaurs or the number of animals on the ark, on which it is simply silent.
The aesthetics of ruins
Hitler and Speer wanted their buildings built out of stone instead of steel and concrete, for they intended to leave majestic ruins at the end of the Reich’s thousand years. How thoughtful! But also: hubristic, shallow, and banal. As if the appeal of ruins lay just in their appearance. As if the only ruins of any value were the stones of Antiquity. As if a place alongside them could be secured by imitation.
Hitler’s fascination with ruins, like his thought to engineer them, was perverse. And it’s not unconnected to his evil. All the same, it was but a single rotten instance of a perfectly healthy impulse.
Why are ruins so interesting and beautiful? Sometimes, of course, it has almost nothing to do with their being ruined. The Coliseum would fascinate in any condition, as would Angkor Wat, Machu Pichu, the Sphinx, etc. These were special and beautiful even in their own time. Decay takes away some of their power, but they gain much back by their importance as artifacts.
If you want to isolate the special pull of ruination, you had better turn your attention to more ordinary things, at any rate, things that were ordinary in their own time and special now that their time has passed, things like abandoned factories, houses reclaimed by nature, and so forth. With enough time even the most common, aesthetically uninteresting things become precious artifacts, if only for personal reasons. This accounts for ruins’ archeological and memorial significance, but not their beauty.
Sometimes I wonder if there is something rather pubescent in appreciating ruins. After all, it requires no special training. As a result there is no chance of being taken in by a subtle effect or misreading a creator’s intentions. Abandoned things unmask the powerful as far more forgetful, wasteful, impotent, and irresponsible than they claim. Ruins are often secluded and dangerous and visited alone or unsupervised or in secret. Since they no longer have a purpose they make no demands and free the imagination.
This is not to say that there’s something essentially puerile about it. Perhaps people leaving adulthood for old age find ruins just as moving as people entering it. Ruins have also been pushed to a sort of verge: they are human things given over to nature.
I think it’s also the case that very often buildings simply have a more open, majestic beauty when worked on by decay. Collapsed, missing, or punctured surfaces sometimes simply improve a building, though not necessarily as a building and certainly not in any practical way, but there needn’t be anything practical about beauty. Things pass and slip away from us, but when they do they sometimes live a second life because of it.
axe, pen, & bell 