Like “commonwealth,” but without the “th”
The winter 2010 issue of Dissent features a forum titled “Intellectuals and Their America.” Among the contributors are Michael Tomasky, Martha Nussbaum, Jackson Lears, and the ever-linkable and often-likable Leon Wieseltier, who writes:
[T]o the inventory of alienating human productions one must add a good deal of American mass culture—for its transformation of a citizenry into an audience; for its hardening of an entire population toward the most obscene representations of violence, which we call entertainment; for its grotesque sexualization of an entire society, which has the effect not least of degrading sex, even dirty sex; for the mental passivity inculcated in millions of people who are helpless before its big and little screens, and who mistake screen-experience for experience; for the vicarious and self-estranged character of existences that are fascinated by the celebrity culture; for the surrender of people’s confidence in their own judgment as a result of its barrage of pseudo-expertise and pseudo-authority—I could go on.
And of course he does, to good effect — “On the question of the academy, may I take an incomplete? (My rant – excuse me, my meditation — might wound some people I admire and even adore.)”
But it’s Lears who wins the prize for (twice!) using the word “commonweal” correctly, and usefully, in sentences not invented to illustrate the meaning of the word “commonweal”:
[F]or many left academics, [Foucault] became less a theorist of the surveillance state than an advocate of Nietzschean individualism, whose vision of “heterotopia” celebrated myriad sites of resistance to repressive authority rather than any larger notion of commonweal. All of this comported well with the emerging cultural politics of the academy, which in many ways constituted a mirror image of free-market individualism. From the mid-1980s on, it was possible to discern a kind of left-wing Reaganism among academics in the humanities and social sciences, most visible in the postmodern tendency to celebrate consumer culture as an arena of choice, liberation, and self-creation.[...]
Still, this is a moment of possibility. The Right has disgraced itself by its inability to govern and, even more, by its disregard of international law and fundamental constitutional traditions. Not since the Great Depression has there been such an opportunity for the Left: a chance to make politics more than a matter of managerial technique—to take the moral high ground, to reassert the claims of commonweal. That is where the intellectuals come in, to articulate that larger vision. Or so we can hope.
Chilling for sure is this recounting of a Bush Lieutenant related by E.J. Dionne Jr. Were we fortunate that a terrible economy rescued us from empire builders?
“Bush’s radicalism—there is no other word—was captured rather chillingly in a 2004 New York Times Magazine article by Ron Suskind. Here’s how Suskind recounted a conversation with a Bush lieutenant:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,: which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We‘re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.:”
So let me get this straight: it has nothing to do with wheels?
As the saying attributed to Nietzsche goes, “There are no facts – only interpretations”.
Or as the Wizard in Wicked sings:
“A man’s called a traitor – or liberator
A rich man’s a thief – or philanthropist
Is one a crusader – or ruthless invader?
It’s all in which label
Is able to persist
There are precious few at ease
With moral ambiguities
So we act as though they don’t exist”
The reality is that our world is in fact marked by individualism and it has only been exasperated by the explosion in technology. At one time, community was made up of people who were different and we were simply forced to exist with a wide array of people. And there was a force that the community exerted on moral behaviour.
This is no longer the case and you have a myriad of pockets of communities that form or do not form and morph into essentially self-selecting groups.
I don’t find Bill’s quote from Bush’s aide at all scandalous. It is in point of fact what America is or how it has been described (hyper-modern) by such philosophers as Baudrillard.
America is the simulacrum. Every politician understands this. Image is everything.
Image is everything but is it ethical? What does that say thay you are not offended by it. The good Samaritan went against every PR advice. Yet it is the Gospel of the Lord.
Thanks for the texts, Molly. Extremely acute, especially the parts pointing out the parallel between Reagan economic individualism and Nietzschean ethical individualism. Weiseltier dascription of American social mores is, sadly, spot on.
Weiseltier mentions violence as entertainment. When are the bishops going to start a crusade against that? The amount of violence on TV, for instance, is obscene. Surely it is a major factor in the culture of death. I should add that I agree that to some extent that that is what America culture is, but when I see the American response to events like the Hatian earthquake and Katrina I realize that “the culture of death” description grossly over-simplifies what the American culture is.
Or, given the endemic individualism found here now, is it possible now to speak of one American culture?
Bill:
The fact that I am not offended by it makes me a clear eyed observer of politics. There is Augustine’s city of God and the city of man (the children of the light and the children of the world who are more adept at handling their own than the children of the light.)
Much of what Nietzsche said was very, very insightful.
I think the Christian in the world should have no illusions whatsoever about the world.
I like Ghandi’s line, “Be the change you want to see in the world”. For me that is hard enough!
Wieseltier is so amazingly clever that he seems to be an artifact of his own cleverness.
Not since the Great Depression has there been such an opportunity for the Left: a chance to make politics more than a matter of managerial technique—to take the moral high ground, to reassert the claims of commonweal. That is where the intellectuals come in, to articulate that larger vision. Or so we can hope.
In your dreams, Boudway.
In fact, Obama’s failing presidency, coupled with recent polls indicating Americans increasing drift to the Right – twice as many people identify themselves as Conservatives than they do Liberals – do not bode well for the Left, which is, well, tending toward the freakish. How long, for example, will it be before the Left begins defending trans-species sexual activities? I am not trying to be snarky; the Left, by it’s own internal logic, must always push toward the unthinkable, is it not true?
Mr. Schwartz,
The “Left” is apparently whatever you need it to be: President Obama (because he is not quite so friendly with Wall Street as his predecessor? because he took too long to accede to the Pentagon’s request for more troops in Afghanistan?), me (because I recommend a piece by Jackson Lears — a piece in which he argues that sexual liberationisms have turned out to be a counterproductive distraction?), or anyone who takes exception when you start badmouthing Muslims. Is it Ivy League postmodernists who are responsible for the cultural decadence Wieseltier describes in the passage I quote, or is it corporate America, squeezing every low appetite for every dollar it holds, lowering appetites whenever that seems profitable? I wonder, Mr. Schwartz (but probably I should just call you Schwartz since we’re such pals), are Wendell Berry and Christopher Lasch also on your long list of freakish Lefties? And Timothy Geithner, is he a Lefty too because he serves under this “failing” president? Your political taxonomy is not only thoughtless; it’s “unthinkable.” Really, I’ve tried.