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A discussion featuring Yakov Feygin, Daniela Gabor, Ho-fung Hung, Thea Riofrancos, and Quinn Slobodian.
A fiscal calamity awaits public schools once pandemic-related federal assistance ends.
We are pleased to announce the winner of the 2023 Dorothy Ross Prize for the best article in U.S. intellectual history. This award goes to an emerging scholar, defined as Read more
The post Announcement: 2023 Dorothy Ross Prize first appeared on Society for US Intellectual History.
I’ve written a great deal about TV — three short books on negative character traits in contemporary television, a peer-reviewed article and now a planned book on Star Trek, and countless blog posts and online publications. I’m even teaching a course that’s primarily about television this fall, namely a study of Watchmen and its HBO adaptation (with the latter being the main object of interest for me). Yet I find myself a big exhausted and disengaged by the culture of TV commentary. Part of that is simply the fact that there has been a vast overproduction of commentary and “takes.” Many of these pieces are written by people I admire and are of very high quality, but the sense of being rushed or forced somehow haunts even the best pieces for me.
I would like TV analysis to be “insight recollected in tranquility,” and the current online publication culture simply is not compatible with that. Trying to keep up is the only way to effectively get read, at all. In six months, no outlet is going to publish your piece about how you just realized something about Succession — there’s a window, and that window is now. I can blog about it and my friends will see it and maybe even like it, but that’s no way to build a reputation or a career as a writer. I understand that it’s a privilege that my full-time teaching job allows me (and in many ways requires me) to sit that out, and perhaps part of my fatigue is a form of survivor’s guilt, because there are many possible alternative timelines where I might have been pushed out of academia and seen the TV commentary game as the only way to maintain some kind of intellectual engagement in my work.
I don’t think that overproduction or weird personal vibes are the only factors here, though. There’s a fundamental unclarity about the task of TV writing. Sometimes, as in episode-by-episode write-ups, the task seems to be to help people remember what happened or process basic plot points — or keep up with events on the show without actually watching it. I notice that sometimes people respond to those write-ups as though they contain “smart” commentary, when it seems to me that they are mostly just summary. Everything about that corner of the TV writing game makes me feel sad — though I would totally accept a TV write-up job for a Star Trek series if offered.
The write-up partly makes me feel sad because I can tell that the writers know the task is beneath their dignity and beneath the dignity of their readers. This is not the case for the true lowest of the low — the kind of TV commentary that suspends disbelief permanently and responds to events as though the characters were real people. This seems to characterize a lot of the Succession takes circulating right now. They amount to gossip columns about fictional characters. At a slightly higher level, perhaps, are speculations about what might happen, especially if they are keyed into what would please or surprise fans the most. Though the latter concerns are superficial, they at least bring into view the show’s status as an intentionally crafted aesthetic object, rather than a window into a fictional but “real” world.
But this is the problem — the TV show’s status as an aesthetic object is never fully secure. Even “prestige drama” is haunted by the anxiety that it’s still just… TV. Is Mad Men a soap opera? Is Succession a weird kind of sitcom? Clearly they are. But are they just that? It’s never okay for a TV show to be precisely and exactly a TV show, and especially to typify a TV genre. The greats have to somehow transcend their medium. The Wire was, famously, like a Victorian novel. Except it wasn’t a novel — it was a TV show, with visual storytelling parcelled out in serialized hour-long units. Even film seems to have enough prestige at this point to be an object of aspiration, so that the most poorly-paced blob of formless content on Netflix can be pitched as a “10-hour movie.” And surely much of the prestige of “prestige TV” comes from the adoption of cinematic-quality production values and performances, though that gap has been narrowing.
If we can’t hold firm to the TV show as a worthy aesthetic object, then, we inflate its importance in another direction — usually by turning it into a source of political insight. Every show produced in the US can be pressed into service as a window into the American soul, almost by definition. How this is supposed to work is unclear to me. The American people did not produce the show. There was not an election in which they got to choose which shows would be made. Ratings provide some kind of measure of popularity, which must mean there’s some kind of resonance there. But I’ve seen similar claims made that, for instance, Star Trek: Enterprise — by all standards a failed show, which struggled to stay above a million viewers in its final seasons — demonstrated how Americans tried to navigate the tensions in a post-Cold War world or whatever. How can we draw any real evidence for American attitudes in general from such a marginal entertainment product?
Even less plausible than the political reflection thesis is the quest for a political prescription in the TV show, which of course always manages to fall short of the critic’s (usually unstated) standards of “correct” politics, or “correct” representation, or what-have-you. Sometimes such pieces seem to veer toward a disguised form of “Monday-morning show-runner” — the political prescription serves as an alibi for the critic’s preference for the plot to have gone in another direction. Strangest of all, though, are the ones that want to see positive political guidance from the TV show, or at least political “lessons.” The sense that this is what TV is somehow “for” leads to a related syndrome of lamenting that a portrayal of bad politics will somehow give people the wrong political ideas — because presumably people get their political ideas directly from TV shows.
What I’d like to see — and what I hope to practice — is a form of analysis that centers the TV show as a work of narrative art with its own strengths and limitations, its own genre expectations and standards. This would mean pausing before lamenting that the show didn’t take your preferred direction and asking why the writers did choose what they chose. It may turn out that their implicit reasons don’t make sense or work at cross-purposes with something else, such that we can lament that the urn is not as well-wrought as we wish it could be. Similarly, before reading off political messages (positive or negative) from a show, we might ask ourselves why such issues are being foregrounded.
For instance, in Andor — widely praised for its gritty political realism — we might note that the goal is to impart a kind of sophistication into an IP that is primarily oriented toward children. The same would presumably hold for the HBO adaptation of Watchmen and its unexpected centering of racial issues. The politics are not the “goal,” they are part of the aesthetic effect. And I guess sometimes people are basically saying that they like TV shows better when they align better with their politics — which is only fair, but is perhaps a point that could be stated more forthrightly, instead of dressing it up in this weird quasi-normative stance. There is nothing preventing a show from genuinely having good political lessons or — more likely — supplying powerful political metaphors, nor is it by any means impossible that a show’s politics could have deleterious real-world effects (e.g., West Wing). But I can’t help but feel we’d get a better handle on that kind of thing if we contextualized it in a formal-aesthetic analysis of the show.
Of course, there is no audience for the kind of criticism I’m calling for, because it feels like English class and everyone hated English class for stealing away their naive enjoyment of literature or whatever. So I’m left blogging, or writing for academic or para-academic presses, or just tweeting out complaints about writers who are really just doing their best. You do you, everyone! Everything is fine and nothing matters.
Succession elephant
akotsko
I have never advocated political violence in any published writing or in any talk. You can read the talk I posted yesterday, for instance, and you will find no recommendation of left-wing political violence, indeed no mention of that possibility. Yet it inevitably happens, in Q&A sessions, that the topic comes up. The way it generally unfolds is that my listeners or readers observe that I make the following claims: the existing political system lacks democratic legitimacy; those in a position to wield institutional power are unresponsive to popular demands; and both major parties fully support police violence, with the Republicans growing ever more tolerant and even encouraging of vigilante violence. Hence, in order to reach the kind of goals I lay out, it seems like some form of political violence would be inevitable. So am I advocating political violence?
I personally do not intend to commit any political violence, nor would I encourage anyone else to do so. I’m at a loss, though, for why anyone considering such a thing would view me as an appropriate confidant or mentor. I am far from an activist. My praxis is objectively that of a middle-class liberal intellectual, and even on the level of individual choices and the various virtue-signals one tends to send, I am not particularly left-coded (e.g., I’m not a vegetarian or vegan).
In fact, I don’t want to be advocating anything at all — I want to undertake a purely analytic and diagnostic project. The problem is that contemporary academic culture will not allow me to do that. If I didn’t put down some kind of prescriptive agenda, people would simply hallucinate one on my behalf. So yes, I end Neoliberalism’s Demons by saying that we need to eliminate the market society in favor of a radically democratic planned economy. That’s the only way to make sure something like neoliberalism can never happen again. That’s the political goal that informs my analysis. It’s not “realistic,” but at least it’s explicitly stated, so I don’t have to bat away a bunch of phantom political agendas that people arbitrarily foist on me.
How do we get from here to there? I don’t know. I’m an idea guy. If we can get there by reading books and talking about them, then I should be among the leaders of the movement. If it takes something else, then maybe I can play more of a supporting role — ideally teaching classes, but maybe writing up some propaganda or even washing dishes or something.
My real agenda, my personal investment, for my intellectual project is that I want to figure out and share what I take to be the truth about our political situation, to the best of my ability. And as far as I can tell, the truth is that we are in a really, really bad position. The power of nonviolent resistance has been exhausted at this point. The media is too corrupt and the political class too brazen and arrogant to concede to popular demands, no matter how much we maintain the moral high ground. The electoral system continues to be a site of political blackmail rather than a venue for the public to influence the direction of public policy. No governing party in any major country seems to be at all serious about addressing the most urgent problems we face — and those problems are genuinely urgent.
In that situation, with all formally legitimate means of political change cut off, my question — which I repeated quite forcefully in the Q&A for my talk on Milton Friedman at Wabash College — is what the powers that be think is going to happen. We are told that the human race is facing environmental ruin that will kill millions, and yet no one with the power to do anything actually does it. Is it not inevitable that someone will take matters into their own hands?
It does seem inevitable — but it largely isn’t happening. And that in itself is an aspect of our situation that I struggle to understand. It seems like in a world where people open fire into random crowds because they can’t get laid or drive into protestors because they’re worried the Jews are going to replace them, someone would get it into their heads to physically threaten the people destroying the world. Why aren’t they?
Maybe the problems seem simply too big, or the system too unassailable. (I’m presumably contributing to the latter in some small way with my buzz-killing analysis.) Maybe the record of the times that the left gave itself permission to use unlimited ultra-violence have disillusioned people — maybe that means so poisons the end as to render it unattainable. Or maybe everyone has decided, collectively, that if we can’t get it done via the institutional structures that happen to exist at this moment of history, then that’s a sign we shouldn’t do it. It works if you work it! And center-left parties can eke out small, largely symbolic gains that the right completely swamps, until our cities flood and our crops fail and millions upon millions of people die in unescapable heat waves.
What can we do as individuals in the face of this mass apathy and willful ignorance? Not fucking much! Not much at all. As the man says, the wrong life cannot be lived rightly — yet there is a certain duty to truth, a certain obligation to acknowledge it as the wrong life. But despite everything, despite the inauguration of Donald Trump, despite the fall of Roe v. Wade and the resulting rise of almost unimaginable misogynistic state violence, despite the fact that the weather is obviously unfixably permanently broken and half the country burns down every year — despite all that, there are a lot of people out there who really don’t see that it’s the wrong life, who in fact are offended that I would criticize the team they’ve chosen to back in the game of politics, a team that is surely made up of good people who are doing their best.
And to that, all I can say is: no. That’s the one ethical duty that I fully and unhypocritically live by. I don’t know what they will do with it — probably nothing. It will probably even make them dig in their heels and become even more apathetic and willfully ignorant, more attached to whichever team of ghouls and empty suits they’ve pathetically identified as fans of. But they can’t say no one ever told them.
Trust_In_The_Law
akotsko
What does the decline of the English major mean for society at large, and university presses in particular?
The post Fallout from the Implosion of Humanities Enrollments appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Richard D. Kahlenberg, whose hero is Robert Kennedy, wants to build a multiracial progressive coalition.
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Twenty year recollections of the 2003 invasion of Iraq are popping up. Some are debating whether there were any positive outcomes from the war, others reflecting on what it meant for those who fought (on the US side) or suffered (on the Iraqi side). The Iraq war has played a big role in my career, but I wanted to talk about what it means for the liberal internationalist orientation to the world.
In the first lecture of my classes, I tell my students that the 9/11 attacks were my second week of college, and discuss what a big impact they had on my choice of career and research area. That’s true, but I really should talk about the Iraq war as well.
As the build up to the war began, my classmates and I at my isolated lefty college were shocked. How could anyone want to start a second war after just invading Afghanistan? How could anyone think Iraq had anything to do with 9/11? How could anyone believe this was a good idea?
I soon realized it didn’t matter what I thought. Conservative friends and family members were swept up in post-9/11 patriotism/panic.
Some have argued that neoconservative adventures like the Iraq war are the end result of liberal internationalism, and it should be abandoned
And then, during spring break, the war began. I watched in shock as the United States unleashed its might on Iraq. I was torn. I wasn’t one of those lefties who defended Saddam Hussein (we had some at my college). I wanted him gone. But even at 20 I knew this wasn’t the way to do it.
I continued with my plan to work in the US intelligence community while also pursuing scholarly studies. I got an internship with a defense contractor, was assigned to an intelligence agency. A few years into my career, I got accepted to a PhD program, was offered a promotion at my firm, and was offered a permanent job with the government agency. I went the PhD route (whether or not that was the right choice is the topic for another post).
I said this post wasn’t going to me about me, and I meant it. I gave this background to explain how I became involved in the bigger debate about the Iraq war: whether it invalidated liberal internationalism. While I was working in DC I also became part of a foreign policy group, the Truman National Security Project, meant to revive muscular liberal internationalism within the Democratic Party. I left after a few years, but the debates we had there stuck with me.
Liberal internationalism is a specific orientation towards the world. Advocates believe there is an international order that can be mutually beneficial. States should resolve disputes peacefully and multilaterally, through the United Nations and other international organizations. Human rights should trump narrow security interests. And states’ foreign policy should focus on upholding this international order.
Historically it had been tied to the US Democratic Party. This changed with the Bush Administration. A group of thinkers within the Republican party–growing out of the Reagan Administration’s aggressive anti-Soviet policies–sought to ensure US primacy while also defending democracy and human rights. They saw the response to 9/11 as a way to advance these goals, as signified in the 2002 National Security Strategy. Bush drew on similar language when justifying the Iraq War.
The Bush Administration’s use of liberal internationalist arguments to justify the Iraq War did trap some liberal internationalists. For example, the prominent liberal thinker Michael Ignatieff supported the Iraq War. This has given rise to the pejorative “liberal hawk” moniker-the claim that liberal internationalists are basically war-mongers. We’ve seen this deployed against Democratic figures like Hillary Clinton from both the left and the right.
As a result, some have argued that neoconservative adventures like the Iraq war are the end result of liberal internationalism, and it should be abandoned. To these policy thinkers, liberal internationalism is an “increasingly unsustainable grand strategy.” Others have gone further to question the validity or even the existence of a liberal international order, which liberal internationalism is meant to sustain.
But liberal internationalism is not dead.
First, Americans do not support an isolationist or restrained foreign policy. A 2019 report from the Center for American Progress found that US voters are “weary” of military interventions, but have not rejected American leadership in the world.
The irony is that many calling for restraint in US foreign policy for the sake of the world are as US-centric as liberal hawks.
Second, there is more to liberal internationalism than military interventions. This is what restrainers tend to suggest-that, since liberal internationalists tend to just be hawks a liberal internationalist grand strategy will lead to another Iraq war. And, to be fair, the liberal side isn’t helped when prominent members like Anne-Marie Slaughter praised Trump’s poorly-thought out air strikes on Syria. But there is a lot more to liberal internationalism- multilateralism, respect for human rights, upholding international institutions.
More importantly, those who assume the Iraq war damned liberal internationalism seem to ignore its relevance outside the United States. Many countries around the world look to the UN to reflect their views and advance their interests. This is why Trump’s decision to pull out of the UN Human Rights Council was concerning: other states take this, and other UN bodies, very seriously. The rest of the world–especially the Global South–has an interest in a robust UN, which only a liberal internationalist grand strategy can ensure.
Additionally, many countries depend on the liberal international order for support. The UN, while far from perfect, performs services no state can legitimately do on its own, such as supporting economic development, protecting cultural sites, and keeping the peace between combatants. Persistent security threat–like that of ISIS and other militant groups in the Sahel–require the international community’s assistance.
The irony, then, is that many calling for restraint in US foreign policy for the sake of the world are as US-centric as liberal hawks. They approach the relevance of liberal internationalism only in terms of whether America will invade another Middle Eastern country.
It gets a little tiresome when debate over US international action boils down to “but the Iraq war was bad.” Reducing the debate to pro/con military intervention makes it hard to effectively respond to crises, as arguably occurred in the Obama Administration’s response (or lack thereof) to the Syrian civil war. It also leads to poor analysis, such as when Middle East experts, viewing everything through the lens of another Iraq war, assumed that Saudi Arabia would pull America into a war with Iran.
But liberal internationalists are also at fault. They’re attached to US primacy, from Madeleine Albright’s invocation of America as the “indispensable nation” to Joe Biden’s foreign policy promise to “place America at the head of the table.” They seem obsessed with looking tough–which I suspect is behind the cheerleading of air strikes. They haven’t figured out a way to support human rights and a robust US international presence while also criticizing the Iraq War.
And that is the issue. Liberal internationalism is still viable, and much of the world depends on America’s continued support of this grand strategy. But US foreign policy debates revolve around that horrific and illegal invasion of March 20th, 2003, rather than the full set of policies we could adopt.
UPDATE: Edited to fix a typo
Armageddon Time is undercut by the very forces it hopes to expose: white complicity, forged through the exploitation of Black life.
The post More Than Hearts and Minds? appeared first on Public Books.
An interview with Michael Walzer on The Struggle for a Decent Politics.
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The dust jacket of John Agresto’s new book, The Death of Learning: How American Education Has Failed Our Students and What to Do about It, depicts Gore Hall at Harvard in the 1870s. Perhaps this is a subtle indication of what lies within: Gore Hall, Harvard’s first proper library, was demolished in 1913. To be sure, it was replaced by the grand Widener Library, which is a treasure. But will it remain a treasure? In September 2020, the university announced in a press release that “Harvard Library has begun building an Anti-Racism team,” appointing its “first Anti-Black Racism Librarian/Archivist,” who “will work with colleagues across Harvard Library on objectives relating to centering anti-racism and diversity in our collections lifecycle.” Imagine being paid to string words together like this about a “collections lifecycle”—at Harvard.
But you don’t have to imagine: this is what has become of education in this country, not only at Harvard but pretty much everywhere. The situation, summed up in a sentence by Agresto: “There’s no way to view this as other than a tragedy.” Particularly insidious is that, unlike most examples of political attacks on education in the past, the recent “dismantling of the liberal arts comes from . . . within”:
It comes from radicalized departments of history, literature, classics, American studies, and all the myriad of other studies connected to ethnopolitical interest groups. It comes from virtually every school and college of education. This is why I have no hesitation in saying that liberal education in America is dying not by murder but by suicide.
Describing the self-destruction with grace, care, and regular doses of humor, Agresto does his best to imagine a better future. A superb writer who largely avoids inflammatory rhetoric, he is the rare gifted administrator who appears to have lost none of his humanity or sense of wonder when he entered the upper echelons of academic bureaucracy: as acting chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the mid-1980s, then as president of St. John’s College in Santa Fe from 1989 to 2000, and more recently as a founding trustee of the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani.
What are the liberal arts? This is Agresto’s pithy explanation, which he provides in highlighting italics: “a way of understanding the most important questions of human concern through reason and reflection.” He writes that “the liberal arts hold out the promise of freeing each of us from the captivity of prejudice, of platitudes and superstition, or of whatever it is that ‘everyone’ believes” and “aim at once to be truly radical and truly conservative,” demanding that individuals acquire a foundation in the wisdom of the past so that they can truly think for themselves.
Endangered Education
Unfortunately, he laments, “a rich and thoroughgoing liberal arts education [now] seems to me as endangered as the Sumatran orangutan.” As he goes on to note, when he first began to think about the book, nearly three decades ago, he drafted such sentences as “It’s clear that in the realm of education the words ‘liberal arts’ have always been words of high praise” and commented on how very rare it was to find a “faculty of liberal arts that does not think of itself as the crown jewel of the whole educational enterprise.” How things change.
Yet even in the 1980s, the bonfire of the humanities was well underway. Agresto knows this, of course. Indeed, he spends a good number of pages on the dismantling of Stanford’s Western Culture curriculum, which was last taught in 1987–88. Some five hundred protesters, including Jesse Jackson, initiated this fight by marching on campus chanting, “Hey ho, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!” The march took place in January 1987; in February, Agresto’s teacher Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind; and at the end of March 1988, the game was finally up when the Faculty Senate voted 39 to 4 to revamp the course to make it more global and, supposedly, less racist and sexist.
The fact is that the humanities—historically a subsection of the liberal arts: literature, music, history, etc.—have been in deep trouble for a long time. It is difficult to find a basic course on Shakespeare at most of the better-known colleges and universities; the rise of STEM, for all its wonders, has led in recent months to the Pandora’s box known as ChatGPT; and, worst of all, today’s would-be defenders of the humanities often don’t seem to have any idea what they’re defending or how to do it.
Part of the challenge is that defending the liberal arts involves clusters of questions and debates rather than a clearly articulated set of principles. Life’s biggest questions are almost never resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, and if we don’t study the differences between the Epicureans and the Stoics, between Locke and Rousseau, and between legal originalists and non-originalists, we are missing out on our own music: sometimes a battle of the bands, sometimes cacophony, always fascinating.
The diverse nature of the liberal arts means that to be educated means knowing not only the proverbial “best that has been thought and said in the world” but also the also-rans. “[W]e understand better the Founders’ Constitution,” Agresto writes, “by reading the writings of various Anti-Federalists alongside The Federalist Papers.” And beyond this: a liberal education should also “com[e] to grips with the very worst that has been said and done and understanding why.”
If we don’t study the differences between the Epicureans and the Stoics, between Locke and Rousseau, and between legal originalists and non-originalists, we are missing out on our own music: sometimes a battle of the bands, sometimes cacophony, always fascinating.
Agresto firmly rejects the idea that people who study the humanities are more humane, perhaps even more human, than those who do not. Obviously he is correct about this. “Are we humanists and liberal artists actually more moral than . . . owners of delicatessens?” Agresto asks. I am the grandson of owners of a delicatessen who did not attend college, and I have no hesitation in saying that they were more moral than both I and most people I have known in decades in academia.
It is one thing to extol the extraordinary, as we should all do. But it is deeply wrong to disdain or condemn the ordinary. Yet this is how the American elite is now acting. “[O]rdinary family life, heterosexuality, simple love of country, traditional virtues, traditional religious habits and outlooks”—all are under regular attack at institutions of higher learning, which at the same time present students with such gotcha questions as “Have you ever been to a gay or lesbian bar, social club, or march? If not, why not?” (courtesy of North Dakota State). It is good to remember Cardinal Newman, as Agresto of course does: “a University training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end.”
For Social Justice Warriors, however, there is a horrifying new “ordinary.” Here’s how Agresto puts it, after reminding us that Social Justice was the name of Father Coughlin’s virulently anti-Semitic journal:
The last thirty years have seen the vandalizing of ever so much of higher education. The supposed reformers have entered the storehouse of centuries of accumulated knowledge, torn down its walls, thrown out its books, and toppled its monuments. For all their brave talk of justice, they have carried out what has to be seen as one of the most intellectually criminal acts of the ages, the modern equivalent of burning the libraries of antiquity. Today, acts that were unthinkable, unimaginable, just years ago now seem so very ordinary.
Agresto’s book is liberal, largely moderate, and explicitly American: liberal not as opposed to “conservative,” but in the sense of being about freedom (Latin libertas, the source of our “liberty”); moderate because moderation is “the virtue a liberal education cultivates best, as well as the virtue for which it is often criticized most”; and American for the reason that “[b]ecause we are diverse, for each of us ‘our own’ means not only what we hold in common but also what we hold separately.” This defense of liberal education will especially resonate with readers like me who at least used to consider themselves liberal, who try when possible to occupy the middle ground, and who find themselves increasingly aggressive about promoting American ideals and institutions.
It is one thing to extol the extraordinary, as we should all do. But it is deeply wrong to disdain or condemn the ordinary. Yet this is how the American elite is now acting.
Underestimating Outrage
Though it is at times repetitive, you can pick up The Death of Learning and read almost any chapter on its own and be edified. But the greatest flaw, in my view, is that Agresto does a better job of explaining “how American education has failed our students” than “what to do about it.” Not that he doesn’t say the right things: about the desirability of investing large sums in small liberal arts colleges; the importance of winning over the young and those who teach them (for which reason he ends the book with two heartfelt exhortations: “A Message to High School Teachers and Principals” and “A Message to High School Seniors”); and the possibilities that new universities offer—from Austin, Texas (disclosure: I am on the advisory board of the University of Austin) to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. But, as I have already hinted, I found in the second half of the book more wishful thinking than original policy suggestions.
There are also a few spots where Agresto gets things wrong. Sometimes he should know better. Most egregious is his valorization of Anthony Fauci, who majored in classics at Holy Cross. Agresto links him with Martin Luther King Jr. as “discerning men of public presence, insight, persuasiveness, and judgment—and thus capable of doing great things,” but I for one would not use him as an exemplar of why a “liberal arts education [is] something peculiarly important and estimable” (italics in original).
On other occasions, however, Agresto overestimates goodwill and overlooks the extent of academic outrage about certain topics. He may be at his strongest when he explains how a liberal education can be not merely of value to us as individuals but of genuine use—Agresto does not shy away from this word—to our collective well-being as a country. He highlights the education and sense of civic responsibility of three of America’s Founding Fathers and its nineteenth-century “refounder,” but fails to note that in the past three years, prominent statues of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln have been taken down or that James Madison’s estate, Montpelier, has become aggressively woke.
Fair enough, perhaps. But would he have predicted that a statue of John Witherspoon that an elite university erected as recently as 2001 would now be under serious threat? As I write, the Princeton administration is debating what to do about a prominently placed representation of the only clergyman and only college president to sign the Declaration of Independence: a citizen of the world after whom the organization that publishes Public Discourse is named. (Disclosure: Princeton fired me last year, but I remain a Senior Fellow at the Witherspoon Institute.) The controversy has made national news, including in these pages. To those who would take down the statue, I offer Witherspoon’s admonition to Princetonians of long ago: “Do not live useless and die contemptible.”
Let me end on a positive note. In his salutary reflections on an “alliance” between the liberal arts and vocational education, Agresto quotes Booker T. Washington, who was assuredly neither useless nor contemptible. Of a student who made use of grammar, chemistry, and other bookish subjects in the raising of an acre of splendid cabbages, Washington wrote, “[T]here is just as much that is interesting, strange, mysterious, and wonderful; just as much to be learned that is edifying, broadening, and refining in a cabbage as there is in a page of Latin.” He was right, and I’ll add to the discussion Pliny the Elder’s statement in the first century A.D., Brassicae laudes longum est exsequi (“it would be a lengthy business to enumerate the glories of the cabbage”).
Learning in all its forms can and must be saved. We do not live in the best of all possible worlds, and it is time for everyone to stop the destructive nonsense and return to cultivating our precious gardens, both agricultural and academic.
[The following is a talk I gave this afternoon as part of a faculty colloquium on “Radical Futures” at North Central College, part of the Intellectual Community series co-sponsored by the Faculty Development and Recognition Committee (of which I am chair) and the Center for Advancing Faculty Excellence and organized by my colleague Sean Kim Butorac.]
Since I teach in the Shimer Great Books program, I will begin with an experience teaching one of the all-time greats, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. In my ethics class this semester, we were discussing Book 1 and came to a passage where Aristotle had isolated three possible human goods that seemed to be good candidates for happiness—by which he means the human good that we pursue for its own sake, with no need for further justification or explanation. The first is pleasure, which is presumably self-explanatory. The second is honor, which we could paraphrase as respect or esteem. The third is contemplation, which we could see as a form of knowledge or understanding. In all three cases, Aristotle believes, it wouldn’t make sense to ask why we are pursuing these goals. Why do you want pleasure? Why do you want people to like and respect you? Why do you want to figure things out? The question doesn’t make sense.
The list feels pretty exhaustive, but Aristotle goes on to introduce a fourth possible candidate: money. Initially it seems to fit the bill—all things being equal, no one will turn down more money. But Aristotle points out that money is not truly an end in itself, but rather a pure means. We only want money because of the things we can do with it. And this, I point out, is an area where Aristotle is out of date. He can’t imagine living a life for the sake of stockpiling as much money as possible, much less orienting an entire society around it. We can.
The shift to a pure market society, to a kind of totalitarianism of capitalism, was so successful that it has become almost invisible to us. Like many other analysts on the left, I choose to call that transition—ushered in by Pinochet, Thatcher, and Reagan, and then adopted by virtually every governing party in the West and every international organization—the shift from the postwar Fordist economic model to neoliberalism. One way to gauge this shift is to think in terms of means and ends. In the postwar era, the existence of an alternative economic model in the form of the USSR—which at the time was experiencing the highest economic growth in human history up to that point—meant that capitalism had to justify itself. It had to prove that it was better, not just at stockpiling money, but at creating broadly shared prosperity that lays the groundwork for national greatness. And through a combination of heavy government intervention, very high marginal tax rates on the wealthy, and high union concentration, the capitalist system really did mostly fulfill its promises, at least for the stereotypical white suburban family. Hypothetically speaking, capitalism set itself an empirical standard that certainly included economic criteria but was not limited to them—in other words, capitalism was a means to an end.
Since the fall of the USSR, capitalism has felt increasingly unburdened by the need to justify itself. Instead, competitive markets are taken as ends in themselves and as models for every area of social life. The reason we want markets is not that they produce better results or they’re more efficient or whatever else—we want markets because we want markets. Market logic is self-evident, the final standard, the final word. It is no longer the means, but the end. And once money is set up as the ultimate end—not even personal wealth that someone could potentially use, but the depersonalized money of endless “economic growth” and endless increases in asset prices—then everything else becomes a means. Where once we made friends, now we network, in the hopes that our social contacts will advance our career. Where once we relaxed and had fun, now we practice self-care, in order to recharge and guarantee increased future productivity. And to bring it a little closer to home, where once we went to school to develop our full intellectual capacities, now we seek the hot job skills employers crave.
Of course, the “before” of this “before and after” dynamic is a bit simplified and idealized in my presentation. There were no good old days when people at large pursued only the highest ends with unmixed motives. Yet I would submit that in past eras, people were better equipped to discern that such ends existed and that the mixed motives were less than ideal. This comes through clearly, for example, in a famous essay by John Maynard Keynes, “The Economic Prospects of Our Grandchildren.” As is well known, this text predicts that within two generations, humanity would essentially begin “cashing out” of capitalism by trading productivity gains for reduced working hours so that they could spend time on what was really valuable in life.
By my math, this would have been my parents’ generation, so obviously this did not occur. But for my purposes, the most interesting thing about his failed prediction is how he characterizes the benefits of the transition. One of the architects of the postwar capitalist order, as well as a gifted financial speculator, Keynes proposes that once humanity has leveraged the immense productivity of capitalism to set itself free from economic necessity, it will be a relief to admit that none of those wealthy businessmen was really as admirable as we pretended they were, that there was something a little disreputable and sad about the way they’d chosen to live their lives.
The neoliberals did everything they could to squelch that insight, to the point where we are supposed to believe that an obviously broken and miserable man like Elon Musk is a genius-level benefactor of humankind, for instance. It’s easy to point and laugh at Musk’s pathetic army of admirers on Twitter, but we academics are guilty of our own distortions. The other day I was meeting with a major in our program, a very strong student who I had not had in class before. We wound up talking for a good half hour, and at a certain point the thought slipped into my head that it was a good thing I was doing this and making her feel so supported, because we really need majors…. A very rewarding part of my job, which I was doing for its own sake and even enjoying, suddenly felt like a cynical manipulation.
I know I’m not the only one to fall victim to this line of thinking, because I’ve heard similar remarks in many other discussions. For instance, once a faculty discussion about providing mentoring and support for students of color devolved into a reflection on the importance of reaching Latinx students for our bottom line. A question of justice becomes a question of finances. No one intended for that to happen—it just rolls right off our tongues.
And more broadly, of course, we are all well-versed in defending our disciplines in market terms. The humanities provide valuable job skills! Employers tell us they want liberal arts majors who can think on their feet! Liberal arts majors eventually catch up to and even exceed the incomes of their STEM counterparts! I understand that such rhetoric is tactically necessary, especially in a media sphere full of misinformation about the value of different fields of study. I also happen to think these things are true! But even though it’s true, it’s harmful to frame the value of education in such narrowly instrumental terms. I did not get into this line of work so that Johnny can get that big promotion years down the road or Suzie can contribute to better quarterly results for her department.
But of course Johnny and Suzie need to be able to get those employment outcomes, or else they aren’t going to be able to pay off the student loans that are financing their education here. And this brings me to another way in which the full-saturation capitalism that I call neoliberalism degrades our moral sense: it shrinks our political horizons. Once installed in a given area of life, marketization produces a feedback loop that constrains our choices within a very, very narrow range. And living a life where the most important choices about our lives and livelihoods are made by an impersonal mechanism—by everyone and no one—cultivates habits of deflection and irresponsibility. We aren’t making decisions or value judgments—we are simply responding appropriately to the demands of the market, and if we don’t, we will lose out to someone who does. In practice, this leads to the conformism of “best practices” that one of our colleagues criticized today—the alibi that we should do what everyone is doing because everyone is doing it.
I am not sure in detail how to get out of this self-reinforcing doom loop of marketization, though in my book Neoliberalism’s Demons, I suggest that we need to embrace the abolition of the market and the establishment of a system of democratic economic planning as a long-term goal. In our more immediate context, I would suggest that—beyond changing our rhetoric about the cash value of majors or the financial urgency of student retention—we need to find a way past our competitive zero-sum approach to curriculum design. Instead of outsourcing those decisions to student choices, we need to find ways to discuss, collaboratively and creatively, how we can best deploy the North Central faculty’s massive talents and expertise to deliver the kind of education we want our students to have. Our marketized system has deeply internalized habits of cynicism and fatalism in most of us, but as Aristotle teaches us, the only way to develop more virtuous habits is to practice.
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Over 100 Israeli philosophers have signed an open letter to the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the nation’s Minister of Justice, Yariv Levin, expressing concern about recently advanced legal changes.
[photo by Ohad Zwigenberg]
The new government in Israel has launched—with unbelievable speed—a campaign for massive, deeply anti-democratic constitutional “reform”. The main people behind this reform take their cues from similar “reforms” in such places as Poland and Hungary (initially only implicitly, recently they are entirely open and loud about looking up to these places). These measures include a change in the appointment and promotion procedures for judges that will make it entirely politicized and up to the current coalition’s whims; putting in place an override clause that will allow the current coalition to set aside court’s decisions that declare pieces of legislation unconstitutional; severely weakening the status and authority of the government’s legal advisors; and more.
The aim—and likely consequence—of these measures is making our independent judiciary a thing of the past, and giving the current (extreme right-wing) coalition unencumbered force, with nothing even remotely resembling checks and balances. It’s easy to guess who will be the first to suffer. (For one example—of the expected consequences for women—see here.)
These measures are opposed by a huge majority of law professors (see, for instance, the various pieces here and here).
The open letter states:
We, over one hundred Israeli philosophers teaching in all the universities and colleges in the country, wish to express our anxiety at the far-reaching legal reforms that are hastily advanced these days in the Knesset. The moral achievements of the modern liberal-democratic state are the fruit of centuries of political thought and of a persistent struggle to apply it in the state’s constitutional structure: human and civil rights, the separation of powers, the protection of the individual from the arbitrary exercise of governmental power, and the equality of every human being without discrimination on the basis of nationality, race, religion, ethnicity, gender, or sexual inclination.
We warn against the political and cultural danger of the self-isolation of Israel within narrow ethnocentric bounds, ignoring universal values such as the dignity of human beings as human beings, openness to other cultures, and the freedom of scientific research and artistic creation.
Twentieth-century experience has demonstrated the intolerable ease with which democratic states backslide from the primary liberal principle—the limitation of government power, particularly by undermining the independence of the judiciary. Such regress begins with a regime that is democratic only in the formal sense of majority rule and ends in dictatorship.
Professor Enoch adds, “Many outside of Israel have also spoken clearly against these ‘reforms’. It would be great if philosophers elsewhere are also heard on this.”
The letter and the list of its signatories is below.
UPDATE (2/28/23): A group of British Jewish philosophers have written a letter in support of their Israeli colleagues:
An interview with Clara E. Mattei, the author of The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism.
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