Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

What Are Intel­lec­tu­als Good For? by George Scial­abba. 2009

Almost fin­ished with an excel­lent col­lec­tion of essays by George Scial­abba, enti­tled, What are Intel­lec­tu­als Good For? It’s a close look pri­mar­ily at the dis­ap­pear­ance in our cul­ture of what once was termed a “pub­lic intel­lec­tual.” A per­son so well versed in so many things, we look to them for insight on a host of sub­jects, from his­tory to lit­er­a­ture, from art to pol­i­tics, from movies to music and back again.

Scial­abba writes about such thinkers as Dwight Mac­don­ald, Irv­ing Howe, Noam Chom­sky, Richard Rorty, Christo­pher Lasch, and Stan­ley Fish, among others.

Mau­reen Cor­ri­gan reviews What Are Intel­lec­tu­als Good For?

The essays are all dif­fer­ent, but point to some com­mon themes. The two essays on Christo­pher Lasch per­haps struck me the most, and pro­voked much thought. A man of the left, Lasch was unusual in his cri­tique of moder­nity itself, see­ing prob­lems not just with inequal­ity, but with our response to it:

Lasch’s most inti­mate and intense dis­agree­ments were with cul­tural rad­i­cals: crit­ics of edu­ca­tion, sports, reli­gion, sex­u­al­ity, the fam­ily, and the work ethic, and pro­po­nents of the new, “lib­er­ated” ideal of expres­sive­ness and self-​​realization. What these rad­i­cals ignore, Lasch charged, is that Chris­tian­ity, com­pet­i­tive indi­vid­u­al­ism, and the patri­ar­chal fam­ily are already obso­les­cent, at least in the social strata where mod­ern­iza­tion is most advanced. Those val­ues and insti­tu­tions have been under­mined not by left­ist oppo­si­tion but by cap­i­tal­ists them­selves, for their own pur­poses: to pro­mote mass con­sump­tion and to reg­i­ment the work process. By espous­ing an ideal of per­sonal lib­er­a­tion largely con­fined to leisure time and heav­ily depen­dent on the con­sump­tion of goods and ser­vices, cul­tural rad­i­cals have con­ceded defeat. Instead of adapt­ing to indus­tri­al­iza­tion and mass cul­ture, Lasch con­tended, the left should oppose them. Only a change to human scale — to local, decen­tral­ized con­trol in work­places, com­mu­ni­ties, and fam­i­lies — can halt the spread of com­mod­ity rela­tions and the bureau­cra­ti­za­tion of the self.

 

In other words, cap­i­tal­ists and cor­po­ra­tions don’t much care about that kind of rebel­lion. They get paid regard­less, and it dis­tracts peo­ple from the real facts of their dom­i­na­tion and con­trol — remote con­trol, essen­tially. If crit­ics rel­e­gate their cri­tique to per­sonal expres­sion and real­iza­tion, and do so in their leisure hours, cor­po­ra­tions remain in charge, gen­er­ally from hun­dreds or thou­sands of miles away. Noth­ing essen­tial has been changed. To make that change hap­pen, Lasch would argue that we need to go local, and we need to go back to the time when we prac­ticed our craft and that craft was our work. He also believes that cap­i­tal­ism and our cor­po­rate struc­ture make it dif­fi­cult to build healthy fam­i­lies, espe­cially healthy chil­dren. There is no longer that tra­di­tional exchange between father and son — I would add mother and daugh­ter, and all of the other pos­si­ble gen­er­a­tional dynam­ics. That life-​​affirming exchange helped pre­pare healthy chil­dren because they could see first hand what their par­ents did, end the myth-​​making, reduce their fears and their out­sized expec­ta­tions, and escape a sort of nar­cis­sism as a result. In short, mature.

Mass cul­ture and mass con­sump­tion. The Wal­mar­ti­za­tion of the world. That robs us of so many things, but espe­cially vibrant, dynamic, local cul­tures. Food, folk­ways, story-​​telling, music, art. Cur­rently, I think many on the right see only the gov­ern­ment at fault and the only source of dom­i­na­tion and con­trol. To me, they’re not pay­ing any atten­tion to the impact of cor­po­rate con­trol, the man­age­r­ial rev­o­lu­tion, the break­down into spe­cial­iza­tion of spe­cial­ties, even the spe­cial­iza­tion of man­age­ment. They don’t see glob­al­iza­tion, cap­i­tal­ism and the “free mar­ket” itself as sources for the break­down of the fam­ily and local communities.

Per­haps all parts of the spec­trum could come together to develop the most effec­tive strate­gies to rein­vig­o­rate local and regional cul­tures, with­out a heavy hand, and with­out let­ting local and regional big­otries take us back to an uglier time.

To me, the best gov­ern­ment would be the one that guar­an­tees basic human rights, with­out ques­tion, while respect­ing indi­vid­ual, local and regional dif­fer­ences. It would fight to pre­vent cor­po­rate con­trol from afar, and help peo­ple who want to go a dif­fer­ent route, away from the busi­ness world, away from some­one else’s idea of how things work, make their mark. It would be the ref on the field to keep the pow­er­ful from dom­i­nat­ing, be they from orga­nized reli­gion, the finan­cial elite, cor­po­ra­tions or other insti­tu­tions. It would pro­mote local arts and crafts, trea­sure local tra­di­tions, sto­ries, music and folk­ways. We need to stop the bull­doz­ers of the present from crush­ing our past, so we can build future cul­tures with ten thou­sand dif­fer­ent fla­vors and vari­a­tions. To get there from here, we need to reduce the dis­tance between our labor and its fruits, and between our­selves and our autonomy.