Intellectuals

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 élite, 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.




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