In 1952, Partisan Review, then near the apex of its influence, held a similar symposium, entitled “Our Country and Our Culture.” Its purpose, wrote the magazine’s editors, was “to examine the apparent fact that American intellectuals now regard America and its institutions in a new way.” Most writers who advocated socialism during the 1930s no longer saw themselves as “rebels and exiles”; in the early years of the cold war, many even agreed that America had “become the protector of Western civilization, at least in a military and economic sense.” But few intellectuals extended their new optimism about the nation to mass culture. “Its tendency,” the editors of PR complained, “is to exclude everything that does not conform to popular norms; it creates and satisfies artificial appetites...[and] has grown into a major industry which converts culture into a commodity.”
In our own uncertain era, it is useful for women and men with a reputation for thoughtfulness and creativity to reflect on issues that bear profoundly on both their craft and their country. We asked four questions:
1. What relationship should American intellectuals have toward mass culture: television, films, mass-market books, popular music, and the Internet?
2. Does the academy further or retard the engagement of intellectuals with American society?
3. How should American intellectuals participate in American politics?
4. Do you consider yourself a patriot, a world citizen, or do you have some other allegiance that helps shape your political opinions?
Each writer could choose to respond to one or all of them. We expect to run additional essays in a forthcoming issue.
E. J. Dionne, Jr., Alice Kessler-Harris, Jackson Lears, Martha Nussbaum, Katha Pollitt, Michael Tomasky, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Leon Wieseltier
FIFTEEN years ago, Todd Gitlin offered a precise and devastating metaphor for what he saw then as the academic Left’s default from democratic politics. In The Twilight of Common Dreams, Gitlin noted that while the Left was “marching on the English department,” the right took the White House.
More than they ever want to admit, intellectuals of the Left are influenced by the cultural politics that dominate their time. While the political right spent the 1980s and 1990s preaching the gospel of privatization and the virtue of pursuing individual satisfactions, many in the progressive academy engaged in their own form of withdrawal. An aesthetic radicalism replaced political radicalism, and a battle over texts and canons displaced the fight over whose interests would be served by government and whose ideas would define mainstream politics....
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I count myself among those disappointed in Barack Obama’s presidency so far. I had not expected miracles, but I had hoped for a more dramatic turnaround in our politics: for an end to the war in Afghanistan; a rapid closing of Guantánamo; and a denunciation of torture, rendition, and the endless pursuit of an elusive and protean terrorism. On Election Day last year, I anticipated a more generous health care bill and a restoration of modest regulations on banks and financial investment firms. Obama led us to expect these things of him when, in his mellifluous and powerful voice, he advocated “change you can believe in.” I understood candidate Obama’s call to be not simply one of political style—not simply a cry to throw the scoundrels out. I wanted to believe that it was also a call to recalibrate our moral compass. As an academic, an intellectual, a student of twentieth-century American history, I resonated to the call....
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COMING of age during the Vietnam War, I cut my cultural teeth on an exalted idea of intellectuals. They were the people who challenged the official pieties, especially the easy equation of power and virtue, the American civil religion that justified imperial misadventure. Sometimes, even at my conservative southern university, they were my professors—especially the historians Paul Gaston and Bill Harbaugh. By exposing the mendacity of American policy, they fostered a critical spirit in their students. By challenging the equation of anticolonial nationalism with Soviet communism and exploring the futility of foreign attempts to crush a popular insurgency, they gave us an alternative way of seeing the U.S. role in the world....
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WHAT relationship American intellectuals should have toward mass culture—television, films, mass-market books, popular music, and the Internet—will vary as much as the people themselves.
I think that it’s good if there are some intellectuals who get deeply involved with these media, because this will help intellectuals keep contact with a wider public. It’s much harder to do that now than it was formerly, given the decline of print journalism. But I hope not too many will become starry-eyed about these media and forget about the habit of slow reading, which is such a large part of good thinking. Sometimes the new media can help reading: for example, I now listen to novels on my iPod while I am running, and I “read” a lot more Trollope and Eliot than I used to. Often, though, the new media discourage people from reading books. I see this in many of my students, and it distresses me. We need to remind them that thinking is slow and rigorous, and that it does not always go well with the fast pace and the flash of popular culture....
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I want to focus on the question of patriotism. If an American child and a Peruvian child were drowning, would you rush to save the American child first? If you were in charge of feeding an international crowd of travelers stranded by a disaster, would you give the Americans extra pie? Would you refuse on principle to marry a foreigner? Of course not. In our lives as individuals we would find it unfair, bigoted, even bizarre, to give automatic preference to another American. What about fairness, equality, merit, relative need, and simple human feeling?...
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I’M not qualified to answer question two, so consider this a response to the other three questions.
Internet, film, television, and popular music are rather broad categories, each containing nutritious wheat and faddish chaff. By “television,” do we mean The Wire or Dancing with the Stars? By “Internet,” do we mean amazon.com or pornography? But without wasting space on a virtually endless inventory of such distinctions, I say, Embrace!...
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SOME questions are really not worth asking, even as they nag. What relationship should American intellectuals have toward mass culture: television, films, mass-market books, popular music, and the Internet may be one of them. Before answering it, let me first attack any effort to do so.
I don’t think we have a recognizable group of American intellectuals of real political weight, at least not intellectuals of the sort celebrated by and occasionally inhabiting the old Partisan Review. That is, we don’t have an identified bunch of very smart and socially interconnected people—of course, often neurotic, passionate, and sometimes delusional—who judge their life by its contribution to human science or art and who see themselves as the guardians of its standards before a debasing and resolutely meretricious mass culture....
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I am human and I consider nothing human alien to me”: this statement has always struck me as preposterous. Of course there are human creations and activities that are alienating, or worse. (The famous sentence in Terence’s comedy is in fact spoken in bad faith, as an excuse for an obtrusive neighbor to intervene in a matter that is none of his business.) And to 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....
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