The conference newsletter we were going to distribute in New York earlier this month (you can view/download a .pdf here) included a column of "Member News and Notes" (page 8). At my request Ray Haberski, S-USIH Secretary, had sent out an email to our membership, and I had also posted a notice on this blog, asking for professional news and publication notices from our members. Below are the news items I received by our newsletter print deadline.
I would be glad to post "Member News and Notes" here on the blog in between our newsletter issues. If you are a member of the S-USIH, and you have a brief notice to share with our readers, please send me an email using the subject line "news and notes." - L.D. Burnett
____________________________
S-USIH Member News and Notes - Fall 2012
Angus Burgin's book, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression, was published in October by Harvard University Press. From the HUP website: "Just as today’s observers struggle to justify the workings of the free market in the wake of a global economic crisis, an earlier generation of economists revisited their worldviews following the Great Depression. The Great Persuasion is an intellectual history of that project. Angus Burgin traces the evolution of postwar economic thought in order to reconsider many of the most basic assumptions of our market-centered world."
George Cotkin's newest book, Dive Deeper: Journeys With Moby Dick, was published in July by Oxford University Press. From the OUP website: "George Cotkin's Dive Deeper provides both a guide to the novel and a record of its dazzling cultural train. It supplies easy-to-follow plot points for each of the novel's 135 sections before taking up a salient phrase, image, or idea in each for further exploration. Through these forays, Cotkin traces the astonishing reach of the novel, sighting the White Whale in mainstream and obscure subcultures alike, from impressionist painting circles to political terrorist cells. In a lively and engaging style, Dive Deeper immerses us into the depths of Melville's influence on the literature, film, and art of our modern world."
Louise (Lucy) W. Knight, Visiting Scholar, Gender Studies Program, Northwestern University, gave a plenary talk on re-interpreting Jane Addams's ideas using a rhetorical analysis at a conference at the University of Dayton titled, "Feminist Pragmatism in Place," October 19-20, 2012.
Drew Maciag's book, Edmund Burke in America: The Contested Career of the Father of Modern Conservatism, will be published by Cornell University Press next spring.
Mike O'Connor's article "Liberals in Space: The 1960s Politics of Star Trek" will be published this December in the journal The Sixties. In March of next year, Mike will be appearing as a talking head on the television series The Real Story (aired in the U.S. on the Smithsonian Channel) on the episode featuring Star Trek. Since last year's newsletter, he has signed a contract for his book A Commercial Republic: Democratic Capitalism in American Thought. It will be published by the University Press of Kansas in early 2014.
Mark Pittinger's book Class Unknown: Undercover Investigations of American Work and Poverty from the Progressive Era to the Present was published in August by New York University press. From the website of the Department of History at the University of Colorado: "The book explains how social scientists, middle-class reformers, and writers have left the comforts of their offices to 'pass' as steel workers, coal miners, assembly-line laborers, waitresses, hoboes, and other working and poor people in an attempt to gain a fuller and more authentic understanding of the lives of the working class and the poor."
Tampilkan postingan dengan label George Cotkin. Tampilkan semua postingan
Tampilkan postingan dengan label George Cotkin. Tampilkan semua postingan
Jumat, 09 November 2012
Senin, 02 April 2012
A Baker's Dozen Awe-Inspiring Cultural and Intellectual Histories
[Editor's Note: Today's guest post comes from George Cotkin, Professor of Postwar United States Intellectual and Cultural History, California Polytechnic State University. Enjoy! - TL]
How often are we both propelled and burdened by great works of cultural and intellectual history? They serve as our models; they sing with their insight, style, and grace.
On my desk I have arranged a lucky thirteen titles. They mock me often and they make me want to stop my own work and read them. They are books that I admire, that I wish I had written.
They all deal with topics in our field. Only one of them is a biography of a single figure. There are other titles, outside the field of intellectual history, I admire equally or that have influenced my life. E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class and Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll, come to mind immediately.
Do these volumes share anything in common? I think that all of them escape the confines of the pedestrian or academic. Many of them fail but in a heroic manner. All of them ooze sophistication and deep learning. And all of them, in my view, are written with verve.
Here are my baker’s dozen of books that I hold in awe (alphabetically, by author):
Rachel Cohen, A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967
Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties
Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s
Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage
Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia
Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud
Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper
David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets
Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
Robert Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire
Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture
Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885-World War I
I am sure that you are bewitched by your own set of favorites. Care to share them?
How often are we both propelled and burdened by great works of cultural and intellectual history? They serve as our models; they sing with their insight, style, and grace.
On my desk I have arranged a lucky thirteen titles. They mock me often and they make me want to stop my own work and read them. They are books that I admire, that I wish I had written.
They all deal with topics in our field. Only one of them is a biography of a single figure. There are other titles, outside the field of intellectual history, I admire equally or that have influenced my life. E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class and Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll, come to mind immediately.
Do these volumes share anything in common? I think that all of them escape the confines of the pedestrian or academic. Many of them fail but in a heroic manner. All of them ooze sophistication and deep learning. And all of them, in my view, are written with verve.
Here are my baker’s dozen of books that I hold in awe (alphabetically, by author):
Rachel Cohen, A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967
Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties
Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s
Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage
Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia
Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud
Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper
David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets
Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
Robert Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire
Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture
Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885-World War I
I am sure that you are bewitched by your own set of favorites. Care to share them?
Kamis, 12 Januari 2012
Tim's Odds And Ends
No, this is not a new menu item at my fictional BBQ shack---or some kind of new junk book store. Rather, I'm using today's post as a dumping ground for intellectual history items that don't fit my usual, ironically titled "Light Reading" series---though these items truly are light USIH reading.
1. If my schedule were free February 2-3, 2012, and I happened to be on the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, I'd attend this gathering in a heartbeat: "The Port Huron Statement at 50."
I confess that I had never really done the obvious in thinking about the Port Huron Statement as an object of intellectual history until I read Cotkin's Existential America (pp. 241-249---even Howard Brick only gives it a few mentions in his better-than-survey assessment of the decade's thought). Indeed, I hadn't thought of Tom Hayden as an actor in America's intellectual history until I pondered, courtesy of George, Hayden's relationship with Camus. There's a whole post I "chould" (should and could) write about the Port Huron Statement, Hayden, and the Occupy movement. But I need to work on my own project for a while (even if I get an extension on the last--fingers crossed).
2. Like Ben, I intend on putting page updates here for the near term to hold myself accountable and get motivated. Here goes: I only wrote about 50 words this past week as I cleared my desk of the task of creating my spring term syllabi. But after I put up this post, my day is clear for writing.
3. Happy 48th birthday to our current "FLOTUS." I predict that someday she'll be the object of an intellectual historian's work.
4. I appreciated the following passages from Jennifer Howard's post-AHA interview with Anthony Grafton, appearing in the Jan. 9 Chronicle (bolds mine):
The Chronicle sat down with Mr. Grafton in Chicago to talk about his presidential year, scholarly directions in the field, the push to rethink graduate education and history careers, and the work that remains to be done.
"The association only matters insofar as it's vital to the profession and to the discipline—two separate things," he says. "Nobody's sure the annual meetings have much of a future." He would like to see the group become more of a communication hub for members, "a place of virtual discussion and dialogue."
In a back-and-forth about new directions in scholarship, Mr. Grafton mentioned intellectual history as a trend "which really delights my soul."
Intellectual history was counted out in the 1970s in favor of cultural history, but it now is clearly a very strong presence, he said.
As some examples, he mentioned recent work on the history of intellectual networks done by scholars like Daniela Bleichmar, an assistant professor of art history and history at the University of Southern California, and Harold J. Cook, a professor of history at Brown University.
Such approaches are "not the way we did intellectual history in the past," he said. "It's not intellectual history in its traditional sense, but it's informed by it, and it's in dialogue with it. It's intellectual history plus a social history of ideas. ... All of these are fields that are transformed by digital-humanities methods and digital archives."
...I'd say that some of that "strong presence" is a direct reflection of the work we've done creating the USIH conference and S-USIH. ...Pat yourselves on the back.
5. Check out the returns on this 1963 survey conducted by a 16-year old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister. Here are the opening three paragraphs of McAllister's story as told recently in the Paris Review:
In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind?
McAllister had just published his first story, “The Faces Outside,” in both IF magazine and Simon and Schuster’s 1964 roundup of the best science fiction of the year. Confident, if not downright cocky, he thought the surveys could settle a conflict with his English teacher by proving that symbols weren’t lying beneath the texts they read like buried treasure awaiting discovery.
His project involved substantial labor—this before the Internet, before e-mail—but was not impossible: many authors and their representatives were listed in the Twentieth-Century American Literature series found in the local library. More impressive is that seventy-five writers replied—most of them, in earnest. Sixty-five of those responses survive (McAllister lost ten to “a kleptomaniacal friend”). Answers ranged from the secretarial blow off to a thick packet of single-spaced typescript in reply.
Read the rest here.
6. What's on your mind? If nothing above excites your imagination, leave your topic of choice in the comments. - TL
1. If my schedule were free February 2-3, 2012, and I happened to be on the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, I'd attend this gathering in a heartbeat: "The Port Huron Statement at 50."
I confess that I had never really done the obvious in thinking about the Port Huron Statement as an object of intellectual history until I read Cotkin's Existential America (pp. 241-249---even Howard Brick only gives it a few mentions in his better-than-survey assessment of the decade's thought). Indeed, I hadn't thought of Tom Hayden as an actor in America's intellectual history until I pondered, courtesy of George, Hayden's relationship with Camus. There's a whole post I "chould" (should and could) write about the Port Huron Statement, Hayden, and the Occupy movement. But I need to work on my own project for a while (even if I get an extension on the last--fingers crossed).
2. Like Ben, I intend on putting page updates here for the near term to hold myself accountable and get motivated. Here goes: I only wrote about 50 words this past week as I cleared my desk of the task of creating my spring term syllabi. But after I put up this post, my day is clear for writing.
3. Happy 48th birthday to our current "FLOTUS." I predict that someday she'll be the object of an intellectual historian's work.
4. I appreciated the following passages from Jennifer Howard's post-AHA interview with Anthony Grafton, appearing in the Jan. 9 Chronicle (bolds mine):
The Chronicle sat down with Mr. Grafton in Chicago to talk about his presidential year, scholarly directions in the field, the push to rethink graduate education and history careers, and the work that remains to be done.
"The association only matters insofar as it's vital to the profession and to the discipline—two separate things," he says. "Nobody's sure the annual meetings have much of a future." He would like to see the group become more of a communication hub for members, "a place of virtual discussion and dialogue."
In a back-and-forth about new directions in scholarship, Mr. Grafton mentioned intellectual history as a trend "which really delights my soul."
Intellectual history was counted out in the 1970s in favor of cultural history, but it now is clearly a very strong presence, he said.
As some examples, he mentioned recent work on the history of intellectual networks done by scholars like Daniela Bleichmar, an assistant professor of art history and history at the University of Southern California, and Harold J. Cook, a professor of history at Brown University.
Such approaches are "not the way we did intellectual history in the past," he said. "It's not intellectual history in its traditional sense, but it's informed by it, and it's in dialogue with it. It's intellectual history plus a social history of ideas. ... All of these are fields that are transformed by digital-humanities methods and digital archives."
...I'd say that some of that "strong presence" is a direct reflection of the work we've done creating the USIH conference and S-USIH. ...Pat yourselves on the back.
5. Check out the returns on this 1963 survey conducted by a 16-year old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister. Here are the opening three paragraphs of McAllister's story as told recently in the Paris Review:
In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind?
McAllister had just published his first story, “The Faces Outside,” in both IF magazine and Simon and Schuster’s 1964 roundup of the best science fiction of the year. Confident, if not downright cocky, he thought the surveys could settle a conflict with his English teacher by proving that symbols weren’t lying beneath the texts they read like buried treasure awaiting discovery.
His project involved substantial labor—this before the Internet, before e-mail—but was not impossible: many authors and their representatives were listed in the Twentieth-Century American Literature series found in the local library. More impressive is that seventy-five writers replied—most of them, in earnest. Sixty-five of those responses survive (McAllister lost ten to “a kleptomaniacal friend”). Answers ranged from the secretarial blow off to a thick packet of single-spaced typescript in reply.
Read the rest here.
6. What's on your mind? If nothing above excites your imagination, leave your topic of choice in the comments. - TL
Kamis, 08 Desember 2011
The Leavings: Connector Figures, Facilitators, And Peripheral Participants In Intellectual History
[Updated: 2 pm CST]
I'm in the midst of a slow read---a relishing really---of George Cotkin's Existential America. After having just passed the halfway mark (p. 170 of 284 total), it occurred to me that you, the USIH reader, critic, and thinker, might be up for discussion of a topic that has arisen from that reading. I want to explore something I inelegantly term "connector figures." These are facilitators and peripheral participants in the various intellectual communities we cover in American history. Bear with me as I meditate out loud, with you, about these figures.
As I see them, connector figures fill the spaces between highly recognized, or dominant, individuals in intellectual history. They occupy the continuum in the social and cultural construction of knowledge. They operate on the fringes of nodes of discussion, or in the outer edges of communities of discourse. They dip in and out of important discourses to provide, or facilitate, discussion of a particular but lesser idea. They are the equivalent of a leaf or branch in the forest of trees of knowledge that we study. Most often we study trunks of various sizes among those trees---Dewey, James, Nietzsche, Emerson, Heidegger, and even the lowly Mortimer Adler.
These leaves, who are often left behind or barely covered in our stories, often end up as leavings in the mills of knowledge. They fill up the cutting room floor.
Historically, and sadly, these leavings are often women---used and abused as mere "helpmeets" in the little clubs, organizations, and circles that form our communities of discourse. They are the editors, organizers, and secretaries in our intellectual establishments. In the formal and informal cultural production of knowledge, they are the lovers, party-goers, and meal companions of "the intellectuals"---the elites and giants of our historiography. These "party functionaries," if you will, are, I believe, an under-explored part of American intellectual history. In the marketplace of USIH knowledge, they represent a market inefficiency in terms of building cultural capital in the field. In other words, more graduate students should explore and play up the roles of these connector figures.
Several examples come to mind. Let me start by citing a few from my reading in Cotkin. In building his narrative on the existential underpinnings of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, Cotkin uses the friends of both to obtain and facilitate insight into their intellectual lives. I particularly appreciated a passage about Wright's friend Dorothy Norman (1905-1997). I hope George won't mind if I simply reproduce the short relevant paragraph (bolds mine---photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, circa 1932, courtesy of Museum Syndiate):
In the 1940s Wright discovered in French existentialism some answers to the "secret of experience" and representations of the "guilt that he could never get rid of." He first learned about existentialism through his friend Dorothy Norman. Norman, a wealthy patron of the arts and an important photographer, was intellectually lively and well connected. In 1938 she founded the journal Twice a Year, which she edited until 1948, publishing work by Kafka, Anaïs Nin, Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, and many other writers. The journal also served as a forum for work by leading anti-fascist writers. Norman met Wright in 1944, and they quickly became friends. At her soirées he encountered important intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt and Paul Tillich. Through Norman, Wright came into contact with Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus (p. 168).
At the time of writing Existential America, published in 2003, the best information on Norman for Cotkin was her memoir, Encounters: A Memoir (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1987).
Here we see all the traits of a connector figure, beginning symbolically with the title of her own account of herself. Norman was a woman, facilitator, party-goer, and even a patron (i.e. a person of some means). She also has some entry skill or trait. In this case it's photography. With other it may be editing, or geography, or prior connections with smarter folks. With her "entry trait" she had the means to create encounters---to foster some degree of community, and even discourse.
Another important connector figure in Cotkin's narrative is Hazel Barnes. Indeed, Barnes is so important to the popularization of existentialism in America that she receives substantial attention from Cotkin---eight full pages (pp. 151-158) in a chapter discussing the creation of an existential canon. Barnes is important enough that I have to qualify my connector figure category. Because I'm writing off-the-cuff, let's divides our connectors into degrees of importance. Barnes is a "first degree connector," while Norman occupies the second or third tier of facilitator figures.
Why? For starters, Barnes was no mere party-planner, patron, or amateur photographer (with apologies to photographers). Barnes was the first translator, into English, of Sartre's Being and Nothingness (pp.vii-xliii herein). She connected existentialism to American pragmatism, "championed" a prominent place for Beauvoir in the existentialism's development, and wrote a popularization titled An Existentialist Ethics (1967) that revealed political commitments in existentialism---commitments that would empower New Left youth and radicals. So Barnes is no mere connector figure.
Yet, in building his argument for her important, Cotkin is only able to cite Barnes's books, her memoir The Story I Tell Myself: A Venture in Existentialist Autobiography, and one intellectual history: Ann Fulton's Apostles of Sartre. To be fair, Fulton mentions Barnes 33 times (23 in text and 10 http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifin the notes). And Barnes makes brief appearances in Howard Brick's Age of Contradiction and even Bruce Kuklick's A History of Philosophy in America. So in the past 15 years Barnes has been increasingly recognized as a pivotal figure in the development and popularization of post-war, French veins of existentialism in America. So Barnes is clearly a first degree facilitator.
To show that connector figures are not limited to women, in my work Clifton Fadiman functions as a first-degree facilitator. Fadiman published several books, and was a popular book critic and reviewer. Fadiman is covered in Janice Radway's A Feeling For Books (North Carolina, 1997), Joan Rubin's The Making of Middlebrow Culture (North Carolina, 1992), and other works. Nevertheless, he is always a helpmate to others, or just the member of a circle. He's never the trunk of a tree, and never considered thoughtful in his own right.
But Fadiman pre-read a great deal of Mortimer Adler's books. Fadiman was a fantastic editor, with a great sense for audience and the off-putting phrase. He was candid and pointed in his commentary. As a Britannica editor (a favored hire by Adler and William Benton), Fadiman wrote extensive letters on proposed projects and long commentaries on encyclopedia entries. He was a Britannica functionary, par excellance. Yet Fadiman is absent from most intellectual histories---or is de-emphasized like Barnes or Norman. Worse yet, he often gets the horrific appellation that kills further USIH conversation: pseudo-intellectual.
Now I turn to you: What lines do you draw between pseudo-intellectuals, facilitators, and connector intellectuals?
What degree of importance (in my first-through-third construct) must be assigned in order to get a better treatment in your narratives? Where are the secretaries, administrative assistants, and party planners in your USIH accounts? Finally, what of race and ethnicity in these roles? That conversation was implicit in my sampling from Cotkin on Wright, Ellison, and Norman. But how does race function in relation to facilitation? How do you distinguish between the trunks of the trees in the forest of your narratives? Which leaves get attention, and which don't?- TL
I'm in the midst of a slow read---a relishing really---of George Cotkin's Existential America. After having just passed the halfway mark (p. 170 of 284 total), it occurred to me that you, the USIH reader, critic, and thinker, might be up for discussion of a topic that has arisen from that reading. I want to explore something I inelegantly term "connector figures." These are facilitators and peripheral participants in the various intellectual communities we cover in American history. Bear with me as I meditate out loud, with you, about these figures.As I see them, connector figures fill the spaces between highly recognized, or dominant, individuals in intellectual history. They occupy the continuum in the social and cultural construction of knowledge. They operate on the fringes of nodes of discussion, or in the outer edges of communities of discourse. They dip in and out of important discourses to provide, or facilitate, discussion of a particular but lesser idea. They are the equivalent of a leaf or branch in the forest of trees of knowledge that we study. Most often we study trunks of various sizes among those trees---Dewey, James, Nietzsche, Emerson, Heidegger, and even the lowly Mortimer Adler.
These leaves, who are often left behind or barely covered in our stories, often end up as leavings in the mills of knowledge. They fill up the cutting room floor.
Historically, and sadly, these leavings are often women---used and abused as mere "helpmeets" in the little clubs, organizations, and circles that form our communities of discourse. They are the editors, organizers, and secretaries in our intellectual establishments. In the formal and informal cultural production of knowledge, they are the lovers, party-goers, and meal companions of "the intellectuals"---the elites and giants of our historiography. These "party functionaries," if you will, are, I believe, an under-explored part of American intellectual history. In the marketplace of USIH knowledge, they represent a market inefficiency in terms of building cultural capital in the field. In other words, more graduate students should explore and play up the roles of these connector figures.
Several examples come to mind. Let me start by citing a few from my reading in Cotkin. In building his narrative on the existential underpinnings of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, Cotkin uses the friends of both to obtain and facilitate insight into their intellectual lives. I particularly appreciated a passage about Wright's friend Dorothy Norman (1905-1997). I hope George won't mind if I simply reproduce the short relevant paragraph (bolds mine---photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, circa 1932, courtesy of Museum Syndiate):
In the 1940s Wright discovered in French existentialism some answers to the "secret of experience" and representations of the "guilt that he could never get rid of." He first learned about existentialism through his friend Dorothy Norman. Norman, a wealthy patron of the arts and an important photographer, was intellectually lively and well connected. In 1938 she founded the journal Twice a Year, which she edited until 1948, publishing work by Kafka, Anaïs Nin, Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, and many other writers. The journal also served as a forum for work by leading anti-fascist writers. Norman met Wright in 1944, and they quickly became friends. At her soirées he encountered important intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt and Paul Tillich. Through Norman, Wright came into contact with Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus (p. 168).At the time of writing Existential America, published in 2003, the best information on Norman for Cotkin was her memoir, Encounters: A Memoir (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1987).
Here we see all the traits of a connector figure, beginning symbolically with the title of her own account of herself. Norman was a woman, facilitator, party-goer, and even a patron (i.e. a person of some means). She also has some entry skill or trait. In this case it's photography. With other it may be editing, or geography, or prior connections with smarter folks. With her "entry trait" she had the means to create encounters---to foster some degree of community, and even discourse.
Another important connector figure in Cotkin's narrative is Hazel Barnes. Indeed, Barnes is so important to the popularization of existentialism in America that she receives substantial attention from Cotkin---eight full pages (pp. 151-158) in a chapter discussing the creation of an existential canon. Barnes is important enough that I have to qualify my connector figure category. Because I'm writing off-the-cuff, let's divides our connectors into degrees of importance. Barnes is a "first degree connector," while Norman occupies the second or third tier of facilitator figures. Why? For starters, Barnes was no mere party-planner, patron, or amateur photographer (with apologies to photographers). Barnes was the first translator, into English, of Sartre's Being and Nothingness (pp.vii-xliii herein). She connected existentialism to American pragmatism, "championed" a prominent place for Beauvoir in the existentialism's development, and wrote a popularization titled An Existentialist Ethics (1967) that revealed political commitments in existentialism---commitments that would empower New Left youth and radicals. So Barnes is no mere connector figure.
Yet, in building his argument for her important, Cotkin is only able to cite Barnes's books, her memoir The Story I Tell Myself: A Venture in Existentialist Autobiography, and one intellectual history: Ann Fulton's Apostles of Sartre. To be fair, Fulton mentions Barnes 33 times (23 in text and 10 http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifin the notes). And Barnes makes brief appearances in Howard Brick's Age of Contradiction and even Bruce Kuklick's A History of Philosophy in America. So in the past 15 years Barnes has been increasingly recognized as a pivotal figure in the development and popularization of post-war, French veins of existentialism in America. So Barnes is clearly a first degree facilitator.
To show that connector figures are not limited to women, in my work Clifton Fadiman functions as a first-degree facilitator. Fadiman published several books, and was a popular book critic and reviewer. Fadiman is covered in Janice Radway's A Feeling For Books (North Carolina, 1997), Joan Rubin's The Making of Middlebrow Culture (North Carolina, 1992), and other works. Nevertheless, he is always a helpmate to others, or just the member of a circle. He's never the trunk of a tree, and never considered thoughtful in his own right.But Fadiman pre-read a great deal of Mortimer Adler's books. Fadiman was a fantastic editor, with a great sense for audience and the off-putting phrase. He was candid and pointed in his commentary. As a Britannica editor (a favored hire by Adler and William Benton), Fadiman wrote extensive letters on proposed projects and long commentaries on encyclopedia entries. He was a Britannica functionary, par excellance. Yet Fadiman is absent from most intellectual histories---or is de-emphasized like Barnes or Norman. Worse yet, he often gets the horrific appellation that kills further USIH conversation: pseudo-intellectual.
Now I turn to you: What lines do you draw between pseudo-intellectuals, facilitators, and connector intellectuals?
What degree of importance (in my first-through-third construct) must be assigned in order to get a better treatment in your narratives? Where are the secretaries, administrative assistants, and party planners in your USIH accounts? Finally, what of race and ethnicity in these roles? That conversation was implicit in my sampling from Cotkin on Wright, Ellison, and Norman. But how does race function in relation to facilitation? How do you distinguish between the trunks of the trees in the forest of your narratives? Which leaves get attention, and which don't?- TL
Rabu, 02 Maret 2011
Bill Fine on Tim Lacy on George Cotkin
Tim Lacy's recent thought-provoking review of George Cotkin's book Morality's Muddy Waters has elicited an interesting series of comments from Bill Fine. As I am home sick with a sick kid, I will defer to a conversation that is taking place on a post that certainly serves up more food for thought. Please see Tim's original review here and Bill's comments here. You will need to scroll down just a bit to find Bill's comments.
Bill Fine on Tim Lacy on George Cotkin
Tim Lacy's recent thought-provoking review of George Cotkin's book Morality's Muddy Waters has elicited an interesting series of comments from Bill Fine. As I am home sick with a sick kid, I will defer to a conversation that is taking place on a post that certainly serves up more food for thought. Please see Tim's original review here and Bill's comments here. You will need to scroll down just a bit to find Bill's comments.
Kamis, 24 Februari 2011
History as "Productive Confusion": Studies of America’s Moral Fiber, 1940-Present
[Warning: Long post. You may want to print. - TL]
----------------------------------------------------
Review of George Cotkin, Morality’s Muddy Waters: Ethical Quandaries in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). ISBN: 978-0-8122-4227-0. 262 pages.
Review by Tim Lacy
Monmouth College
History as "Productive Confusion": Studies of America’s Moral Fiber, 1940-Present
I.
The human soul possesses some kind of an essential imperative to remember moral axioms and lessons from the past. Institutionally, the clearest proof of this is in religion. Revered works in both the Eastern and Western traditions are commonly recited for their proverbs, tales of good and evil, and moral laws. Among individuals, the wise (as well as the pretentious) quote pithy laws and maxims from memory---the simpler, the better. Today's Evangelical Christians and faithful Muslims quote passages from their respective sacred texts, and intellectuals borrow quotes from literature or perhaps even a philosopher. There is a reason why John Bartlett's Familiar Quotations was filled with lines from the Bible and Shakespeare when first published in 1855.[1]
Related to the simple urge to have prescriptions on hand, there exists another, more complex means of thinking through morality and virtue in the Western tradition. Aristotle helped articulate this other approach. The key to this line of thinking is circumstance, no matter where on the timeline the action under consideration occurred. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle observed that "every state of soul has a nature relative to and concerned with the kinds of things by which it tends to be made worse or better." Continuing and rephrasing another aspect of Aristotle's passage centuries later, Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica, wrote: "A virtuous man acts as he should, and when he should, and so on in respect of other circumstances." And Aquinas continued in two other passages:
"Human actions are good or evil according to circumstances. ...The fullness of [an action's] goodness does not consist wholly in its species, but also in certain additions which accrue to it by reason of certain accidents. And its due circumstances are of this character."
"The vicious man...acts when he should not, or where he should not, and so on with the other circumstances. [2]
If Aquinas and Aristotle are correct, and morality is always and everywhere linked to circumstance, and the study of history, furthermore is the study of circumstance (or context) par excellance, then it is clear that the study of history is absolutely crucial to understanding morality. Indeed, one might argue that by studying history, one is always engaged, at a minimum, in an indirect moral endeavor.
Of course some works of history are more and less specific about their moral goals. The moral message of a historical work depends on the historian's willingness to engage moral questions and problems. And if historians are cautious in the moral arena, their reluctance derives from mistakes of older works where moral judgments were not hard earned. While caution perhaps makes historians seem timid or amoral, it also serves as armor against foolishness and the hazards of subjectivity. One person's evil is often, with good reason, another's grey area.
II.
My first direct interaction with George Cotkin came via e-mail about three years ago. In an unsolicited note, he wrote simply to praise the U.S. Intellectual History weblog as a "wonderful idea." He promised to "spread the news" to his students and colleagues. I relay this because, though I generally refuse my first impressions on principle, the charitable kindness of that missive accurately conveyed something about Cotkin’s character. My next noteworthy interaction was indirect. On a prompt from Wilfred McClay, I read Cotkin's April 2008 article, “History’s Moral Turn,” in the Journal of the History of Ideas (Vol. 69, no. 2). The essay led a symposium, with responses from Neil Jumonville, Michael O’Brien, James Livingston, and Lewis Perry. Cotkin's final reply to his respondents came in the July 2008 issue of the journal.[3] Off and on for the rest of the year I contemplated how to continue that conversation at the weblog. In the end I did nothing, and regretted it.
My regret was rooted in the fact that I was impressed with Cotkin's call for historians to explicitly take up moral analysis. In the article he cited abundant evidence of a "moral turn" evident in American life---explicit at the time in America's public sphere, particularly in the actions and words of President George Bush (pp. 293-94). His piece resonated deeply with a sense, buttressed perhaps by my Catholicism and reading in theology and philosophy, that historical analysis must necessarily involve trafficking in morality, sometimes deeply. Admittedly, the historian’s moral sensibility is often tempered, and sometimes disguised (intentionally and unintentionally). The discredited legacy of providential history, tempered and corrected by the analytical turn of the late nineteenth century, explains historians' general reluctance to take up explicit moral analysis.
But Cotkin asserted that historians need to participate, and that they "can play an important role in deepening and directing" the moral conversation. He argued that historians have a positive role to play in moving the public "away from simplicity to complexity, from rhetorical heat to cool compassion." Indeed, other academic intellectuals, particularly moral philosophers, use history to discuss morals in their work. Cotkin chided them, however, for "conceptualizations that are deep, but...historical excavations [that] are commonly shallow." He then made the case for historians to pick up the baton:
Historians can, and are at present, beginning to benefit from acquaintance with how philosophers employ and problematize various concepts—intentionality, virtue, character, moral luck, action, and Just War. ...The moral turn is less about imposing our moral and political judgments on historical events and figures. It looks at historical agents and events to warn us that human motivation is complex and confusing, open and constrained. Morality becomes a process of thinking rather than a predigested set of answers. ...History’s moral turn may help create productive confusion, a willingness to recognize that behind all of our moral choices...lurks paradox, tragedy, and irony (p. 294).
Cotkin spoke generally to historians in his article, but it was clear to me that intellectual historians were specifically implicated. Few other subfields engage philosophy, but that was precisely the discipline he underscored.
I could quote endlessly from the Cotkin essay because it lays out the historiography of moral considerations in the history profession: opposition to, proponents of, always been there, impossible to escape, decayed sense of, secularity and morals, and books that specifically addressed moral inquiry and moral problems. I can stop here, however, because the rest of the article was a precis for another larger work due to appear in a few years.
III.
That work, titled Morality’s Muddy Waters: Ethical Quandaries in Modern America and published by Penn Press, made it to my desk last October. The book both exemplifies Cotkin's call to action and exhibits the assertion that history, written and analyzed by historians, is a superb vehicle for the study of morality. As a matter of classification, the book is what some could call a "study in U.S. intellectual history." In other words, it is not a straightforward narrative of intellectual-ethical-moral matters with seamless transitions between chapters and a recurring community of discourse. Cotkin proposes topics, presented chronologically, that underscore moral complexity, competing ethical imperatives, circumstances, the nature and effects of evil, empathy, responsibility, moral clarity, strictures, contingency, contradictions, and character. I was most fascinated by the emotional complexity of morality, both as cause and effect, of the events presented.
As is the case with any accessible history, Cotkin's overall argument appears in various forms throughout the text. One version arises, naturally, on the first page: MMW "rejects...easy certitude and argues that we need instead...a healthy dose of befuddlement, and even when we are assured that our ends are correct and moral...the means to achieve them may be deeply problematic" (p. 1-2). The problem at hand is moral absolutism, and the solution is complexity. Indeed, by way of conclusion, Cotkin presents a most intriguing paradox with his thesis: namely, that less moral certainty leads to more morality. Stated another way, "the best moral decision-making occurs only after internal struggle and the recognition of bewilderment concerning means and ends" (p. 5). But how does he arrive at this end? What evidence is presented?
The specific thesis of MMW, in relation to its historical material, is this: by "allowing moral moments to emerge in their full confusion" we "learn from historical situations...that we...wander through a fog-enshrouded landscape of perplexing issues" (p. 4). Cotkin adds that "the point of history is to muddy the waters of easy moral clarity rather than to confirm our own sense of moral righteousness or political persuasion" (p. 4). In other words, we do not see enough the moral confusion in history, and a "moral turn" in works like MMW will enrich the present by showing us that moral clarity is not a given. It is hard earned, and sometimes real understanding cannot happen until after the fact.
To enact his thesis in a way that is different from other historians who have fruitfully engaged morality (e.g. David Brion Davis, William Cronon, Harry Stout, Drew Gilpin Faust), Cotkin follows through on his exhortation from "The Moral Turn" by incorporating the work of moral philosophers, ethicists, and psychological theorists. This begins in chapter one with a long, fascinating look at Hannah Arendt and her critics. It continues in the next chapter on World War II bombing by exploring combatant/combatant line in theories of total war (e.g. Giulio Douhet) and just war (e.g. A.C. Grayling, Robert Nozick, and Michael Walzer, Avishai Margalit). Having paused on many occasions in the classroom to pose moral questions in relation to the use of atomic weapons, I appreciated Cotkin's interjection of philosophy in a section titled "Can Bombing of Civilians Be Justified?" (pp. 51-54). That section could be lifted, as is, and incorporated as either an in-class reading or an out-of-class reflection.
In successive chapters, Cotkin continues this invaluable task. In tackling My Lai he weaves in the work of psychologists Stanley Milgram, Philip Zimbardo, and Robert Jay Lifton, as well as the reflections of Reinhold Niebuhr and the work of Aristotle on the cultivation of character. John Howard Griffin and his famous work, Black Like Me, are examined in relation to the writings of Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Nagel, and a host of philosophers who have written on empathy. A key issue for Griffin was whether moral luck can be transformed, via empathy, into some kind of "universalist vision" (p. 120). When Cotkin moves to capital punishment in chapter five, the pro-death penalty thinking of Ernest van den Haag, Isaac Ehrlich, Hans Zeisel, and the Straussian Walter Berns makes an appearance. In opposition, Cotkin refers to the thinking of Karl Menninger, Hugo Adam Bedau, Philip Hallie, and the famous Sister Helen Prejean.
The last, and necessarily most tentative, full chapter focuses on terrorism and the Iraq War, post September 11. Philosophy makes its appearance in the form of a long discussion about "humanitarian intervention" (meaning, of course, the military variety). The theorists and philosophers of interest include Natan Sharansky, a Soviet refugee and neoconservative Zionist, and Ron Dermer. They co-authored a work The Case for Democracy (2004), the book Bush cited as inspirational for his international moral vision (i.e. democratic freedom must be spread at any price). Other intellectuals cited by Cotkin in this chapter, covering various degrees of interventionism versus outright opposition, include Kanan Makiya, Michael Ignatieff, Samantha Power, David Rieff, Christopher Hitchens, Peter Beinart, and Paul Berman---the last receiving extended treatment. Even though this topic still retains some heat, and it is clear that Cotkin did not support the war, his fairness in relaying the thought processes of the "war hawks" enables a civil tone to pervade the chapter. He only reproves in his final analysis of the characters.
Again, in relation to the aforementioned topics, Cotkin does not merely incorporate the insights of the abovementioned philosophers, ethicists, and psychologists. If he only did that, he would be reproducing the same works as other thinkers who utilize historical examples. Cotkin sets himself apart by following through on his promise to create "productive confusion" by adding more of the context, usually in terms of discussing decision-making and motivations of historical actors, but also by way of regret. He embraces "a tragic and ironic moral stance," and also avoids being judgmental (though the judgments, and regrets, of historical actors are given full play).[4]
IV.
This work engages that still-evolving subfield called the history of emotions---both in its historiography (i.e. approach) and topically in the narrative. Indeed, by invoking the messiness of war, murder, racism, hate, and capital punishment, one can hardly avoid terms like suffering, regret, revenge, morale, repulsion, honor, joy, shock, elation, unsavory, etc. One term, however, that both captured the emotional responses of several of Cotkin's historical eras and evoked an intellectual-religious-emotional response in this reader was "demonic." The word necessarily has fuzzy referential content, but nevertheless draws on our fears and repulsiveness. 'Demonic' captures something of the unreasonableness of radical evil, helping Cotkin articulate what I think is universal revulsion at mid-century's Holocaust and mass murders. It is not surprising, then, that 'demonic' arises primarily in chapter one on "The Problems of Evil," which focuses on Hannah Arendt. This, indeed, is the chapter that opens up the language, terms, and problems that haunt the rest of the book.
Cotkin's goal is to parse the depths of evil. To his credit, he does not pretend to have an answer, or answers, about why evil exists---the metaphysics of evil. Rather, through Arendt as a kind of avatar for his own views, Cotkin gets at the depths of evil achieved both within and outside of social and political structures. The primary structure of concern at mid-century is totalitarianism. Arendt starts with Kant's idea of "radical evil" in The Origins of Totalitarianism (pp. 17-19), intensifies it, and then clarifies further in Eichmann in Jerusalem by adding "the banality of evil" (pp. 23-24). To help Arendt and himself in grappling with people Hitler, Stalin, and Gary Gilmore later, as well as events like My Lai, Cotkin interjects the mysterious element of the 'demonic' into his studies (pp. 16, 79, 136). Here is a crucial passage (bolds mine):
Arendt...painted herself into a narrow corner. If the crimes of totalitarianism were as original and immense as she averred, then could they be anything other than demonic? She never hesitated to describe them throughout Origins...as "monstrous." But to use the term demonic would be to situate evil as mysterious, perhaps outside the realm of rational explanation and the march of worldly events. The demonic resisted laws of nature and the wills of men. Even strong structures of representative democracy and public debate, it seemed, were futile against a demonic entity. ...Arendt was onto something when she remarked on the mysterious nature of evil as something not "humanly understandable." ....Radical evil, despite her best attempts, seemed to slip through her interpretive structure. Arendt's frustrations grew just after publication of the book, when she admitted , "What radical evil is I don't know" (p. 22).
In other words, because totalitarianism demolished the principles of "freedom, contingency, and choice"---principles on which Kant's and Arendt's views of radical evil rested---other concepts had to be introduced in a world where "evil had assumed a new face." But Arendt left her version "grounded...in the institutions and ideology of totalitarianism" (p. 19). Her only revision was to introduce "banality" as an explanatory trope for Eichmann's "less than demonic" position as a "dedicated bureaucrat" lacking "independence of mind" (p. 24).
But the idea of the 'demonic' raises a host of other issues. From where does the idea arise? Is it a universal concept? How can one discuss the topic without an in-depth study of Western theology or metaphysics? Mortimer J. Adler once asserted that a philosopher could posit the existence of angels, meaning the possibility of spiritual intelligences, or "bodies without minds," without buying into Christianity, Islam, or Judaism. Adler argued that it was of a piece with general popular fascination about the idea of "superhuman intelligence," and suggested that fascination could be called "theology-fiction" or "philosophy-fiction" (instead of the old term, "angelology").[5] Adler buttressed his assertion by noting that many philosophers in Western history have speculated the possible role of angels in the universe, including Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, John Locke, Descartes, and others. Studying angels was about studying intelligences that were less than Divine (even if that divinity constituted only the necessary God of the philosophers) but greater than human. As for Satan and demons, however, Adler asserts that they are products of Western religious dogma, and shared by Christianity, Islam, and Judaism (though Christianity has special assertions about Satan in relation to Jesus Christ).[6]
I relay this apparent digression because Cotkin does discuss religion, particularly Christianity, in Morality's Muddy Waters. Topics that arise on the latter include born agains, Catholicism, Dorothy Day, fundamentalism, Søren Kierkegaard, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Denis de Rougemont. For the most part, Cotkin limits his discussion of these figures and topics to the historical actors at hand: Arendt's views of Rougemont, Franklin D. Roosevelt's Christianity is broached, Dorothy Day's influence on John Howard Griffin, fundamentalists' views on capital punishment and retributive justice, and the religious backgrounds of My Lai soldiers. With the exception of Arendt's reaction to Rougement's 1944 book, The Devil's Snare, Cotkin does not spend much time delving into theology (p. 15-16).
This is either the great strength or great weakness in Cotkin's analysis. As a weakness, unlike his insertions from philosophers and psychologists throughout the book, the relative absence of theology diminishes the real contributions of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic thinkers. If religion has something substantial to say to us about the human condition, as a great majority of the world believes it does, then it would behoove the intellectual historian dealing in morality to read some of that speculation into the text. In the case of MMW, where most of Cotkin's decision-makers are operating in something of a Judeo-Christian context, whether by violation of or perceived adherence to their faith, that means doing more with Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant theology. Perhaps theological speculation about demonic evil, given dispassionately, would at least help us understand something about the contexts in which these evil characters saw themselves? Would this also help us understand how the masses processed and received news of these atrocities of hatred, murder, mass murder, and international humanitarianism?
I fully recognize the dangers of a professional historian engaging in this kind of speculation. How would colleagues perceive the work? Would an academic press accept the book? What is the line between moral speculation and moralizing? How does one discuss the meaning of 'demonic' without getting past knee-jerk reactions? Cotkin's work is about "productive confusion." Does theological speculation move us into contentious, unproductive territory? And then, in relation to America's Judeo-Christian culture, how does one properly navigate the Protestant-Catholic-Jewish lines of division? Then again, if competing ethical imperatives are an important topic, what raises the bar on moral competition more than religious divisions?
It is not hard to see how avoiding in-depth theological speculation also strengthens the book. For one, it keeps Christianity from dominating MMW, making Cotkin's moral analysis accessible to a wider audience. His more secular study of the idea of evil in recent history results in an unpretentious exploration of the confusion of the moments at hand. By avoiding easy answers, especially those amenable to particular religious dogma, Cotkin maintains the humility, or "moral modesty," he sought to model in the book (p. 205). Indeed, early in the text he wrote:
Some readers may chafe at talk of evil as too tinged with religious overtones or weighted by heavy metaphysical baggage. It resists explanation and therefore obfuscates reality or explains away horror---all dangers, to be sure. (p. 7).
Cotkin listened to this inner warning, and stuck with philosophical and psychological contributions to understanding the events and topics he chose. Based on the fairness of the rest of the text, I believe Cotkin could have successfully navigated a few pages of theology in each chapter. Those few pages, however, would have constituted a tremendous amount of work, especially when exploring work outside one's faith tradition. Even so, in MMW as it is, there is nothing wrong with leading us to the brink. Perhaps by being led to the edge, the reader may be inspired to think through his or her own knowledge, or lack of knowledge, about radical evil in the world.
V.
When "The Moral Turn" appeared in 2008, I mentioned that it led a symposium with four interlocutors. It is worth revisiting some of the points made there now that Cotkin has provided a book-length example of his call. None of the respondents, of course, had access to Morality's Muddy Waters. Even so, all four respondents made solid points about the study of morality in history and asked poignant questions.
Neil Jumonville rightly reminded readers that many mid-century intellectual historians---Richard Hofstadter, David Potter, and Louis Hartz---were excellent models of "complexity, nuance, and contingency" on moral matters. Michael O'Brien asserted that "engagement with morality has been fairly constant in historical scholarship since almost any period one might care to name." He doubted "that the dialogue Cotkin wishes to encourage between historians and moral philosophers is capable of being sustained." O'Brien also warns against prescription and moralizing. In my view, Cotkin avoids those pitfalls. He also proves in the pages of MMW that an in-text dialogue between historians and moral philosophers can be sustained. Lewis Perry reminded Cotkin that yet another intellectual historian, John Higham, had also encouraged historians, in a 1962 essay, to develop a moral voice obtained from historical study. Titled "Beyond Consensus: The Historian as Moral Critic," Perry cited the Higham essay as taking a stand against false detachment and objectivity. The present sometimes demands historical moral reflection. I have not read the Higham essay, but it seems, to some extent, to have prefigured Cotkin's call.[7]
As I have discovered is often the case, James Livingston's response proved most provocative. He flat out denied that a "moral turn" in history was necessary because "the grammar of American history has always been determined by moral problems." Livingston went on to assert, thinking he had put Cotkin in some kind of a headlock, that the early modern, or Enlightenment, project of narrative construction necessarily consisted of agents, historians and otherwise, articulating their moral points. Livingston tightens his hold by pointing out the cultural pervasiveness, in history and the general public today, of moral considerations. I think this misses Cotkin's point. He did not dispute that moral considerations, simple and otherwise, abound. Rather, Cotkin called for an explicit, conscious engagement with moral complexity, or productive confusion, and moral philosophy in the text. In other words, if historians have been and always will be moral agents, they have not always engaged the subject with the complexity, fairness, depth, and explicit sense of purpose exhibited in MMW. [8] I think Livingston, in the end, would be happier with the product of Cotkin's book than he was with Cotkin's proposal in the Journal of the History of Ideas. Then again, he might not.
VI.
Though the presidential administration that haunts the end of Morality's Muddy Waters is gone, questions remain about the motivations, ideological and otherwise, for going to war in Iraq. Just this week an exclusive Guardian story revealed that a key source from Germany, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi and code-named "Curveball," lied about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to boost his personal prospects of success in civilian life. It was al-Janabi's testimony that floated to the top of America's intelligence system, to the point that it anchored Colin Powell's infamous U.N. testimony before the war's start.[9] Here is a CNN story that elaborates:
Even with this revelation, what is interesting to me is that Cotkin's analysis of the Iraqi War stands. Why? Because Cotkin aimed at the moral roots and simplistic black-and-white thinking, or good-versus-evil drama, that drove President Bush. The fact that the intelligence was fuzzy only proves that ideology drove the war. Furthermore, its same kind of thinking that inspires the Tea Party and other politically powerful conservatives.
Of course that wing of the political spectrum is not unopposed. President Barack Obama exhibits an understanding of moral complexity, and his name arises in a few spots in the text. Cotkin is heartened by President Obama's admiration of the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, particularly in relation to the latter's imperative that sin, pain, evil, unexpected consequences, and humility are necessary topics in relation to foreign and domestic policy (p. 201).
Even so, we cannot be reminded enough—whether by friends, relatives, ministers, teachers, colleagues, or otherwise—that moral progress will not be achieved without embracing complexity. Cotkin is not naive to the fact that we must eventually act, but he implores us to abhor anti-intellectualism and embrace circumspection. We must aspire to a full understanding of moral complications, potential and real. With that, Morality's Muddy Waters stands tall as a model of timely, professional engagement on a topic that concerns a wide variety of the populace. We need more historical works that convey the "productive confusion" Cotkin provides.
------------------------------
*A special thanks to Paul Murphy and David Veenstra for their comments on this review.
[1] Justin Kaplan, ed. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (Boston: Little Brown, 2002).
[2] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by W.D. Ross, in Great Books of the Western World, Mortimer J. Adler, ed., Vol. 8, Aristotle: II (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1990), 350 (II-3); Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, trans. by Father Laurence Shapcote, in Great Books of the Western World, Mortimer J. Adler, ed., Vol. 17, Aquinas: I (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1990), 695-96 (II-I.18.3).
[3] The JHI symposium is located on pages 293-337. The full citation for Cotkin’s reply is as follows: “A Conversation About Morals and History,” JHI 69 (June 2008): 493-97.
[4] From Cotkin's reply to the Symposium, 496-97.
[5] Mortimer J. Adler, The Angels and Us (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1982), x, 3-4.
[6] Ibid., 83-85.
[7] Symposium, 320, 324-25, 334-35; Cotkin, "Conversation," 493-97.
[8] Symposium, Livingston, "The Return of the Self-Made Man: A Response to Cotkin," 327-31.
[9] Martin Chulov and Helen Pidd, "Defector admits to WMD lies that triggered Iraq war," Guardian, February 15, 2011. URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/15/defector-admits-wmd-lies-iraq-war. Accessed on February 21, 2011.
----------------------------------------------------
Review of George Cotkin, Morality’s Muddy Waters: Ethical Quandaries in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). ISBN: 978-0-8122-4227-0. 262 pages.
Review by Tim Lacy
Monmouth College
History as "Productive Confusion": Studies of America’s Moral Fiber, 1940-Present
I.
The human soul possesses some kind of an essential imperative to remember moral axioms and lessons from the past. Institutionally, the clearest proof of this is in religion. Revered works in both the Eastern and Western traditions are commonly recited for their proverbs, tales of good and evil, and moral laws. Among individuals, the wise (as well as the pretentious) quote pithy laws and maxims from memory---the simpler, the better. Today's Evangelical Christians and faithful Muslims quote passages from their respective sacred texts, and intellectuals borrow quotes from literature or perhaps even a philosopher. There is a reason why John Bartlett's Familiar Quotations was filled with lines from the Bible and Shakespeare when first published in 1855.[1]
Related to the simple urge to have prescriptions on hand, there exists another, more complex means of thinking through morality and virtue in the Western tradition. Aristotle helped articulate this other approach. The key to this line of thinking is circumstance, no matter where on the timeline the action under consideration occurred. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle observed that "every state of soul has a nature relative to and concerned with the kinds of things by which it tends to be made worse or better." Continuing and rephrasing another aspect of Aristotle's passage centuries later, Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica, wrote: "A virtuous man acts as he should, and when he should, and so on in respect of other circumstances." And Aquinas continued in two other passages:
"Human actions are good or evil according to circumstances. ...The fullness of [an action's] goodness does not consist wholly in its species, but also in certain additions which accrue to it by reason of certain accidents. And its due circumstances are of this character."
"The vicious man...acts when he should not, or where he should not, and so on with the other circumstances. [2]
If Aquinas and Aristotle are correct, and morality is always and everywhere linked to circumstance, and the study of history, furthermore is the study of circumstance (or context) par excellance, then it is clear that the study of history is absolutely crucial to understanding morality. Indeed, one might argue that by studying history, one is always engaged, at a minimum, in an indirect moral endeavor.
Of course some works of history are more and less specific about their moral goals. The moral message of a historical work depends on the historian's willingness to engage moral questions and problems. And if historians are cautious in the moral arena, their reluctance derives from mistakes of older works where moral judgments were not hard earned. While caution perhaps makes historians seem timid or amoral, it also serves as armor against foolishness and the hazards of subjectivity. One person's evil is often, with good reason, another's grey area.
II.
My first direct interaction with George Cotkin came via e-mail about three years ago. In an unsolicited note, he wrote simply to praise the U.S. Intellectual History weblog as a "wonderful idea." He promised to "spread the news" to his students and colleagues. I relay this because, though I generally refuse my first impressions on principle, the charitable kindness of that missive accurately conveyed something about Cotkin’s character. My next noteworthy interaction was indirect. On a prompt from Wilfred McClay, I read Cotkin's April 2008 article, “History’s Moral Turn,” in the Journal of the History of Ideas (Vol. 69, no. 2). The essay led a symposium, with responses from Neil Jumonville, Michael O’Brien, James Livingston, and Lewis Perry. Cotkin's final reply to his respondents came in the July 2008 issue of the journal.[3] Off and on for the rest of the year I contemplated how to continue that conversation at the weblog. In the end I did nothing, and regretted it.
My regret was rooted in the fact that I was impressed with Cotkin's call for historians to explicitly take up moral analysis. In the article he cited abundant evidence of a "moral turn" evident in American life---explicit at the time in America's public sphere, particularly in the actions and words of President George Bush (pp. 293-94). His piece resonated deeply with a sense, buttressed perhaps by my Catholicism and reading in theology and philosophy, that historical analysis must necessarily involve trafficking in morality, sometimes deeply. Admittedly, the historian’s moral sensibility is often tempered, and sometimes disguised (intentionally and unintentionally). The discredited legacy of providential history, tempered and corrected by the analytical turn of the late nineteenth century, explains historians' general reluctance to take up explicit moral analysis.
But Cotkin asserted that historians need to participate, and that they "can play an important role in deepening and directing" the moral conversation. He argued that historians have a positive role to play in moving the public "away from simplicity to complexity, from rhetorical heat to cool compassion." Indeed, other academic intellectuals, particularly moral philosophers, use history to discuss morals in their work. Cotkin chided them, however, for "conceptualizations that are deep, but...historical excavations [that] are commonly shallow." He then made the case for historians to pick up the baton:
Historians can, and are at present, beginning to benefit from acquaintance with how philosophers employ and problematize various concepts—intentionality, virtue, character, moral luck, action, and Just War. ...The moral turn is less about imposing our moral and political judgments on historical events and figures. It looks at historical agents and events to warn us that human motivation is complex and confusing, open and constrained. Morality becomes a process of thinking rather than a predigested set of answers. ...History’s moral turn may help create productive confusion, a willingness to recognize that behind all of our moral choices...lurks paradox, tragedy, and irony (p. 294).
Cotkin spoke generally to historians in his article, but it was clear to me that intellectual historians were specifically implicated. Few other subfields engage philosophy, but that was precisely the discipline he underscored.
I could quote endlessly from the Cotkin essay because it lays out the historiography of moral considerations in the history profession: opposition to, proponents of, always been there, impossible to escape, decayed sense of, secularity and morals, and books that specifically addressed moral inquiry and moral problems. I can stop here, however, because the rest of the article was a precis for another larger work due to appear in a few years.
III.
That work, titled Morality’s Muddy Waters: Ethical Quandaries in Modern America and published by Penn Press, made it to my desk last October. The book both exemplifies Cotkin's call to action and exhibits the assertion that history, written and analyzed by historians, is a superb vehicle for the study of morality. As a matter of classification, the book is what some could call a "study in U.S. intellectual history." In other words, it is not a straightforward narrative of intellectual-ethical-moral matters with seamless transitions between chapters and a recurring community of discourse. Cotkin proposes topics, presented chronologically, that underscore moral complexity, competing ethical imperatives, circumstances, the nature and effects of evil, empathy, responsibility, moral clarity, strictures, contingency, contradictions, and character. I was most fascinated by the emotional complexity of morality, both as cause and effect, of the events presented.
As is the case with any accessible history, Cotkin's overall argument appears in various forms throughout the text. One version arises, naturally, on the first page: MMW "rejects...easy certitude and argues that we need instead...a healthy dose of befuddlement, and even when we are assured that our ends are correct and moral...the means to achieve them may be deeply problematic" (p. 1-2). The problem at hand is moral absolutism, and the solution is complexity. Indeed, by way of conclusion, Cotkin presents a most intriguing paradox with his thesis: namely, that less moral certainty leads to more morality. Stated another way, "the best moral decision-making occurs only after internal struggle and the recognition of bewilderment concerning means and ends" (p. 5). But how does he arrive at this end? What evidence is presented?
The specific thesis of MMW, in relation to its historical material, is this: by "allowing moral moments to emerge in their full confusion" we "learn from historical situations...that we...wander through a fog-enshrouded landscape of perplexing issues" (p. 4). Cotkin adds that "the point of history is to muddy the waters of easy moral clarity rather than to confirm our own sense of moral righteousness or political persuasion" (p. 4). In other words, we do not see enough the moral confusion in history, and a "moral turn" in works like MMW will enrich the present by showing us that moral clarity is not a given. It is hard earned, and sometimes real understanding cannot happen until after the fact.
To enact his thesis in a way that is different from other historians who have fruitfully engaged morality (e.g. David Brion Davis, William Cronon, Harry Stout, Drew Gilpin Faust), Cotkin follows through on his exhortation from "The Moral Turn" by incorporating the work of moral philosophers, ethicists, and psychological theorists. This begins in chapter one with a long, fascinating look at Hannah Arendt and her critics. It continues in the next chapter on World War II bombing by exploring combatant/combatant line in theories of total war (e.g. Giulio Douhet) and just war (e.g. A.C. Grayling, Robert Nozick, and Michael Walzer, Avishai Margalit). Having paused on many occasions in the classroom to pose moral questions in relation to the use of atomic weapons, I appreciated Cotkin's interjection of philosophy in a section titled "Can Bombing of Civilians Be Justified?" (pp. 51-54). That section could be lifted, as is, and incorporated as either an in-class reading or an out-of-class reflection.
In successive chapters, Cotkin continues this invaluable task. In tackling My Lai he weaves in the work of psychologists Stanley Milgram, Philip Zimbardo, and Robert Jay Lifton, as well as the reflections of Reinhold Niebuhr and the work of Aristotle on the cultivation of character. John Howard Griffin and his famous work, Black Like Me, are examined in relation to the writings of Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Nagel, and a host of philosophers who have written on empathy. A key issue for Griffin was whether moral luck can be transformed, via empathy, into some kind of "universalist vision" (p. 120). When Cotkin moves to capital punishment in chapter five, the pro-death penalty thinking of Ernest van den Haag, Isaac Ehrlich, Hans Zeisel, and the Straussian Walter Berns makes an appearance. In opposition, Cotkin refers to the thinking of Karl Menninger, Hugo Adam Bedau, Philip Hallie, and the famous Sister Helen Prejean.
The last, and necessarily most tentative, full chapter focuses on terrorism and the Iraq War, post September 11. Philosophy makes its appearance in the form of a long discussion about "humanitarian intervention" (meaning, of course, the military variety). The theorists and philosophers of interest include Natan Sharansky, a Soviet refugee and neoconservative Zionist, and Ron Dermer. They co-authored a work The Case for Democracy (2004), the book Bush cited as inspirational for his international moral vision (i.e. democratic freedom must be spread at any price). Other intellectuals cited by Cotkin in this chapter, covering various degrees of interventionism versus outright opposition, include Kanan Makiya, Michael Ignatieff, Samantha Power, David Rieff, Christopher Hitchens, Peter Beinart, and Paul Berman---the last receiving extended treatment. Even though this topic still retains some heat, and it is clear that Cotkin did not support the war, his fairness in relaying the thought processes of the "war hawks" enables a civil tone to pervade the chapter. He only reproves in his final analysis of the characters.
Again, in relation to the aforementioned topics, Cotkin does not merely incorporate the insights of the abovementioned philosophers, ethicists, and psychologists. If he only did that, he would be reproducing the same works as other thinkers who utilize historical examples. Cotkin sets himself apart by following through on his promise to create "productive confusion" by adding more of the context, usually in terms of discussing decision-making and motivations of historical actors, but also by way of regret. He embraces "a tragic and ironic moral stance," and also avoids being judgmental (though the judgments, and regrets, of historical actors are given full play).[4]
IV.
This work engages that still-evolving subfield called the history of emotions---both in its historiography (i.e. approach) and topically in the narrative. Indeed, by invoking the messiness of war, murder, racism, hate, and capital punishment, one can hardly avoid terms like suffering, regret, revenge, morale, repulsion, honor, joy, shock, elation, unsavory, etc. One term, however, that both captured the emotional responses of several of Cotkin's historical eras and evoked an intellectual-religious-emotional response in this reader was "demonic." The word necessarily has fuzzy referential content, but nevertheless draws on our fears and repulsiveness. 'Demonic' captures something of the unreasonableness of radical evil, helping Cotkin articulate what I think is universal revulsion at mid-century's Holocaust and mass murders. It is not surprising, then, that 'demonic' arises primarily in chapter one on "The Problems of Evil," which focuses on Hannah Arendt. This, indeed, is the chapter that opens up the language, terms, and problems that haunt the rest of the book.
Cotkin's goal is to parse the depths of evil. To his credit, he does not pretend to have an answer, or answers, about why evil exists---the metaphysics of evil. Rather, through Arendt as a kind of avatar for his own views, Cotkin gets at the depths of evil achieved both within and outside of social and political structures. The primary structure of concern at mid-century is totalitarianism. Arendt starts with Kant's idea of "radical evil" in The Origins of Totalitarianism (pp. 17-19), intensifies it, and then clarifies further in Eichmann in Jerusalem by adding "the banality of evil" (pp. 23-24). To help Arendt and himself in grappling with people Hitler, Stalin, and Gary Gilmore later, as well as events like My Lai, Cotkin interjects the mysterious element of the 'demonic' into his studies (pp. 16, 79, 136). Here is a crucial passage (bolds mine):
Arendt...painted herself into a narrow corner. If the crimes of totalitarianism were as original and immense as she averred, then could they be anything other than demonic? She never hesitated to describe them throughout Origins...as "monstrous." But to use the term demonic would be to situate evil as mysterious, perhaps outside the realm of rational explanation and the march of worldly events. The demonic resisted laws of nature and the wills of men. Even strong structures of representative democracy and public debate, it seemed, were futile against a demonic entity. ...Arendt was onto something when she remarked on the mysterious nature of evil as something not "humanly understandable." ....Radical evil, despite her best attempts, seemed to slip through her interpretive structure. Arendt's frustrations grew just after publication of the book, when she admitted , "What radical evil is I don't know" (p. 22).
In other words, because totalitarianism demolished the principles of "freedom, contingency, and choice"---principles on which Kant's and Arendt's views of radical evil rested---other concepts had to be introduced in a world where "evil had assumed a new face." But Arendt left her version "grounded...in the institutions and ideology of totalitarianism" (p. 19). Her only revision was to introduce "banality" as an explanatory trope for Eichmann's "less than demonic" position as a "dedicated bureaucrat" lacking "independence of mind" (p. 24).
But the idea of the 'demonic' raises a host of other issues. From where does the idea arise? Is it a universal concept? How can one discuss the topic without an in-depth study of Western theology or metaphysics? Mortimer J. Adler once asserted that a philosopher could posit the existence of angels, meaning the possibility of spiritual intelligences, or "bodies without minds," without buying into Christianity, Islam, or Judaism. Adler argued that it was of a piece with general popular fascination about the idea of "superhuman intelligence," and suggested that fascination could be called "theology-fiction" or "philosophy-fiction" (instead of the old term, "angelology").[5] Adler buttressed his assertion by noting that many philosophers in Western history have speculated the possible role of angels in the universe, including Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, John Locke, Descartes, and others. Studying angels was about studying intelligences that were less than Divine (even if that divinity constituted only the necessary God of the philosophers) but greater than human. As for Satan and demons, however, Adler asserts that they are products of Western religious dogma, and shared by Christianity, Islam, and Judaism (though Christianity has special assertions about Satan in relation to Jesus Christ).[6]
I relay this apparent digression because Cotkin does discuss religion, particularly Christianity, in Morality's Muddy Waters. Topics that arise on the latter include born agains, Catholicism, Dorothy Day, fundamentalism, Søren Kierkegaard, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Denis de Rougemont. For the most part, Cotkin limits his discussion of these figures and topics to the historical actors at hand: Arendt's views of Rougemont, Franklin D. Roosevelt's Christianity is broached, Dorothy Day's influence on John Howard Griffin, fundamentalists' views on capital punishment and retributive justice, and the religious backgrounds of My Lai soldiers. With the exception of Arendt's reaction to Rougement's 1944 book, The Devil's Snare, Cotkin does not spend much time delving into theology (p. 15-16).
This is either the great strength or great weakness in Cotkin's analysis. As a weakness, unlike his insertions from philosophers and psychologists throughout the book, the relative absence of theology diminishes the real contributions of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic thinkers. If religion has something substantial to say to us about the human condition, as a great majority of the world believes it does, then it would behoove the intellectual historian dealing in morality to read some of that speculation into the text. In the case of MMW, where most of Cotkin's decision-makers are operating in something of a Judeo-Christian context, whether by violation of or perceived adherence to their faith, that means doing more with Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant theology. Perhaps theological speculation about demonic evil, given dispassionately, would at least help us understand something about the contexts in which these evil characters saw themselves? Would this also help us understand how the masses processed and received news of these atrocities of hatred, murder, mass murder, and international humanitarianism?
I fully recognize the dangers of a professional historian engaging in this kind of speculation. How would colleagues perceive the work? Would an academic press accept the book? What is the line between moral speculation and moralizing? How does one discuss the meaning of 'demonic' without getting past knee-jerk reactions? Cotkin's work is about "productive confusion." Does theological speculation move us into contentious, unproductive territory? And then, in relation to America's Judeo-Christian culture, how does one properly navigate the Protestant-Catholic-Jewish lines of division? Then again, if competing ethical imperatives are an important topic, what raises the bar on moral competition more than religious divisions?
It is not hard to see how avoiding in-depth theological speculation also strengthens the book. For one, it keeps Christianity from dominating MMW, making Cotkin's moral analysis accessible to a wider audience. His more secular study of the idea of evil in recent history results in an unpretentious exploration of the confusion of the moments at hand. By avoiding easy answers, especially those amenable to particular religious dogma, Cotkin maintains the humility, or "moral modesty," he sought to model in the book (p. 205). Indeed, early in the text he wrote:
Some readers may chafe at talk of evil as too tinged with religious overtones or weighted by heavy metaphysical baggage. It resists explanation and therefore obfuscates reality or explains away horror---all dangers, to be sure. (p. 7).
Cotkin listened to this inner warning, and stuck with philosophical and psychological contributions to understanding the events and topics he chose. Based on the fairness of the rest of the text, I believe Cotkin could have successfully navigated a few pages of theology in each chapter. Those few pages, however, would have constituted a tremendous amount of work, especially when exploring work outside one's faith tradition. Even so, in MMW as it is, there is nothing wrong with leading us to the brink. Perhaps by being led to the edge, the reader may be inspired to think through his or her own knowledge, or lack of knowledge, about radical evil in the world.
V.
When "The Moral Turn" appeared in 2008, I mentioned that it led a symposium with four interlocutors. It is worth revisiting some of the points made there now that Cotkin has provided a book-length example of his call. None of the respondents, of course, had access to Morality's Muddy Waters. Even so, all four respondents made solid points about the study of morality in history and asked poignant questions.
Neil Jumonville rightly reminded readers that many mid-century intellectual historians---Richard Hofstadter, David Potter, and Louis Hartz---were excellent models of "complexity, nuance, and contingency" on moral matters. Michael O'Brien asserted that "engagement with morality has been fairly constant in historical scholarship since almost any period one might care to name." He doubted "that the dialogue Cotkin wishes to encourage between historians and moral philosophers is capable of being sustained." O'Brien also warns against prescription and moralizing. In my view, Cotkin avoids those pitfalls. He also proves in the pages of MMW that an in-text dialogue between historians and moral philosophers can be sustained. Lewis Perry reminded Cotkin that yet another intellectual historian, John Higham, had also encouraged historians, in a 1962 essay, to develop a moral voice obtained from historical study. Titled "Beyond Consensus: The Historian as Moral Critic," Perry cited the Higham essay as taking a stand against false detachment and objectivity. The present sometimes demands historical moral reflection. I have not read the Higham essay, but it seems, to some extent, to have prefigured Cotkin's call.[7]
As I have discovered is often the case, James Livingston's response proved most provocative. He flat out denied that a "moral turn" in history was necessary because "the grammar of American history has always been determined by moral problems." Livingston went on to assert, thinking he had put Cotkin in some kind of a headlock, that the early modern, or Enlightenment, project of narrative construction necessarily consisted of agents, historians and otherwise, articulating their moral points. Livingston tightens his hold by pointing out the cultural pervasiveness, in history and the general public today, of moral considerations. I think this misses Cotkin's point. He did not dispute that moral considerations, simple and otherwise, abound. Rather, Cotkin called for an explicit, conscious engagement with moral complexity, or productive confusion, and moral philosophy in the text. In other words, if historians have been and always will be moral agents, they have not always engaged the subject with the complexity, fairness, depth, and explicit sense of purpose exhibited in MMW. [8] I think Livingston, in the end, would be happier with the product of Cotkin's book than he was with Cotkin's proposal in the Journal of the History of Ideas. Then again, he might not.
VI.
Though the presidential administration that haunts the end of Morality's Muddy Waters is gone, questions remain about the motivations, ideological and otherwise, for going to war in Iraq. Just this week an exclusive Guardian story revealed that a key source from Germany, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi and code-named "Curveball," lied about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to boost his personal prospects of success in civilian life. It was al-Janabi's testimony that floated to the top of America's intelligence system, to the point that it anchored Colin Powell's infamous U.N. testimony before the war's start.[9] Here is a CNN story that elaborates:
Even with this revelation, what is interesting to me is that Cotkin's analysis of the Iraqi War stands. Why? Because Cotkin aimed at the moral roots and simplistic black-and-white thinking, or good-versus-evil drama, that drove President Bush. The fact that the intelligence was fuzzy only proves that ideology drove the war. Furthermore, its same kind of thinking that inspires the Tea Party and other politically powerful conservatives.
Of course that wing of the political spectrum is not unopposed. President Barack Obama exhibits an understanding of moral complexity, and his name arises in a few spots in the text. Cotkin is heartened by President Obama's admiration of the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, particularly in relation to the latter's imperative that sin, pain, evil, unexpected consequences, and humility are necessary topics in relation to foreign and domestic policy (p. 201).
Even so, we cannot be reminded enough—whether by friends, relatives, ministers, teachers, colleagues, or otherwise—that moral progress will not be achieved without embracing complexity. Cotkin is not naive to the fact that we must eventually act, but he implores us to abhor anti-intellectualism and embrace circumspection. We must aspire to a full understanding of moral complications, potential and real. With that, Morality's Muddy Waters stands tall as a model of timely, professional engagement on a topic that concerns a wide variety of the populace. We need more historical works that convey the "productive confusion" Cotkin provides.
------------------------------
*A special thanks to Paul Murphy and David Veenstra for their comments on this review.
[1] Justin Kaplan, ed. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (Boston: Little Brown, 2002).
[2] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by W.D. Ross, in Great Books of the Western World, Mortimer J. Adler, ed., Vol. 8, Aristotle: II (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1990), 350 (II-3); Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, trans. by Father Laurence Shapcote, in Great Books of the Western World, Mortimer J. Adler, ed., Vol. 17, Aquinas: I (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1990), 695-96 (II-I.18.3).
[3] The JHI symposium is located on pages 293-337. The full citation for Cotkin’s reply is as follows: “A Conversation About Morals and History,” JHI 69 (June 2008): 493-97.
[4] From Cotkin's reply to the Symposium, 496-97.
[5] Mortimer J. Adler, The Angels and Us (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1982), x, 3-4.
[6] Ibid., 83-85.
[7] Symposium, 320, 324-25, 334-35; Cotkin, "Conversation," 493-97.
[8] Symposium, Livingston, "The Return of the Self-Made Man: A Response to Cotkin," 327-31.
[9] Martin Chulov and Helen Pidd, "Defector admits to WMD lies that triggered Iraq war," Guardian, February 15, 2011. URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/15/defector-admits-wmd-lies-iraq-war. Accessed on February 21, 2011.
History as "Productive Confusion": Studies of America’s Moral Fiber, 1940-Present
[Warning: Long post. You may want to print. - TL]
----------------------------------------------------
Review of George Cotkin, Morality’s Muddy Waters: Ethical Quandaries in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). ISBN: 978-0-8122-4227-0. 262 pages.
Review by Tim Lacy
Monmouth College
History as "Productive Confusion": Studies of America’s Moral Fiber, 1940-Present
I.
The human soul possesses some kind of an essential imperative to remember moral axioms and lessons from the past. Institutionally, the clearest proof of this is in religion. Revered works in both the Eastern and Western traditions are commonly recited for their proverbs, tales of good and evil, and moral laws. Among individuals, the wise (as well as the pretentious) quote pithy laws and maxims from memory---the simpler, the better. Today's Evangelical Christians and faithful Muslims quote passages from their respective sacred texts, and intellectuals borrow quotes from literature or perhaps even a philosopher. There is a reason why John Bartlett's Familiar Quotations was filled with lines from the Bible and Shakespeare when first published in 1855.[1]
Related to the simple urge to have prescriptions on hand, there exists another, more complex means of thinking through morality and virtue in the Western tradition. Aristotle helped articulate this other approach. The key to this line of thinking is circumstance, no matter where on the timeline the action under consideration occurred. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle observed that "every state of soul has a nature relative to and concerned with the kinds of things by which it tends to be made worse or better." Continuing and rephrasing another aspect of Aristotle's passage centuries later, Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica, wrote: "A virtuous man acts as he should, and when he should, and so on in respect of other circumstances." And Aquinas continued in two other passages:
"Human actions are good or evil according to circumstances. ...The fullness of [an action's] goodness does not consist wholly in its species, but also in certain additions which accrue to it by reason of certain accidents. And its due circumstances are of this character."
"The vicious man...acts when he should not, or where he should not, and so on with the other circumstances. [2]
If Aquinas and Aristotle are correct, and morality is always and everywhere linked to circumstance, and the study of history, furthermore is the study of circumstance (or context) par excellance, then it is clear that the study of history is absolutely crucial to understanding morality. Indeed, one might argue that by studying history, one is always engaged, at a minimum, in an indirect moral endeavor.
Of course some works of history are more and less specific about their moral goals. The moral message of a historical work depends on the historian's willingness to engage moral questions and problems. And if historians are cautious in the moral arena, their reluctance derives from mistakes of older works where moral judgments were not hard earned. While caution perhaps makes historians seem timid or amoral, it also serves as armor against foolishness and the hazards of subjectivity. One person's evil is often, with good reason, another's grey area.
II.
My first direct interaction with George Cotkin came via e-mail about three years ago. In an unsolicited note, he wrote simply to praise the U.S. Intellectual History weblog as a "wonderful idea." He promised to "spread the news" to his students and colleagues. I relay this because, though I generally refuse my first impressions on principle, the charitable kindness of that missive accurately conveyed something about Cotkin’s character. My next noteworthy interaction was indirect. On a prompt from Wilfred McClay, I read Cotkin's April 2008 article, “History’s Moral Turn,” in the Journal of the History of Ideas (Vol. 69, no. 2). The essay led a symposium, with responses from Neil Jumonville, Michael O’Brien, James Livingston, and Lewis Perry. Cotkin's final reply to his respondents came in the July 2008 issue of the journal.[3] Off and on for the rest of the year I contemplated how to continue that conversation at the weblog. In the end I did nothing, and regretted it.
My regret was rooted in the fact that I was impressed with Cotkin's call for historians to explicitly take up moral analysis. In the article he cited abundant evidence of a "moral turn" evident in American life---explicit at the time in America's public sphere, particularly in the actions and words of President George Bush (pp. 293-94). His piece resonated deeply with a sense, buttressed perhaps by my Catholicism and reading in theology and philosophy, that historical analysis must necessarily involve trafficking in morality, sometimes deeply. Admittedly, the historian’s moral sensibility is often tempered, and sometimes disguised (intentionally and unintentionally). The discredited legacy of providential history, tempered and corrected by the analytical turn of the late nineteenth century, explains historians' general reluctance to take up explicit moral analysis.
But Cotkin asserted that historians need to participate, and that they "can play an important role in deepening and directing" the moral conversation. He argued that historians have a positive role to play in moving the public "away from simplicity to complexity, from rhetorical heat to cool compassion." Indeed, other academic intellectuals, particularly moral philosophers, use history to discuss morals in their work. Cotkin chided them, however, for "conceptualizations that are deep, but...historical excavations [that] are commonly shallow." He then made the case for historians to pick up the baton:
Historians can, and are at present, beginning to benefit from acquaintance with how philosophers employ and problematize various concepts—intentionality, virtue, character, moral luck, action, and Just War. ...The moral turn is less about imposing our moral and political judgments on historical events and figures. It looks at historical agents and events to warn us that human motivation is complex and confusing, open and constrained. Morality becomes a process of thinking rather than a predigested set of answers. ...History’s moral turn may help create productive confusion, a willingness to recognize that behind all of our moral choices...lurks paradox, tragedy, and irony (p. 294).
Cotkin spoke generally to historians in his article, but it was clear to me that intellectual historians were specifically implicated. Few other subfields engage philosophy, but that was precisely the discipline he underscored.
I could quote endlessly from the Cotkin essay because it lays out the historiography of moral considerations in the history profession: opposition to, proponents of, always been there, impossible to escape, decayed sense of, secularity and morals, and books that specifically addressed moral inquiry and moral problems. I can stop here, however, because the rest of the article was a precis for another larger work due to appear in a few years.
III.
That work, titled Morality’s Muddy Waters: Ethical Quandaries in Modern America and published by Penn Press, made it to my desk last October. The book both exemplifies Cotkin's call to action and exhibits the assertion that history, written and analyzed by historians, is a superb vehicle for the study of morality. As a matter of classification, the book is what some could call a "study in U.S. intellectual history." In other words, it is not a straightforward narrative of intellectual-ethical-moral matters with seamless transitions between chapters and a recurring community of discourse. Cotkin proposes topics, presented chronologically, that underscore moral complexity, competing ethical imperatives, circumstances, the nature and effects of evil, empathy, responsibility, moral clarity, strictures, contingency, contradictions, and character. I was most fascinated by the emotional complexity of morality, both as cause and effect, of the events presented.
As is the case with any accessible history, Cotkin's overall argument appears in various forms throughout the text. One version arises, naturally, on the first page: MMW "rejects...easy certitude and argues that we need instead...a healthy dose of befuddlement, and even when we are assured that our ends are correct and moral...the means to achieve them may be deeply problematic" (p. 1-2). The problem at hand is moral absolutism, and the solution is complexity. Indeed, by way of conclusion, Cotkin presents a most intriguing paradox with his thesis: namely, that less moral certainty leads to more morality. Stated another way, "the best moral decision-making occurs only after internal struggle and the recognition of bewilderment concerning means and ends" (p. 5). But how does he arrive at this end? What evidence is presented?
The specific thesis of MMW, in relation to its historical material, is this: by "allowing moral moments to emerge in their full confusion" we "learn from historical situations...that we...wander through a fog-enshrouded landscape of perplexing issues" (p. 4). Cotkin adds that "the point of history is to muddy the waters of easy moral clarity rather than to confirm our own sense of moral righteousness or political persuasion" (p. 4). In other words, we do not see enough the moral confusion in history, and a "moral turn" in works like MMW will enrich the present by showing us that moral clarity is not a given. It is hard earned, and sometimes real understanding cannot happen until after the fact.
To enact his thesis in a way that is different from other historians who have fruitfully engaged morality (e.g. David Brion Davis, William Cronon, Harry Stout, Drew Gilpin Faust), Cotkin follows through on his exhortation from "The Moral Turn" by incorporating the work of moral philosophers, ethicists, and psychological theorists. This begins in chapter one with a long, fascinating look at Hannah Arendt and her critics. It continues in the next chapter on World War II bombing by exploring combatant/combatant line in theories of total war (e.g. Giulio Douhet) and just war (e.g. A.C. Grayling, Robert Nozick, and Michael Walzer, Avishai Margalit). Having paused on many occasions in the classroom to pose moral questions in relation to the use of atomic weapons, I appreciated Cotkin's interjection of philosophy in a section titled "Can Bombing of Civilians Be Justified?" (pp. 51-54). That section could be lifted, as is, and incorporated as either an in-class reading or an out-of-class reflection.
In successive chapters, Cotkin continues this invaluable task. In tackling My Lai he weaves in the work of psychologists Stanley Milgram, Philip Zimbardo, and Robert Jay Lifton, as well as the reflections of Reinhold Niebuhr and the work of Aristotle on the cultivation of character. John Howard Griffin and his famous work, Black Like Me, are examined in relation to the writings of Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Nagel, and a host of philosophers who have written on empathy. A key issue for Griffin was whether moral luck can be transformed, via empathy, into some kind of "universalist vision" (p. 120). When Cotkin moves to capital punishment in chapter five, the pro-death penalty thinking of Ernest van den Haag, Isaac Ehrlich, Hans Zeisel, and the Straussian Walter Berns makes an appearance. In opposition, Cotkin refers to the thinking of Karl Menninger, Hugo Adam Bedau, Philip Hallie, and the famous Sister Helen Prejean.
The last, and necessarily most tentative, full chapter focuses on terrorism and the Iraq War, post September 11. Philosophy makes its appearance in the form of a long discussion about "humanitarian intervention" (meaning, of course, the military variety). The theorists and philosophers of interest include Natan Sharansky, a Soviet refugee and neoconservative Zionist, and Ron Dermer. They co-authored a work The Case for Democracy (2004), the book Bush cited as inspirational for his international moral vision (i.e. democratic freedom must be spread at any price). Other intellectuals cited by Cotkin in this chapter, covering various degrees of interventionism versus outright opposition, include Kanan Makiya, Michael Ignatieff, Samantha Power, David Rieff, Christopher Hitchens, Peter Beinart, and Paul Berman---the last receiving extended treatment. Even though this topic still retains some heat, and it is clear that Cotkin did not support the war, his fairness in relaying the thought processes of the "war hawks" enables a civil tone to pervade the chapter. He only reproves in his final analysis of the characters.
Again, in relation to the aforementioned topics, Cotkin does not merely incorporate the insights of the abovementioned philosophers, ethicists, and psychologists. If he only did that, he would be reproducing the same works as other thinkers who utilize historical examples. Cotkin sets himself apart by following through on his promise to create "productive confusion" by adding more of the context, usually in terms of discussing decision-making and motivations of historical actors, but also by way of regret. He embraces "a tragic and ironic moral stance," and also avoids being judgmental (though the judgments, and regrets, of historical actors are given full play).[4]
IV.
This work engages that still-evolving subfield called the history of emotions---both in its historiography (i.e. approach) and topically in the narrative. Indeed, by invoking the messiness of war, murder, racism, hate, and capital punishment, one can hardly avoid terms like suffering, regret, revenge, morale, repulsion, honor, joy, shock, elation, unsavory, etc. One term, however, that both captured the emotional responses of several of Cotkin's historical eras and evoked an intellectual-religious-emotional response in this reader was "demonic." The word necessarily has fuzzy referential content, but nevertheless draws on our fears and repulsiveness. 'Demonic' captures something of the unreasonableness of radical evil, helping Cotkin articulate what I think is universal revulsion at mid-century's Holocaust and mass murders. It is not surprising, then, that 'demonic' arises primarily in chapter one on "The Problems of Evil," which focuses on Hannah Arendt. This, indeed, is the chapter that opens up the language, terms, and problems that haunt the rest of the book.
Cotkin's goal is to parse the depths of evil. To his credit, he does not pretend to have an answer, or answers, about why evil exists---the metaphysics of evil. Rather, through Arendt as a kind of avatar for his own views, Cotkin gets at the depths of evil achieved both within and outside of social and political structures. The primary structure of concern at mid-century is totalitarianism. Arendt starts with Kant's idea of "radical evil" in The Origins of Totalitarianism (pp. 17-19), intensifies it, and then clarifies further in Eichmann in Jerusalem by adding "the banality of evil" (pp. 23-24). To help Arendt and himself in grappling with people Hitler, Stalin, and Gary Gilmore later, as well as events like My Lai, Cotkin interjects the mysterious element of the 'demonic' into his studies (pp. 16, 79, 136). Here is a crucial passage (bolds mine):
Arendt...painted herself into a narrow corner. If the crimes of totalitarianism were as original and immense as she averred, then could they be anything other than demonic? She never hesitated to describe them throughout Origins...as "monstrous." But to use the term demonic would be to situate evil as mysterious, perhaps outside the realm of rational explanation and the march of worldly events. The demonic resisted laws of nature and the wills of men. Even strong structures of representative democracy and public debate, it seemed, were futile against a demonic entity. ...Arendt was onto something when she remarked on the mysterious nature of evil as something not "humanly understandable." ....Radical evil, despite her best attempts, seemed to slip through her interpretive structure. Arendt's frustrations grew just after publication of the book, when she admitted , "What radical evil is I don't know" (p. 22).
In other words, because totalitarianism demolished the principles of "freedom, contingency, and choice"---principles on which Kant's and Arendt's views of radical evil rested---other concepts had to be introduced in a world where "evil had assumed a new face." But Arendt left her version "grounded...in the institutions and ideology of totalitarianism" (p. 19). Her only revision was to introduce "banality" as an explanatory trope for Eichmann's "less than demonic" position as a "dedicated bureaucrat" lacking "independence of mind" (p. 24).
But the idea of the 'demonic' raises a host of other issues. From where does the idea arise? Is it a universal concept? How can one discuss the topic without an in-depth study of Western theology or metaphysics? Mortimer J. Adler once asserted that a philosopher could posit the existence of angels, meaning the possibility of spiritual intelligences, or "bodies without minds," without buying into Christianity, Islam, or Judaism. Adler argued that it was of a piece with general popular fascination about the idea of "superhuman intelligence," and suggested that fascination could be called "theology-fiction" or "philosophy-fiction" (instead of the old term, "angelology").[5] Adler buttressed his assertion by noting that many philosophers in Western history have speculated the possible role of angels in the universe, including Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, John Locke, Descartes, and others. Studying angels was about studying intelligences that were less than Divine (even if that divinity constituted only the necessary God of the philosophers) but greater than human. As for Satan and demons, however, Adler asserts that they are products of Western religious dogma, and shared by Christianity, Islam, and Judaism (though Christianity has special assertions about Satan in relation to Jesus Christ).[6]
I relay this apparent digression because Cotkin does discuss religion, particularly Christianity, in Morality's Muddy Waters. Topics that arise on the latter include born agains, Catholicism, Dorothy Day, fundamentalism, Søren Kierkegaard, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Denis de Rougemont. For the most part, Cotkin limits his discussion of these figures and topics to the historical actors at hand: Arendt's views of Rougemont, Franklin D. Roosevelt's Christianity is broached, Dorothy Day's influence on John Howard Griffin, fundamentalists' views on capital punishment and retributive justice, and the religious backgrounds of My Lai soldiers. With the exception of Arendt's reaction to Rougement's 1944 book, The Devil's Snare, Cotkin does not spend much time delving into theology (p. 15-16).
This is either the great strength or great weakness in Cotkin's analysis. As a weakness, unlike his insertions from philosophers and psychologists throughout the book, the relative absence of theology diminishes the real contributions of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic thinkers. If religion has something substantial to say to us about the human condition, as a great majority of the world believes it does, then it would behoove the intellectual historian dealing in morality to read some of that speculation into the text. In the case of MMW, where most of Cotkin's decision-makers are operating in something of a Judeo-Christian context, whether by violation of or perceived adherence to their faith, that means doing more with Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant theology. Perhaps theological speculation about demonic evil, given dispassionately, would at least help us understand something about the contexts in which these evil characters saw themselves? Would this also help us understand how the masses processed and received news of these atrocities of hatred, murder, mass murder, and international humanitarianism?
I fully recognize the dangers of a professional historian engaging in this kind of speculation. How would colleagues perceive the work? Would an academic press accept the book? What is the line between moral speculation and moralizing? How does one discuss the meaning of 'demonic' without getting past knee-jerk reactions? Cotkin's work is about "productive confusion." Does theological speculation move us into contentious, unproductive territory? And then, in relation to America's Judeo-Christian culture, how does one properly navigate the Protestant-Catholic-Jewish lines of division? Then again, if competing ethical imperatives are an important topic, what raises the bar on moral competition more than religious divisions?
It is not hard to see how avoiding in-depth theological speculation also strengthens the book. For one, it keeps Christianity from dominating MMW, making Cotkin's moral analysis accessible to a wider audience. His more secular study of the idea of evil in recent history results in an unpretentious exploration of the confusion of the moments at hand. By avoiding easy answers, especially those amenable to particular religious dogma, Cotkin maintains the humility, or "moral modesty," he sought to model in the book (p. 205). Indeed, early in the text he wrote:
Some readers may chafe at talk of evil as too tinged with religious overtones or weighted by heavy metaphysical baggage. It resists explanation and therefore obfuscates reality or explains away horror---all dangers, to be sure. (p. 7).
Cotkin listened to this inner warning, and stuck with philosophical and psychological contributions to understanding the events and topics he chose. Based on the fairness of the rest of the text, I believe Cotkin could have successfully navigated a few pages of theology in each chapter. Those few pages, however, would have constituted a tremendous amount of work, especially when exploring work outside one's faith tradition. Even so, in MMW as it is, there is nothing wrong with leading us to the brink. Perhaps by being led to the edge, the reader may be inspired to think through his or her own knowledge, or lack of knowledge, about radical evil in the world.
V.
When "The Moral Turn" appeared in 2008, I mentioned that it led a symposium with four interlocutors. It is worth revisiting some of the points made there now that Cotkin has provided a book-length example of his call. None of the respondents, of course, had access to Morality's Muddy Waters. Even so, all four respondents made solid points about the study of morality in history and asked poignant questions.
Neil Jumonville rightly reminded readers that many mid-century intellectual historians---Richard Hofstadter, David Potter, and Louis Hartz---were excellent models of "complexity, nuance, and contingency" on moral matters. Michael O'Brien asserted that "engagement with morality has been fairly constant in historical scholarship since almost any period one might care to name." He doubted "that the dialogue Cotkin wishes to encourage between historians and moral philosophers is capable of being sustained." O'Brien also warns against prescription and moralizing. In my view, Cotkin avoids those pitfalls. He also proves in the pages of MMW that an in-text dialogue between historians and moral philosophers can be sustained. Lewis Perry reminded Cotkin that yet another intellectual historian, John Higham, had also encouraged historians, in a 1962 essay, to develop a moral voice obtained from historical study. Titled "Beyond Consensus: The Historian as Moral Critic," Perry cited the Higham essay as taking a stand against false detachment and objectivity. The present sometimes demands historical moral reflection. I have not read the Higham essay, but it seems, to some extent, to have prefigured Cotkin's call.[7]
As I have discovered is often the case, James Livingston's response proved most provocative. He flat out denied that a "moral turn" in history was necessary because "the grammar of American history has always been determined by moral problems." Livingston went on to assert, thinking he had put Cotkin in some kind of a headlock, that the early modern, or Enlightenment, project of narrative construction necessarily consisted of agents, historians and otherwise, articulating their moral points. Livingston tightens his hold by pointing out the cultural pervasiveness, in history and the general public today, of moral considerations. I think this misses Cotkin's point. He did not dispute that moral considerations, simple and otherwise, abound. Rather, Cotkin called for an explicit, conscious engagement with moral complexity, or productive confusion, and moral philosophy in the text. In other words, if historians have been and always will be moral agents, they have not always engaged the subject with the complexity, fairness, depth, and explicit sense of purpose exhibited in MMW. [8] I think Livingston, in the end, would be happier with the product of Cotkin's book than he was with Cotkin's proposal in the Journal of the History of Ideas. Then again, he might not.
VI.
Though the presidential administration that haunts the end of Morality's Muddy Waters is gone, questions remain about the motivations, ideological and otherwise, for going to war in Iraq. Just this week an exclusive Guardian story revealed that a key source from Germany, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi and code-named "Curveball," lied about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to boost his personal prospects of success in civilian life. It was al-Janabi's testimony that floated to the top of America's intelligence system, to the point that it anchored Colin Powell's infamous U.N. testimony before the war's start.[9] Here is a CNN story that elaborates:
Even with this revelation, what is interesting to me is that Cotkin's analysis of the Iraqi War stands. Why? Because Cotkin aimed at the moral roots and simplistic black-and-white thinking, or good-versus-evil drama, that drove President Bush. The fact that the intelligence was fuzzy only proves that ideology drove the war. Furthermore, its same kind of thinking that inspires the Tea Party and other politically powerful conservatives.
Of course that wing of the political spectrum is not unopposed. President Barack Obama exhibits an understanding of moral complexity, and his name arises in a few spots in the text. Cotkin is heartened by President Obama's admiration of the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, particularly in relation to the latter's imperative that sin, pain, evil, unexpected consequences, and humility are necessary topics in relation to foreign and domestic policy (p. 201).
Even so, we cannot be reminded enough—whether by friends, relatives, ministers, teachers, colleagues, or otherwise—that moral progress will not be achieved without embracing complexity. Cotkin is not naive to the fact that we must eventually act, but he implores us to abhor anti-intellectualism and embrace circumspection. We must aspire to a full understanding of moral complications, potential and real. With that, Morality's Muddy Waters stands tall as a model of timely, professional engagement on a topic that concerns a wide variety of the populace. We need more historical works that convey the "productive confusion" Cotkin provides.
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*A special thanks to Paul Murphy and David Veenstra for their comments on this review.
[1] Justin Kaplan, ed. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (Boston: Little Brown, 2002).
[2] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by W.D. Ross, in Great Books of the Western World, Mortimer J. Adler, ed., Vol. 8, Aristotle: II (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1990), 350 (II-3); Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, trans. by Father Laurence Shapcote, in Great Books of the Western World, Mortimer J. Adler, ed., Vol. 17, Aquinas: I (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1990), 695-96 (II-I.18.3).
[3] The JHI symposium is located on pages 293-337. The full citation for Cotkin’s reply is as follows: “A Conversation About Morals and History,” JHI 69 (June 2008): 493-97.
[4] From Cotkin's reply to the Symposium, 496-97.
[5] Mortimer J. Adler, The Angels and Us (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1982), x, 3-4.
[6] Ibid., 83-85.
[7] Symposium, 320, 324-25, 334-35; Cotkin, "Conversation," 493-97.
[8] Symposium, Livingston, "The Return of the Self-Made Man: A Response to Cotkin," 327-31.
[9] Martin Chulov and Helen Pidd, "Defector admits to WMD lies that triggered Iraq war," Guardian, February 15, 2011. URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/15/defector-admits-wmd-lies-iraq-war. Accessed on February 21, 2011.
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Review of George Cotkin, Morality’s Muddy Waters: Ethical Quandaries in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). ISBN: 978-0-8122-4227-0. 262 pages.
Review by Tim Lacy
Monmouth College
History as "Productive Confusion": Studies of America’s Moral Fiber, 1940-Present
I.
The human soul possesses some kind of an essential imperative to remember moral axioms and lessons from the past. Institutionally, the clearest proof of this is in religion. Revered works in both the Eastern and Western traditions are commonly recited for their proverbs, tales of good and evil, and moral laws. Among individuals, the wise (as well as the pretentious) quote pithy laws and maxims from memory---the simpler, the better. Today's Evangelical Christians and faithful Muslims quote passages from their respective sacred texts, and intellectuals borrow quotes from literature or perhaps even a philosopher. There is a reason why John Bartlett's Familiar Quotations was filled with lines from the Bible and Shakespeare when first published in 1855.[1]
Related to the simple urge to have prescriptions on hand, there exists another, more complex means of thinking through morality and virtue in the Western tradition. Aristotle helped articulate this other approach. The key to this line of thinking is circumstance, no matter where on the timeline the action under consideration occurred. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle observed that "every state of soul has a nature relative to and concerned with the kinds of things by which it tends to be made worse or better." Continuing and rephrasing another aspect of Aristotle's passage centuries later, Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica, wrote: "A virtuous man acts as he should, and when he should, and so on in respect of other circumstances." And Aquinas continued in two other passages:
"Human actions are good or evil according to circumstances. ...The fullness of [an action's] goodness does not consist wholly in its species, but also in certain additions which accrue to it by reason of certain accidents. And its due circumstances are of this character."
"The vicious man...acts when he should not, or where he should not, and so on with the other circumstances. [2]
If Aquinas and Aristotle are correct, and morality is always and everywhere linked to circumstance, and the study of history, furthermore is the study of circumstance (or context) par excellance, then it is clear that the study of history is absolutely crucial to understanding morality. Indeed, one might argue that by studying history, one is always engaged, at a minimum, in an indirect moral endeavor.
Of course some works of history are more and less specific about their moral goals. The moral message of a historical work depends on the historian's willingness to engage moral questions and problems. And if historians are cautious in the moral arena, their reluctance derives from mistakes of older works where moral judgments were not hard earned. While caution perhaps makes historians seem timid or amoral, it also serves as armor against foolishness and the hazards of subjectivity. One person's evil is often, with good reason, another's grey area.
II.
My first direct interaction with George Cotkin came via e-mail about three years ago. In an unsolicited note, he wrote simply to praise the U.S. Intellectual History weblog as a "wonderful idea." He promised to "spread the news" to his students and colleagues. I relay this because, though I generally refuse my first impressions on principle, the charitable kindness of that missive accurately conveyed something about Cotkin’s character. My next noteworthy interaction was indirect. On a prompt from Wilfred McClay, I read Cotkin's April 2008 article, “History’s Moral Turn,” in the Journal of the History of Ideas (Vol. 69, no. 2). The essay led a symposium, with responses from Neil Jumonville, Michael O’Brien, James Livingston, and Lewis Perry. Cotkin's final reply to his respondents came in the July 2008 issue of the journal.[3] Off and on for the rest of the year I contemplated how to continue that conversation at the weblog. In the end I did nothing, and regretted it.
My regret was rooted in the fact that I was impressed with Cotkin's call for historians to explicitly take up moral analysis. In the article he cited abundant evidence of a "moral turn" evident in American life---explicit at the time in America's public sphere, particularly in the actions and words of President George Bush (pp. 293-94). His piece resonated deeply with a sense, buttressed perhaps by my Catholicism and reading in theology and philosophy, that historical analysis must necessarily involve trafficking in morality, sometimes deeply. Admittedly, the historian’s moral sensibility is often tempered, and sometimes disguised (intentionally and unintentionally). The discredited legacy of providential history, tempered and corrected by the analytical turn of the late nineteenth century, explains historians' general reluctance to take up explicit moral analysis.
But Cotkin asserted that historians need to participate, and that they "can play an important role in deepening and directing" the moral conversation. He argued that historians have a positive role to play in moving the public "away from simplicity to complexity, from rhetorical heat to cool compassion." Indeed, other academic intellectuals, particularly moral philosophers, use history to discuss morals in their work. Cotkin chided them, however, for "conceptualizations that are deep, but...historical excavations [that] are commonly shallow." He then made the case for historians to pick up the baton:
Historians can, and are at present, beginning to benefit from acquaintance with how philosophers employ and problematize various concepts—intentionality, virtue, character, moral luck, action, and Just War. ...The moral turn is less about imposing our moral and political judgments on historical events and figures. It looks at historical agents and events to warn us that human motivation is complex and confusing, open and constrained. Morality becomes a process of thinking rather than a predigested set of answers. ...History’s moral turn may help create productive confusion, a willingness to recognize that behind all of our moral choices...lurks paradox, tragedy, and irony (p. 294).
Cotkin spoke generally to historians in his article, but it was clear to me that intellectual historians were specifically implicated. Few other subfields engage philosophy, but that was precisely the discipline he underscored.
I could quote endlessly from the Cotkin essay because it lays out the historiography of moral considerations in the history profession: opposition to, proponents of, always been there, impossible to escape, decayed sense of, secularity and morals, and books that specifically addressed moral inquiry and moral problems. I can stop here, however, because the rest of the article was a precis for another larger work due to appear in a few years.
III.
That work, titled Morality’s Muddy Waters: Ethical Quandaries in Modern America and published by Penn Press, made it to my desk last October. The book both exemplifies Cotkin's call to action and exhibits the assertion that history, written and analyzed by historians, is a superb vehicle for the study of morality. As a matter of classification, the book is what some could call a "study in U.S. intellectual history." In other words, it is not a straightforward narrative of intellectual-ethical-moral matters with seamless transitions between chapters and a recurring community of discourse. Cotkin proposes topics, presented chronologically, that underscore moral complexity, competing ethical imperatives, circumstances, the nature and effects of evil, empathy, responsibility, moral clarity, strictures, contingency, contradictions, and character. I was most fascinated by the emotional complexity of morality, both as cause and effect, of the events presented.
As is the case with any accessible history, Cotkin's overall argument appears in various forms throughout the text. One version arises, naturally, on the first page: MMW "rejects...easy certitude and argues that we need instead...a healthy dose of befuddlement, and even when we are assured that our ends are correct and moral...the means to achieve them may be deeply problematic" (p. 1-2). The problem at hand is moral absolutism, and the solution is complexity. Indeed, by way of conclusion, Cotkin presents a most intriguing paradox with his thesis: namely, that less moral certainty leads to more morality. Stated another way, "the best moral decision-making occurs only after internal struggle and the recognition of bewilderment concerning means and ends" (p. 5). But how does he arrive at this end? What evidence is presented?
The specific thesis of MMW, in relation to its historical material, is this: by "allowing moral moments to emerge in their full confusion" we "learn from historical situations...that we...wander through a fog-enshrouded landscape of perplexing issues" (p. 4). Cotkin adds that "the point of history is to muddy the waters of easy moral clarity rather than to confirm our own sense of moral righteousness or political persuasion" (p. 4). In other words, we do not see enough the moral confusion in history, and a "moral turn" in works like MMW will enrich the present by showing us that moral clarity is not a given. It is hard earned, and sometimes real understanding cannot happen until after the fact.
To enact his thesis in a way that is different from other historians who have fruitfully engaged morality (e.g. David Brion Davis, William Cronon, Harry Stout, Drew Gilpin Faust), Cotkin follows through on his exhortation from "The Moral Turn" by incorporating the work of moral philosophers, ethicists, and psychological theorists. This begins in chapter one with a long, fascinating look at Hannah Arendt and her critics. It continues in the next chapter on World War II bombing by exploring combatant/combatant line in theories of total war (e.g. Giulio Douhet) and just war (e.g. A.C. Grayling, Robert Nozick, and Michael Walzer, Avishai Margalit). Having paused on many occasions in the classroom to pose moral questions in relation to the use of atomic weapons, I appreciated Cotkin's interjection of philosophy in a section titled "Can Bombing of Civilians Be Justified?" (pp. 51-54). That section could be lifted, as is, and incorporated as either an in-class reading or an out-of-class reflection.
In successive chapters, Cotkin continues this invaluable task. In tackling My Lai he weaves in the work of psychologists Stanley Milgram, Philip Zimbardo, and Robert Jay Lifton, as well as the reflections of Reinhold Niebuhr and the work of Aristotle on the cultivation of character. John Howard Griffin and his famous work, Black Like Me, are examined in relation to the writings of Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Nagel, and a host of philosophers who have written on empathy. A key issue for Griffin was whether moral luck can be transformed, via empathy, into some kind of "universalist vision" (p. 120). When Cotkin moves to capital punishment in chapter five, the pro-death penalty thinking of Ernest van den Haag, Isaac Ehrlich, Hans Zeisel, and the Straussian Walter Berns makes an appearance. In opposition, Cotkin refers to the thinking of Karl Menninger, Hugo Adam Bedau, Philip Hallie, and the famous Sister Helen Prejean.
The last, and necessarily most tentative, full chapter focuses on terrorism and the Iraq War, post September 11. Philosophy makes its appearance in the form of a long discussion about "humanitarian intervention" (meaning, of course, the military variety). The theorists and philosophers of interest include Natan Sharansky, a Soviet refugee and neoconservative Zionist, and Ron Dermer. They co-authored a work The Case for Democracy (2004), the book Bush cited as inspirational for his international moral vision (i.e. democratic freedom must be spread at any price). Other intellectuals cited by Cotkin in this chapter, covering various degrees of interventionism versus outright opposition, include Kanan Makiya, Michael Ignatieff, Samantha Power, David Rieff, Christopher Hitchens, Peter Beinart, and Paul Berman---the last receiving extended treatment. Even though this topic still retains some heat, and it is clear that Cotkin did not support the war, his fairness in relaying the thought processes of the "war hawks" enables a civil tone to pervade the chapter. He only reproves in his final analysis of the characters.
Again, in relation to the aforementioned topics, Cotkin does not merely incorporate the insights of the abovementioned philosophers, ethicists, and psychologists. If he only did that, he would be reproducing the same works as other thinkers who utilize historical examples. Cotkin sets himself apart by following through on his promise to create "productive confusion" by adding more of the context, usually in terms of discussing decision-making and motivations of historical actors, but also by way of regret. He embraces "a tragic and ironic moral stance," and also avoids being judgmental (though the judgments, and regrets, of historical actors are given full play).[4]
IV.
This work engages that still-evolving subfield called the history of emotions---both in its historiography (i.e. approach) and topically in the narrative. Indeed, by invoking the messiness of war, murder, racism, hate, and capital punishment, one can hardly avoid terms like suffering, regret, revenge, morale, repulsion, honor, joy, shock, elation, unsavory, etc. One term, however, that both captured the emotional responses of several of Cotkin's historical eras and evoked an intellectual-religious-emotional response in this reader was "demonic." The word necessarily has fuzzy referential content, but nevertheless draws on our fears and repulsiveness. 'Demonic' captures something of the unreasonableness of radical evil, helping Cotkin articulate what I think is universal revulsion at mid-century's Holocaust and mass murders. It is not surprising, then, that 'demonic' arises primarily in chapter one on "The Problems of Evil," which focuses on Hannah Arendt. This, indeed, is the chapter that opens up the language, terms, and problems that haunt the rest of the book.
Cotkin's goal is to parse the depths of evil. To his credit, he does not pretend to have an answer, or answers, about why evil exists---the metaphysics of evil. Rather, through Arendt as a kind of avatar for his own views, Cotkin gets at the depths of evil achieved both within and outside of social and political structures. The primary structure of concern at mid-century is totalitarianism. Arendt starts with Kant's idea of "radical evil" in The Origins of Totalitarianism (pp. 17-19), intensifies it, and then clarifies further in Eichmann in Jerusalem by adding "the banality of evil" (pp. 23-24). To help Arendt and himself in grappling with people Hitler, Stalin, and Gary Gilmore later, as well as events like My Lai, Cotkin interjects the mysterious element of the 'demonic' into his studies (pp. 16, 79, 136). Here is a crucial passage (bolds mine):
Arendt...painted herself into a narrow corner. If the crimes of totalitarianism were as original and immense as she averred, then could they be anything other than demonic? She never hesitated to describe them throughout Origins...as "monstrous." But to use the term demonic would be to situate evil as mysterious, perhaps outside the realm of rational explanation and the march of worldly events. The demonic resisted laws of nature and the wills of men. Even strong structures of representative democracy and public debate, it seemed, were futile against a demonic entity. ...Arendt was onto something when she remarked on the mysterious nature of evil as something not "humanly understandable." ....Radical evil, despite her best attempts, seemed to slip through her interpretive structure. Arendt's frustrations grew just after publication of the book, when she admitted , "What radical evil is I don't know" (p. 22).
In other words, because totalitarianism demolished the principles of "freedom, contingency, and choice"---principles on which Kant's and Arendt's views of radical evil rested---other concepts had to be introduced in a world where "evil had assumed a new face." But Arendt left her version "grounded...in the institutions and ideology of totalitarianism" (p. 19). Her only revision was to introduce "banality" as an explanatory trope for Eichmann's "less than demonic" position as a "dedicated bureaucrat" lacking "independence of mind" (p. 24).
But the idea of the 'demonic' raises a host of other issues. From where does the idea arise? Is it a universal concept? How can one discuss the topic without an in-depth study of Western theology or metaphysics? Mortimer J. Adler once asserted that a philosopher could posit the existence of angels, meaning the possibility of spiritual intelligences, or "bodies without minds," without buying into Christianity, Islam, or Judaism. Adler argued that it was of a piece with general popular fascination about the idea of "superhuman intelligence," and suggested that fascination could be called "theology-fiction" or "philosophy-fiction" (instead of the old term, "angelology").[5] Adler buttressed his assertion by noting that many philosophers in Western history have speculated the possible role of angels in the universe, including Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, John Locke, Descartes, and others. Studying angels was about studying intelligences that were less than Divine (even if that divinity constituted only the necessary God of the philosophers) but greater than human. As for Satan and demons, however, Adler asserts that they are products of Western religious dogma, and shared by Christianity, Islam, and Judaism (though Christianity has special assertions about Satan in relation to Jesus Christ).[6]
I relay this apparent digression because Cotkin does discuss religion, particularly Christianity, in Morality's Muddy Waters. Topics that arise on the latter include born agains, Catholicism, Dorothy Day, fundamentalism, Søren Kierkegaard, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Denis de Rougemont. For the most part, Cotkin limits his discussion of these figures and topics to the historical actors at hand: Arendt's views of Rougemont, Franklin D. Roosevelt's Christianity is broached, Dorothy Day's influence on John Howard Griffin, fundamentalists' views on capital punishment and retributive justice, and the religious backgrounds of My Lai soldiers. With the exception of Arendt's reaction to Rougement's 1944 book, The Devil's Snare, Cotkin does not spend much time delving into theology (p. 15-16).
This is either the great strength or great weakness in Cotkin's analysis. As a weakness, unlike his insertions from philosophers and psychologists throughout the book, the relative absence of theology diminishes the real contributions of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic thinkers. If religion has something substantial to say to us about the human condition, as a great majority of the world believes it does, then it would behoove the intellectual historian dealing in morality to read some of that speculation into the text. In the case of MMW, where most of Cotkin's decision-makers are operating in something of a Judeo-Christian context, whether by violation of or perceived adherence to their faith, that means doing more with Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant theology. Perhaps theological speculation about demonic evil, given dispassionately, would at least help us understand something about the contexts in which these evil characters saw themselves? Would this also help us understand how the masses processed and received news of these atrocities of hatred, murder, mass murder, and international humanitarianism?
I fully recognize the dangers of a professional historian engaging in this kind of speculation. How would colleagues perceive the work? Would an academic press accept the book? What is the line between moral speculation and moralizing? How does one discuss the meaning of 'demonic' without getting past knee-jerk reactions? Cotkin's work is about "productive confusion." Does theological speculation move us into contentious, unproductive territory? And then, in relation to America's Judeo-Christian culture, how does one properly navigate the Protestant-Catholic-Jewish lines of division? Then again, if competing ethical imperatives are an important topic, what raises the bar on moral competition more than religious divisions?
It is not hard to see how avoiding in-depth theological speculation also strengthens the book. For one, it keeps Christianity from dominating MMW, making Cotkin's moral analysis accessible to a wider audience. His more secular study of the idea of evil in recent history results in an unpretentious exploration of the confusion of the moments at hand. By avoiding easy answers, especially those amenable to particular religious dogma, Cotkin maintains the humility, or "moral modesty," he sought to model in the book (p. 205). Indeed, early in the text he wrote:
Some readers may chafe at talk of evil as too tinged with religious overtones or weighted by heavy metaphysical baggage. It resists explanation and therefore obfuscates reality or explains away horror---all dangers, to be sure. (p. 7).
Cotkin listened to this inner warning, and stuck with philosophical and psychological contributions to understanding the events and topics he chose. Based on the fairness of the rest of the text, I believe Cotkin could have successfully navigated a few pages of theology in each chapter. Those few pages, however, would have constituted a tremendous amount of work, especially when exploring work outside one's faith tradition. Even so, in MMW as it is, there is nothing wrong with leading us to the brink. Perhaps by being led to the edge, the reader may be inspired to think through his or her own knowledge, or lack of knowledge, about radical evil in the world.
V.
When "The Moral Turn" appeared in 2008, I mentioned that it led a symposium with four interlocutors. It is worth revisiting some of the points made there now that Cotkin has provided a book-length example of his call. None of the respondents, of course, had access to Morality's Muddy Waters. Even so, all four respondents made solid points about the study of morality in history and asked poignant questions.
Neil Jumonville rightly reminded readers that many mid-century intellectual historians---Richard Hofstadter, David Potter, and Louis Hartz---were excellent models of "complexity, nuance, and contingency" on moral matters. Michael O'Brien asserted that "engagement with morality has been fairly constant in historical scholarship since almost any period one might care to name." He doubted "that the dialogue Cotkin wishes to encourage between historians and moral philosophers is capable of being sustained." O'Brien also warns against prescription and moralizing. In my view, Cotkin avoids those pitfalls. He also proves in the pages of MMW that an in-text dialogue between historians and moral philosophers can be sustained. Lewis Perry reminded Cotkin that yet another intellectual historian, John Higham, had also encouraged historians, in a 1962 essay, to develop a moral voice obtained from historical study. Titled "Beyond Consensus: The Historian as Moral Critic," Perry cited the Higham essay as taking a stand against false detachment and objectivity. The present sometimes demands historical moral reflection. I have not read the Higham essay, but it seems, to some extent, to have prefigured Cotkin's call.[7]
As I have discovered is often the case, James Livingston's response proved most provocative. He flat out denied that a "moral turn" in history was necessary because "the grammar of American history has always been determined by moral problems." Livingston went on to assert, thinking he had put Cotkin in some kind of a headlock, that the early modern, or Enlightenment, project of narrative construction necessarily consisted of agents, historians and otherwise, articulating their moral points. Livingston tightens his hold by pointing out the cultural pervasiveness, in history and the general public today, of moral considerations. I think this misses Cotkin's point. He did not dispute that moral considerations, simple and otherwise, abound. Rather, Cotkin called for an explicit, conscious engagement with moral complexity, or productive confusion, and moral philosophy in the text. In other words, if historians have been and always will be moral agents, they have not always engaged the subject with the complexity, fairness, depth, and explicit sense of purpose exhibited in MMW. [8] I think Livingston, in the end, would be happier with the product of Cotkin's book than he was with Cotkin's proposal in the Journal of the History of Ideas. Then again, he might not.
VI.
Though the presidential administration that haunts the end of Morality's Muddy Waters is gone, questions remain about the motivations, ideological and otherwise, for going to war in Iraq. Just this week an exclusive Guardian story revealed that a key source from Germany, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi and code-named "Curveball," lied about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to boost his personal prospects of success in civilian life. It was al-Janabi's testimony that floated to the top of America's intelligence system, to the point that it anchored Colin Powell's infamous U.N. testimony before the war's start.[9] Here is a CNN story that elaborates:
Even with this revelation, what is interesting to me is that Cotkin's analysis of the Iraqi War stands. Why? Because Cotkin aimed at the moral roots and simplistic black-and-white thinking, or good-versus-evil drama, that drove President Bush. The fact that the intelligence was fuzzy only proves that ideology drove the war. Furthermore, its same kind of thinking that inspires the Tea Party and other politically powerful conservatives.
Of course that wing of the political spectrum is not unopposed. President Barack Obama exhibits an understanding of moral complexity, and his name arises in a few spots in the text. Cotkin is heartened by President Obama's admiration of the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, particularly in relation to the latter's imperative that sin, pain, evil, unexpected consequences, and humility are necessary topics in relation to foreign and domestic policy (p. 201).
Even so, we cannot be reminded enough—whether by friends, relatives, ministers, teachers, colleagues, or otherwise—that moral progress will not be achieved without embracing complexity. Cotkin is not naive to the fact that we must eventually act, but he implores us to abhor anti-intellectualism and embrace circumspection. We must aspire to a full understanding of moral complications, potential and real. With that, Morality's Muddy Waters stands tall as a model of timely, professional engagement on a topic that concerns a wide variety of the populace. We need more historical works that convey the "productive confusion" Cotkin provides.
------------------------------
*A special thanks to Paul Murphy and David Veenstra for their comments on this review.
[1] Justin Kaplan, ed. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (Boston: Little Brown, 2002).
[2] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by W.D. Ross, in Great Books of the Western World, Mortimer J. Adler, ed., Vol. 8, Aristotle: II (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1990), 350 (II-3); Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, trans. by Father Laurence Shapcote, in Great Books of the Western World, Mortimer J. Adler, ed., Vol. 17, Aquinas: I (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1990), 695-96 (II-I.18.3).
[3] The JHI symposium is located on pages 293-337. The full citation for Cotkin’s reply is as follows: “A Conversation About Morals and History,” JHI 69 (June 2008): 493-97.
[4] From Cotkin's reply to the Symposium, 496-97.
[5] Mortimer J. Adler, The Angels and Us (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1982), x, 3-4.
[6] Ibid., 83-85.
[7] Symposium, 320, 324-25, 334-35; Cotkin, "Conversation," 493-97.
[8] Symposium, Livingston, "The Return of the Self-Made Man: A Response to Cotkin," 327-31.
[9] Martin Chulov and Helen Pidd, "Defector admits to WMD lies that triggered Iraq war," Guardian, February 15, 2011. URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/15/defector-admits-wmd-lies-iraq-war. Accessed on February 21, 2011.
Kamis, 17 Februari 2011
Public Promise
My post next Thursday will be a thorough review of George Cotkin's Morality's Muddy Waters. This is a first-rate book; buy it if you haven't already. More to come next week. - TL
Public Promise
My post next Thursday will be a thorough review of George Cotkin's Morality's Muddy Waters. This is a first-rate book; buy it if you haven't already. More to come next week. - TL
Rabu, 29 Desember 2010
A great book of 2010: John Dower's "Cultures of War"
As we are still in a week of relative rest (and my kid is out of school), I will keep this post quite brief. I am happy Ben asked us to suggest great books of 2010. Like him, I strongly recommend George Cotkin's Morality's Muddy Waters and our own David Sehat's The Myth of American Religious Freedom. Both books deserve greater attention that I can give them in this post. So I will offer another book with a link to a great discussion by its author. John Dower's The Cultures of War has impressed me in large part because it asks questions that are difficult to answer but fascinating to investigate. You can find Dower's conversation about the book at After Words.
This is a big, bold book that takes as its general theme a comparison between the cultures of war that surrounded the American war with Japan and the American wars following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But this is comparative history with a twist: rather than comparing American and Japanese visions of the same war, as Dower did in War without Mercy, Dower uses comparative history within the same country, between many different countries, and as a way to critique to use of historical analogy. For example, he discusses the strange use of Ground Zero to describe both the point of detonation of the atomic bombs over Japan in 1945 and the destruction of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan. The fact that such a term can be used in such different and seemingly contradictory ways frames one of Dower's most interesting insights: that "the reasons we humans embrace violence and mass destruction are more convoluted than the war planners or most policy analysts acknowledge, and we ignore this complexity at our peril--however forbidding what this says about us as individuals and societies may be."
Because I am wrestling with the ways in which wars since 1945 have influenced the construction and uses of American civil religion, I find Dower's willingness to wade into difficult subjects such as evil, holy wars, terrorism and terror bombing, just war, the elegance of science and the science of destruction, and myth-making to be nothing short of brave. Moreover, Dower once again puts to use his keen critical eye for war photography by including a remarkable 122 illustrations in his book. Somewhat like Susan Sontag (whom I also admire), Dower doesn't merely critique the social significance of iconic photographs but has the audacity to question our relationships to images of real suffering--there is a moral imperative to his reading.
I will close for now and promise a fuller discussion of Dower's important work soon.
Happy New Year!
This is a big, bold book that takes as its general theme a comparison between the cultures of war that surrounded the American war with Japan and the American wars following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But this is comparative history with a twist: rather than comparing American and Japanese visions of the same war, as Dower did in War without Mercy, Dower uses comparative history within the same country, between many different countries, and as a way to critique to use of historical analogy. For example, he discusses the strange use of Ground Zero to describe both the point of detonation of the atomic bombs over Japan in 1945 and the destruction of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan. The fact that such a term can be used in such different and seemingly contradictory ways frames one of Dower's most interesting insights: that "the reasons we humans embrace violence and mass destruction are more convoluted than the war planners or most policy analysts acknowledge, and we ignore this complexity at our peril--however forbidding what this says about us as individuals and societies may be."
Because I am wrestling with the ways in which wars since 1945 have influenced the construction and uses of American civil religion, I find Dower's willingness to wade into difficult subjects such as evil, holy wars, terrorism and terror bombing, just war, the elegance of science and the science of destruction, and myth-making to be nothing short of brave. Moreover, Dower once again puts to use his keen critical eye for war photography by including a remarkable 122 illustrations in his book. Somewhat like Susan Sontag (whom I also admire), Dower doesn't merely critique the social significance of iconic photographs but has the audacity to question our relationships to images of real suffering--there is a moral imperative to his reading.
I will close for now and promise a fuller discussion of Dower's important work soon.
Happy New Year!
A great book of 2010: John Dower's "Cultures of War"
As we are still in a week of relative rest (and my kid is out of school), I will keep this post quite brief. I am happy Ben asked us to suggest great books of 2010. Like him, I strongly recommend George Cotkin's Morality's Muddy Waters and our own David Sehat's The Myth of American Religious Freedom. Both books deserve greater attention that I can give them in this post. So I will offer another book with a link to a great discussion by its author. John Dower's The Cultures of War has impressed me in large part because it asks questions that are difficult to answer but fascinating to investigate. You can find Dower's conversation about the book at After Words.
This is a big, bold book that takes as its general theme a comparison between the cultures of war that surrounded the American war with Japan and the American wars following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But this is comparative history with a twist: rather than comparing American and Japanese visions of the same war, as Dower did in War without Mercy, Dower uses comparative history within the same country, between many different countries, and as a way to critique to use of historical analogy. For example, he discusses the strange use of Ground Zero to describe both the point of detonation of the atomic bombs over Japan in 1945 and the destruction of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan. The fact that such a term can be used in such different and seemingly contradictory ways frames one of Dower's most interesting insights: that "the reasons we humans embrace violence and mass destruction are more convoluted than the war planners or most policy analysts acknowledge, and we ignore this complexity at our peril--however forbidding what this says about us as individuals and societies may be."
Because I am wrestling with the ways in which wars since 1945 have influenced the construction and uses of American civil religion, I find Dower's willingness to wade into difficult subjects such as evil, holy wars, terrorism and terror bombing, just war, the elegance of science and the science of destruction, and myth-making to be nothing short of brave. Moreover, Dower once again puts to use his keen critical eye for war photography by including a remarkable 122 illustrations in his book. Somewhat like Susan Sontag (whom I also admire), Dower doesn't merely critique the social significance of iconic photographs but has the audacity to question our relationships to images of real suffering--there is a moral imperative to his reading.
I will close for now and promise a fuller discussion of Dower's important work soon.
Happy New Year!
This is a big, bold book that takes as its general theme a comparison between the cultures of war that surrounded the American war with Japan and the American wars following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But this is comparative history with a twist: rather than comparing American and Japanese visions of the same war, as Dower did in War without Mercy, Dower uses comparative history within the same country, between many different countries, and as a way to critique to use of historical analogy. For example, he discusses the strange use of Ground Zero to describe both the point of detonation of the atomic bombs over Japan in 1945 and the destruction of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan. The fact that such a term can be used in such different and seemingly contradictory ways frames one of Dower's most interesting insights: that "the reasons we humans embrace violence and mass destruction are more convoluted than the war planners or most policy analysts acknowledge, and we ignore this complexity at our peril--however forbidding what this says about us as individuals and societies may be."
Because I am wrestling with the ways in which wars since 1945 have influenced the construction and uses of American civil religion, I find Dower's willingness to wade into difficult subjects such as evil, holy wars, terrorism and terror bombing, just war, the elegance of science and the science of destruction, and myth-making to be nothing short of brave. Moreover, Dower once again puts to use his keen critical eye for war photography by including a remarkable 122 illustrations in his book. Somewhat like Susan Sontag (whom I also admire), Dower doesn't merely critique the social significance of iconic photographs but has the audacity to question our relationships to images of real suffering--there is a moral imperative to his reading.
I will close for now and promise a fuller discussion of Dower's important work soon.
Happy New Year!
Senin, 27 Desember 2010
2010 in US Intellectual History
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| Historically, we don't amount to much apparently! |
1. The most significant works in U.S. intellectual history.
2. The most significant developments in U.S. thought.
That second meaning, I think, will likely be somewhat elusive at this point. After all, one of the reasons we do intellectual history is that ideas take a while to work their significance out (if that's not dreadfully old-fashioned to say). Though some very important things have been thought in 2010, we're likely not to know what they are at this point. I took a glance at both Scientific American's list of World Changing Ideas 2010 (behind a paywall, unfortunately) and the New York Times' Year in Ideas and they are both heavily dominated by technological innovations rather than ideas per se.
(There are, however, some technological innovations of direct interest to intellectual historians, like crowd-sourced manuscript transcription and Google's Ngram, which generated the little chart at the top of this post. The latter, in particular, is worthy of further discussion, I think)
As for the first meaning, a lot of interesting and significant works of intellectual history have been published this year, including one by USIH's own David Sehat: The Myth of American Religious Freedom.
The New York Times list of 100 Notable Books of 2010 includes at least six works that might qualify as U.S. intellectual history (you might count even more among them): Lewis Hyde's Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership; Eric Foner's The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery; Oren Harman's The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness; Alan Brinkley's The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century; Pauline Maier's Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 (which David Sehat reviewed for this blog); and Justin Spring's Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade.
Though a number of these books are on my to-read list, I haven't read any of them yet. Among the works of US intellectual history published this year that I have read, George Cotkin's Morality's Muddy Waters stands out as one of the year's best.
What do you think has defined--and will define--2010 in US intellectual history?
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* A third possible meaning would involve the year for USIH (i.e. this blog/organization). It's been a good year, but I don't think that's necessarily worth a post.
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