[Updated: 9:55 am]
I won't profess to being either a fan or knowledgeable of Christopher Hitchens's life and work. But I'm game to reflect here on both. What follows are a few reasonably trustworthy sources to start a conversation:
1. The NYT obituary.
2. Scott McLemee on Hitchens in a June 2010 piece at The National.
3. A collection of his recent essays at VF Daily.
4. Corey Robin's brief, not-so-flattering reflection on Hitchens's narcissism.
What are your thoughts? What's Hitchens's place--positive, negative, or otherwise---in the late twentieth-century U.S. intellectual landscape? I expect instant-historical perspective and analysis. :) - TL
Tampilkan postingan dengan label Scott McLemee. Tampilkan semua postingan
Tampilkan postingan dengan label Scott McLemee. Tampilkan semua postingan
Jumat, 16 Desember 2011
Jumat, 13 Mei 2011
Tim's Light Reading (5-13-2011)
1. Beneke and Stephens on Barton and Stewart
Chris Beneke and Randall Stephens discuss "The Daily Show's Limits" in a May 10, 2011 Christian Century article. Here's the opening one-third of the piece (bolds mine):
"Open conversation that leads to nothing."
That's how Jon Stewart summed up his interview with popular right-wing historian David Barton. He was right. After 30 minutes of glib back-and-forth with Barton (ten of which made it onto TV), Stewart was flummoxed, worn down, unfunny:
As the air left the room, the conversation exposed the gaping ideological divide between Americans--and the challenges we face in bridging it.
Conservatives who go on the Daily Show usually end up looking the fool. But Stewart met his match in Barton, an ideological warrior revered by Glenn Beck and Mike Huckabee. Stewart's razor wit and trademark blue index cards were no match for Barton's prodigious memory and unwavering insistence that America's Christian founding has been erased by secular elites.
The show's staff probably thought Barton could be caricatured as a half-crazed ideologue, unconcerned with larger inconvenient truths. Perhaps they figured that a few well-chosen facts that don't fit his God-and-country narrative would render him speechless, that he would crumble under the relentless ironic jabs. But if it were just a matter of enumerating quotations and dates, members of Congress wouldn't be calling Barton to provide them with the founders' views on deficits, stem cell research and stimulus programs. Barton offers his listeners something much more alluring.
One thing we learned from Stewart's tête-à-tête with Barton is that anecdote-ridden claims can't be countered with more anecdotes. What Stewart never articulated was the essential function of history--using the preponderance of evidence to provide a credible context for understanding the past and the present. Barton presents himself as the high priest of founding texts and the arbiter of honest truth.
If you're interested in a thorough debunking of Barton's claims as made on The Daily Show, read through John Fea's series at The Way of Improvement Leads Home.
2. PhilPapers Notes: Two Forthcoming Articles of Interest (with abstracts)
(a) D. Howard (forthcoming). "Why Study the History of Political Thought?" Philosophy and Social Criticism.
This article explains why its author has spent much of the past decade rediscovering the history of political thought (rather than enter into the fray of political philosophy as it has been practised since Rawls). The article is only an illustration; but its virtue is that it summarizes in a short space the thesis developed in my book The Primacy of the Political: A History of Political Thought from the Greeks to the American and French Revolutions . It lays out a general theory of the political, demonstrates that there exists an inherent anti-political tendency within all politics (as seen in the rise of 20 th-century totalitarianism), and tries to suggest how this difficulty can be confronted.
(b) Melinda Rosenberg (forthcoming). "Principled Autonomy and Plagiarism." Journal of Academic Ethics.
Every semester, professors in every discipline are burdened with the task of checking for plagiarized papers. Since plagiarism has become rampant in the university, it can be argued that devoting time to checking for plagiarism is nothing more than a fool’s errand. Students will continue to plagiarize regardless of the consequences. In this paper, I will argue that professors do have a categorically binding obligation to confirm whether papers have been plagiarized. I will use Onora O'Neill’s account of principled autonomy as the foundation for my argument. Moral agents can only act on principles that can be adopted by all. Dishonesty cannot be adopted since honesty would cease to exist. Furthermore, failing to check for plagiarized papers is a failure to treat all students and professors and ends-in-themselves.
3. Movie Audiences Yawned at Atlas Shrugged
Producer John Aglialoro was dismayed at reviews of his feature film take on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Scott McLemee also didn't like the film. Here's an excerpt from his review (bolds mine):
The full course of Randian thought-reform is itself quite demanding, however. Most conversions to Rand’s worldview prove halfhearted. Many are called, but few are Galtian. The world, or at least the United States, is full of people who remember the novels fondly, and vote Republican, while otherwise falling short of the glory. Rand would have scorned them. She was good at scorn, and hardcore Objectivists get a lot of practice at it as well.
But her fans -- as distinct from her followers, sometimes called Randroids, though never by each other -- form the real constituency for the "Atlas Shrugged" movie now in theaters. It is only the first of two or three parts. Whether the project will be finished appears to be a matter of debate among the moviemakers themselves. Clearly, though, it's going over well with its intended market, to judge by the Twitterchat hailing it as one of the great films of all time. And when I saw it in New York this weekend, the audience clapped at the end, as the credits began to roll.
By that point, my capacity for disbelief had been tested quite enough for one evening; the applause seemed one challenge to it too many. The problem with this incarnation of Atlas Shrugged is not ideology but competence. The film looks cheap. Its cinematography is at roughly the level of a TV show from the 1980s. Rand’s plot is almost operatic in its indifference to plausibility, but none of the cast is up to the challenge.
4. "Cunning Forces Are Seeking To Bend History To Their Will"
The NYT's Kate Kernike speculates on "The Persistence of Conspiracy Theories" in this 4/30 article. Here are some highlights from the piece (bolds and links mine):
[Conspiracy theories] have a long history in the United States and elsewhere, coming from left and right, covering all sorts of subjects, political and otherworldly (the twin towers were not hit by airplanes; Paul is dead). And those who doubt Mr. Obama’s citizenship fit the mold of other conspiracy theorists: they don’t lose their grip on their beliefs easily, if at all.
“It almost becomes an article of faith, and as with any theological belief, you can’t confront it with facts,” said Kenneth D. Kitts, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke who has written extensively about presidential commissions that looked into events that have generated some of the biggest conspiracy theories of the last century — the attack on Pearl Harbor and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, among others. ...
Eighty percent of Americans, he said, believe that President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy, rather than a lone gunman, as a government commission affirmed. Thirty percent believe that the government covered up aliens’ landing in Roswell, N.M., and a third of American blacks believe that government scientists created AIDS as a weapon of black genocide. ...
By definition, Professor Goldberg said, a conspiracy theory is a belief that cunning forces are seeking to bend history to their will, provoking terror attacks or economic calamity to move the world in the direction they wish. ...
The strong embrace of conspiracy theories is also embedded in the American experience. A fear of enemies — real and imagined, internal and external — defined those who forged this country. A place created as God’s country was bound to see the subversions of Satan behind every uncertain turn.
As Professor Goldberg writes in an encyclopedia, Conspiracy Theories in American History: “Conspiracy theory draws power by merging with and reinforcing traditional American values and beliefs: a sense of mission, Protestant supremacy, concerns about encroachments on liberty, anti-elitism, maintenance of the racial order, and the sanctity of private property.”
Again, this is a great article. Read it all here. - TL
Chris Beneke and Randall Stephens discuss "The Daily Show's Limits" in a May 10, 2011 Christian Century article. Here's the opening one-third of the piece (bolds mine):
"Open conversation that leads to nothing."
That's how Jon Stewart summed up his interview with popular right-wing historian David Barton. He was right. After 30 minutes of glib back-and-forth with Barton (ten of which made it onto TV), Stewart was flummoxed, worn down, unfunny:
As the air left the room, the conversation exposed the gaping ideological divide between Americans--and the challenges we face in bridging it.
Conservatives who go on the Daily Show usually end up looking the fool. But Stewart met his match in Barton, an ideological warrior revered by Glenn Beck and Mike Huckabee. Stewart's razor wit and trademark blue index cards were no match for Barton's prodigious memory and unwavering insistence that America's Christian founding has been erased by secular elites.
The show's staff probably thought Barton could be caricatured as a half-crazed ideologue, unconcerned with larger inconvenient truths. Perhaps they figured that a few well-chosen facts that don't fit his God-and-country narrative would render him speechless, that he would crumble under the relentless ironic jabs. But if it were just a matter of enumerating quotations and dates, members of Congress wouldn't be calling Barton to provide them with the founders' views on deficits, stem cell research and stimulus programs. Barton offers his listeners something much more alluring.
One thing we learned from Stewart's tête-à-tête with Barton is that anecdote-ridden claims can't be countered with more anecdotes. What Stewart never articulated was the essential function of history--using the preponderance of evidence to provide a credible context for understanding the past and the present. Barton presents himself as the high priest of founding texts and the arbiter of honest truth.
If you're interested in a thorough debunking of Barton's claims as made on The Daily Show, read through John Fea's series at The Way of Improvement Leads Home.
2. PhilPapers Notes: Two Forthcoming Articles of Interest (with abstracts)
(a) D. Howard (forthcoming). "Why Study the History of Political Thought?" Philosophy and Social Criticism.
This article explains why its author has spent much of the past decade rediscovering the history of political thought (rather than enter into the fray of political philosophy as it has been practised since Rawls). The article is only an illustration; but its virtue is that it summarizes in a short space the thesis developed in my book The Primacy of the Political: A History of Political Thought from the Greeks to the American and French Revolutions . It lays out a general theory of the political, demonstrates that there exists an inherent anti-political tendency within all politics (as seen in the rise of 20 th-century totalitarianism), and tries to suggest how this difficulty can be confronted.
(b) Melinda Rosenberg (forthcoming). "Principled Autonomy and Plagiarism." Journal of Academic Ethics.
Every semester, professors in every discipline are burdened with the task of checking for plagiarized papers. Since plagiarism has become rampant in the university, it can be argued that devoting time to checking for plagiarism is nothing more than a fool’s errand. Students will continue to plagiarize regardless of the consequences. In this paper, I will argue that professors do have a categorically binding obligation to confirm whether papers have been plagiarized. I will use Onora O'Neill’s account of principled autonomy as the foundation for my argument. Moral agents can only act on principles that can be adopted by all. Dishonesty cannot be adopted since honesty would cease to exist. Furthermore, failing to check for plagiarized papers is a failure to treat all students and professors and ends-in-themselves.
3. Movie Audiences Yawned at Atlas Shrugged
Producer John Aglialoro was dismayed at reviews of his feature film take on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Scott McLemee also didn't like the film. Here's an excerpt from his review (bolds mine):
The full course of Randian thought-reform is itself quite demanding, however. Most conversions to Rand’s worldview prove halfhearted. Many are called, but few are Galtian. The world, or at least the United States, is full of people who remember the novels fondly, and vote Republican, while otherwise falling short of the glory. Rand would have scorned them. She was good at scorn, and hardcore Objectivists get a lot of practice at it as well.
But her fans -- as distinct from her followers, sometimes called Randroids, though never by each other -- form the real constituency for the "Atlas Shrugged" movie now in theaters. It is only the first of two or three parts. Whether the project will be finished appears to be a matter of debate among the moviemakers themselves. Clearly, though, it's going over well with its intended market, to judge by the Twitterchat hailing it as one of the great films of all time. And when I saw it in New York this weekend, the audience clapped at the end, as the credits began to roll.
By that point, my capacity for disbelief had been tested quite enough for one evening; the applause seemed one challenge to it too many. The problem with this incarnation of Atlas Shrugged is not ideology but competence. The film looks cheap. Its cinematography is at roughly the level of a TV show from the 1980s. Rand’s plot is almost operatic in its indifference to plausibility, but none of the cast is up to the challenge.
4. "Cunning Forces Are Seeking To Bend History To Their Will"
The NYT's Kate Kernike speculates on "The Persistence of Conspiracy Theories" in this 4/30 article. Here are some highlights from the piece (bolds and links mine):
[Conspiracy theories] have a long history in the United States and elsewhere, coming from left and right, covering all sorts of subjects, political and otherworldly (the twin towers were not hit by airplanes; Paul is dead). And those who doubt Mr. Obama’s citizenship fit the mold of other conspiracy theorists: they don’t lose their grip on their beliefs easily, if at all.
“It almost becomes an article of faith, and as with any theological belief, you can’t confront it with facts,” said Kenneth D. Kitts, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke who has written extensively about presidential commissions that looked into events that have generated some of the biggest conspiracy theories of the last century — the attack on Pearl Harbor and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, among others. ...
Eighty percent of Americans, he said, believe that President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy, rather than a lone gunman, as a government commission affirmed. Thirty percent believe that the government covered up aliens’ landing in Roswell, N.M., and a third of American blacks believe that government scientists created AIDS as a weapon of black genocide. ...
By definition, Professor Goldberg said, a conspiracy theory is a belief that cunning forces are seeking to bend history to their will, provoking terror attacks or economic calamity to move the world in the direction they wish. ...
The strong embrace of conspiracy theories is also embedded in the American experience. A fear of enemies — real and imagined, internal and external — defined those who forged this country. A place created as God’s country was bound to see the subversions of Satan behind every uncertain turn.
As Professor Goldberg writes in an encyclopedia, Conspiracy Theories in American History: “Conspiracy theory draws power by merging with and reinforcing traditional American values and beliefs: a sense of mission, Protestant supremacy, concerns about encroachments on liberty, anti-elitism, maintenance of the racial order, and the sanctity of private property.”
Again, this is a great article. Read it all here. - TL
Tim's Light Reading (5-13-2011)
1. Beneke and Stephens on Barton and Stewart
Chris Beneke and Randall Stephens discuss "The Daily Show's Limits" in a May 10, 2011 Christian Century article. Here's the opening one-third of the piece (bolds mine):
"Open conversation that leads to nothing."
That's how Jon Stewart summed up his interview with popular right-wing historian David Barton. He was right. After 30 minutes of glib back-and-forth with Barton (ten of which made it onto TV), Stewart was flummoxed, worn down, unfunny:
As the air left the room, the conversation exposed the gaping ideological divide between Americans--and the challenges we face in bridging it.
Conservatives who go on the Daily Show usually end up looking the fool. But Stewart met his match in Barton, an ideological warrior revered by Glenn Beck and Mike Huckabee. Stewart's razor wit and trademark blue index cards were no match for Barton's prodigious memory and unwavering insistence that America's Christian founding has been erased by secular elites.
The show's staff probably thought Barton could be caricatured as a half-crazed ideologue, unconcerned with larger inconvenient truths. Perhaps they figured that a few well-chosen facts that don't fit his God-and-country narrative would render him speechless, that he would crumble under the relentless ironic jabs. But if it were just a matter of enumerating quotations and dates, members of Congress wouldn't be calling Barton to provide them with the founders' views on deficits, stem cell research and stimulus programs. Barton offers his listeners something much more alluring.
One thing we learned from Stewart's tête-à-tête with Barton is that anecdote-ridden claims can't be countered with more anecdotes. What Stewart never articulated was the essential function of history--using the preponderance of evidence to provide a credible context for understanding the past and the present. Barton presents himself as the high priest of founding texts and the arbiter of honest truth.
If you're interested in a thorough debunking of Barton's claims as made on The Daily Show, read through John Fea's series at The Way of Improvement Leads Home.
2. PhilPapers Notes: Two Forthcoming Articles of Interest (with abstracts)
(a) D. Howard (forthcoming). "Why Study the History of Political Thought?" Philosophy and Social Criticism.
This article explains why its author has spent much of the past decade rediscovering the history of political thought (rather than enter into the fray of political philosophy as it has been practised since Rawls). The article is only an illustration; but its virtue is that it summarizes in a short space the thesis developed in my book The Primacy of the Political: A History of Political Thought from the Greeks to the American and French Revolutions . It lays out a general theory of the political, demonstrates that there exists an inherent anti-political tendency within all politics (as seen in the rise of 20 th-century totalitarianism), and tries to suggest how this difficulty can be confronted.
(b) Melinda Rosenberg (forthcoming). "Principled Autonomy and Plagiarism." Journal of Academic Ethics.
Every semester, professors in every discipline are burdened with the task of checking for plagiarized papers. Since plagiarism has become rampant in the university, it can be argued that devoting time to checking for plagiarism is nothing more than a fool’s errand. Students will continue to plagiarize regardless of the consequences. In this paper, I will argue that professors do have a categorically binding obligation to confirm whether papers have been plagiarized. I will use Onora O'Neill’s account of principled autonomy as the foundation for my argument. Moral agents can only act on principles that can be adopted by all. Dishonesty cannot be adopted since honesty would cease to exist. Furthermore, failing to check for plagiarized papers is a failure to treat all students and professors and ends-in-themselves.
3. Movie Audiences Yawned at Atlas Shrugged
Producer John Aglialoro was dismayed at reviews of his feature film take on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Scott McLemee also didn't like the film. Here's an excerpt from his review (bolds mine):
The full course of Randian thought-reform is itself quite demanding, however. Most conversions to Rand’s worldview prove halfhearted. Many are called, but few are Galtian. The world, or at least the United States, is full of people who remember the novels fondly, and vote Republican, while otherwise falling short of the glory. Rand would have scorned them. She was good at scorn, and hardcore Objectivists get a lot of practice at it as well.
But her fans -- as distinct from her followers, sometimes called Randroids, though never by each other -- form the real constituency for the "Atlas Shrugged" movie now in theaters. It is only the first of two or three parts. Whether the project will be finished appears to be a matter of debate among the moviemakers themselves. Clearly, though, it's going over well with its intended market, to judge by the Twitterchat hailing it as one of the great films of all time. And when I saw it in New York this weekend, the audience clapped at the end, as the credits began to roll.
By that point, my capacity for disbelief had been tested quite enough for one evening; the applause seemed one challenge to it too many. The problem with this incarnation of Atlas Shrugged is not ideology but competence. The film looks cheap. Its cinematography is at roughly the level of a TV show from the 1980s. Rand’s plot is almost operatic in its indifference to plausibility, but none of the cast is up to the challenge.
4. "Cunning Forces Are Seeking To Bend History To Their Will"
The NYT's Kate Kernike speculates on "The Persistence of Conspiracy Theories" in this 4/30 article. Here are some highlights from the piece (bolds and links mine):
[Conspiracy theories] have a long history in the United States and elsewhere, coming from left and right, covering all sorts of subjects, political and otherworldly (the twin towers were not hit by airplanes; Paul is dead). And those who doubt Mr. Obama’s citizenship fit the mold of other conspiracy theorists: they don’t lose their grip on their beliefs easily, if at all.
“It almost becomes an article of faith, and as with any theological belief, you can’t confront it with facts,” said Kenneth D. Kitts, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke who has written extensively about presidential commissions that looked into events that have generated some of the biggest conspiracy theories of the last century — the attack on Pearl Harbor and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, among others. ...
Eighty percent of Americans, he said, believe that President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy, rather than a lone gunman, as a government commission affirmed. Thirty percent believe that the government covered up aliens’ landing in Roswell, N.M., and a third of American blacks believe that government scientists created AIDS as a weapon of black genocide. ...
By definition, Professor Goldberg said, a conspiracy theory is a belief that cunning forces are seeking to bend history to their will, provoking terror attacks or economic calamity to move the world in the direction they wish. ...
The strong embrace of conspiracy theories is also embedded in the American experience. A fear of enemies — real and imagined, internal and external — defined those who forged this country. A place created as God’s country was bound to see the subversions of Satan behind every uncertain turn.
As Professor Goldberg writes in an encyclopedia, Conspiracy Theories in American History: “Conspiracy theory draws power by merging with and reinforcing traditional American values and beliefs: a sense of mission, Protestant supremacy, concerns about encroachments on liberty, anti-elitism, maintenance of the racial order, and the sanctity of private property.”
Again, this is a great article. Read it all here. - TL
Chris Beneke and Randall Stephens discuss "The Daily Show's Limits" in a May 10, 2011 Christian Century article. Here's the opening one-third of the piece (bolds mine):
"Open conversation that leads to nothing."
That's how Jon Stewart summed up his interview with popular right-wing historian David Barton. He was right. After 30 minutes of glib back-and-forth with Barton (ten of which made it onto TV), Stewart was flummoxed, worn down, unfunny:
As the air left the room, the conversation exposed the gaping ideological divide between Americans--and the challenges we face in bridging it.
Conservatives who go on the Daily Show usually end up looking the fool. But Stewart met his match in Barton, an ideological warrior revered by Glenn Beck and Mike Huckabee. Stewart's razor wit and trademark blue index cards were no match for Barton's prodigious memory and unwavering insistence that America's Christian founding has been erased by secular elites.
The show's staff probably thought Barton could be caricatured as a half-crazed ideologue, unconcerned with larger inconvenient truths. Perhaps they figured that a few well-chosen facts that don't fit his God-and-country narrative would render him speechless, that he would crumble under the relentless ironic jabs. But if it were just a matter of enumerating quotations and dates, members of Congress wouldn't be calling Barton to provide them with the founders' views on deficits, stem cell research and stimulus programs. Barton offers his listeners something much more alluring.
One thing we learned from Stewart's tête-à-tête with Barton is that anecdote-ridden claims can't be countered with more anecdotes. What Stewart never articulated was the essential function of history--using the preponderance of evidence to provide a credible context for understanding the past and the present. Barton presents himself as the high priest of founding texts and the arbiter of honest truth.
If you're interested in a thorough debunking of Barton's claims as made on The Daily Show, read through John Fea's series at The Way of Improvement Leads Home.
2. PhilPapers Notes: Two Forthcoming Articles of Interest (with abstracts)
(a) D. Howard (forthcoming). "Why Study the History of Political Thought?" Philosophy and Social Criticism.
This article explains why its author has spent much of the past decade rediscovering the history of political thought (rather than enter into the fray of political philosophy as it has been practised since Rawls). The article is only an illustration; but its virtue is that it summarizes in a short space the thesis developed in my book The Primacy of the Political: A History of Political Thought from the Greeks to the American and French Revolutions . It lays out a general theory of the political, demonstrates that there exists an inherent anti-political tendency within all politics (as seen in the rise of 20 th-century totalitarianism), and tries to suggest how this difficulty can be confronted.
(b) Melinda Rosenberg (forthcoming). "Principled Autonomy and Plagiarism." Journal of Academic Ethics.
Every semester, professors in every discipline are burdened with the task of checking for plagiarized papers. Since plagiarism has become rampant in the university, it can be argued that devoting time to checking for plagiarism is nothing more than a fool’s errand. Students will continue to plagiarize regardless of the consequences. In this paper, I will argue that professors do have a categorically binding obligation to confirm whether papers have been plagiarized. I will use Onora O'Neill’s account of principled autonomy as the foundation for my argument. Moral agents can only act on principles that can be adopted by all. Dishonesty cannot be adopted since honesty would cease to exist. Furthermore, failing to check for plagiarized papers is a failure to treat all students and professors and ends-in-themselves.
3. Movie Audiences Yawned at Atlas Shrugged
Producer John Aglialoro was dismayed at reviews of his feature film take on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Scott McLemee also didn't like the film. Here's an excerpt from his review (bolds mine):
The full course of Randian thought-reform is itself quite demanding, however. Most conversions to Rand’s worldview prove halfhearted. Many are called, but few are Galtian. The world, or at least the United States, is full of people who remember the novels fondly, and vote Republican, while otherwise falling short of the glory. Rand would have scorned them. She was good at scorn, and hardcore Objectivists get a lot of practice at it as well.
But her fans -- as distinct from her followers, sometimes called Randroids, though never by each other -- form the real constituency for the "Atlas Shrugged" movie now in theaters. It is only the first of two or three parts. Whether the project will be finished appears to be a matter of debate among the moviemakers themselves. Clearly, though, it's going over well with its intended market, to judge by the Twitterchat hailing it as one of the great films of all time. And when I saw it in New York this weekend, the audience clapped at the end, as the credits began to roll.
By that point, my capacity for disbelief had been tested quite enough for one evening; the applause seemed one challenge to it too many. The problem with this incarnation of Atlas Shrugged is not ideology but competence. The film looks cheap. Its cinematography is at roughly the level of a TV show from the 1980s. Rand’s plot is almost operatic in its indifference to plausibility, but none of the cast is up to the challenge.
4. "Cunning Forces Are Seeking To Bend History To Their Will"
The NYT's Kate Kernike speculates on "The Persistence of Conspiracy Theories" in this 4/30 article. Here are some highlights from the piece (bolds and links mine):
[Conspiracy theories] have a long history in the United States and elsewhere, coming from left and right, covering all sorts of subjects, political and otherworldly (the twin towers were not hit by airplanes; Paul is dead). And those who doubt Mr. Obama’s citizenship fit the mold of other conspiracy theorists: they don’t lose their grip on their beliefs easily, if at all.
“It almost becomes an article of faith, and as with any theological belief, you can’t confront it with facts,” said Kenneth D. Kitts, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke who has written extensively about presidential commissions that looked into events that have generated some of the biggest conspiracy theories of the last century — the attack on Pearl Harbor and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, among others. ...
Eighty percent of Americans, he said, believe that President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy, rather than a lone gunman, as a government commission affirmed. Thirty percent believe that the government covered up aliens’ landing in Roswell, N.M., and a third of American blacks believe that government scientists created AIDS as a weapon of black genocide. ...
By definition, Professor Goldberg said, a conspiracy theory is a belief that cunning forces are seeking to bend history to their will, provoking terror attacks or economic calamity to move the world in the direction they wish. ...
The strong embrace of conspiracy theories is also embedded in the American experience. A fear of enemies — real and imagined, internal and external — defined those who forged this country. A place created as God’s country was bound to see the subversions of Satan behind every uncertain turn.
As Professor Goldberg writes in an encyclopedia, Conspiracy Theories in American History: “Conspiracy theory draws power by merging with and reinforcing traditional American values and beliefs: a sense of mission, Protestant supremacy, concerns about encroachments on liberty, anti-elitism, maintenance of the racial order, and the sanctity of private property.”
Again, this is a great article. Read it all here. - TL
Kamis, 06 Januari 2011
Tim's Light Reading (1/6/2011)
Happy New Year!
1. The Most Influential Thinker In Europe Is...---According to a poll conducted by the journal Social Europe, "the thinker with the most influence on the European left-of-centre political agenda" is an American, Paul Krugman. A fellow USIHer, Andrew Hartman, will be pleased with #3. Here's the top ten:
1. Paul Krugman
2. Juergen Habermas
3. Slavoj Zizek
4. Anthony Giddens
5. Daniel Cohn-Bendit
6. Umberto Eco
7. Zygmund Bauman, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen
9. Oskar Lafontaine
10. Ulrich Beck
2. A Scandalous Conversion in the Philosophy of Religion---A (former) philosopher of religion at the University of Houston, Keith Parsons, has given up his academic discipline. Parsons said he could no longer sincerely present arguments for theism in an academic setting. Too much support for Intelligent Design seems to have been Parsons tipping point. Here's a snippet from the article:
Keeping an eye on the truth was also a matter of practical importance for Parsons, who was alarmed by the support for Intelligent Design creationism among philosophy of religion’s most influential names. These include Alvin Plantinga and Peter van Inwagen, who led the subfield’s resurgence in the 1970s and ’80s, and William Lane Craig, an Evangelical who popularizes the subfield’s arguments for God in widely-attended public debates. “One of the things the really active conservative Christians covet enormously, more than anything else, is intellectual respectability. And they think they have found it in some of the arguments from these philosophers of religion,” Parsons said.
BTW: The online magazine Religion Dispatches has quickly become a go-to site for thoughtful analysis and news on its namesake topic. Add it to your reader; all the the cool kids are doing it.
3. Almost All of Us are Unhappy with Our Jobs---A survey by Manpower subsidiary Right Management reports that 84 percent of workers are looking for a new job. ...I just thought I'd throw this out there light of the history job market news.
4. Good Censorship---On January 1, Lake Superior State University put forth its 36th annual "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness." I like several of the selections---fail, viral, man up, momma grizzlies, refudiate, wow factor---but disliked the hate for "back story." Here's the sour quote in the press release on that term:
"This should be on the list of words that don't need to exist because a perfectly good word has been used for years. In this case, the word is 'history,' or, for those who must be weaned, 'story.'" Jeff Williams, Sherwood, Ariz.
BTW: I don't think it's an accident that at least two phrases from Sarah Palin made it into the list.
5. Tips on Refereeing for Journals---Thom Brooks of Newcastle University wrote an article for the open access Social Science Research Network (SSRN) titled "Guidelines on How to Referee." Here's the abstract:
This essay offers clear practical advice on how to act as a referee when asked to review an article for an academic journal. The advice is also relevant for reviewing manuscript proposals for academic publishers. My advice is based on my experiences in editing an academic journal, the Journal of Moral Philosophy, and four book series. I will draw on these experiences throughout as illustrations. The structure of the advice is as follows. First, I will begin by saying a few words about the academic publishing industry. Secondly, I will discuss whether one should accept or decline an invitation to review. Thirdly, I will examine the question of what appropriate standard should be applied when reviewing submissions. Finally, I conclude with advice on how to draft a report before submitting it to an editor.
6. The Intellectual Historian's Toolbox---Larry Cebula at Northwest History offers advice on what should be in a "Digital Toolbox for Graduate Students in History." I agree with all of his recommendations, as well as the suggestions given in the post's comments. In addition, I would add something specific to Cebula's #1 that Ben mentioned in a post here a few days ago: Google's "Books Ngram Viewer." Here's a link to what Google says about that tool.
7. Rethinking Human Rights---The ubiquitous Scott McLemee reviews a book for The National Conversation that takes human rights talk to task for its latent utopianism. The book's author, Samuel Moyn, a Columbia University historian of European intellectual life (and co-editor of Modern Intellectual History), seems to argue that strong doses of hard-headed empiricism (in the mode of Jeremy Bentham) and an on-the-ground, rough-and-tumble political sensibility would be beneficial to the future of human rights ideals. The book's title is The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard, 2010).
1. The Most Influential Thinker In Europe Is...---According to a poll conducted by the journal Social Europe, "the thinker with the most influence on the European left-of-centre political agenda" is an American, Paul Krugman. A fellow USIHer, Andrew Hartman, will be pleased with #3. Here's the top ten:
1. Paul Krugman
2. Juergen Habermas
3. Slavoj Zizek
4. Anthony Giddens
5. Daniel Cohn-Bendit
6. Umberto Eco
7. Zygmund Bauman, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen
9. Oskar Lafontaine
10. Ulrich Beck
2. A Scandalous Conversion in the Philosophy of Religion---A (former) philosopher of religion at the University of Houston, Keith Parsons, has given up his academic discipline. Parsons said he could no longer sincerely present arguments for theism in an academic setting. Too much support for Intelligent Design seems to have been Parsons tipping point. Here's a snippet from the article:
Keeping an eye on the truth was also a matter of practical importance for Parsons, who was alarmed by the support for Intelligent Design creationism among philosophy of religion’s most influential names. These include Alvin Plantinga and Peter van Inwagen, who led the subfield’s resurgence in the 1970s and ’80s, and William Lane Craig, an Evangelical who popularizes the subfield’s arguments for God in widely-attended public debates. “One of the things the really active conservative Christians covet enormously, more than anything else, is intellectual respectability. And they think they have found it in some of the arguments from these philosophers of religion,” Parsons said.
BTW: The online magazine Religion Dispatches has quickly become a go-to site for thoughtful analysis and news on its namesake topic. Add it to your reader; all the the cool kids are doing it.
3. Almost All of Us are Unhappy with Our Jobs---A survey by Manpower subsidiary Right Management reports that 84 percent of workers are looking for a new job. ...I just thought I'd throw this out there light of the history job market news.
4. Good Censorship---On January 1, Lake Superior State University put forth its 36th annual "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness." I like several of the selections---fail, viral, man up, momma grizzlies, refudiate, wow factor---but disliked the hate for "back story." Here's the sour quote in the press release on that term:
"This should be on the list of words that don't need to exist because a perfectly good word has been used for years. In this case, the word is 'history,' or, for those who must be weaned, 'story.'" Jeff Williams, Sherwood, Ariz.
BTW: I don't think it's an accident that at least two phrases from Sarah Palin made it into the list.
5. Tips on Refereeing for Journals---Thom Brooks of Newcastle University wrote an article for the open access Social Science Research Network (SSRN) titled "Guidelines on How to Referee." Here's the abstract:
This essay offers clear practical advice on how to act as a referee when asked to review an article for an academic journal. The advice is also relevant for reviewing manuscript proposals for academic publishers. My advice is based on my experiences in editing an academic journal, the Journal of Moral Philosophy, and four book series. I will draw on these experiences throughout as illustrations. The structure of the advice is as follows. First, I will begin by saying a few words about the academic publishing industry. Secondly, I will discuss whether one should accept or decline an invitation to review. Thirdly, I will examine the question of what appropriate standard should be applied when reviewing submissions. Finally, I conclude with advice on how to draft a report before submitting it to an editor.
6. The Intellectual Historian's Toolbox---Larry Cebula at Northwest History offers advice on what should be in a "Digital Toolbox for Graduate Students in History." I agree with all of his recommendations, as well as the suggestions given in the post's comments. In addition, I would add something specific to Cebula's #1 that Ben mentioned in a post here a few days ago: Google's "Books Ngram Viewer." Here's a link to what Google says about that tool.
7. Rethinking Human Rights---The ubiquitous Scott McLemee reviews a book for The National Conversation that takes human rights talk to task for its latent utopianism. The book's author, Samuel Moyn, a Columbia University historian of European intellectual life (and co-editor of Modern Intellectual History), seems to argue that strong doses of hard-headed empiricism (in the mode of Jeremy Bentham) and an on-the-ground, rough-and-tumble political sensibility would be beneficial to the future of human rights ideals. The book's title is The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard, 2010).
Tim's Light Reading (1/6/2011)
Happy New Year!
1. The Most Influential Thinker In Europe Is...---According to a poll conducted by the journal Social Europe, "the thinker with the most influence on the European left-of-centre political agenda" is an American, Paul Krugman. A fellow USIHer, Andrew Hartman, will be pleased with #3. Here's the top ten:
1. Paul Krugman
2. Juergen Habermas
3. Slavoj Zizek
4. Anthony Giddens
5. Daniel Cohn-Bendit
6. Umberto Eco
7. Zygmund Bauman, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen
9. Oskar Lafontaine
10. Ulrich Beck
2. A Scandalous Conversion in the Philosophy of Religion---A (former) philosopher of religion at the University of Houston, Keith Parsons, has given up his academic discipline. Parsons said he could no longer sincerely present arguments for theism in an academic setting. Too much support for Intelligent Design seems to have been Parsons tipping point. Here's a snippet from the article:
Keeping an eye on the truth was also a matter of practical importance for Parsons, who was alarmed by the support for Intelligent Design creationism among philosophy of religion’s most influential names. These include Alvin Plantinga and Peter van Inwagen, who led the subfield’s resurgence in the 1970s and ’80s, and William Lane Craig, an Evangelical who popularizes the subfield’s arguments for God in widely-attended public debates. “One of the things the really active conservative Christians covet enormously, more than anything else, is intellectual respectability. And they think they have found it in some of the arguments from these philosophers of religion,” Parsons said.
BTW: The online magazine Religion Dispatches has quickly become a go-to site for thoughtful analysis and news on its namesake topic. Add it to your reader; all the the cool kids are doing it.
3. Almost All of Us are Unhappy with Our Jobs---A survey by Manpower subsidiary Right Management reports that 84 percent of workers are looking for a new job. ...I just thought I'd throw this out there light of the history job market news.
4. Good Censorship---On January 1, Lake Superior State University put forth its 36th annual "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness." I like several of the selections---fail, viral, man up, momma grizzlies, refudiate, wow factor---but disliked the hate for "back story." Here's the sour quote in the press release on that term:
"This should be on the list of words that don't need to exist because a perfectly good word has been used for years. In this case, the word is 'history,' or, for those who must be weaned, 'story.'" Jeff Williams, Sherwood, Ariz.
BTW: I don't think it's an accident that at least two phrases from Sarah Palin made it into the list.
5. Tips on Refereeing for Journals---Thom Brooks of Newcastle University wrote an article for the open access Social Science Research Network (SSRN) titled "Guidelines on How to Referee." Here's the abstract:
This essay offers clear practical advice on how to act as a referee when asked to review an article for an academic journal. The advice is also relevant for reviewing manuscript proposals for academic publishers. My advice is based on my experiences in editing an academic journal, the Journal of Moral Philosophy, and four book series. I will draw on these experiences throughout as illustrations. The structure of the advice is as follows. First, I will begin by saying a few words about the academic publishing industry. Secondly, I will discuss whether one should accept or decline an invitation to review. Thirdly, I will examine the question of what appropriate standard should be applied when reviewing submissions. Finally, I conclude with advice on how to draft a report before submitting it to an editor.
6. The Intellectual Historian's Toolbox---Larry Cebula at Northwest History offers advice on what should be in a "Digital Toolbox for Graduate Students in History." I agree with all of his recommendations, as well as the suggestions given in the post's comments. In addition, I would add something specific to Cebula's #1 that Ben mentioned in a post here a few days ago: Google's "Books Ngram Viewer." Here's a link to what Google says about that tool.
7. Rethinking Human Rights---The ubiquitous Scott McLemee reviews a book for The National Conversation that takes human rights talk to task for its latent utopianism. The book's author, Samuel Moyn, a Columbia University historian of European intellectual life (and co-editor of Modern Intellectual History), seems to argue that strong doses of hard-headed empiricism (in the mode of Jeremy Bentham) and an on-the-ground, rough-and-tumble political sensibility would be beneficial to the future of human rights ideals. The book's title is The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard, 2010).
1. The Most Influential Thinker In Europe Is...---According to a poll conducted by the journal Social Europe, "the thinker with the most influence on the European left-of-centre political agenda" is an American, Paul Krugman. A fellow USIHer, Andrew Hartman, will be pleased with #3. Here's the top ten:
1. Paul Krugman
2. Juergen Habermas
3. Slavoj Zizek
4. Anthony Giddens
5. Daniel Cohn-Bendit
6. Umberto Eco
7. Zygmund Bauman, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen
9. Oskar Lafontaine
10. Ulrich Beck
2. A Scandalous Conversion in the Philosophy of Religion---A (former) philosopher of religion at the University of Houston, Keith Parsons, has given up his academic discipline. Parsons said he could no longer sincerely present arguments for theism in an academic setting. Too much support for Intelligent Design seems to have been Parsons tipping point. Here's a snippet from the article:
Keeping an eye on the truth was also a matter of practical importance for Parsons, who was alarmed by the support for Intelligent Design creationism among philosophy of religion’s most influential names. These include Alvin Plantinga and Peter van Inwagen, who led the subfield’s resurgence in the 1970s and ’80s, and William Lane Craig, an Evangelical who popularizes the subfield’s arguments for God in widely-attended public debates. “One of the things the really active conservative Christians covet enormously, more than anything else, is intellectual respectability. And they think they have found it in some of the arguments from these philosophers of religion,” Parsons said.
BTW: The online magazine Religion Dispatches has quickly become a go-to site for thoughtful analysis and news on its namesake topic. Add it to your reader; all the the cool kids are doing it.
3. Almost All of Us are Unhappy with Our Jobs---A survey by Manpower subsidiary Right Management reports that 84 percent of workers are looking for a new job. ...I just thought I'd throw this out there light of the history job market news.
4. Good Censorship---On January 1, Lake Superior State University put forth its 36th annual "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness." I like several of the selections---fail, viral, man up, momma grizzlies, refudiate, wow factor---but disliked the hate for "back story." Here's the sour quote in the press release on that term:
"This should be on the list of words that don't need to exist because a perfectly good word has been used for years. In this case, the word is 'history,' or, for those who must be weaned, 'story.'" Jeff Williams, Sherwood, Ariz.
BTW: I don't think it's an accident that at least two phrases from Sarah Palin made it into the list.
5. Tips on Refereeing for Journals---Thom Brooks of Newcastle University wrote an article for the open access Social Science Research Network (SSRN) titled "Guidelines on How to Referee." Here's the abstract:
This essay offers clear practical advice on how to act as a referee when asked to review an article for an academic journal. The advice is also relevant for reviewing manuscript proposals for academic publishers. My advice is based on my experiences in editing an academic journal, the Journal of Moral Philosophy, and four book series. I will draw on these experiences throughout as illustrations. The structure of the advice is as follows. First, I will begin by saying a few words about the academic publishing industry. Secondly, I will discuss whether one should accept or decline an invitation to review. Thirdly, I will examine the question of what appropriate standard should be applied when reviewing submissions. Finally, I conclude with advice on how to draft a report before submitting it to an editor.
6. The Intellectual Historian's Toolbox---Larry Cebula at Northwest History offers advice on what should be in a "Digital Toolbox for Graduate Students in History." I agree with all of his recommendations, as well as the suggestions given in the post's comments. In addition, I would add something specific to Cebula's #1 that Ben mentioned in a post here a few days ago: Google's "Books Ngram Viewer." Here's a link to what Google says about that tool.
7. Rethinking Human Rights---The ubiquitous Scott McLemee reviews a book for The National Conversation that takes human rights talk to task for its latent utopianism. The book's author, Samuel Moyn, a Columbia University historian of European intellectual life (and co-editor of Modern Intellectual History), seems to argue that strong doses of hard-headed empiricism (in the mode of Jeremy Bentham) and an on-the-ground, rough-and-tumble political sensibility would be beneficial to the future of human rights ideals. The book's title is The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard, 2010).
Rabu, 04 Agustus 2010
Culture in Postmodernity; Or, the Historical Logic of the Culture Wars
One of my summer tasks was to write a proposal for the book I’ve been researching on the culture wars. In this process, I’ve been thinking a lot about the broader historical logic of the culture wars. Why was culture in the specific sense of the word—literature, film, curriculum, museums, art, etc.—at the heart of a political firestorm? From there, several related questions arose. Had culture shifted as a concept? If so, could we tie such a shift to what theorists have conceptualized as the displacement of modernity? Is the culture of postmodernity the historical logic of the culture wars?
As part of the paper I will be giving at the upcoming annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference—a paper I title “Moderns Versus Postmoderns: The Culture Wars and the Future of the Left”—I’ve been reading several of the philosophical interventions into the debates about postmodernism made by Marxists such as Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Nancy Fraser, Terry Eagleton, and Perry Anderson. It is my contention that they offer the intellectual historian a better understanding of the culture wars. By attaching the intellectual and cultural particulars of postmodernity to the political and economic transformations of what they wishfully termed “late capitalism,” these Marxist critics anticipate my contention that the culture wars allowed Americans space to articulate and contest the discombobulating effects of postindustrial capitalism and postmodern epistemologies.
What is meant by postmodern epistemologies—or more specifically, “postmodernism,” which Jameson sub-titles “the cultural logic of late capitalism” in his famous 1984 New Left Review article? Jameson contends that “postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good,” or when “‘culture’ has become a veritable ‘second nature.’” In short, in postmodernity, culture takes precedent. Culture is everywhere. Culture is not something we become—as I wrote about in an earlier blog post on the “Intellectual History of Culture as Becoming”—culture is what we are. We are shot through with culture.
In thinking about the etymology of culture, Terry Eagleton’s works are extremely helpful, especially his 2000 book, The Idea of Culture. (I came to this book after reading, on the advice of Scott McLemee, The Task of the Critic, a lengthy interview with Eagleton about his intellectual biography.) For Eagleton, culture first became a political project when the state began to sponsor it. This was a thoroughly modern project: the state sought to cultivate its subjects, to give them culture. Such acculturation was necessary for citizenship. Subjects needed culture before they could be political. The state wanted to form individuals, as Eagleton argues, “into suitably well-tempered, responsible citizens. This is the rhetoric of the civics class, if a little more highly pitched.”
But such a notion of culture no longer seems viable given the postmodern scattering of grand narratives, including the grandest of them all, nationalism. I quote Jameson at length: “If the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant (or hegemonic) ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist countries today are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm. Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existences, but they no longer need to impose their speech (or are henceforth unable to); and the postliteracy of the late capitalist world reflects not only the absence of any great collective project but also the unavailability of the older national language itself.”
In the words of Perry Anderson, whose 1998 book The Origins of Postmodernity serves as an extended review of Jameson’s writings, the postmodern unavailability of grand narratives, especially the Marxist narrative of class struggle, resulted from the following: “The receding of class conflict within the metropolis, while violence was projected without; the enormous weight of advertising and media fantasy in suppressing the realities of division and exploitation; the disconnection of private and public existence...” Getting to the heart of postmodern epistemologies, Jameson writes: “In psychological terms, we may say that as a service economy we are henceforth so far removed from the realities of production and work that we inhabit a dream world of artificial stimuli and televised experience: never in any previous civilization have the great metaphysical preoccupations, the fundamental questions of being and of the meaning of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless.”
Then how does the implosion of grand narratives—or the explosion of heterogeneity and hybridity—lead to the culture wars? In spite of the postmodern notion of culture as everywhere and yet nowhere, older, modern notions of culture persistently creep back into the collective consciousness, as the return of the repressed. Culture in this modern sense is a normative way of imagining society. The problem, though, is that normative ways of imagining American society have multiplied. The national narrative, always contested, has given way to various ethnic, racial, religious, and other identity-based narratives, which often lay claim to the national narrative in new and innovative ways. This is the breeding ground of cultural conflict. So, perhaps postmodernity is not the death of the grand narrative, but the multiplication of mini-grand narratives?
As part of the paper I will be giving at the upcoming annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference—a paper I title “Moderns Versus Postmoderns: The Culture Wars and the Future of the Left”—I’ve been reading several of the philosophical interventions into the debates about postmodernism made by Marxists such as Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Nancy Fraser, Terry Eagleton, and Perry Anderson. It is my contention that they offer the intellectual historian a better understanding of the culture wars. By attaching the intellectual and cultural particulars of postmodernity to the political and economic transformations of what they wishfully termed “late capitalism,” these Marxist critics anticipate my contention that the culture wars allowed Americans space to articulate and contest the discombobulating effects of postindustrial capitalism and postmodern epistemologies.
What is meant by postmodern epistemologies—or more specifically, “postmodernism,” which Jameson sub-titles “the cultural logic of late capitalism” in his famous 1984 New Left Review article? Jameson contends that “postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good,” or when “‘culture’ has become a veritable ‘second nature.’” In short, in postmodernity, culture takes precedent. Culture is everywhere. Culture is not something we become—as I wrote about in an earlier blog post on the “Intellectual History of Culture as Becoming”—culture is what we are. We are shot through with culture.
In thinking about the etymology of culture, Terry Eagleton’s works are extremely helpful, especially his 2000 book, The Idea of Culture. (I came to this book after reading, on the advice of Scott McLemee, The Task of the Critic, a lengthy interview with Eagleton about his intellectual biography.) For Eagleton, culture first became a political project when the state began to sponsor it. This was a thoroughly modern project: the state sought to cultivate its subjects, to give them culture. Such acculturation was necessary for citizenship. Subjects needed culture before they could be political. The state wanted to form individuals, as Eagleton argues, “into suitably well-tempered, responsible citizens. This is the rhetoric of the civics class, if a little more highly pitched.”
But such a notion of culture no longer seems viable given the postmodern scattering of grand narratives, including the grandest of them all, nationalism. I quote Jameson at length: “If the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant (or hegemonic) ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist countries today are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm. Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existences, but they no longer need to impose their speech (or are henceforth unable to); and the postliteracy of the late capitalist world reflects not only the absence of any great collective project but also the unavailability of the older national language itself.”
In the words of Perry Anderson, whose 1998 book The Origins of Postmodernity serves as an extended review of Jameson’s writings, the postmodern unavailability of grand narratives, especially the Marxist narrative of class struggle, resulted from the following: “The receding of class conflict within the metropolis, while violence was projected without; the enormous weight of advertising and media fantasy in suppressing the realities of division and exploitation; the disconnection of private and public existence...” Getting to the heart of postmodern epistemologies, Jameson writes: “In psychological terms, we may say that as a service economy we are henceforth so far removed from the realities of production and work that we inhabit a dream world of artificial stimuli and televised experience: never in any previous civilization have the great metaphysical preoccupations, the fundamental questions of being and of the meaning of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless.”
Then how does the implosion of grand narratives—or the explosion of heterogeneity and hybridity—lead to the culture wars? In spite of the postmodern notion of culture as everywhere and yet nowhere, older, modern notions of culture persistently creep back into the collective consciousness, as the return of the repressed. Culture in this modern sense is a normative way of imagining society. The problem, though, is that normative ways of imagining American society have multiplied. The national narrative, always contested, has given way to various ethnic, racial, religious, and other identity-based narratives, which often lay claim to the national narrative in new and innovative ways. This is the breeding ground of cultural conflict. So, perhaps postmodernity is not the death of the grand narrative, but the multiplication of mini-grand narratives?
Culture in Postmodernity; Or, the Historical Logic of the Culture Wars
One of my summer tasks was to write a proposal for the book I’ve been researching on the culture wars. In this process, I’ve been thinking a lot about the broader historical logic of the culture wars. Why was culture in the specific sense of the word—literature, film, curriculum, museums, art, etc.—at the heart of a political firestorm? From there, several related questions arose. Had culture shifted as a concept? If so, could we tie such a shift to what theorists have conceptualized as the displacement of modernity? Is the culture of postmodernity the historical logic of the culture wars?
As part of the paper I will be giving at the upcoming annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference—a paper I title “Moderns Versus Postmoderns: The Culture Wars and the Future of the Left”—I’ve been reading several of the philosophical interventions into the debates about postmodernism made by Marxists such as Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Nancy Fraser, Terry Eagleton, and Perry Anderson. It is my contention that they offer the intellectual historian a better understanding of the culture wars. By attaching the intellectual and cultural particulars of postmodernity to the political and economic transformations of what they wishfully termed “late capitalism,” these Marxist critics anticipate my contention that the culture wars allowed Americans space to articulate and contest the discombobulating effects of postindustrial capitalism and postmodern epistemologies.
What is meant by postmodern epistemologies—or more specifically, “postmodernism,” which Jameson sub-titles “the cultural logic of late capitalism” in his famous 1984 New Left Review article? Jameson contends that “postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good,” or when “‘culture’ has become a veritable ‘second nature.’” In short, in postmodernity, culture takes precedent. Culture is everywhere. Culture is not something we become—as I wrote about in an earlier blog post on the “Intellectual History of Culture as Becoming”—culture is what we are. We are shot through with culture.
In thinking about the etymology of culture, Terry Eagleton’s works are extremely helpful, especially his 2000 book, The Idea of Culture. (I came to this book after reading, on the advice of Scott McLemee, The Task of the Critic, a lengthy interview with Eagleton about his intellectual biography.) For Eagleton, culture first became a political project when the state began to sponsor it. This was a thoroughly modern project: the state sought to cultivate its subjects, to give them culture. Such acculturation was necessary for citizenship. Subjects needed culture before they could be political. The state wanted to form individuals, as Eagleton argues, “into suitably well-tempered, responsible citizens. This is the rhetoric of the civics class, if a little more highly pitched.”
But such a notion of culture no longer seems viable given the postmodern scattering of grand narratives, including the grandest of them all, nationalism. I quote Jameson at length: “If the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant (or hegemonic) ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist countries today are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm. Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existences, but they no longer need to impose their speech (or are henceforth unable to); and the postliteracy of the late capitalist world reflects not only the absence of any great collective project but also the unavailability of the older national language itself.”
In the words of Perry Anderson, whose 1998 book The Origins of Postmodernity serves as an extended review of Jameson’s writings, the postmodern unavailability of grand narratives, especially the Marxist narrative of class struggle, resulted from the following: “The receding of class conflict within the metropolis, while violence was projected without; the enormous weight of advertising and media fantasy in suppressing the realities of division and exploitation; the disconnection of private and public existence...” Getting to the heart of postmodern epistemologies, Jameson writes: “In psychological terms, we may say that as a service economy we are henceforth so far removed from the realities of production and work that we inhabit a dream world of artificial stimuli and televised experience: never in any previous civilization have the great metaphysical preoccupations, the fundamental questions of being and of the meaning of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless.”
Then how does the implosion of grand narratives—or the explosion of heterogeneity and hybridity—lead to the culture wars? In spite of the postmodern notion of culture as everywhere and yet nowhere, older, modern notions of culture persistently creep back into the collective consciousness, as the return of the repressed. Culture in this modern sense is a normative way of imagining society. The problem, though, is that normative ways of imagining American society have multiplied. The national narrative, always contested, has given way to various ethnic, racial, religious, and other identity-based narratives, which often lay claim to the national narrative in new and innovative ways. This is the breeding ground of cultural conflict. So, perhaps postmodernity is not the death of the grand narrative, but the multiplication of mini-grand narratives?
As part of the paper I will be giving at the upcoming annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference—a paper I title “Moderns Versus Postmoderns: The Culture Wars and the Future of the Left”—I’ve been reading several of the philosophical interventions into the debates about postmodernism made by Marxists such as Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Nancy Fraser, Terry Eagleton, and Perry Anderson. It is my contention that they offer the intellectual historian a better understanding of the culture wars. By attaching the intellectual and cultural particulars of postmodernity to the political and economic transformations of what they wishfully termed “late capitalism,” these Marxist critics anticipate my contention that the culture wars allowed Americans space to articulate and contest the discombobulating effects of postindustrial capitalism and postmodern epistemologies.
What is meant by postmodern epistemologies—or more specifically, “postmodernism,” which Jameson sub-titles “the cultural logic of late capitalism” in his famous 1984 New Left Review article? Jameson contends that “postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good,” or when “‘culture’ has become a veritable ‘second nature.’” In short, in postmodernity, culture takes precedent. Culture is everywhere. Culture is not something we become—as I wrote about in an earlier blog post on the “Intellectual History of Culture as Becoming”—culture is what we are. We are shot through with culture.
In thinking about the etymology of culture, Terry Eagleton’s works are extremely helpful, especially his 2000 book, The Idea of Culture. (I came to this book after reading, on the advice of Scott McLemee, The Task of the Critic, a lengthy interview with Eagleton about his intellectual biography.) For Eagleton, culture first became a political project when the state began to sponsor it. This was a thoroughly modern project: the state sought to cultivate its subjects, to give them culture. Such acculturation was necessary for citizenship. Subjects needed culture before they could be political. The state wanted to form individuals, as Eagleton argues, “into suitably well-tempered, responsible citizens. This is the rhetoric of the civics class, if a little more highly pitched.”
But such a notion of culture no longer seems viable given the postmodern scattering of grand narratives, including the grandest of them all, nationalism. I quote Jameson at length: “If the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant (or hegemonic) ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist countries today are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm. Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existences, but they no longer need to impose their speech (or are henceforth unable to); and the postliteracy of the late capitalist world reflects not only the absence of any great collective project but also the unavailability of the older national language itself.”
In the words of Perry Anderson, whose 1998 book The Origins of Postmodernity serves as an extended review of Jameson’s writings, the postmodern unavailability of grand narratives, especially the Marxist narrative of class struggle, resulted from the following: “The receding of class conflict within the metropolis, while violence was projected without; the enormous weight of advertising and media fantasy in suppressing the realities of division and exploitation; the disconnection of private and public existence...” Getting to the heart of postmodern epistemologies, Jameson writes: “In psychological terms, we may say that as a service economy we are henceforth so far removed from the realities of production and work that we inhabit a dream world of artificial stimuli and televised experience: never in any previous civilization have the great metaphysical preoccupations, the fundamental questions of being and of the meaning of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless.”
Then how does the implosion of grand narratives—or the explosion of heterogeneity and hybridity—lead to the culture wars? In spite of the postmodern notion of culture as everywhere and yet nowhere, older, modern notions of culture persistently creep back into the collective consciousness, as the return of the repressed. Culture in this modern sense is a normative way of imagining society. The problem, though, is that normative ways of imagining American society have multiplied. The national narrative, always contested, has given way to various ethnic, racial, religious, and other identity-based narratives, which often lay claim to the national narrative in new and innovative ways. This is the breeding ground of cultural conflict. So, perhaps postmodernity is not the death of the grand narrative, but the multiplication of mini-grand narratives?
Sabtu, 05 Desember 2009
Tim's Light Reading (12/7/2009)
1. The Top 15 Most Important, Post-WWII Anglophone Books of Philosophy, According To Google: Brian Leiter, of Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog fame, compiled a list derived from Google search results of the Top 15 (plus Top 10 runners-up) most important philosophy books of the last 50 years. To paraphrase a comment made by Mr. Leiter on his own post, I'm not sure these books tell us anything about philosophy, but they do say something about the accessibility and potential usefulness of philosophy to the general public. Several works and authors on the list familiar historians and many readers here include: Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; John Rawls, A Theory of Justice; Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge; W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object; and maybe Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. And this Wikipedia post will help you sort through some of the other players.
No Isaiah Berlin? Aside: Jurgen Habermas apparently floats on the edges of the analytic/anglophone tradition.
2. Evaluating Participation Grades: Bonnie M. Miller, in the latest issue of the AHA's Perspectives on History, asks whether and how we should grade class participation. The article is a useful revisitation of the philosophies, both pro and con, behind accounting for participation. Most of my conversations with colleagues on this topic have been informal. As such, it's nice to see a write-up. Of course the article also unintentionally underscores just how imperfect evaluation is on the whole. I like Miller's mid-term self-evaluation of participation idea.
3. A Cornel West Takedown---For His Own Good?: In a recent InsideHigherEd article written for potpourri posts like this one, Scott McLemee takes Cornel West to task for being less than McLemee thinks he can, or should, be. Others have commented on McLemee's story and West's book, but I want to take the conversation in another direction. Since I'm neither an enemy nor a fan of West---I'm a neutral, I have no personal dog in McLemee's fight with West's accounting of himself. But, I find the practice of thinking about public intellectuals---their place, role, and expectations of them---of interest. To recount the principles, the object of McLemee's ire is West's own autobiography, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud: A Memoir. McLemee never uses this phrase, but you get the feeling that he sees Brother West as a This Is Spinal Tap version of West's autobiography. Let me tease you with two brief passages from McLemee's piece:
There is seldom much detail and never any depth [to West's reflections]. West makes a few references to academic mentors. He notes his intense interest in various philosophers or authors. Yet there is never a sustained effort to grapple with them as influences on his life and thinking. He mentions his own scholarly books on Marxism and pragmatism (for some odd reason forgetting that he also published one on African-American theology) but does not describe the process of thinking and writing that went into them.
...If sketchy in other regards, Brother West is never anything but expansive on how Cornel West feels about Cornel West. He is deeply committed to his committed-ness, and passionately passionate about being full of passion. Various works of art, literature, music, and philosophy remind West of himself. He finds Augustinian humility to be deeply meaningful. This is mentioned in one sentence. His taste for three-piece suits is full of subtle implications that require a couple of substantial paragraphs to elucidate.
To me, McLemee seems to be saying that once you have entered the public arena, you ~owe~ that same public---at some point---an authentic, sincere, applied remembrance of your life. I think I agree, but I'm not sure. And of course West still has some time to provide that narrative. But will he?
4. Political Correctness and Identity Politics in the Academy, Soberly Assessed: Stanley Fish considers political correctness as an object of study as presented in new books from both "liberal" and "conservative" angles. Fish finds the "conservative" study, which consists of a compilation of essays published by the American Enterprise Institute, to be intriguing---even convincing. He relays that the following from that study:
The call for intellectual diversity is, as the volume’s authors acknowledge, less philosophical than strategic; it is designed to embarrass liberal academics who are dedicated to what Peter Wood calls the “diversity regime” in academia. ...The answer [to the problem] is that it would be better if all sides acknowledged that “diversity” is a word that has lost whatever usefulness it may have had and has become an umbrella rationale for importing political criteria into the process of academic decision-making. We should be done with it.
Fish concludes: No one...will agree with everything these two books say, but reading them together, and in counterpoint, is a genuinely educational experience. Rather than merely cheering for your side and booing at the other, you actually learn something.
5. A New Penn Press Series: The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America: This new series, edited by Casey Nelson Blake, consists thus far of the following hardbacks:
---Iain Anderson's This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture;
---Casey Nelson Blake's The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State;
---Cándida Smith's The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century;
---Steven Conn's Do Museums Still Need Objects?;
---April F. Masten's Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York; and
---A. Joan Saab's For the Millions: American Art and Culture Between the Wars.
6. Teaching Early Modern Philosophy: Dana McCourt over at The Edge of the American West, claiming an unintended provocation by provoked by Crooked Timber's John Holbo, discusses alternative teaching strategies for the Early Modern period of philosophy. I love Dana's suggestion of using female philosophers, at the very least, as critics of the Big Guys who dominate this period: Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. Here's the book she recommends to that end. The issue of how to approach this period is no small consideration for someone attempting to teach a "History of Philosophy in America" course that honestly deals with the colonial period.
7. The Armageddon Imperative: This CFP will be of interest to those who work on the Cold War in the late twentieth century. I see a great many intellectual history intersections in the invited topics subsection.
8. We've Tried NeoLiberalism Before in the Modern West: Tony Judt explains here how it didn't work. I wonder what future historian will write the book titled: "The Myth and Reality of Government Inefficiency: How The New Right Won the Late Twentieth-Century Culture Wars in America, 1980 - __2008? 2012?*__ - TL
No Isaiah Berlin? Aside: Jurgen Habermas apparently floats on the edges of the analytic/anglophone tradition.
2. Evaluating Participation Grades: Bonnie M. Miller, in the latest issue of the AHA's Perspectives on History, asks whether and how we should grade class participation. The article is a useful revisitation of the philosophies, both pro and con, behind accounting for participation. Most of my conversations with colleagues on this topic have been informal. As such, it's nice to see a write-up. Of course the article also unintentionally underscores just how imperfect evaluation is on the whole. I like Miller's mid-term self-evaluation of participation idea.
3. A Cornel West Takedown---For His Own Good?: In a recent InsideHigherEd article written for potpourri posts like this one, Scott McLemee takes Cornel West to task for being less than McLemee thinks he can, or should, be. Others have commented on McLemee's story and West's book, but I want to take the conversation in another direction. Since I'm neither an enemy nor a fan of West---I'm a neutral, I have no personal dog in McLemee's fight with West's accounting of himself. But, I find the practice of thinking about public intellectuals---their place, role, and expectations of them---of interest. To recount the principles, the object of McLemee's ire is West's own autobiography, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud: A Memoir. McLemee never uses this phrase, but you get the feeling that he sees Brother West as a This Is Spinal Tap version of West's autobiography. Let me tease you with two brief passages from McLemee's piece:
There is seldom much detail and never any depth [to West's reflections]. West makes a few references to academic mentors. He notes his intense interest in various philosophers or authors. Yet there is never a sustained effort to grapple with them as influences on his life and thinking. He mentions his own scholarly books on Marxism and pragmatism (for some odd reason forgetting that he also published one on African-American theology) but does not describe the process of thinking and writing that went into them.
...If sketchy in other regards, Brother West is never anything but expansive on how Cornel West feels about Cornel West. He is deeply committed to his committed-ness, and passionately passionate about being full of passion. Various works of art, literature, music, and philosophy remind West of himself. He finds Augustinian humility to be deeply meaningful. This is mentioned in one sentence. His taste for three-piece suits is full of subtle implications that require a couple of substantial paragraphs to elucidate.
To me, McLemee seems to be saying that once you have entered the public arena, you ~owe~ that same public---at some point---an authentic, sincere, applied remembrance of your life. I think I agree, but I'm not sure. And of course West still has some time to provide that narrative. But will he?
4. Political Correctness and Identity Politics in the Academy, Soberly Assessed: Stanley Fish considers political correctness as an object of study as presented in new books from both "liberal" and "conservative" angles. Fish finds the "conservative" study, which consists of a compilation of essays published by the American Enterprise Institute, to be intriguing---even convincing. He relays that the following from that study:
The call for intellectual diversity is, as the volume’s authors acknowledge, less philosophical than strategic; it is designed to embarrass liberal academics who are dedicated to what Peter Wood calls the “diversity regime” in academia. ...The answer [to the problem] is that it would be better if all sides acknowledged that “diversity” is a word that has lost whatever usefulness it may have had and has become an umbrella rationale for importing political criteria into the process of academic decision-making. We should be done with it.
Fish concludes: No one...will agree with everything these two books say, but reading them together, and in counterpoint, is a genuinely educational experience. Rather than merely cheering for your side and booing at the other, you actually learn something.
5. A New Penn Press Series: The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America: This new series, edited by Casey Nelson Blake, consists thus far of the following hardbacks:
---Iain Anderson's This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture;
---Casey Nelson Blake's The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State;
---Cándida Smith's The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century;
---Steven Conn's Do Museums Still Need Objects?;
---April F. Masten's Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York; and
---A. Joan Saab's For the Millions: American Art and Culture Between the Wars.
6. Teaching Early Modern Philosophy: Dana McCourt over at The Edge of the American West, claiming an unintended provocation by provoked by Crooked Timber's John Holbo, discusses alternative teaching strategies for the Early Modern period of philosophy. I love Dana's suggestion of using female philosophers, at the very least, as critics of the Big Guys who dominate this period: Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. Here's the book she recommends to that end. The issue of how to approach this period is no small consideration for someone attempting to teach a "History of Philosophy in America" course that honestly deals with the colonial period.
7. The Armageddon Imperative: This CFP will be of interest to those who work on the Cold War in the late twentieth century. I see a great many intellectual history intersections in the invited topics subsection.
8. We've Tried NeoLiberalism Before in the Modern West: Tony Judt explains here how it didn't work. I wonder what future historian will write the book titled: "The Myth and Reality of Government Inefficiency: How The New Right Won the Late Twentieth-Century Culture Wars in America, 1980 - __2008? 2012?*__ - TL
Tim's Light Reading (12/7/2009)
1. The Top 15 Most Important, Post-WWII Anglophone Books of Philosophy, According To Google: Brian Leiter, of Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog fame, compiled a list derived from Google search results of the Top 15 (plus Top 10 runners-up) most important philosophy books of the last 50 years. To paraphrase a comment made by Mr. Leiter on his own post, I'm not sure these books tell us anything about philosophy, but they do say something about the accessibility and potential usefulness of philosophy to the general public. Several works and authors on the list familiar historians and many readers here include: Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; John Rawls, A Theory of Justice; Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge; W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object; and maybe Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. And this Wikipedia post will help you sort through some of the other players.
No Isaiah Berlin? Aside: Jurgen Habermas apparently floats on the edges of the analytic/anglophone tradition.
2. Evaluating Participation Grades: Bonnie M. Miller, in the latest issue of the AHA's Perspectives on History, asks whether and how we should grade class participation. The article is a useful revisitation of the philosophies, both pro and con, behind accounting for participation. Most of my conversations with colleagues on this topic have been informal. As such, it's nice to see a write-up. Of course the article also unintentionally underscores just how imperfect evaluation is on the whole. I like Miller's mid-term self-evaluation of participation idea.
3. A Cornel West Takedown---For His Own Good?: In a recent InsideHigherEd article written for potpourri posts like this one, Scott McLemee takes Cornel West to task for being less than McLemee thinks he can, or should, be. Others have commented on McLemee's story and West's book, but I want to take the conversation in another direction. Since I'm neither an enemy nor a fan of West---I'm a neutral, I have no personal dog in McLemee's fight with West's accounting of himself. But, I find the practice of thinking about public intellectuals---their place, role, and expectations of them---of interest. To recount the principles, the object of McLemee's ire is West's own autobiography, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud: A Memoir. McLemee never uses this phrase, but you get the feeling that he sees Brother West as a This Is Spinal Tap version of West's autobiography. Let me tease you with two brief passages from McLemee's piece:
There is seldom much detail and never any depth [to West's reflections]. West makes a few references to academic mentors. He notes his intense interest in various philosophers or authors. Yet there is never a sustained effort to grapple with them as influences on his life and thinking. He mentions his own scholarly books on Marxism and pragmatism (for some odd reason forgetting that he also published one on African-American theology) but does not describe the process of thinking and writing that went into them.
...If sketchy in other regards, Brother West is never anything but expansive on how Cornel West feels about Cornel West. He is deeply committed to his committed-ness, and passionately passionate about being full of passion. Various works of art, literature, music, and philosophy remind West of himself. He finds Augustinian humility to be deeply meaningful. This is mentioned in one sentence. His taste for three-piece suits is full of subtle implications that require a couple of substantial paragraphs to elucidate.
To me, McLemee seems to be saying that once you have entered the public arena, you ~owe~ that same public---at some point---an authentic, sincere, applied remembrance of your life. I think I agree, but I'm not sure. And of course West still has some time to provide that narrative. But will he?
4. Political Correctness and Identity Politics in the Academy, Soberly Assessed: Stanley Fish considers political correctness as an object of study as presented in new books from both "liberal" and "conservative" angles. Fish finds the "conservative" study, which consists of a compilation of essays published by the American Enterprise Institute, to be intriguing---even convincing. He relays that the following from that study:
The call for intellectual diversity is, as the volume’s authors acknowledge, less philosophical than strategic; it is designed to embarrass liberal academics who are dedicated to what Peter Wood calls the “diversity regime” in academia. ...The answer [to the problem] is that it would be better if all sides acknowledged that “diversity” is a word that has lost whatever usefulness it may have had and has become an umbrella rationale for importing political criteria into the process of academic decision-making. We should be done with it.
Fish concludes: No one...will agree with everything these two books say, but reading them together, and in counterpoint, is a genuinely educational experience. Rather than merely cheering for your side and booing at the other, you actually learn something.
5. A New Penn Press Series: The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America: This new series, edited by Casey Nelson Blake, consists thus far of the following hardbacks:
---Iain Anderson's This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture;
---Casey Nelson Blake's The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State;
---Cándida Smith's The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century;
---Steven Conn's Do Museums Still Need Objects?;
---April F. Masten's Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York; and
---A. Joan Saab's For the Millions: American Art and Culture Between the Wars.
6. Teaching Early Modern Philosophy: Dana McCourt over at The Edge of the American West, claiming an unintended provocation by provoked by Crooked Timber's John Holbo, discusses alternative teaching strategies for the Early Modern period of philosophy. I love Dana's suggestion of using female philosophers, at the very least, as critics of the Big Guys who dominate this period: Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. Here's the book she recommends to that end. The issue of how to approach this period is no small consideration for someone attempting to teach a "History of Philosophy in America" course that honestly deals with the colonial period.
7. The Armageddon Imperative: This CFP will be of interest to those who work on the Cold War in the late twentieth century. I see a great many intellectual history intersections in the invited topics subsection.
8. We've Tried NeoLiberalism Before in the Modern West: Tony Judt explains here how it didn't work. I wonder what future historian will write the book titled: "The Myth and Reality of Government Inefficiency: How The New Right Won the Late Twentieth-Century Culture Wars in America, 1980 - __2008? 2012?*__ - TL
No Isaiah Berlin? Aside: Jurgen Habermas apparently floats on the edges of the analytic/anglophone tradition.
2. Evaluating Participation Grades: Bonnie M. Miller, in the latest issue of the AHA's Perspectives on History, asks whether and how we should grade class participation. The article is a useful revisitation of the philosophies, both pro and con, behind accounting for participation. Most of my conversations with colleagues on this topic have been informal. As such, it's nice to see a write-up. Of course the article also unintentionally underscores just how imperfect evaluation is on the whole. I like Miller's mid-term self-evaluation of participation idea.
3. A Cornel West Takedown---For His Own Good?: In a recent InsideHigherEd article written for potpourri posts like this one, Scott McLemee takes Cornel West to task for being less than McLemee thinks he can, or should, be. Others have commented on McLemee's story and West's book, but I want to take the conversation in another direction. Since I'm neither an enemy nor a fan of West---I'm a neutral, I have no personal dog in McLemee's fight with West's accounting of himself. But, I find the practice of thinking about public intellectuals---their place, role, and expectations of them---of interest. To recount the principles, the object of McLemee's ire is West's own autobiography, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud: A Memoir. McLemee never uses this phrase, but you get the feeling that he sees Brother West as a This Is Spinal Tap version of West's autobiography. Let me tease you with two brief passages from McLemee's piece:
There is seldom much detail and never any depth [to West's reflections]. West makes a few references to academic mentors. He notes his intense interest in various philosophers or authors. Yet there is never a sustained effort to grapple with them as influences on his life and thinking. He mentions his own scholarly books on Marxism and pragmatism (for some odd reason forgetting that he also published one on African-American theology) but does not describe the process of thinking and writing that went into them.
...If sketchy in other regards, Brother West is never anything but expansive on how Cornel West feels about Cornel West. He is deeply committed to his committed-ness, and passionately passionate about being full of passion. Various works of art, literature, music, and philosophy remind West of himself. He finds Augustinian humility to be deeply meaningful. This is mentioned in one sentence. His taste for three-piece suits is full of subtle implications that require a couple of substantial paragraphs to elucidate.
To me, McLemee seems to be saying that once you have entered the public arena, you ~owe~ that same public---at some point---an authentic, sincere, applied remembrance of your life. I think I agree, but I'm not sure. And of course West still has some time to provide that narrative. But will he?
4. Political Correctness and Identity Politics in the Academy, Soberly Assessed: Stanley Fish considers political correctness as an object of study as presented in new books from both "liberal" and "conservative" angles. Fish finds the "conservative" study, which consists of a compilation of essays published by the American Enterprise Institute, to be intriguing---even convincing. He relays that the following from that study:
The call for intellectual diversity is, as the volume’s authors acknowledge, less philosophical than strategic; it is designed to embarrass liberal academics who are dedicated to what Peter Wood calls the “diversity regime” in academia. ...The answer [to the problem] is that it would be better if all sides acknowledged that “diversity” is a word that has lost whatever usefulness it may have had and has become an umbrella rationale for importing political criteria into the process of academic decision-making. We should be done with it.
Fish concludes: No one...will agree with everything these two books say, but reading them together, and in counterpoint, is a genuinely educational experience. Rather than merely cheering for your side and booing at the other, you actually learn something.
5. A New Penn Press Series: The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America: This new series, edited by Casey Nelson Blake, consists thus far of the following hardbacks:
---Iain Anderson's This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture;
---Casey Nelson Blake's The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State;
---Cándida Smith's The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century;
---Steven Conn's Do Museums Still Need Objects?;
---April F. Masten's Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York; and
---A. Joan Saab's For the Millions: American Art and Culture Between the Wars.
6. Teaching Early Modern Philosophy: Dana McCourt over at The Edge of the American West, claiming an unintended provocation by provoked by Crooked Timber's John Holbo, discusses alternative teaching strategies for the Early Modern period of philosophy. I love Dana's suggestion of using female philosophers, at the very least, as critics of the Big Guys who dominate this period: Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. Here's the book she recommends to that end. The issue of how to approach this period is no small consideration for someone attempting to teach a "History of Philosophy in America" course that honestly deals with the colonial period.
7. The Armageddon Imperative: This CFP will be of interest to those who work on the Cold War in the late twentieth century. I see a great many intellectual history intersections in the invited topics subsection.
8. We've Tried NeoLiberalism Before in the Modern West: Tony Judt explains here how it didn't work. I wonder what future historian will write the book titled: "The Myth and Reality of Government Inefficiency: How The New Right Won the Late Twentieth-Century Culture Wars in America, 1980 - __2008? 2012?*__ - TL
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