"The Ladder To Nowhere": The New Inquiry, Recent Cultural History, And A Little Bit More

Alex Williams recounted some recent cultural history in yesterday's online New York Times* with an article on the founding of The New Inquiry. You might remember that Casey Nelson Blake and the rest of the panelists from the 2010 USIH Conference plenary finale, titled "Intellectual History for What?", published each of their pieces in The New Inquiry (via Scribd). This honored both the spirit that drove both their panel (i.e. the place of intellectuals, and historian-intellectuals, in the academy) and the founding of The New Inquiry.**

Returning to Williams' write-up on the founding of TNI, I think many USIH contributors and followers will relate to the sense of alienation many "unestablished" youthful thinkers have in relation to the academy and the current intellectual establishment.

The article begins with brief bios of a few TNI founders---Rebecca Chapman, Helena Fitzgerald, and Willie Osterweil. There are several other editors, and their names populate the bottom of this page. But here's a slice from the opening (bolds mine):

Willie Osterweil, 25, an aspiring novelist who graduated magna cum laude from Cornell in 2009, found himself sweeping Brooklyn movie theaters for $7.25 an hour. And the closest that Helena Fitzgerald, a recent Columbia graduate, got was an interview at a top magazine, during which the editor dismissed her literary career dreams, telling her, “C’mon, that’s not realistic.”

Sounds all too familiar, I'm sure, to those highly-qualified-but-young historians making ends meet by being "subway" or commuter "scholars"--traipsing about the landscape of higher education, teaching surveys at institutions known more for training than cultivating the life of the mind.

Williams' narrative continues:

[This] explains, in a way, how they all ended up on a crisp November night, huddled together at an invitation-only party at a cramped, bookshelved apartment on the Upper East Side. It was the weekly meeting of The New Inquiry, a scrappy online journal and roving clubhouse that functions as an Intellectuals Anonymous of sorts for desperate members of the city’s literary underclass barred from the publishing establishment. Fueled by B.Y.O.B. bourbon, impressive degrees and the angst that comes with being young and unmoored, members spend their hours filling the air with talk of Edmund Wilson and poststructuralism.

Desperate? Perhaps. Scrappy? Absolutely. ...And what's wrong with BYOB gatherings? :) ...Continuing:

Lately, they have been catching the eye of the literary elite, earning praise that sounds as extravagantly brainy as the thesis-like articles that The New Inquiry uploads every few days.

Nice. I'm sure it's the only goal of all the editors to leave behind this juvenile format for the luxury and safety of more established modes of intellectual being.

And here's the passage that inspired this post's title:

There was no thought of turning a profit. But who cared? No one was making any money on the traditional path, anyway. "There’s something incredibly liberating," Ms. Rosenfelt said, "when you realize that climbing that ladder is a ladder to nowhere." Ms. Chapman added: "My whole life, I had been doing everything everybody told me. I went to the right school. I got really good grades. I got all the internships. Then, I couldn’t do anything."

That phrase---"a ladder to nowhere"---will no doubt echo through my mind, as well as the minds of many others, as we await word in relation to our own job searches, whether in academia or beyond. Though I have almost fifteen years on Rosenfelt, I share her sense of alienation. I can confirm her disaffection with "the process", which is a bramble of entanglements continually adding just one thing more to the requirements needed to "arrive." Even now popular literature dissects "emerging adults" while America's corporate and intellectual structures steadily delay that very cohort's integration into adult structures.

Continuing:

Despite its slacker-revolutionary spirit, The New Inquiry is starting to tiptoe toward the publishing mainstream. ...Even though staff members routinely serve up gloomy eulogies over the “death of print,” the publication plans to roll out a quarterly print edition next year, along with an iPad magazine for $2 a month. Its breakout stars are even starting to climb publishing’s “ladder to nowhere.”

Nice.

This is not to say that the generational angst fueling The New Inquiry is likely to vanish soon. At the most recent salon two weeks ago, Will Canine, the operations director, showed up with 5 o’clock shadow after spending 35 hours in jail following his arrest at the Occupy Wall Street protests. Tim Barker, a junior at Columbia, said he was drawn to the salons for the chance to “discuss ideas at an extremely high level, without worrying about status or material support of traditional institutions: publishing houses or universities.” He added, though, that while he aspires to be a history professor, he was “extremely conscious of the contraction of job opportunities” in publishing and academia.

It's great to see a historian in the mix here. And it goes to my point above about how the spirit behind TNI cuts across the life of the mind.

Read the whole article here.

As a postscript, I hope I wasn't the only one who found the title of the article---"The Literary Cubs"---condescending. It denigrates the youthfulness of the founders, and belittles their intellectual sensibilities. It makes their work seem "cute." By implication, the title also (accidentally?) turns Internet publishing into yet one more right of passage needed before one arrives at professional adulthood.

I'm sure that TNI editors, upon seeing the title, felt the same impulse of exasperation---to put it nicely---as I did. We all know that EXPERIENCE is the only route to wisdom, yes? And wisdom is not to found in the alienation of youth and disaffection with the establishment; only experience will keep us from repeating the mistakes of the past. Right. - TL

---------------------------------
* The article was published in today's print edition under the title "Literary Cubs."

**Apart from Blake, who teaches at Columbia University, the rest of the plenary consisted of George Cotkin (Cal Poly), Rochelle Gurstein (Independent Scholar), Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (Syracuse University), Wilfred McClay (University of Tennessee), and David Steigerwald (The Ohio State University). Each of the panelists released those essays for re-publication in a collection, loosely based on last year's conference, that is currently being considered for publication by Palgrave Macmillan. The editors of that volume include the aforementioned Lasch-Quinn and McClay, as well as Hunter Heyck, Julian Nemeth, and myself.

Love Letters to Limbaugh

The legendary right-wing radio jockey Rush Limbaugh never lacks for attention. But it’s rare for him to be the center of intellectual history discourse. And it’s even less common for him to be the subject of a sonnet written by a respected intellectual historian. But that’s what happened this week when Wilfred McClay, the SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, friend of USIH, and author of the award winning The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, offered up an unqualified defense of the (in)famous radio jockey in this month’s edition of Commentary. McClay’s essay, “How to Understand Rush Limbaugh,” has gained wide attention among liberal intellectuals thanks to Jonathan Chait’s response over at The New Republic, where he charges McClay with ignoring inconvenient facts that might complicate his “ode to the goodness of Rush Limbaugh.”

Although I largely agree with Chait’s rather harsh assessment, let me begin with where I think McClay is right. He argues that liberal intellectuals schizophrenically charge Limbaugh with being a conservative puppet master and with being a drug-addled “big fat idiot.” I think McClay is right here. Most liberals don’t get Limbaugh’s appeal, in part because they never listen to him and generally lack curiosity about him. As someone who listens to Limbaugh’s radio program semi-regularly, I understand why he’s the most popular radio host in the nation. Limbaugh is a comedian who doubles as a political judo master in that he almost always successfully turns the tables on his liberal detractors. Take last year when the Obama administration thought it strategically wise, not to mention subtly comedic, to use Limbaugh as its whipping boy, to tie Obama’s congressional opponents to the polemical radio host, as if Limbaugh would act as an albatross on the Republican Party. Well, as Limbaugh might ask, who’s laughing now?

But though McClay accurately analyzes liberal myopia regarding Limbaugh, his understanding of Limbaugh’s place in the larger political and cultural context is equally myopic. Here’s a taste:

Without Limbaugh’s influence, talk radio might well have become a dreary medium of loud voices, relentless anger, and seething resentment, the sort of thing that the New York screamer Joe Pyne had pioneered in the 50s and 60s—“go gargle with razor blades,” he liked to tell his callers as he hung up on them—and that one can still see pop up in some of Limbaugh’s lesser epigones. Or it might have descended to the sometimes amusing but corrosive nonstop vulgarity of a Howard Stern. Limbaugh himself can be edgy, though almost always within PG-rated boundaries. But what he gave talk radio was a sense of sheer fun, of lightness, humor, and wit, whether indulging in his self-parodying Muhammad Ali–like braggadocio, drawing on his vast array of American pop-cultural reference points, or, in moving impromptu mini-sermons, reminding his listeners of the need to stay hopeful, work hard, and count their blessings as Americans. In such moments, and in many other moments besides, he reminds one of the affirmative spirit of Ronald Reagan and, like Reagan, reminds his listeners of the better angels of their nature. He transmutes the anger and frustration of millions of Americans into something more constructive.

More constructive? Chait documents some of the ways in which Limbaugh has been less than constructive, such as hyping up conspiracies that Obama is a foreigner out to destroy the United States from within:

All right, little Barry is back in Indonesia, and they're all happy over there. Little Barry Soetoro is back and they're all happy over there in Indonesia. In fact, he was someplace in India, he was introduced by somebody from Kenya, and the woman says, “As a fellow Kenyan, Mr. President,” of course everybody looked the other way, “What do you mean fellow Kenyan, we don't want to hear this,” and now little Barry is back.

Chait also addresses Limbaugh’s very real record of race baiting, of stroking the egos and stoking the anxieties of whites in the manner of George Wallace. This has been an easy sell with a black man occupying the Oval Office. A recent tidbit:

You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety but in Obama's America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, “Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on,” and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he's white.

By ignoring Limbaugh’s less than constructive provocations, McClay’s Commentary article positions him as a conservative culture warrior, rather than a dispassionate, scholarly chronicler. Which is fine for several reasons. First, I’m not one of those rah-rah objectivity types. Objectivity is overrated. Second, McClay obviously brackets off his serious scholarship, on display in his books and at the most recent USIH conference, from his political commentary (or, at least, I bracket them off in my mind). And third, I would not begrudge McClay the larger audience he will gain by writing for Commentary, or from being “heartily” endorsed by Limbaugh over the air (which he was).

That said, some intellectual contradictions need exploration. McClay concludes his Commentary essay as follows:

The critics may be correct that the flourishing of talk radio is a sign of something wrong in our culture. But they mistake the effect for the cause. Talk radio is not the cause, but the corrective. In our own time, and in the person of Rush Limbaugh, along with others of his talk-radio brethren, a problem of long-standing in our culture has reached a critical stage: the growing loss of confidence in our elite cultural institutions, including the media, universities, and the agencies of government. The posture and policies of the Obama presidency, using temporary majorities and legislative trickery to shove through massive unread bills that will likely damage the nation and may subvert the Constitution, have brought this distrust to a higher level. The medium of talk radio has played a critical role in giving articulate shape and force to the resistance. If it is at times a crude and bumptious medium, it sometimes has to be, to disarm the false pieties and self-righteous gravitas in which our current elites too often clothe themselves. Genuinely democratic speech tends to be just that way, in case we have forgotten.

McClay thus thinks of Limbaugh as a champion of those who would take on the despised “new class,” putting McClay in the same camp of neoconservative thinkers such as Daniel Bell (“new class” thought is discussed here, here, and here). Let’s return to Rush. Here’s what he had to say on his program in 1994 during the dust-up over the National History Standards, in part authored by UCLA historian Gary Nash, who defended interpretation and exploration as the goals of history education:

What? History is an exploration? Let me tell you something folks. History is real simple. You know what history is? It’s what happened. It’s no more. The problem you get into is when guys like Gary Nash try to skew history by saying, "Well, let's interpret what happened because maybe we don’t find the truth in the facts, or at least we don’t like the truth as it’s presented. So let’s change the interpretation a little bit so that it will be the way we wished it were." Well, that's not what history is. History is what happened, and history ought to be nothing more than the quest to find out what happened.

McClay obviously can’t endorse such simplistic anti-intellectualism. (Hell, if Limbaugh were honest, he wouldn’t endorse his own diatribe, since he’s constantly exploring and interpreting the past.) So I conclude with a question for readers: How do neoconservative intellectuals who lambaste the “new class” reconcile what appears to be anti-intellectualism with the fact that they are intellectuals? (I ask this question fully recognizing its unfairness, given that we’re all riddled with contradiction, especially when we enter the political realm.)

Love Letters to Limbaugh

The legendary right-wing radio jockey Rush Limbaugh never lacks for attention. But it’s rare for him to be the center of intellectual history discourse. And it’s even less common for him to be the subject of a sonnet written by a respected intellectual historian. But that’s what happened this week when Wilfred McClay, the SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, friend of USIH, and author of the award winning The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, offered up an unqualified defense of the (in)famous radio jockey in this month’s edition of Commentary. McClay’s essay, “How to Understand Rush Limbaugh,” has gained wide attention among liberal intellectuals thanks to Jonathan Chait’s response over at The New Republic, where he charges McClay with ignoring inconvenient facts that might complicate his “ode to the goodness of Rush Limbaugh.”

Although I largely agree with Chait’s rather harsh assessment, let me begin with where I think McClay is right. He argues that liberal intellectuals schizophrenically charge Limbaugh with being a conservative puppet master and with being a drug-addled “big fat idiot.” I think McClay is right here. Most liberals don’t get Limbaugh’s appeal, in part because they never listen to him and generally lack curiosity about him. As someone who listens to Limbaugh’s radio program semi-regularly, I understand why he’s the most popular radio host in the nation. Limbaugh is a comedian who doubles as a political judo master in that he almost always successfully turns the tables on his liberal detractors. Take last year when the Obama administration thought it strategically wise, not to mention subtly comedic, to use Limbaugh as its whipping boy, to tie Obama’s congressional opponents to the polemical radio host, as if Limbaugh would act as an albatross on the Republican Party. Well, as Limbaugh might ask, who’s laughing now?

But though McClay accurately analyzes liberal myopia regarding Limbaugh, his understanding of Limbaugh’s place in the larger political and cultural context is equally myopic. Here’s a taste:

Without Limbaugh’s influence, talk radio might well have become a dreary medium of loud voices, relentless anger, and seething resentment, the sort of thing that the New York screamer Joe Pyne had pioneered in the 50s and 60s—“go gargle with razor blades,” he liked to tell his callers as he hung up on them—and that one can still see pop up in some of Limbaugh’s lesser epigones. Or it might have descended to the sometimes amusing but corrosive nonstop vulgarity of a Howard Stern. Limbaugh himself can be edgy, though almost always within PG-rated boundaries. But what he gave talk radio was a sense of sheer fun, of lightness, humor, and wit, whether indulging in his self-parodying Muhammad Ali–like braggadocio, drawing on his vast array of American pop-cultural reference points, or, in moving impromptu mini-sermons, reminding his listeners of the need to stay hopeful, work hard, and count their blessings as Americans. In such moments, and in many other moments besides, he reminds one of the affirmative spirit of Ronald Reagan and, like Reagan, reminds his listeners of the better angels of their nature. He transmutes the anger and frustration of millions of Americans into something more constructive.

More constructive? Chait documents some of the ways in which Limbaugh has been less than constructive, such as hyping up conspiracies that Obama is a foreigner out to destroy the United States from within:

All right, little Barry is back in Indonesia, and they're all happy over there. Little Barry Soetoro is back and they're all happy over there in Indonesia. In fact, he was someplace in India, he was introduced by somebody from Kenya, and the woman says, “As a fellow Kenyan, Mr. President,” of course everybody looked the other way, “What do you mean fellow Kenyan, we don't want to hear this,” and now little Barry is back.

Chait also addresses Limbaugh’s very real record of race baiting, of stroking the egos and stoking the anxieties of whites in the manner of George Wallace. This has been an easy sell with a black man occupying the Oval Office. A recent tidbit:

You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety but in Obama's America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, “Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on,” and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he's white.

By ignoring Limbaugh’s less than constructive provocations, McClay’s Commentary article positions him as a conservative culture warrior, rather than a dispassionate, scholarly chronicler. Which is fine for several reasons. First, I’m not one of those rah-rah objectivity types. Objectivity is overrated. Second, McClay obviously brackets off his serious scholarship, on display in his books and at the most recent USIH conference, from his political commentary (or, at least, I bracket them off in my mind). And third, I would not begrudge McClay the larger audience he will gain by writing for Commentary, or from being “heartily” endorsed by Limbaugh over the air (which he was).

That said, some intellectual contradictions need exploration. McClay concludes his Commentary essay as follows:

The critics may be correct that the flourishing of talk radio is a sign of something wrong in our culture. But they mistake the effect for the cause. Talk radio is not the cause, but the corrective. In our own time, and in the person of Rush Limbaugh, along with others of his talk-radio brethren, a problem of long-standing in our culture has reached a critical stage: the growing loss of confidence in our elite cultural institutions, including the media, universities, and the agencies of government. The posture and policies of the Obama presidency, using temporary majorities and legislative trickery to shove through massive unread bills that will likely damage the nation and may subvert the Constitution, have brought this distrust to a higher level. The medium of talk radio has played a critical role in giving articulate shape and force to the resistance. If it is at times a crude and bumptious medium, it sometimes has to be, to disarm the false pieties and self-righteous gravitas in which our current elites too often clothe themselves. Genuinely democratic speech tends to be just that way, in case we have forgotten.

McClay thus thinks of Limbaugh as a champion of those who would take on the despised “new class,” putting McClay in the same camp of neoconservative thinkers such as Daniel Bell (“new class” thought is discussed here, here, and here). Let’s return to Rush. Here’s what he had to say on his program in 1994 during the dust-up over the National History Standards, in part authored by UCLA historian Gary Nash, who defended interpretation and exploration as the goals of history education:

What? History is an exploration? Let me tell you something folks. History is real simple. You know what history is? It’s what happened. It’s no more. The problem you get into is when guys like Gary Nash try to skew history by saying, "Well, let's interpret what happened because maybe we don’t find the truth in the facts, or at least we don’t like the truth as it’s presented. So let’s change the interpretation a little bit so that it will be the way we wished it were." Well, that's not what history is. History is what happened, and history ought to be nothing more than the quest to find out what happened.

McClay obviously can’t endorse such simplistic anti-intellectualism. (Hell, if Limbaugh were honest, he wouldn’t endorse his own diatribe, since he’s constantly exploring and interpreting the past.) So I conclude with a question for readers: How do neoconservative intellectuals who lambaste the “new class” reconcile what appears to be anti-intellectualism with the fact that they are intellectuals? (I ask this question fully recognizing its unfairness, given that we’re all riddled with contradiction, especially when we enter the political realm.)

Tim's Light Reading (1/20/2010)

1. The Marketplace of Ideas: Louis Menand's new book---subtitled Reform and Resistance in American Universities---is getting a fair amount of attention. Here's a solid review in Slate.com, but I've seen other excellent reflections here (WSJ, Wilfred McClay) and here (Bookforum, Jessica Loudis).

2. Dissent's "Intellectuals and Their America": I'm very interested in this forum but have not yet had the time to explore it fully. Have you? Feel free to color my reading.

3. Graduate-level Liberal Arts---In Business Schools: So the NYT has unintentionally(?) documented the sorry state of liberal arts education in America by showing how a liberal arts mindset has to be remedially taught in graduate professional school. Maybe this foreshadows a burgeoning market for un/under-employed humanities PhDs?!

4. An Addition to the Annals of African-American Intellectual History: My online colleague Sharon Williams, editor of The Chicago History Journal (a weblog), has relayed some of the biography of the literary critic, Chicagoan, and former Duke University professor Kenny J. Williams (1927-2003).

5. An Upcoming Conference on Neoliberalism: My home institution, UIC, is planning a conference on neoliberalism courtesy of Walter Benn Michaels. I'm planning to attend, so let me know if you'll be there too.

6. Common Education Standards for Schools: E.D. Hirsch reflects on the weaknesses of the Common Core Standards Initiative sponsored by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. This initiative applies to college/university professor types because it deals with college readiness. And Hirsch believes a major weakness to be the lack of content standards---much of which deals directly with history, or at least historical topics.

7. Butler's Critical Americans: The October 2009 issue of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Vol. 8, no. 4) contains a review of Leslie Butler's Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform. The reviewer is Christopher McKnight Nichols.

8. Anti-intellectualism and Ignorance Today: This conspiracy-theory video on Obama, Catholicism, and domestic politics shows why we need to study intellectual history in America. I've never seen so much ignorance packed into a 3:36 minute clip. Wow.

9. For Fun: What type---meaning font---are you? The password is "character." I came up Expanded Antique; here's a sample.

Tim's Light Reading (1/20/2010)

1. The Marketplace of Ideas: Louis Menand's new book---subtitled Reform and Resistance in American Universities---is getting a fair amount of attention. Here's a solid review in Slate.com, but I've seen other excellent reflections here (WSJ, Wilfred McClay) and here (Bookforum, Jessica Loudis).

2. Dissent's "Intellectuals and Their America": I'm very interested in this forum but have not yet had the time to explore it fully. Have you? Feel free to color my reading.

3. Graduate-level Liberal Arts---In Business Schools: So the NYT has unintentionally(?) documented the sorry state of liberal arts education in America by showing how a liberal arts mindset has to be remedially taught in graduate professional school. Maybe this foreshadows a burgeoning market for un/under-employed humanities PhDs?!

4. An Addition to the Annals of African-American Intellectual History: My online colleague Sharon Williams, editor of The Chicago History Journal (a weblog), has relayed some of the biography of the literary critic, Chicagoan, and former Duke University professor Kenny J. Williams (1927-2003).

5. An Upcoming Conference on Neoliberalism: My home institution, UIC, is planning a conference on neoliberalism courtesy of Walter Benn Michaels. I'm planning to attend, so let me know if you'll be there too.

6. Common Education Standards for Schools: E.D. Hirsch reflects on the weaknesses of the Common Core Standards Initiative sponsored by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. This initiative applies to college/university professor types because it deals with college readiness. And Hirsch believes a major weakness to be the lack of content standards---much of which deals directly with history, or at least historical topics.

7. Butler's Critical Americans: The October 2009 issue of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Vol. 8, no. 4) contains a review of Leslie Butler's Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform. The reviewer is Christopher McKnight Nichols.

8. Anti-intellectualism and Ignorance Today: This conspiracy-theory video on Obama, Catholicism, and domestic politics shows why we need to study intellectual history in America. I've never seen so much ignorance packed into a 3:36 minute clip. Wow.

9. For Fun: What type---meaning font---are you? The password is "character." I came up Expanded Antique; here's a sample.

Tim's Light Reading (10/5/2009)

1. Historical Counterfactuals. Via the Matters of Substance weblog, I learned that University of Nottingham Professor Daniel Nolan is seeking input on a paper of his titled "Why Historians (And Everyone Else) Should Care About Counterfactuals." From his home institution's website, I learned the following: "Daniel Nolan is Professor of Philosophy in the Philosophy Department at The University of Nottingham. He works on a range of topics: primarily metaphysics, but also philosophy of science, philosophy of language, meta-ethics, philosophical logic." Here is his personal website.

2. Comedy As Cultural Criticism. As an inveterate Monty Python fan, I can't resist passing on this NYT television review of the upcoming documentary hosted by the Independent Film Channel, titled “Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut).". Thanks to Michael Kramer for making me aware of the article. My favorite part of the write-up, and your obligatory great books reference of the day, was this:

"To find the equivalent of the Pythons’ kind of wordplay and punning (verbal and visual) you have to turn to written humor, which may be where some of the Pythons’ inspiration came from in the first place. You could make a case, for example, that “Tristram Shandy” is the most pythonesque book in all of English literature."

Everyone should know that Robert M. Hutchins was the prime advocate for including Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy in Britannica's 1952 set of the Great Books of the Western World (volume 36).

3. More Job Market Considerations? InsideHigherEd published another article related to graduate students in philosophy and potential dos-and-don'ts related to job seeking. Productive or not, the first one created quite a stir. Yet again, I wonder how history search committees view the same matter---meaning publications? In the same kind of mixed way? Is the lack of publications viewed negatively? On the other hand, are too many viewed negatively? Do search committees attend to the quality of the publication for junior scholar/grad student applicants? Or is initiative a plus, regardless of early career quality? I ask because I don't recall seeing this issue discussed by AHA, either through the org's weblog or Perspectives in History, within the past few years.

4. They Might Be Giants and the Philosophy of Science. Matthew Yglesias takes issue with philosophy of science forwarded by the musical group They Might Be Giants in a recent song, titled "Science Is Real" from a new CD/DVD release, "Here Comes Science." The group relies on a definition from Rudolf Carnap, and apparently Yglesias doesn't appreciate Carnap's definition of the subject: "Science is a system of statements based on direct experience and controlled by experimental verification.” Yglesias beef, in essence, is that Carnap's definition isn't instrumental enough in the Deweyian tradition---that Carnap's line is too bright between the researcher and the object researched. Yeglesias further laments:

I think it’s unfortunate that people trying to enhance the social prestige of science and scientists (which is basically what the TMBG song is about) have this tendency to want to fall back on this kind of naive realism and positivism as their means for doing so.

This is true in terms of the philosophy of science, but I think he's suffering from a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Based on the visible tradition of anti-intellectualism in this country, particularly the hostile-toward-science variety (e.g. think global warming, evolution), it would seem that we can live with some subtle promotion of science by a band that sings primarily to our youth. - TL

Tim's Light Reading (10/5/2009)

1. Historical Counterfactuals. Via the Matters of Substance weblog, I learned that University of Nottingham Professor Daniel Nolan is seeking input on a paper of his titled "Why Historians (And Everyone Else) Should Care About Counterfactuals." From his home institution's website, I learned the following: "Daniel Nolan is Professor of Philosophy in the Philosophy Department at The University of Nottingham. He works on a range of topics: primarily metaphysics, but also philosophy of science, philosophy of language, meta-ethics, philosophical logic." Here is his personal website.

2. Comedy As Cultural Criticism. As an inveterate Monty Python fan, I can't resist passing on this NYT television review of the upcoming documentary hosted by the Independent Film Channel, titled “Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut).". Thanks to Michael Kramer for making me aware of the article. My favorite part of the write-up, and your obligatory great books reference of the day, was this:

"To find the equivalent of the Pythons’ kind of wordplay and punning (verbal and visual) you have to turn to written humor, which may be where some of the Pythons’ inspiration came from in the first place. You could make a case, for example, that “Tristram Shandy” is the most pythonesque book in all of English literature."

Everyone should know that Robert M. Hutchins was the prime advocate for including Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy in Britannica's 1952 set of the Great Books of the Western World (volume 36).

3. More Job Market Considerations? InsideHigherEd published another article related to graduate students in philosophy and potential dos-and-don'ts related to job seeking. Productive or not, the first one created quite a stir. Yet again, I wonder how history search committees view the same matter---meaning publications? In the same kind of mixed way? Is the lack of publications viewed negatively? On the other hand, are too many viewed negatively? Do search committees attend to the quality of the publication for junior scholar/grad student applicants? Or is initiative a plus, regardless of early career quality? I ask because I don't recall seeing this issue discussed by AHA, either through the org's weblog or Perspectives in History, within the past few years.

4. They Might Be Giants and the Philosophy of Science. Matthew Yglesias takes issue with philosophy of science forwarded by the musical group They Might Be Giants in a recent song, titled "Science Is Real" from a new CD/DVD release, "Here Comes Science." The group relies on a definition from Rudolf Carnap, and apparently Yglesias doesn't appreciate Carnap's definition of the subject: "Science is a system of statements based on direct experience and controlled by experimental verification.” Yglesias beef, in essence, is that Carnap's definition isn't instrumental enough in the Deweyian tradition---that Carnap's line is too bright between the researcher and the object researched. Yeglesias further laments:

I think it’s unfortunate that people trying to enhance the social prestige of science and scientists (which is basically what the TMBG song is about) have this tendency to want to fall back on this kind of naive realism and positivism as their means for doing so.

This is true in terms of the philosophy of science, but I think he's suffering from a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Based on the visible tradition of anti-intellectualism in this country, particularly the hostile-toward-science variety (e.g. think global warming, evolution), it would seem that we can live with some subtle promotion of science by a band that sings primarily to our youth. - TL

David Brooks' Short History Of Humility And Narcissism: What's Missing?

A September 15 New York Times op-ed by David Brooks, titled "High-Five Nation," explores the notion of humility since World War II. Set off, no doubt, by the recent outburst of South Carolina's Republican congressman Joe Wilson---who is mentioned in the article---Brooks looks backward for the roots of incivility and narcissism in the United States. [Thanks to John Fea for bringing the op-ed to my attention.]

Brooks's piece is an extended compare-and-contrast between 1945 and today. He looks closely at Western democratic humility at the close of World War II, as opposed to the pomposity of fascism, and then quickly brings the narrative to the present with only brief notes of Muhammad Ali and Norman Mailer's self-promoting personas. The present includes citations of Joe Wilson, Kanye West, and Michael Jordan. The only thing missing at the end was Tucker Max. But I admire Brooks's restrained conclusion: "This isn’t the death of civilization. It’s just the culture in which we live." It isn't worth it to get riled up over people like Mr. Max; indeed, if you do, you're feeding the beast.

Christopher Lasch's name isn't mentioned, but his thinking is all over Brooks's op-ed. The article is clearly a extension, a brief updating, of Lasch's Culture of Narcissism. I've read around this book for ten years, but have somehow avoided a close study. Given my sympathies I'm surprised by my own neglect.

But I don't need to Lasch to tell me about how things have developed---and how Brooks's op-ed is short-sighted in its hindsight. By stopping at World War II---an event that interrupted a great many trends in U.S. history---Brooks ignores the means by which we are assaulted on a daily basis with excess personality, incivility, crass behavior, rudeness, and the constant stream of self-promotion. Of course I'm talking about newspapers, television, film, radio, and now the internet. Because the barrier of literacy is missing with the middle three media, they become the culprits of quickening. Those media incessantly broadcast the beams of narcissism. But even a focus on media is somewhat myopic.

The real culprit is the desire for fame and riches---the desire to be a star. Film enabled the star system paradigm and star worship, but the desire to be a star, of any kind seemingly, has become part of the so-called American Dream since the 1920s. The star system, in sum, is part and parcel with the advent of American Modernity after World War I and the rise of the film system. Today everyone seemingly wants to be "in pictures"---no matter the level of nastiness or crudeness it takes to get there. I'm not denying a link to narcissism or Lasch, who I believe is feeding Brooks's thinking. It's just that the roots of the problem run deeper than WWII.

So rather than high-five Brooks for his piece, I'd give him the more subdued Obama fist bump. The op-ed is on the right track, it just stops a few years short of the most relevant historical touchstones. - TL

David Brooks' Short History Of Humility And Narcissism: What's Missing?

A September 15 New York Times op-ed by David Brooks, titled "High-Five Nation," explores the notion of humility since World War II. Set off, no doubt, by the recent outburst of South Carolina's Republican congressman Joe Wilson---who is mentioned in the article---Brooks looks backward for the roots of incivility and narcissism in the United States. [Thanks to John Fea for bringing the op-ed to my attention.]

Brooks's piece is an extended compare-and-contrast between 1945 and today. He looks closely at Western democratic humility at the close of World War II, as opposed to the pomposity of fascism, and then quickly brings the narrative to the present with only brief notes of Muhammad Ali and Norman Mailer's self-promoting personas. The present includes citations of Joe Wilson, Kanye West, and Michael Jordan. The only thing missing at the end was Tucker Max. But I admire Brooks's restrained conclusion: "This isn’t the death of civilization. It’s just the culture in which we live." It isn't worth it to get riled up over people like Mr. Max; indeed, if you do, you're feeding the beast.

Christopher Lasch's name isn't mentioned, but his thinking is all over Brooks's op-ed. The article is clearly a extension, a brief updating, of Lasch's Culture of Narcissism. I've read around this book for ten years, but have somehow avoided a close study. Given my sympathies I'm surprised by my own neglect.

But I don't need to Lasch to tell me about how things have developed---and how Brooks's op-ed is short-sighted in its hindsight. By stopping at World War II---an event that interrupted a great many trends in U.S. history---Brooks ignores the means by which we are assaulted on a daily basis with excess personality, incivility, crass behavior, rudeness, and the constant stream of self-promotion. Of course I'm talking about newspapers, television, film, radio, and now the internet. Because the barrier of literacy is missing with the middle three media, they become the culprits of quickening. Those media incessantly broadcast the beams of narcissism. But even a focus on media is somewhat myopic.

The real culprit is the desire for fame and riches---the desire to be a star. Film enabled the star system paradigm and star worship, but the desire to be a star, of any kind seemingly, has become part of the so-called American Dream since the 1920s. The star system, in sum, is part and parcel with the advent of American Modernity after World War I and the rise of the film system. Today everyone seemingly wants to be "in pictures"---no matter the level of nastiness or crudeness it takes to get there. I'm not denying a link to narcissism or Lasch, who I believe is feeding Brooks's thinking. It's just that the roots of the problem run deeper than WWII.

So rather than high-five Brooks for his piece, I'd give him the more subdued Obama fist bump. The op-ed is on the right track, it just stops a few years short of the most relevant historical touchstones. - TL