The Dumbest Generation (31 page)
Read The Dumbest Generation Online
Authors: Mark Bauerlein
Our society is so parceled out into professional and political niches that direct and open ideological combat infrequently takes place. Intellectuals operate in restricted settings—teachers in classrooms, professors at scholarly conferences, editors in editorial offices, foundation and think tank personnel at headquarters, bloggers at home . . . Professors talk to other professors in a stilted, quasi-technical language, and in spite of their disputatiousness, they mirror one another more than they realize, agreeing on Big Questions and quibbling over small ones. Advocacy groups deliberate in rooms filled with members only, letting the ideas that unify them go fallow and flat, the discussion turning ever to tactics, not premises. Web-based intellectuals develop an audience of agreeable minds, and the comment rolls in blog entries sound like an echo chamber. Many news-rooms and publishing ventures constitute a monoculture, a subtle ideological radar passing within as objectivity but in fact typecasting the content workers address in their jobs before they are even conscious of it.
Culture wars break down the walls. They don’t stop the sectarianism, and they can aggravate group commitments, but they also pierce the insulation of each group. Insiders may grow more polarized, but they have to face the arguments and strategies of outsiders. If they ignore them, keeping to themselves and shoring up turf, not articulating underlying values, they lose the war, for the theater has spread to the public square, and combatants can’t rely on the rhetoric that suffices within familiar niches. Twenty years ago, for example, when William Bennett, Allan Bloom, and other traditionalist conservatives attacked the campus for its leftist bias and abandonment of the classics, it did the professors no good to retort and deny in committee rooms and conference papers. Bennett spoke from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and politicians and journalists listened. Bloom’s
The Closing of the American Mind
lingered on best-seller lists for more than a year, selling one million copies in the months after its publication. The author even appeared on
Oprah.
To respond effectively, professors had to plead their case at the microphone and in the op-ed page, and they failed miserably. They had grooved their idiom in the mannered zones of academia, and they couldn’t revise it for public presentation.
The Closing of the American Mind
lingered on best-seller lists for more than a year, selling one million copies in the months after its publication. The author even appeared on
Oprah.
To respond effectively, professors had to plead their case at the microphone and in the op-ed page, and they failed miserably. They had grooved their idiom in the mannered zones of academia, and they couldn’t revise it for public presentation.
The customary rites of professionalism and rehearsals of group identity didn’t work, and college professors have been nervous about public attention ever since. Academics resented the publicity Bloom, Bennett, and other traditionalists received, while traditionalists grumbled that it had no effect on the campus. (Ten years after writing the foreword to
The Closing of the American Mind,
Saul Bellow stated, “I’m certain it has affected persons. I don’t think it’s affected departments or institutions, to judge by the going trend.”) But while none of the contenders were satisfied, the episode demonstrates the value of culture wars operations. Academia had grown too complacent and self-involved. The professors had become too caught up with themselves, and they needed a shake-up. Any group pledged to uphold or to dismantle certain values and norms should never grow too comfortable with its agenda, or too closed in its deliberations. Insularity is unhealthy. It gives insiders false pictures of the world and overconfidence in their opinions. It consoles them on all sides with compliant reflections. But the comforts of belonging don’t prepare them to leave the group, to enter the marketplace of ideas and defeat adversaries with the weapons of the intellect, not the devices of group standing, party membership, accreditation, and inside information. However intelligent they are, people who think and act within their niche avoid the irritating presence of ideological foes, but they also forgo one of the preconditions of learning: hearing other sides. Hearing them, that is, in earnest and positive versions, not through the lens of people who don’t endorse them. They develop their own positions, tautly and intricately, but can’t imagine others’. Again, in the words of John Stuart Mill: “They have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them.” A paradoxical effect sets in. The more secure they feel, the more limited their horizons and the more parochial their outlook.
The Closing of the American Mind,
Saul Bellow stated, “I’m certain it has affected persons. I don’t think it’s affected departments or institutions, to judge by the going trend.”) But while none of the contenders were satisfied, the episode demonstrates the value of culture wars operations. Academia had grown too complacent and self-involved. The professors had become too caught up with themselves, and they needed a shake-up. Any group pledged to uphold or to dismantle certain values and norms should never grow too comfortable with its agenda, or too closed in its deliberations. Insularity is unhealthy. It gives insiders false pictures of the world and overconfidence in their opinions. It consoles them on all sides with compliant reflections. But the comforts of belonging don’t prepare them to leave the group, to enter the marketplace of ideas and defeat adversaries with the weapons of the intellect, not the devices of group standing, party membership, accreditation, and inside information. However intelligent they are, people who think and act within their niche avoid the irritating presence of ideological foes, but they also forgo one of the preconditions of learning: hearing other sides. Hearing them, that is, in earnest and positive versions, not through the lens of people who don’t endorse them. They develop their own positions, tautly and intricately, but can’t imagine others’. Again, in the words of John Stuart Mill: “They have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them.” A paradoxical effect sets in. The more secure they feel, the more limited their horizons and the more parochial their outlook.
Culture wars intrude upon the parishes. They slow the impetus toward specialization. They don’t end partisanship, to be sure, but they do check the influence of one-note interest groups and narrow experts. And the rancor they evoke shouldn’t cancel the galvanizing challenges they pose. Opportunists and zealots join the fray, yes, but that’s the cost a society pays to ensure pluralism and fend off bias.
The process can slide into the equivalent of a shouting match, and two things that keep it grounded and productive are, once again, knowledge and tradition. An open society always contains elements that drift toward extremes, and advocacy groups tend to interpret local and temporary circumstances as grave signs of ideological danger. Knowledge and tradition restrain the campaigns they mount, measuring their strategies by the curtailing examples of American history and civics and literature. They tie the arguments of the moment to founding principles and ideas, and hold them up against the best expressions of them through time. The example of Martin Luther King’s dignified and unwavering nonviolence chastises social protest whenever it descends into vitriol and intolerance. The reluctant public service of George Washington, who filled the presidency for his country and not for private reward, embarrasses greedy politicians who use government as a stepping-stone to wealth. The bristling independence of the New York Intellectuals warns subsequent thinkers to beware fashionable ideas and the blandishments of popularity. Such object lessons ensure that skirmishes stay civil and evidence-based, and they censure a culture warrior who crosses lines of basic rights, freedoms, and respect. They breed sharper disputants, sending veterans of them into high positions in media, politics, and education better seasoned in ideological debate and with superior role models.
The presence of tradition and knowledge also keeps the process from sliding into relativism and power plays. In praising the overall effect of culture wars, we shouldn’t level all the outcomes or focus only on safeguarding fair procedures. Some norms are better than others, some doctrines should remain in effect, some theories are true and others false, and sometimes the wrong side wins the war. Sometimes, indeed, worthy traditions fall prey to the war, and essential knowledge gets buried as battles approach. Here we arrive at the national implications of the Dumbest Generation. The benighted mental condition of American youth today results from many causes, but one of them is precisely a particular culture-war outcome, the war over the status of youth fought four decades ago. From roughly 1955 to 1975, youth movements waged culture warfare on television and in recording studios, outside national conventions and inside university administration buildings, and the mentors who should have fought back surrendered. This was a novel army, a front never seen before, with adults facing an adolescent horde declaring the entire arsenal of the Establishment illegitimate.
Two generations on, we see the effects of the sovereignty of youth, and one of them bears upon culture wars to come. Put bluntly, few members of the rising cohort are ready to enlist in them properly outfitted with liberal learning and good archetypes. An able culture warrior passes long hours in libraries and in public debate. He knows the great arguments, and he applies them smoothly to the day’s issues. He acknowledges his better opponents, but never shies away from a skirmish. He mixes the arcane thesis with the engaging illustration, his rhetoric consistent with the loftiest sources but accessible to educated laypersons. It is the rare under-30-year-old who comes close to qualifying, even as a novice. They don’t read enough books and study enough artworks, or care enough to do so. They don’t ponder enough ideas or have the vocabulary to discuss them. They derive no lessons from history and revere few heroes outside pop culture and from before 1990.
For those few who are disposed to intellectual sport, they embark automatically disadvantaged by their social habitat. However serious their ambition and disciplined their reading, the would-be young intellectuals of today lack a vital component that earlier intellectuals enjoyed from their teens through college and that they credited for their later successes. It is: a youthworld of ideas and arguments, an intellectual forensic in the social settings of the young. The New York Intellectuals are a case in point. A 1998 documentary by Joseph Dorman titled
Arguing the World
profiles four of them—Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, and Irving Kristol—and each one credits a major part of his formation to the fiery polemical climate of City College in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s. Like all the other brainy but poor kids in the city, Bell and others attended City College purely for the education it provided—not for any direct privileges, contacts, or money it might bring. They wanted learning and colloquy, and their motives found ample room in the extraordinary habitat of the campus, the lead coming not from the teachers, but from the students. “Most of the teachers were dodos,” Bell recalls on camera, “and we educated ourselves.” Kristol agrees, stating in an essay many years earlier, “The education I got was pretty good, even if most of it was acquired outside the classroom” (Kristol). The cafeteria, not the seminar, was the debating place, and students divided themselves up into different alcoves, one for jocks, ROTC, Catholics, Zionists, African Americans, and the pro-Stalinist Left in Alcove 2 and the anti-Stalinist Left in Alcove 1. Bell, Howe, Kristol, Glazer, and many others who ended up making distinguished academic careers sidled into Alcove 1 each day for a sandwich and Coke and the latest pieces by Sidney Hook and Clement Greenberg. In Alcove 2, Kristol remembers only two men, both prominent scientists later on, one of them the convicted and executed spy Julius Rosenberg. Over lunch Alcove 1 taunted and berated Alcove 2, and the Stalinists tried not to reply, for they were under orders from the Party not to engage Trotskyists at any time—which shows just how much intellectual engagements mattered. The Trotskyists jockeyed with one another, too, running to class and returning an hour later to finish the argument. The experience, Kristol says, “put me in touch with people and ideas that prompted me to read and think and argue with a furious energy.” One commentator in the film, Morris Dickstein, calls City College back then “a school for political disputation,” and Howe marvels over the “atmosphere of perfervid, overly heated, overly excited intellectuality.” Books and ideas counted most, and citations from Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky filled the air. Students passed around copies of
Partisan Review
and short stories by James Joyce and Thomas Mann.
Arguing the World
profiles four of them—Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, and Irving Kristol—and each one credits a major part of his formation to the fiery polemical climate of City College in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s. Like all the other brainy but poor kids in the city, Bell and others attended City College purely for the education it provided—not for any direct privileges, contacts, or money it might bring. They wanted learning and colloquy, and their motives found ample room in the extraordinary habitat of the campus, the lead coming not from the teachers, but from the students. “Most of the teachers were dodos,” Bell recalls on camera, “and we educated ourselves.” Kristol agrees, stating in an essay many years earlier, “The education I got was pretty good, even if most of it was acquired outside the classroom” (Kristol). The cafeteria, not the seminar, was the debating place, and students divided themselves up into different alcoves, one for jocks, ROTC, Catholics, Zionists, African Americans, and the pro-Stalinist Left in Alcove 2 and the anti-Stalinist Left in Alcove 1. Bell, Howe, Kristol, Glazer, and many others who ended up making distinguished academic careers sidled into Alcove 1 each day for a sandwich and Coke and the latest pieces by Sidney Hook and Clement Greenberg. In Alcove 2, Kristol remembers only two men, both prominent scientists later on, one of them the convicted and executed spy Julius Rosenberg. Over lunch Alcove 1 taunted and berated Alcove 2, and the Stalinists tried not to reply, for they were under orders from the Party not to engage Trotskyists at any time—which shows just how much intellectual engagements mattered. The Trotskyists jockeyed with one another, too, running to class and returning an hour later to finish the argument. The experience, Kristol says, “put me in touch with people and ideas that prompted me to read and think and argue with a furious energy.” One commentator in the film, Morris Dickstein, calls City College back then “a school for political disputation,” and Howe marvels over the “atmosphere of perfervid, overly heated, overly excited intellectuality.” Books and ideas counted most, and citations from Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky filled the air. Students passed around copies of
Partisan Review
and short stories by James Joyce and Thomas Mann.
This was boot camp for culture warriors. Alcove 1 trained future intellectuals in political radicalism and intellectual rigor, standards of erudition and aesthetic taste. It fostered adversarial postures and loaded rhetoric, but it also demanded genuine reflection and study, and particularly a sense of fallibility. The students may have been hotheaded sophomores, but they turned their fierce analysis upon the worldly questions of the day and upon themselves. In
Arguing the World,
Kristol remembers the
Arguing the World,
Kristol remembers the
internal self-examination . . . trying to figure out our own radicalism, and particularly that absolutely overwhelming question that haunted us, namely, Was there something in Marxism and Leninism that led to Stalinism?
In 1939, no ideological question mattered more, especially after the Hitler-Stalin pact. The answer might turn these young intellectuals upside down. Self-examination could lead to the apprehension that everything they thought was wrong, wrong about the world and wrong about themselves all the way down to their radical self-image. But they didn’t care about self-esteem, nor did they aim to shore up a party line or preserve their heroes from accountability. To enter Alcove 1 and hold your own, you had to read daily newspapers and nineteenth-century books, polish your speech and test your convictions, and embrace an intellectual attitude throughout. Ideas had consequences—that was the faith. The truth must be found, and however young, poor, and powerless these individuals were, they felt directly implicated in the doings of politicians 6,000 miles away and in the writings of thinkers six decades before.
Twenty years later, a New Left came along and prosecuted a culture war that began the steady deterioration of intellectual life among young Americans. We should remember, though, that many of them, for a time at least, thought the same way about books and ideas even as they attacked the institutions that purveyed them. “We devoured books and articles both polemical and technical,” Todd Gitlin writes in his memoir
The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.
Tracts by Jean-Paul Sartre and C. Wright Mills circulated among them. Tom Hayden wrote his master’s thesis on Mill’s work and criticized the outlook of two graduates of Alcove 1, Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset, for the themes they developed in the 1950s. In his own memoir,
Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey,
ex-Berkeley radical David Horowitz recalls that the Bay of Pigs fiasco sent him not into the streets but to the library “to get a copy of
Imperialism: The Last Stage of Capitalism
and read it for the first time.” Gitlin, a former president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), goes so far as to remember his first colleagues in the movement as “steeped in a most traditional American individualism, especially the utopian edge of it expressed in the mid-nineteenth-century middle-class transcendentalism of Emerson and Whitman.” When they met to hash out the famous Port Huron Statement, they debated old cruxes such as the perfectibility of man and the dangers of utopian thinking, not to mention communism, anti-communism, and anti-anti-communism.
The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.
Tracts by Jean-Paul Sartre and C. Wright Mills circulated among them. Tom Hayden wrote his master’s thesis on Mill’s work and criticized the outlook of two graduates of Alcove 1, Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset, for the themes they developed in the 1950s. In his own memoir,
Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey,
ex-Berkeley radical David Horowitz recalls that the Bay of Pigs fiasco sent him not into the streets but to the library “to get a copy of
Imperialism: The Last Stage of Capitalism
and read it for the first time.” Gitlin, a former president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), goes so far as to remember his first colleagues in the movement as “steeped in a most traditional American individualism, especially the utopian edge of it expressed in the mid-nineteenth-century middle-class transcendentalism of Emerson and Whitman.” When they met to hash out the famous Port Huron Statement, they debated old cruxes such as the perfectibility of man and the dangers of utopian thinking, not to mention communism, anti-communism, and anti-anti-communism.
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