On Thursday, February 5, 2004 at 19:23:46 (-0500) Doug Henwood writes: >... >"'Action Will Be Taken': Left Anti-intellectualism and Its >Discontents," by Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood, and Christian >Parenti (comments highly welcome!)
A very thoughtful piece. I do have some comments. I applaud your call for more thinking and a desire to get out the word about how the world works. It does strike me though that there is a tremendous amount of room to combine critical thinking with undercutting the opposition, a favorite tactic usually employed by the activist powerful. I was reading the Sermon on the Mount yesterday and was struck by how many of the things said I agreed with (I'm not religious). The Sermon is in many ways profoundly conservative: don't beat your chest about the alms you give, for example. This lesson is totally ignored, the practice of publicly patting yourself on the back (think of PGA tour players who give .0004 percent of their winnings to charity and are lauded by announcers for their deep humanity) deeply ingrained in our culture, and embraced by so-called conservatives. I sometimes feel that the left should really be called "true American rock-ribbed patriot conservatives" because so many of the values of the left align with the (at least) rhetorical claims of conservatism as I see it. You know: self-sacrifice, not mortgaging your future for present pleasures, real distaste for power (as opposed to organization), humility, gentleness in the face of aggression, generosity instead of mindless accumulation, a recognition and fear of greed (the single greatest cancer eating at our private and public lives, which atomizes us so effectively), etc. You want more people to read "Bakunin, Marx and Fanon", yet you don't want a movement that is headed by a few pointy-headed intellectuals. I think it is time to write alternative works that I can hand to my in-laws, who have only heard of one of the three and who would stop reading Marx as a worthless waste of time after the first four sentences. I'm all for theorizing, but I agree with Chomsky, and disagree with Zizek's rather careless criticism of him. Chomsky doesn't ever say, explicitly or implicitly, "you don't have to do any theory". First, he is very skeptical of the value of a lot of the "theory" that he has seen for very good reasons: most of it is unsupported garbage. Second, he applauds theorizing especially when it can be expressed to others in plain language, as, for example he does when he talks about (for example) Thomas Ferguson's fine work theorizing how much of American political life works, and many, many others who have admirably done the work of hard-core empirical research and who can turn around and share their work with a wide audience. So, I'd say, it's time to re-engage Marx's goal: rewrite a book that explains in outline all of society, in 200 pages or less. Then write volumes two and three for more details. Then, as times change, update the book, don't let it get musty and irrelevant. Create a new bible that you rewrite every 5 years, but don't worship it, be willing to change your ideas (another core conservative principle). The book should start with moral precepts drawn from the powerful, truly conservative and admirable core of our culture that is trampled on, violated daily, by the laughable monsters we call "conservatives" who when confronted by sayings such as "blessed are the peacemakers" hiss and shrivel. Bill
