Christopher Lasch
The Revolt of the Elites (1995)
According to Walter Lippman...the "omnicompetent citizen" was an anachronism in the age of specialization. In any case, most citizens, he thought, cared very little about the substance of public policy. The purpose of journalism was not to encourage public debate but to provide experts with the information on which to base intelligent decisions.
(p. 10)
(This "in opposition to John Dewey and other veterans of the progressive movement.")
Lippman's argument rested on a sharp distinction between opinion and science. Only the latter, he thought, could claim to be objective. ... This cult of professionalism had a decisive influence on the development of modern journalism. Newspapers might have served as extensions of the town meeting. Instead they embraced a misguided ideal of objectivity and defined their goal as the circulation of reliable information—the kind of information, that is, that tends not to promote debate but circumvent it. The most curious feature in all this, of course, is that although Americans are now drowning in information...surveys regularly report a steady decline in their knowledge of public affairs. In the "age of information" the American people are notoriously ill informed. ... They have become almost as incompetent as their critics have always claimed—a reminder that it is debate itself, and debate alone, that gives rise to the desire for usable information. In the absence of democratic exchange, most people have no incentive to master the knowledge that would make them capable citizens.
(pp. 11-12)
All brilliant points.
The misguided ideal of objectivity also prevails, I think, in certain academic milieux. To be sure, academia is the place for it. There should always be some of this kind of academic work being done as a necessary safeguard against the total unmooring of discourse from its empirical foundations. But there are, nonetheless, many academic projects where the conceit to objectivity is counterproductive for precisely the reasons laid out by Lasch above; if many of these are one-off projects, nonetheless they collectively comprise a sizable chunk of academic turf. Further, it is always worth asking whether the rigidly objective academic posture has emerged organically from the task at hand or if it is a merely calculated piece of theater designed to give a certain impression to a certain audience for a certain self-interested reason.
The circumvent[ion] of debate by appealing to hard facts (which usually are just hard to verify) has a history worthy of its own book. Interestingly, Lasch begs an exemption for religion here, precisely where some of us (as he is aware) would think of it first.
Priding themselves ["devoutly open-minded intellectuals"] on their emancipation from religion, they misunderstand religion as a set of definitive, absolute dogmas resistant to any kind of intelligent appraisal. They miss the discipline against fanaticism in religion itself. The "quest for certainty," as Dewey called it, is nowhere condemned with such relentless passion as in the prophetic tradition common to Judaism and Christianity, which warns again and again against idolatry, the idolatry of the church included. Many intellectuals assume that religion satisfies the need for moral and emotional security—a notion that even a passing knowledge of religion would dispel.These are beautiful thoughts, but I can't help but think we have passed through incomplete evidence here, i.e. merely the worst of the "intellectuals" and the best of the "religious."
(p. 90)
As for debate itself, this is so brilliant and so important, but damned if it is not also extremely unpleasant nowadays. Because we live in the age of information I have often found myself simply unable to engage (whether to agree or disagree hardly matters) with much of anyone too far outside my own political orientation, because their arguments, whether well-crafted or ill-constructed on the rhetorical level, so often invoke supporting evidence which I am entirely unable to evaluate for sheer lack of familiarity. Regular competence is elusive enough; omnicompetence feels unattainable. Human beings cannot become "omnicompetent" on any larger scale than the village. By affinity I am a big-city person to the bone, but on a purely rational level it is becoming ever more difficult to ignore this problem.
We do not know what we need to know until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy. Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its byproduct. When we get into arguments that focus and fully engage our attention, we become avid seekers of relevant information. Otherwise we take in information passively—if we take it in at all.We lose sight of this nowadays because we seem veritably surrounded by others' "views," hemmed in on all sides by them as it were. But perhaps the real story is how many people don't articulate anything in particular, perhaps because they have nothing to articulate, and moreover (as Lasch would have it here) because they don't have to.
(p. 163)
The attempt to bring others around to our own point of view carries the risk, of course, that we may adopt their point of view instead. We have to enter imaginatively into our opponents' arguments, if only for the purpose of refuting them, and we may end up being persuaded by those we sought to persuade. Argument is risky and unpredictable, therefore educational. Most of us tend to think of it (as Lippman thought of it) as a clash of rival dogmas, a shouting match in which neither side gives any ground. But arguments are not won by shouting down opponents. They are won by changing opponents' minds—something that can happen only if we give opposing arguments a respectful hearing and still persuade their advocates that there is something wrong with those arguments. In the course of this activity we may well decide that there is something wrong with our own.
If we insist on argument as the essence of education, we will defend democracy not as the most efficient but as the most educational form of government, one that extends the circle of debate as widely as possible and thus forces all citizens to articulate their views, to put their views at risk, and to cultivate the virtues of eloquence, clarity of thought and expression, and sound judgment. As Lippman noted, small communities are the classic locus of democracy—not because they are "self-contained," however, but simply because they allow everyone to take part in public debates.
(pp. 170-171)
2 comments:
Ernest Becker
The Denial of Death
(1973)
[191] "Rank saw that this hyper-self-consciousness had left modern man to his own resources, and he called him aptly "psychological man." It is a fitting epithet in more than one sense. Modern man became psychological because he had become insulated from protective collective ideologies. He had to justify himself from within himself. But he also became psychological because modern thought itself evolved that way when it developed out of religion. The inner life of man had always been portrayed traditionally as the area of the soul.
But the 19th century scientists wanted to reclaim this last domain of superstition from the Church. ... They gradually abandoned the word "soul" and began to talk about the "self" and to study how it develops in the child's early relationship with his mother. The great miracles of language, thought, and morality could now be studied as social products and not divine interventions. It was a great breakthrough in science that culminated only with the work of Freud; but it was Rank who saw that this scientific victory raised more problems than it solved. Science thought that it had gotten rid forever of the problems of the soul by making the inner world the subject of scientific analysis. But few wanted to admit that this work still left the soul perfectly intact as a word to explain the inner energy of organisms, the mystery of the creation and sustenance of living matter. It really doesn't matter if we discover that man's inner precepts about himself and his world, his very self-consciousness in language, art, laughter, and tears, are all socially built into him. We still haven't explained the inner forces of evolution that have led to the development of an animal capable of self-consciousness, which is what we still must mean by "soul"—the mystery of the meaning of organismic awareness, of the inner dynamism and pulsations of nature. From this point of view the hysterical reaction of 19th-century believers against Darwin only shows the thinness and unimaginativeness of their faith. They were not open to plain and ordinary awe and wonder; they took life too much for granted; and when Darwin stripped them of their sense of "special wondrousness" they felt as good as dead."
(more)
Ernest Becker
Escape From Evil
(1975)
"It is all too true, alas, but we do not live in an ideal world. If we wanted to imagine such a world, give in to utopian fantasies, we already know what we would want our leaders to be like: persons who abstracted and objected least, who took each single life and its suffering full in the face as it is. Which is another way of saying that they would know the reality of death as a primary problem. We might even let our musings go wild while we are at it, and imagine that we would choose leaders for exactly this quality: that they themselves were conscious of their own fear of life and death, and of the cultural system as a way of heroic transcendence—but a way that is not absolute, that is relative and not timeless. This might be another way of saying that we would want our leaders to be "well-analyzed" men, except that even the best analysis does not guarantee to produce this level of self-conscious, tragic sophistication.
"Yet, democracy does encroach on utopia a little bit, because it already addresses itself to the problem of mystification by free flow of self-criticism. We could carry the utopian musings further and say that the gauge of a truly free society would be the extent to which it admitted its own central fear of death and questioned its own system of heroic transcendence—and this is precisely what democracy is doing much of the time. This is why authoritarians always scoff at it: it seems ridiculously intent on discrediting itself. The free flow of criticism, satire, art, and science is a continuous attack on the cultural fiction—which is why totalitarians from Plato to Mao have to control these things, as has long been known. It we look at the dénouement of psychiatry and social science today, they represent a fairly thorough self-revelation of the fictional nature of human meanings—and nothing is theoretically more powerfully liberating than that. Lifton has even detected self-mockery and
[168]
caricature as peculiar signs of a new type of modern man who is attempting to transcend the horror and absurdity of his cultural world."
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