WE (chapter 8)

8

 

PROGRESS AND TRADITION

 

As Gary Wills puts it, “the authority of government can no longer be assumed.”[i]   Existing political institutions do not receive the explicit consent of all men and women subject to them, and it is difficult to defend the claim that they would do so if people were rational in some uncontroversial sense.  The government makes many of its decisions under the influence of the money power, and competition by candidates for campaign contributions is at least as important as competition for votes.  Emotional factors such as charisma, fear, or group animosity are more important than calculation of consequences or application of principles.  The attempt to bracket differences of moral or religious outlook in political argument implies that people whose views are neglected find themselves subject to taxation without moral representation. 

Thus large numbers of people see the social and political order as imposed and for that reason unjust. [ii]  Prosperity mitigates the resulting tensions, but it cannot be guaranteed, and is never sufficient to resolve legitimacy issues.  This is true even domestically, but globalization multiplies the number of people who find themselves subject to powers whose legitimacy they have no reason to acknowledge.

Efforts to overcome the resulting ‘legitimacy deficit’ take two forms, sometimes combined:  reforms that increase the participation of marginal people in the political process, and appeals to a transgenerational enterprise in which present people can believe themselves participants.  Shared memories and shared hopes are important to making a group of people a We.[iii]  Hence the argument of this chapter will look both forwards and backwards.

 

 

 

 

INCLUSION AND DELIBERATION

Perhaps we could remedy the legitimacy deficit if more people voted, and if their electoral decisions were more meaningful.  In an attempt to attain this result, some radical democrats have advocated a ‘politics of difference.’  As Iris Marion Young puts it, they support “claims of justice and political inclusion made on the basis of the specific group experiences of women, gay men and lesbians, racial minorities, or people with disabilities” (Y 83).[iv]  She rightly distinguishes political exclusion from other forms of social conflict and injustice (Y 13).  But we are properly concerned only with unjust exclusion:  if I am traveling in Scotland to attend a philosophical conference, no injustice occurs if I cannot vote in Scottish elections.  Hence the question of the pertinent criteria of justice is urgent.

Though Young has much in common with identity politics, she rejects it in favor of relational concept of group differentiation (Y 87ff.).  In her own words, “any group consists in a collective of individuals who stand in determinate relations with one another because of the actions and interactions of both those associated with the group and those on the outside or at the margins of the group” (Y 89).  But, like identity politics, this doctrine can easily lead to chaos or quietism.  Everything here depends on what groups we recognize – whether, for example, we include cohesive, internally undemocratic, groups such as Hasidic Jews.  In practice, her list of disadvantaged groups is with one exception an artifact of neo-Marxist politics:  she breaks in a limited but significant way with the usual neglect of religious perspectives in leftist politics, and several times mentions Muslims (Y 80, 106, 110, and 122).

In order to give shape to her understanding of difference, Young reaches back to Marx and appeals to the concept of a structural group, i.e., “a collection of persons who are similarly positioned in interactive and institutional relations that condition their opportunities and life prospects” (Y 97).  In her view, “while they are often built upon and intersect with cultural differences, the social relations constituting gender, race, and class, and sexuality, and ability are best understood as structural” (Y 92).  In sum, all group differences are socially constructed, but some differences, since they influence opportunities in special ways, are therefore less socially constructed than others.  This conclusion seems right, but it raises the issue, in what other ways nature and history constrain our attempt to re-describe and refashion social existence.  These ways include both sexual difference and the propensity of human beings to form We’s (and hence also They’s) in ways liberal and leftist theorists find inconvenient. 

Politics, however, includes not only decision-making procedures, but also deliberation about common problems, and the attempt to reach results all parties can live with.  According to the principle of ‘deliberative’ democracy, we should encourage people of every sort to bring their distinctive experiences and modes of discourse to the bargaining table (see Y 20-26; for bibliography see Y 22 n.13).  Yet the more seriously we take a strong conception of democracy, however, the wider the variety of perspectives that will appear in public debate, the richer the framework of shared understandings necessary to make it work, and the greater the strains of inclusion.

Fundamentalists and homosexuals are in many ways similar in their social and political role.  The former group seems better at getting out the vote, the second at manipulating bureaucratic, media, and legal structures.  In any event, diversity often means gridlock, and the making of inescapable decisions without public accountability by ‘unpolitical’ authorities such as insurance companies, the Supreme Court, or the Federal Reserve Board. 

Political debate is often raucous and disorderly.  On stealing one’s adversaries’ newspapers, disrupting religious services, or other controversial cases for freedom of expression, Young’s arguments point in two different ways.  In one place, she writes, “I prefer to call the normal condition of democratic debate a process of struggle” (Y 50; emphasis hers) – which would seem to imply few if any limits on political tactics.  But she also writes, “struggle is a process of communicative engagement of citizens with one another” (Y 50; emphasis hers) – which would seem to require tactical self-restraint.   

Speaking in a rationalistic vein, Young holds that reasonableness in public debate means that people “cannot come to the discussion of a collective problem with commitments that bind them to the authority of prior norms or unquestionable beliefs” (Y 24).  In a less rationalistic mood, she rejects

Norms of deliberative democracy [that] oppose disorderly, demonstrative, and disruptive political behavior and label a certain range of positions extreme in order to dismiss them. Disorderliness is an important tool of critical communication aimed at calling attention to the unreasonableness of others. (Y 48-49) 

Arguments for treating one’s political positions as immutable dogmas, and for widening the acceptable forms of political struggle, are equally available to all parties.

One-sidedly to impose civility and open-mindedness on some party is to disable it politically and to threaten its continued existence as a group or even as individuals. 

People ought to feel deeply about political issues, which are directly or indirectly questions of life and death.  No group can be expected calmly to envisage becoming the target of genocide or ethnic cleansing, nor should the disabled people who protested Peter Singer’s appointment at Princeton be soothed by telling them that, as adults, they are no longer at risk from his program of infanticide.  Proposals to destroy an entire culture are only slightly less obnoxious.  Yet all of us, however tolerant we may be, know of people whose speech, even if we may not want to suppress it, we would prefer not to support through either tax dollars or private philanthropy.  

This issue arises, not in some a priori philosophical construction, but in a society that includes constantly shifting and therefore contested boundaries on public discourse.  The required judgment calls are inevitably opaque, and will moreover reflect our communal affiliation.  There are circles where it is anathema to hold that there are normatively significant supra-cultural distinctions between men and women, and circles where it is anathema to hold that the distinction between the sexes is conventional only.  Here, as so often in social and political philosophy, we are caught between the devil of tribalism and the deep blue sea of cosmopolitanism deluded about the social nature of human beings.

As a general proposition, no one starts a culture war any more than a civil war:  we have rather groups whose members’ understanding of shared beliefs move gradually apart.  But there are cases where a group has formally declared culture war.  The French Revolutionaries decided, not only to nationalize the Church, but also to de-Christianize society to the point of abolishing the Christian calendar.  Likewise to demand legal abortion at public expense, or same-sex marriage as a matter of constitutional right, is to declare culture war if anything is.

Political theories are best thought of, not as attempts to replace existing political institutions with a philosophically superior set, but as embodying attempts to push literate discourse about politics in one direction rather than another.  In American practice, our institutions support and are reflected in a ‘prejudice’ (in Burke’s sense) in favor of tolerance, summed up in such phrases as this is a free country.  This prejudice stands in the way of ‘solving’ social and political problems by interning minorities, as happened to the Japanese Americans during the Second World War.  In a society in which this outlook prevails, complex institutions enable groups defeated in one forum to seek redress in another.  No one has the last word, since the Supreme Court can be brought to overrule earlier decisions, the Constitution can be amended, and a constitutional amendment can be repealed.  The cause of tolerance is not guaranteed success:  our ‘inherited conglomerate’ also includes the belief that ‘We’ are visible saints, and for that reason entitled to suppress the reprobate (or ‘Them’). 

But the argument cannot be limited to domestic contexts.  Decisions made in one nation-state have effects in others – economic, cultural, ecological, ideological, and military.  Events in Afghanistan cause literal explosions in New York, and events in New Hampshire cause metaphorical explosions in Nigeria and Uganda.  At the gut level, the same considerations that make me want to have a say in the workings of the Federal Government make me want one in the workings of major oil companies and of the government of Saudi Arabia.  And the people of Saudi Arabia have the same reasons for wanting a say in American politics.  No nation can claim a natural right to rule the others, and hence the legitimacy of decisions affecting non-nationals will always be in question.  International bodies of every sort, from multinational corporations to organizations like Amnesty International, also require accountability. 

In a world that has seen the break-up of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia, and in which the unity of Canada and the United Kingdom has been put at risk, the prospects of a worldwide political community, democratic or otherwise, seem dim.  Crony capitalism, ethnically targeted programs of confiscation, and ethnic cleansing are at least as likely outcomes of globalization as the worldwide triumph of forms of democracy acceptable in the West.[v]  Overt imperial rule from Washington is unlikely to be humane or democratic even in the most limited sense.  Cosmopolitan democrats take these facts as a spur to the creation of transnational democracy.[vi]  But they still have to show how we can do this without a transnational democratic ethos — or even a transnational demos — already in place.   

            A belief in progress, which enables us to accommodate unpleasant historical realities while hoping that we will eventually be able to overcome them, helps overcome the legitimacy deficit.  So does tradition, which unites us with our ancestors, spiritual as well as physical, in a common enterprise.  Belief in progress is traditional in America at least, so that the two approaches to the legitimacy deficit fuse.  But the meta-narrative which unites us with our ancestors, supports our belief in the centrality of our common humanity, and persuades us of our ability to fashion institutions in accordance with intelligible and intellectually defensible principles, has been thrown into question in the contemporary world.   The slogan Hey, hey, ho ho, Western culture’s gotta go! (Stanford, 1988) exploited the self-doubts pervasive among Liberal intellectuals.

 

POLTICS AND CULTURE

One vehicle for our shared tradition, and for the aspirations that form part of it, is high culture.  Matthew Arnold attempted to use literature and other forms of high culture to overcome the legitimacy deficit, replacing the religion he found to be no longer effective.  Some of his critics reverse the proposition and argue that, by debunking high culture and/or its ideological role, they are promoting a revolution that will end in truly legitimate regime.  Thus Terry Eagleton writes: “We know that the lion is stronger than the lion tamer, and so does the lion tamer.  The problem is that the lion does not know it.  It is not out of the question that the death of literature will help the lion to awaken.” [vii]  (How?)  Short of such extreme claims, cultural issues have a real though lesser political importance; an element of collective imagination is at work in such contemporary problems as war and the displacement of peoples.[viii]   

Many people these days believe that the high culture is in irreversible decline.  Secular popular culture is now all-pervasive, and it is hard to find shared criteria according to which we are entitled to call all or most of it ‘trash.’  Moreover, the academic Left has argued that the project of Western reason is repressive at its core. We thus enter a complex set of arguments linking politics with literature and the, itself controversial, project of literary theory.  I make my argument for literature, but much of it would also apply to music, the visual arts, and to mixed genres such as dance, opera, and film. 

In dealing with the resulting issues, we must bear two points in mind.  First, claims that our opponents’ judgments are distorted by racism, or some other malign prejudice, now fill the cultural atmosphere.  But, in the sage words of Alasdair MacIntyre,

Claims about hallucinations, illusion, distortion of thought, and the like can be made only from the standpoint of claims that the contrast cab be clearly drawn between hallucinatory, illusory and distorted modes of perception or thought, on the one hand, and genuine perceptions of realty or rigorous or undistorted reflection and deliberation, on the other.  Hence, to identify ideological distortion one must not be a victim of it oneself.  The claim to a privileged exemption from such distortion seems to be presupposed when such distortion is identified in others.[ix]

Second, the presupposition of much literary theory, that it is possible to drive a wedge between and text and the author’s intention in producing it, is false.  It is possible neither to fix the interpretation of a text by going behind it to the author’s intention, nor to undermine our efforts at interpretation (or license whatever interpretation might suit our fancy) by arguing that the author’s intention is unknowable.  For to see an inscription as a text is already to see it as the product of a person’s intentional activity.  As Stephen Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels put it, “The mistake made by theorists has been to imagine the possibility or desirability of moving from one term (the author’s intended meaning) to a second term (the text’s meaning), when actually the two terms are the same.” [x]  Once we acknowledge the reality of the author, some limitations on interpretation follow:  the Sherlock Holmes stories are not pornography, even if some eccentric finds them sexually stimulating.

Nonetheless, the mind of the author is not transparent, especially when we deal with texts whose origin is distant from us.  And some people argue that a text like the Bible or the Constitution gathers meaning as history proceeds.  Moreover, some texts, on their face, require us to go beyond their face:  whatever Nietzsche meant by God is dead, it was not that someone had thrown Him out of a window.  And some apparently meaningless statements, like Heidegger’s The nothing noths, might yield an intelligible meaning under careful interpretation.  Hence the question of interpretation pervades contemporary culture – from literary criticism through law to theology.  

It is impossible to articulate general hermeneutical principles.  Legal interpretation has real-world consequences of a sort that literary interpretation does not:  people are killed, imprisoned, and deprived of large amounts of money because courts read the law in one way rather than another.  As Robert Cover puts it,  “legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death.”[xi]  And the consequences of judicial decisions for persons other than the parties are sometimes large.  On the other hand, not everything goes even in literary interpretation:  readers of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice divide in their evaluation of Mr. and Mrs. Bennett, but no one admires Mr. Collins.

In short, different methods of interpretation are proper in law and literature, and a still different set of methods is appropriate in theology.  Discussion of the tacit assumptions that lead us to prefer one understanding of even a literary text to another will implicate, among other things, social and political controversies.  We should not pretend that conservative politics is not politics. 

 

Conservative Perspectives  

 ‘Traditionalism’ is the outlook of people who believe that they have been unjustly displaced by history, or that valuable elements of our shared past to which their forebears contributed have been neglected by their contemporaries.  Such people argue that our public philosophy is designed to keep them out of collective decision-making and to deprive them of control even of their own children.  In this way, they argue, current practice prevents the transmission of those beliefs and practices that they most value.  

Traditions are those elements of our shared past that we now find valuable – Shakespeare but not public executions – and for that reason our understanding of tradition is both contested and under constant revision.   Many traditionalists look back to an earlier state of society in which conflicts among the members were less intense than they are now.  Yet there was no period of history free of systematic conflict:  many American traditionalists look back to early America minus slavery and the oppression of Indians – in words, to an entirely hypothetical society.  Likewise, the Middle Ages experienced conflicts ranging from peasant rebellions to disputes about the reception of Aristotle.  Even the early Church was full of conflicts about the mission to the Gentiles, and the possible earthly role of the Messiah.  Some traditions claim a divine source, but this doctrine requires a way of sorting out optional inherited practices (Christmas trees, for example) from those that we dare not abandon.  Between the earthly paradise and us there stands an angel with a fiery sword.    

The most important argument for rejecting change is a fear of chaos.  The view that a document like the American Constitution has an ascertainable original meaning is, on some premises, like the existence of God, a necessary myth (though a few philosophers are permitted to hint at its falsity with the help of a ‘concealed blasphemy’).[xii]  A person who thinks in this way might abandon the task of managing the decline of our civilization to the politicians, and content himself with teaching the classics in a spirit of perpetual lament.  But, even in Conservative circles, there is a better understanding of the role of tradition available, according to which we draw upon the past in order to move into the future.[xiii]

 

Marxism and Culture

Marxists maintain that literature is necessarily and pervasively political, at least under capitalism, and that the same is therefore true of both literary criticism and literary theory.  In the words of the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wā Thiong’o: “Every writer is a writer in politics. The only question is what and whose politics.”[xiv]  But many people who think this way prefer nationalism (sometimes religious nationalism) or some other ideology to Marxism.

According to Marxists and their allies, attempts by ‘humanists’ to defend a supra-political role for culture are dishonest evasions of political choice.  Even a novel that seems politically innocent, by giving experience a structure defined by a stock narrative pattern, provides an illusory source of comfort for the alienated soul.  Marxists and their allies are right to protest the confusion of high culture with religion, and its use as a badge of social status or as a substitute for politics.  Though Matthew Arnold may have believed that teaching the working class Jane Austen would prevent a proletarian revolution, that anything of that sort happened in historical fact is unlikely.  Though responses to Brecht, Shelley, and Yeats reflect our political sympathies, we must avoid the ‘pseudo-politics of interpretation,’ whereby disputes about literary interpretation serve as substitutes for real-world political argument.[xv]   

Neoconservatives invert the value judgments made by Marxists and their allies.  For Neoconservatives, both writers and those who discuss their productions have a duty to support the existing social order and can be denounced as ‘unpatriotic’ or ‘truants’ if they fail to do so.  If an emphasis on complexity stands in the way of leftish political activity, that is all to the good from the Neoconservative point of view.  But if it stands in the way of the ‘war on terror,’ that is another matter.

 

Postmodernism

Modernism is a useful word for the outlook of people for whom modern is not a chronological word but a word of praise, and hence old–fashioned a word of blame. [xvi]    Modernists typically hold that the religious and other tribal outlooks of the past are being replaced by the claims of universal scientific reason.  They place their criticism of literature within a meta-narrative in which the history of the West can be seen as leading to a happy resolution, and in which it is therefore possible to speak of residual, dominant, and emergent forms of culture (to use Raymond Williams’ distinction).  Those who regard modernity as more than a chronological expression, but invert its normative claims, can be called ‘Anti-modernists.’

There are, however, no laws of history guaranteeing that the right sort of politics will resolve our cultural conflicts in a desirable direction, nor are there laws of inexorable decline.  Instead of progress toward the emancipation of humanity through universal principles of reason, or unstoppable descent into barbarism, we have a sequence of ad hoc adaptations symbolized by a bricolage of disparate cultural elements.  Still, a global return to pre-modern ways of living is impossible.  The outlook of those who despair both of the possibilities of modern culture and of return to pre-modern culture is thus appropriately considered ‘Postmodern,’ despite the word’s paradoxical air.[xvii]  Postmodernists oppose the imperialism of modern secular reason, not in the name of inherited religion[xviii] or culture, but in that of the diversity secularity represses.

Paul Feyerabend has argued, most explicitly in a posthumous book aptly titled Conquest of Abundance,[xix] that imperialistic worldviews such as ‘the scientific outlook’ have repressed their alternatives, not by rational arguments, but by inducing changes in collective mentality by political means broadly understood (F 210-11).  (For summary of his conclusions, see F 78-79.)  The outcome of this argument, however, is not relativism in the usual sense. 

First, existing cultures contain enough ambiguity to make change possible, including change brought about their problems, their successes, and their interaction with other cultures (for Feyerabend’s rejection of closed cultures, see F 78; on the importance of cultural ambiguity, see F 39 n.39, 59, 123, and 241).  Second, “not all approaches to ‘reality’ are successful” (F 215).  Third, Feyerabend himself holds at least one transcendent moral principle, by which he judges science itself – namely respect for diverse ways of life (F Pt. II, chap. 9).  Fourth, as he writes, “cultural differences [are] special and changeable manifestations of a common human nature” (F 24 n.25). 

It follows from Feyerabend’s principles that some ways of life and their associated outlooks – such as (his example) Ceausescu’s Romania (F 250-51) – ought to be repressed.  In less extreme cases, he sensibly concludes we ought to reason with those who do things to which we object, and also listen to the reasons they give for so doing (F 34 n.25).  In any event, Feyerabend abandons the Postmodern claim that appeals to a common human nature are repressive, and proposes instead the continuation of the Western rational tradition in a revised form, sidelining deductive argument.[xx]   

 

The Western Tradition and Liberal Education

The West is not a geographical expression:  every part of the planet, except the two poles, is both to the west and to the east of every other.  It refers rather to that stream of culture, formed by the union of Greek and Hebrew themes in the period 500 BC/BCE – 500 AD/CE, to which Christian, Germanic, Asian, African, and other traditions have contributed.  On this view Islam is one current of the Western tradition, and one that includes works of permanent value.

Not everything the West has done is worthy of honor, and much is complex and controversial.  But the Western high culture includes criticisms of Western societies, sometimes severe; hopes of a world in which each of us recognizes the others’ humanity, in theory and practice; and attempts to appreciate both popular and non-Western culture.  That the more ambitious hopes of the Enlightenment have proved vain does not discredit traditional Christianity, Judaism, or Islam.  The claim that the Western tradition is exhausted is therefore a bit of insufferable arrogance.

Yet many people believe that the extreme circumstances of Twentieth (and now Twenty-first) century life imply that we must reject the irony and complexity of high culture for the simplicity of outlook needed for political action.  Sometimes people make this argument on behalf of groups that are economically and militarily weak;[xxi] sometimes on behalf of the war against terrorism.  But whether the distinction between aesthetics and politics is eroded from the side of aesthetics or from the side of art, the sort of politics that might prevent disaster gets shortchanged.  There are, we may agree, moments of crisis where politics dominates all other concerns, but such moments are rare (and must be rare, if human beings are to remain sane).  Politics is at work in literature (and consequently also in literary criticism and literary theory), but so are sexual passion, religious conviction, and all the other motives that move the human animal. 

The works that get recognized as contributions to high culture have four features:

1. They represent the societies of their origin.  They portray not only the practice of their societies, but also their reflections on themselves.  The connections between high and popular culture, including the contributions by lowly groups like African American slaves, deserve careful examination.
2. They do so in a richly and finely crafted manner.  The plots of Greek tragedy are in themselves soap opera, but the art of the tragedian brings out their deeper import.  In fiction, what distinguishes serious writing from pornography and other forms of trash is the portrayal of believable people doing believable things rather than various forms of stereotype and cartoon.
3. They are in some degree critical of the practice of their society in the name of its highest aspirations.  I here include not merely the moral critique associated with the Hebrew prophets, but also invitations to see our world in new ways even when these do not have immediate moral or political implications.
4. They cross the barriers of time, place, class, and so forth.  Shakespeare’s Macbeth, though in every way a product of Elizabethan England, inspired the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s “Throne of Blood” (1957), a film many Americans have enjoyed.  

Literary critics argue for adding or retaining some element in the canon – as Tolkien did for Beowulf – or pruning the canon of a surplus member – as Chinua Achebe did in his polemic against Conrad.  People who believe that their group’s productions have been unjustly neglected, or that some traditional works are over-rated, need to make the argument case by case.  Thus American cultural nationalists have every right to argue for the importance of the philosophy of Edwards and Peirce, the poetry of Dickinson and Whitman,[xxii] and the political thought of Madison and Rawls.  But neither American nationalists, nor any one else, should denigrate the contribution of other nations, including the colonial power that has importantly shaped many national cultures.

High culture and hence also liberal education can play a benign political role.  For, however elusive the aesthetic dimension of experience, it includes one feature of importance to our present inquiry:  human beings are capable of responding to expressions that are morally, sexually, politically, or religiously alien.  A heterosexual man or woman can enjoy Proust, a political radical Eliot, a Conservative Brecht, an atheist Dante, a vegetarian Hemmingway’s rendition of a bullfight, a Cambridge Liberal the aesthetics of hellfire preaching.  Even our aesthetic predispositions take a beating:  by every aesthetic principle I know Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is terrible novel, but it remains strangely compelling.  The response that makes these reactions possible is a bit of a mystery, but (like moral judgment) it includes both a cognitive and emotional dimension.  It is also important even in the choice of scientific theories. 

Many of the groups who engage our sympathy in literature – young men around Socrates, the British who administered the Raj and their wives and daughters, Confederate soldiers during the American Civil War – are no longer able to make political demands on us, however.   Nor are those who use literature for political purposes interested in coming to understand poor Southern white people – say by a reading of the works of Flannery O’Connor.[xxiii]  

In dealing with issues in which culture and politics mix, we need to steer a course around five errors:

1. Naïve progressivism believes that there are laws of history guaranteeing the triumph of the good, and consequently the obsolescence of older contributions to the Western tradition.  Scientific and technical advances, together with the decline of religion, are supposed to supply the motor of progressive change.  But there are no such laws of history.  Whether there has been any progress in terms of morality or human happiness is an unanswerable question:  there has been improvement on some issues and retrogression on others, and all of us spontaneously  prefer the attitudes of our own time to those of others. 
2. Multiculturalism ignores the severe problems – both theoretical and practical – that arise when we encounter the culturally alien.  Celebrators of diversity present the culturally alien in an expurgated form that excludes both Islamic terrorism and the aesthetics of ritual suicide of Yukio Mishima.
3. Postmodernists attempt to discredit the Western tradition, by tracing its roots to a shameful origin.  The result is a philosophy that can neither deny nor affirm, but puts everything into irresoluble question.  Charles E. Scott, for example, compares our situation as heirs to the Western tradition to that of an abused child, still bound to the parents or other adults who have mistreated him.[xxiv]    
4. Nostalgia at once oversimplifies the past and denies new generations the capacity to contribute to an ongoing enterprise.  Such is the posture of Tolkien’s Galadriel, “through ages of the world [fighting] the long defeat.”[xxv]  The better part is that of her granddaughter Arwen Evenstar, and of Frodo’s sidekick Sam, who help found a new civilization.  Gandalf formulates the necessary principle:  “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after us may have clean earth to till.”[xxvi]
5. Neoconservativism in its more extreme forms sets the West against the world and endeavors to “rid the world of evil.”[xxvii]  This view implies that any attempt to transcend cultural barriers is either self-deluded or disloyal and our relations with the culturally alien are determined only by power.  High culture inculcates a sense of moral complexity valuable in domestic contexts, but Neoconservatives damn the attempt to extend this sense outward as belief in ‘moral equivalence.’  Since a vision of a united humanity lies near the core of the Western tradition, and since contributors to the Western tradition have often come from countries or milieus out of favor in Washington, this approach to high culture destroys the Western tradition in order to save it.  

 

–

CONCLUSION

The progressive strand in social and political philosophy attempts to embody, in an ever wider and deeper way, the realization that human institutions are human creations, and for that reason open to rationally directed change.  To avoid endless conflict and make it possible for all of us to co-operate for common purposes, we should be able to reshape our various identities in into a harmonious whole without anyone having to sacrifice anything essential.  In this way, social and political institutions should come to reflect – and to be seen to reflect – the rationally accepted convictions of all members of society.[xxviii]

This formulation supposes, however, that when we have completed collective deliberation, everyone, or nearly everyone, will agree, at least broadly, what changes are desirable and what not.  Otherwise our divergence of views will widen, as the range of social choice widens, into a war of each against all or at least of tribe against tribe.  For, the wider the extent of change thought possible, the deeper and more bitter conflict will be among those who disagree about normative issues.  If belief in our common humanity is only a useful fiction, of no greater rational standing than the atavistic national myths that motivate human beings at least as effectively, we cannot expect it to stand up in a skeptical age.  

In the contemporary world, our interpretation of one another’s behavior has become uncertain, and we can no longer be sure that even the least admirable of our associates will observe certain limits.  Our problems are reinforced by the staggering variety of perspectives human beings take on their social and natural environment, and the pervasive suspicion that our claims to know are out of accord with Things as They Are.   Hence despite our best efforts, social reality appears as an alien, and often hostile, reality.  It is always possible to ‘unmask’ supposedly consensual authorities or programs as products of chance and necessity at best, or of coercion and deceit at worst.  Hence the prospect of getting rid of atavistic feelings about territory and political rule are negligible.  Paranoia also becomes a hallmark of modern consciousness, and the task of avoiding a fascist outcome challenging.

 

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[i] Wills, “The New Revolutionaries,” New York Review of Books 42, no. 13 (18 April 1995):  54.

[ii] I am here influenced by Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston:  Beacon Press, 1975), as read by Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge, Mass.:  MIT Press, 1978), chap. 5; and J. Donald Moon,” Political Discourse and Communicative Ethics,” in Stephen K. White, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Habermas (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 157-60.

[iii] Thus Todd Gitlin is right to be alarmed by The Twilight of Common Dreams (New York:  Metropolitan, 1993).

[iv] Y = Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2000).

[v]For reasons set forth in Amy Chua, World on Fire (New York:  Anchor, 2004).

[vi] For a critical discussion of cosmopolitan democracy, see Jocelyne Coutre, “Cosmopolitan Democracy and Liberal Democracy,” Monist 82 (1999):  491-515.

[vii] Eagleton, Literary Theory:  An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 217. 

[viii]  Despite Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Malden, Mass.:  Blackwell, 2000), p. 230.

[ix] MacIntyre, “Ideology, Social Science, and Revolution,” Comparative Politics 5 (1975): 22.

[x] Knapp and Michaels, “Against Theory,” in Vincent B. Leitch, ed., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York:  Norton, 2001), pp. 2460-75; quotation, p. 2461.

[xi] Cover, Narrative, Violence, and the Law, Martha Minow, Michael Ryan and Austin Sarat, eds. (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 1992). p. 203.

 [xii] This appears to be the view of Leo Strauss; see his Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, Ill.:  Free Press, 1952) and Studies in the Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1983).  For commentary see Shaida Drury, The Political Thought of Leo Strauss (New York:  St. Martin’s Press, 1988), and, more stridently, Leo Strauss and the American Right (New York:  St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

[xiii]See T.S. Eliot’s critical writings, especially “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and  “The Metaphysical Poets,” both reprinted in Leitch, ed., Anthology, pp. 1092-1105.  For a more extensive discussion of tradition and traditionalism, see my Human Diversity and the Culture Wars (Westport, Conn.:  Praeger, 1996), pp. 6-10.

[xiv] Quoted in the head-note to his “On the Abolition of the English Department,” with Taban Lo Liyong, and Henry Owuor-Anyumba, in Leitch, ed. Anthology, p. 2091.

[xv] For an internal critique of this sort of approach to literature, see Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself  (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1979)

[xvi] See, for example, Habermas, “Modernity – An Incomplete Project,” in Leitch, ed., Anthology, pp. 1748ff.

[xvii] See Jean François Lyotard, “Defining the Postmodern,” Leitch, ed., Anthology, pp. 1612-15.

[xviii] Some Postmodernists are moving in a Christian direction, however; see Paul J. Griffiths, “Christ and Critical Theory,” First Things, no. 145 (August-September 2004): 46-55.

[xix]F = Feyerabend, Conquest of Abundance, Bert Terpstra, ed. (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1999).   

[xx] For more discussion of Postmodernism, see my Human Diversity, pp. 30-34.

[xxi] See the celebrated statement by Walter Benjamin,  “The Work of Art in An Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” trans. Henry Zahn in Leitch, ed., Anthology, p.  1186.

[xxii] Americans are entitled to be dissatisfied with a collection of  “English verse” that ends its American component with Philip Freneau (1752-1832) and Phillis Wheately (1753-1784), before America had found its poetic voice, while including poems in Scots dialect and from an independent Republic of Ireland.  For the editor’s justification of his practice, see Christopher Ricks, ed., Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. xxxvi-xxxviii.

[xxiii] These sentences are directed against Richard Rorty, “Two Cheers for the Cultural Left,” in Darryl J. Gless and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, eds., The Politics of Liberal Education (Durham:  Duke University Press, 1992), p. 239. 

[xxiv]See Scott, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Ethics and Politics for Life (Bloomington, Ind.:  Indiana University Press, 1996), esp. chap. 9.

[xxv] Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (Boston:  Houghton Mifflin, 1987), vol. 1, bk. 2, chap. 7, p. 372.

[xxvi] Ibid., vol. 3, bk. 5, chap. 9, p. 155.  For a different reading of Tolkien, see Claire Valente, “Translating Tolkien’s Epic,” Intercollegiate Review 40, no. 1 (fall-winter 2004): 35-43

[xxvii] For a frank statement of this sort Neoconservatism, see David Frum and Richard Perle, Ridding the World of Evil (New York:  Random House, 2003).

[xxviii]See, for example, Robert Paul Wolff, “Beyond the Legitimate State,” excerpted from In Defense of Anarchism (New York:  Harper and Row, 1970), in Stephen Eric Bonner, ed., Twentieth Century Political Theory (New York:  Routledge, 1997), p. 131.