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Brain drain (continued)

BY MICHAEL BRONSKI

THERE IS A LONG, impressive history of rich debate among American public intellectuals — including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Tubman, Ida Tarbell, George Santayana, W.E.B. Du Bois, Hannah Arendt, Lillian Hellman, Fannie Lou Hamer, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Martin Luther King Jr., Harvey Cox, Malcolm X. No one would argue that everything this diverse group of people said was always true. More often than not, their writings and speeches met with disagreement, displeasure, and disdain. But each lived during a time when popular culture not only encouraged, but often welcomed debate on vital issues. Indeed, it remains the case that Sontag, Chomsky, and Vidal not only enjoy the right to speak their minds today, but they also have access to such influential media venues as the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Nation, and National Public Radio. What has changed, however, is that today their critics have consistently resorted to smear campaigns, personal invective, and jingoistic attacks that question not their right to dissent, but rather the inherent value of dissent from prevailing political currents.

This anti-intellectualism is not new to American life. As much as it would be lovely to romanticize the history of American culture and claim that we've always fostered healthy and productive public discourse, the reality is far more somber. Ever since the colonies broke from England, US culture has been marked by a deep strain of anti-intellectualism. Often this took the form of ridiculing "book learning" (frequently portrayed as Old World, effeminate, or womanish) and praising brawn and action. For over a century, Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow taught children that it’s the "Herculean" horseman Brom Bones, and not the spindly schoolmaster Ichabod Crane, who gets the girls and builds the nation. Andrew Jackson’s public image and presidential campaigns pitched a new sort of character, the daring and adventurous American frontiersman (and Indian killer), against overly schooled and dangerously intellectual do-nothings. Even Harvard-educated Theodore Roosevelt seized on the emerging cult of masculinity — which he helped construct by publicizing his exploits as a game hunter and a Rough Rider, and crowing about having overcome a sickly childhood through manly physical exercise — to help leaven his intellectual accomplishments, a combination which rendered him a beloved public figure and model of patriotic manhood. Roosevelt pursued his domestic reforms, as well as his foreign policy, less by "getting to yes" than by declaring that he would "speak softly and carry a big stick." Woodrow Wilson notwithstanding, it was Roosevelt who set much of the tone (that is, the pose and language) for contemporary politics. This "bully" (a word of multiple meanings embraced by T.R.) posture has become deeply ingrained in US public and political culture.

More recently, we have seen a base anti-intellectualism move to the forefront of American public life in a variety of ways — Ronald Reagan’s infamous statement while running for governor of California in the late 1960s, that "universities should not subsidize intellectual curiosity," springs immediately to mind. Such sentiment has played a prominent role in the attacks on academic freedom promoted by Reagan Revolution ideologues like William Bennett and current vice-presidential wife Lynne Cheney. What can you say when a presidential candidate (distancing himself, no doubt from his Oval Office predecessor, who was a Rhodes scholar) boasts that he was a C student at Yale, and still becomes president? Or when the same president stomps on the intellectual integrity of the UN: "It is time to determine if they will be a force for peace," Bush urged in a September 17 Nashville speech, "or an ineffective debating society." For a country that began with the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams — all of whom were products of the Enlightenment — we have become increasingly less interested, less willing, and less able to conduct intelligent, informed, and truly democratic public discussions.

In modern history, this anti-intellectualism hit its first low in the 1950s, when McCarthyism gripped the nation. At that time, simply questioning the logistics, methods, or reasoning behind the federal government’s crusade against Communism would earn you not only the label of "traitor," but also an invitation to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee and possibly a place on a professional blacklist. Charges of who was red, pink, or soft on Communism were flung far and wide, and anything that didn’t appear totally American — in the most conventional and narrow sense of that term — was suspect. When J. Edgar Hoover spoke at the Republican National Convention in 1960 — which eventually nominated Richard M. Nixon — he claimed that "America’s three menaces" were "communists, beatniks, and eggheads." The very idea that being an intellectual might be detrimental to national security actually seemed reasonable. Being an "egghead" was, indeed, the most effective charge against Adlai E. Stevenson and deeply contributed to his losing his bid for the presidency against Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. These attacks prompted Richard Hofstadter to write his seminal Anti-Intellectualism in American Life in 1963, which charted the waning of a vibrant, public intellectual life in US culture and also surveyed how the threads of anti-intellectualism were multiplying. Intellectuals — in Hofstadter’s view — were always suspect because they often dissented from accepted political opinion.

WHY IS THE PUBLIC intellectual so threatening? Why is it that when Henry Kissinger and Susan Sontag both agree that attacking Iraq is a bad idea, she gets all the shit and he — of all people — is taken seriously as a wise policymaker? The most salient reason for this — and the reason why anti-intellectualism has succeeded in growing such deep roots in US culture — is that Americans are deeply attached to the idea of a conventional political discourse: that is, a basic, shared set of accepted political and social ideals. Only within that consensus is it possible to have debate — even rancorous debate. For instance, it is possible for Kissinger and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to disagree about attacking Iraq without one or the other being dismissed as a kook — as Sontag and Chomsky have been — because both Rumsfeld and Kissinger accept the basic tenets of US primacy in geopolitics. But the role of the public intellectual — at her or his best — is to question those basic shared assumptions and reframe the discussion in such a way that problems can be seen in a new light. This is what abolitionists such as Emerson and William Lloyd Garrison did. It’s what early woman’s-suffrage-movement leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton did. It’s what Margaret Sanger did for the idea of women’s reproductive rights. It is what Upton Sinclair and other muckrakers did when they exposed the criminal activities of US industries and thus threw into doubt the maxim, "what is good for business is good for America." They all refused to accept the basic principles and rules governing public discussion. In much the same way — by profoundly questioning the history and the place of the US government’s role in world affairs — Sontag, Chomsky, and Vidal are doing this too.

You don’t have to agree with everything Sontag, Chomsky, or Vidal writes — in fact, it is probably idiotic to agree with everything anybody writes — but to dismiss what they say because they have been labeled unpatriotic, anti-American, "relativists," or "moral idiots" is equally wrong-headed. History has shown us that many thinkers who were hated and despised in their own time were ultimately proven right — just as many of them were proven wrong. In his New Yorker piece, Menand quite sensibly notes that "if the United States goes the way of nineteenth-century Britain, Chomsky’s interpretation will be the standard one among historians a hundred years from now. People will talk about the destruction of the World Trade Center the way we talk about the Indian Mutiny or Custer’s Last Stand — a terrible massacre, but they had it coming." But curiously, Menand adds, "Which is a good reason never to worry about what future historians will think of us: they’ll despise us no matter what. It’s what we think of us that we need to be concerned with." Surely there is a another road here — we need to be concerned not only with "what we think of us," but with how we act and speak as well. We have intelligence and agency. We should not be used "as flies to wanton boys," as Gloucester says in King Lear, by the gods or historians or the media.

In his 1992 book The Decline and Fall of the American Empire (Odonian), Vidal notes that "[t]he corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity — much less dissent. Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions ..." But before allowing history in the future, or the media now, to decide our fates, it is vital that a public debate occur — a debate that encompasses all points of view, especially those that question the debate’s basic framework.

Michael Bronski is the author of The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom (St. Martin’s, 1998). He can be reached at mabronski@aol.com

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Issue Date: September 19 - 26, 2002
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