The Guardian and Journalistic Mediocrity: Musings on an Article About the Political Leanings of Academia in the Guardian

 

Recently the American page of the English newspaper The Guardian, one of the few quality newspapers left in a world of sub-mediocre newspapers and gossip rags (which The Guardian is in part as well), published an article entitled “US Universities are Moving to the Right: Will it Help Them Escape Trump’s Wrath?” What is remarkable about this article is how mediocre it is, something journalism at its best generally is these days. In fact, this article points up how little social science capital and savvy most journalists have.

This article notes a 2016 study by a professor of business, a developer of health economic solutions for the private sector, and a professor of economics  of the 40 “leading" universities in the US (mostly research universities that are members of the Association of American Universities). This study showed that a majority of faculty in the Humanities and the Social Sciences skew Democrat and, since the Democrats are popularly regarded as liberals in the US, liberal. Before I go on I should not that one might and should wonder about what the 2016 study left out namely,  the political and ideological leanings of faculty in agriculture schools, business schools, medical schools, dental schools, and veterinary schools are and why those who did the 2016 study did not study those academics as well.

But let’s assume for the moment that the 2016 study is correct, a conclusion that other studies could be used to raise questions about, and that the Humanities and Social Sciences (they also include journalism and law schools in these categories which is problematic) are filled to the brim with liberals. The question that needs to be asked about this is why is this the case? Why are those in the Humanities and Social Sciences liberals.

The answer to that question is rather obvious and is backed up by a host of social science qualitative studies. The higher the educational level achieved by someone the more they are to vote liberal in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Educational level, in other words, is the key variable here.

Why is this the case? The answer to that question is also obvious. Higher education faculty, particularly those in the Social Science, have generally been, to quote Nick Lowe, nutted by reality. They know, for example, that while some may assume that crime is higher in urban areas data has, in the past, shown that crime is higher percentage wise in rural areas.

Now this fact, the fact that higher education in the Social Sciences is a reality check, does not mean that there aren’t political and ideological conservatives in the ivy halls of academe and that there can’t be more political and ideological conservative intellectuals (real conservatives not the fake populists who claim the conservative mantle) in higher education. There are intellectual conservatives in American universities and there can be more. For a conservative who currently teaches in the ivy covered walls of the Ivy League I give you Niall Ferguson who holds a well paying job at Harvard and whose books, unlike his homiletics, skew empirical. 

Moreover, one might argue that if ideology is broken in surveys of politics and ideology in American education into a number of more nuanced criteria, such as religion to take one example, often a marker of a more conservative sensibility at least on one level, one might find interesting cultural and ideological contradictions or seeming inconsistencies. Studies of the religious sensibilities in American higher education, for example, show that even in the hard sciences there are a significant number of academics who believe in god even in these supposed secular anti-Christian days. Exploring cultural factors might, in other words, give us a more nuanced picture of the cultures and ideologies of academe.

But back to the nutted by reality argument, the fact is is that right wing populists, who are in no way intellectual conservatives, have been socialised into mythic or what David Graeber might call bullshit history and social science. Such a history and social science are often if not always fake history and such a history and social science should not be taught in academe save in literary studies or in classes on how cultural and ideology create reality in some human populations because they are fake history and fake social science. They are not science. Real science has to be vetted by empirical reality. They are instead ideology.

The thing is is that Trump and his ilk may argue for an affirmative action programme for “conservatives” in higher education, itself a paradox and perhaps an irony given that they oppose diversity, equity, and inclusion programmes (save for themselves it appears). What they really want is power, exclusive power, and they know that to achieve this they need to transform higher education into a politically and ideologically correct image and mirror of themselves. And they are, at the moment more than willing to engage in an inquisition of higher education in order to obtain this power.

I want to end this essay by suggesting to the authors of the study on political and ideological attitudes among academic social scientists and humanities scholars that they do a similar study of political and ideological attitudes among the police in the United States. What I think they will find, if Staten Island is prologue, is that there needs to be an affirmative action programme for liberals and Democrats in America’s police forces, an institution that is not only full of right wing populists who vote Republicam but a healthy dose of proto-fascists if not full fledged fascists.

The Books of My Life: The Psychology of Joss Whedon

 

As a general rule I have never found the pop culture meets academic discipline or sub-discipline genre particularly satisfying. They are often a curious hybrid or mixture in which a television show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, or Firefly is pushed screaming and shouting into a science, physics, philosophical, or psychological box and made to fit, sometimes violently, into that box. Additionally, they are often written by fans of the show raising questions about how dispassionate or objective those writing essays in what are mostly collections of essays are.

Now don’t get me wrong sometimes these edited collections can be helpful to those attempting to understand a pop culture phenomenon (something which often means that they have a cult or sectarian following and hence people who will buy books on the subject given their often rabid interest in the show) when they are relevant to the television shows or films under discussion. And relevant to a number of academic boxes the work of Joss Whedon, specifically his television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly, is. 

Buffy, Angel, and Firefly, as anyone who has closely watched these television show knows, have great philosophical and, thanks to their focus on character and character arcs, great psychological depth, to them something many of the essays in James South’s edited collection Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2003) and the essays in Joy Davidson’s edited collection The Psychology of Joss Whedon (Dallas: BenBella, 2007) point up. The essays in the former explore the Platonic, Aristotelian,  Nietzschean, feminist, noir, theodicy, scientific, pragmatic, Kantian, educational, irrational and tragic, fascist, religious, political, moral, and metaphorical aspects of the show. Paradoxically, its existentialism, something its creator Joss Whedon has said is central to the show, doesn’t even merit an entry it the index of this book. The latter, part of BenBella’s Psychology of Popular Culture series along with edited collections on The Simpsons, the Harry Potter series, and Survivor (see that fanboy and fangirl cult connection?), explores the social psychological, clinical psychological, neuropsychological, psychotherapeutic, psychoanalytic aspects of the show in an often compelling and often convincing way.

There are, for example, essays on free will versus determinism issue in The Psychology of Joss Whedon. Is the work of Whedon deterministic, filled to the brim with free will, or a bit of both these essays ask There are essays on character personality traits and character development in Buffy, Angel, and Firefly. Who are Buffy, Angel, and Mal and why are they the way they are these essays ask? There are essays on the reason Buffy falls for the guys she does in Buffy. One of the essays is therapeutic. It is an essay on how the television work of Whedon helped one writer get through the trauma of leaving an authoritarian Christian fundamentalist social and cultural group. There are essays on the existentialist aspects of all three shows, apropos given the fact that Whedon is a self-professed existentialist and atheist. In terms of theory, some of the essays take a nature perspective, other a nurture perspective, still one of the binary fractures in a lot of the social sciences.

Unlike the essays in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy, many of which I found interesting and compelling and many which made me roll my eyes in the way that only academics of the crystal ball persuasion can make you roll your eyes, I found most of the essays in The Psychology of Joss Whedon interesting for what they told me about the state of the psychological art circa 2007 and for what they told us about the show itself, quite an achievement for a book in the academia meets pop cult genre. After finishing it I thought that it would make an excellent book to use in an introductory psychology class given that its explorations of early 21st century psychological thought are easy to understand and  are written in a clear and straightforward language that even a university frosh can readily grasp in a world where American universities and colleges look and feel more like high schools that they did fifty years ago.

That does not mean that I did not have qualms about some of the essays in the book. Some, particularly those on the nature side of the spectrum, seemed far too reductive and needed a more social psychological perspective to balance them and make them more compelling for my taste. After all, humans are the product not only of nature but of nurture (their economic, political, cultural, and geographical environments they are embedded in) and there is, as several of the essays in the collection make clear, an, at least, grain of choice that humans can make by drawing on the complexity and contradictions available in our broader cultural contexts. Finally, we must never forget the dangers of psychological hubris and the fact that it has a close relationship to the powers that be (including the legal system and its core nation cultural systems thanks to the fact that it has historically proved easy to harmonise with modern and postmodern notions of individualism) and, as such, can institutionalise those they conceptualise as “deviant”, a category that has a strong whiff of the cultural, ideological, and polemical about it. That is even scarier than aspects of Buffy.

Miserable Political Experience: Musings on Politics, Academics, and Political Science

 

When I was an intellectually younger man so one of the major works in American political science was Yale Political Scientist Robert Dahl’s Who Governs, a study of how American government actually worked in one American community, Yale’s home city of New Haven, Connecticut, a book published by Yale University Press in 1961.  Dahl’s book took a consensus and conflict theory approach, the two major theoretical approaches to politics (and by extension American economics and culture presumably) in the social sciences at the time, arguing that New Haven, and by extension the US, was pluralist and stratified and hierarchical in its interest group centred politics.

Who Governs, which made Dahl an intellectual and academic celebrity and superstar, would prove to be a critical jumping off point for empirical and normative theoretical analyses and critiques of American politics in the late 1960s and in the 1970s, the era when I took my undergraduate degree at a university that will henceforth remain nameless because of its increasing theo-fascism. The late 1960s, of course, saw a revival of Marxist theory and practise in the US in American intellectual life and American academia and many Marxist critics of Dahl’s work and his later theory of polyarchy. grounded in his early work, saw Dahl as too much of a consensus theorist. Dahl, however, was hardly, like Max Weber, a purely consensus or functionalist theorist since he argued that there were power inequalities in American political culture. Some interest groups, Dahl argued, had more power, authority, and hence influence than others. But then attacks in the social sciences during the long sixties on consensus and functionalist theorists was as much in the heady and overgeneralising academic air just as it was in the countercultural air of core nations more broadly at the time and this almost revivalistic oxygen did not really breed more nuanced critiques. 

For many of those who did recognise that Dahl was both a consensus and a conflict theorist it was Dahl’s conception of power that many of them had a problem with. Many of Dahl’s critics found it to limited and limiting. Subsequently, of course, the conception of power and its adjunct authority has broadened in the social sciences since Dahl and this is all for the good in my opinion. Power is not only about getting A to do B, as Dahl had it. It is also discursive. Humans are, as contemporary studies of power have shown, embedded in socially and culturally constructed webs thanks to socialisation, for instance, that rule out certain ideological options by marginalising them and silencing them, something that should be remembered in these looney politically and ideologically correct days on increasingly fascist university campuses. As such power, in both its social and cultural constructionist discursive and rhetorical form and in its ability to make A do B form, is central to traditional, modern, and postmodern societies with their class, ethnic-racial, gender, and age inequalities.

As I have grown older I have become increasingly convinced that conscious ideology plays a very limited role in how American (and core nation) politics actually works and functions, something that some if not many academics and intellectuals embedded as they are in their own little fetishised world  of Enlightenment rationality with education as the means to right thinking enlightenment and subsequently liberation (intellectual and academic nirvana) aren’t likely to agree with me on. There are, of course, a few true believers for who conscious ideological purity is important. Sometimes such ideological purity movements can give rise to a cult centred around a charismatic figure in the Weberian sense. I give you the contemporary Republican party which has become an institutionalised cult centred around their holy figure of Donald Trump, their Tangholio. For most potential voters, however, I am increasingly convinced, fatigue, tiredness, and weariness of the party in power plays an important role in who they vote against and who they consequently vote for.

Such weariness of those in power, of course, works hand in hand and hand in glove with the demagogic polemical attack strategies of those prominent political forces not in power. In a media world with a steady diet where those prominent and elites out of power attack those in power for all sorts of political, economic, and cultural woes, with their sky is falling sensationalistic if it bleeds if leads apocalyptic rhetoric coming from polemicists and demagogues and which has become central to the communication sphere, works quite well, as it always had, with the masses. As such, the social and cultural construction of weariness and tiredness is quite easy to manufacture and, in turn, manipulate. We can readily see this process working in contemporary Britian where those who once voted Tory, even in areas traditional Labour geographies which switched to Conservative in the last election, look ready to switch to Labour to throw the bastards out in the upcoming election. We can see it in Canada where the Liberals of Trudeau, who won two successive elections, are running behind the Conservatives once again. Shades of Harper Tories. We can see it in attack dog politics in the United States today.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to assert that political culture is nothing but fatigue politics. Luck and being in the right place at the right time are factors in elections. The recent Labour victory in the United Kingdom, for instance was aided and abetted not only by fatigue with the Tories after fourteen years of Conservative rule in the UK but also by scandals in the Conservative Party, the incompetence of the Conservative Party, specifically the incompetence of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, and scandals in the Scottish National Party, all of which aided the Labour Party. 

Additionally, there are, as I noted earlier, true believers who operate on the elite faithful and elite demagogic political levels and on the mass political level in the core nations. There are a cadre of true believers among the masses. Political culture in core nations is also, as the celebrations of D-Day today show, symbolic, grounded in cultural meanings even if those cultural meanings, as they have been on this “sacred" D-Day, rather and necessarily so vague since one can interpret things like “freedom” and “liberty’ in multiple ways while others can see such meanings for what they are, the ways and means great powers like Imperial America, Imperial Russia, Imperial China and wanna be Imperial Europe manipulate the masses via vague declarations that play on national and regional faiths and broad notions of what has been socialised into some as profane.

Life in the Pissant Swamp: Musings on the University at Albany's Project Renaissance

 

For many of those who dream of going to university and who dream of being an academic someday the academic life is often surrounded by and encased within a web of romanticism. The problem with this is that many of those who romanticise academia have a Californicated rather than a real view of university life and of the professors they hope to study with. In actuality, the academic life is very different from the fantasies that fill the minds of those academic wanna bes who romanticise higher education and the academic life. In fact, academia is closer to Peyton Place crossed with The West Wing if The West Wing was much ado about very little if not nothing, than to the fantasy world of mediaeval romance and chivalry which was never really real in the first place.

When I was young and naive I was one of those who romanticised higher education. These romantic illusions and delusions about academe were largely maintained during my undergraduate years thanks to my limited knowledge of and experience with the more Peyton Place and The West Wing aspects of life within the ivy-covered sometimes gothic walls of higher education. Fortunately, this romanticism did not survive my postgraduate years thanks to a number of smacked by reality moments during my postgraduate sojourn including professors who blackmailed female graduate students into having sex with them, its more powerful professors leaving their wives for the less powerful client younger graduate students they worked with, and its ultimately petty political and ideological machinations.

My most intimate experience with the petty political and ideological machination side of academe happened around 1997. I was hired to be one of, if memory serves, six teaching assistants working with six faculty members for a new academic programme at the University at Albany in Albany, New York, Project Renaissance. While I no longer remember all of the dramatis personae in the Project Renaissance saga thanks to the passage of time, I do recall that Project Renaissance was the brainchild of Lil Brannon, who had a doctorate of education from from East Texas State University (one of the many teacher's colleges that became universities in the post-World War II era and now Texas A&M- Commerce), the head the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, CETL, at the University at Albany at the time. 

Project Renaissance's goal was to provide a multidisciplinary living and learning educational experience for selected students. All selected students were assigned to Mohawk Tower, the 22 storey skyscraper in the centre of Indian Quad (now Indigenous Quad), one of the quadruplet quads on the University of Albany campus. At the heart of Project Renaissance's educational focus was a course called Human Identity and Technology, a course that all the students had to take and a course which fulfilled the University of Albany's general education requirement, something that made it more appealing to some students. The goal of these courses--there were eight sections of the course--over the two semesters was to explore how individual identity was impacted by groups, cultures, and institutions, how human identity was impacted by various technologies, and how human identity was impacted by nature, religion, the arts, literature, society, genetics, gender, race, and ethnicity 

Six faculty members and six teaching assistants were hired to teach this course and its course sections. The faculty and graduate assistants were assigned to two groups with each group putting its own spin on the class.. The course I was assigned to, which included V. Ng, some bloke from the mediocre Religious Studies Faculty at SUNY Albany, and another chap whose name I don'tt recall, decided to put a historical spin on the class, something I was not particularly comfortable with given that it seemed to me to replicate the world history courses that were already offered in the History Faculty at the University at Albany. I thus decided, in my discussion section of the course, a section that supplemented the larger course taught by the faculty to at least one hundred students, to be more topical emphasising identity--class, ethnic-racial, gender, sexual/gender identity--in my section. Needless to say, this was a course massively unworthy of the name Renaissance. By the way, I was also uncomfortable with the large size of the generar class meeting--100 students--since it seemed to me to undermine what I thought was one purposes of Project Renaissance, to wit, to provide greater student-faculty intimacy in both its courses and its interactions

I made my concerns public at one of the planning meetings for my group. As a consequence within a few days I was taken off the project at, I was told, the request of the faculty members that ran my group. They didn't even talk to me about this issue before they did the you're fired rag. They simply branded me a heretic--I was told there was concern about my general focus on identity and sexual/gender identity in particular--and ingloriously dismissed from Project Renaissance. They apparently wanted nothing but yes men. Needless to say I learned a valuable and important lesson in how petty power and petty ideological politics play out in the postmodern American university that day.

My ignominious dismissal was, to say the least, a serious problem for a graduate student like myself as I no longer had an assistantship and hence no longer had financial support for the school year. Project Renaissance, perhaps as a result of History Faculty lobbying for me, gave me an administrative assistantship. This lasted a semester instead of the school year as promised. I was summarily dismissed from my administrative position at CETL and Project Renaissance claimed that they no longer had the monies to support me for the next semester. It turned out, of course, that this claim of poverty was a lie. Just before the end of the term I discovered a letter that said that Project Renaissance was planning on getting rid of heretical me and giving my monies to someone else instead.

I contacted the Graduate Student Union of which I was a card carrying member about this injustice and provided the union with a copy of the letter detailing the fact that the powers that be were giving my money to someone else and thus unfairly dismissing me, and filed a formal complaint with the union. The union representative met with Brannon and, at least on one occasion, with Brannon and me. Brannon continued to claim pennilessness throughout the meeting. This experience with the union complaint process provided me with yet another valuable lesson which I have never forgotten, a lesson in the limited power of unions, and in the limits of unions in general. The union was of absolutely no help to me. In fact, the union rep seemed to be more interested in pleasing the powers that be than in helping me in a case where the powers that be were clearly dissembling. As a result, I was only able to continue my doctoral education thanks to the History Faculty which provided me with an adjunct position so I could continue to pay the rent, buy food, and pay for and take classes. By the way, this lesson would be replayed several years later when I taught at SUNY Oneonta where the union conceded to the bureaucrats the right to hide the classes of adjuncts during the pandemic making sure that students could't enrol in the class. a situation that made it impossible for me to continue to teach at Oneonta given that it meant that I would only have one class and would thus not have health insurance and that my pay would be halved, both of which made it impossible for me to continue to commute to Oneonta from Albany to teach given the associated costs. So I retired.

Project Renaissance did not last long. My sense was that many administrative personnel and faculty members at the University at Albany were sceptical about the programme and raised questions about the it during the reevaluation phase despite claims by Project Renaissance that it aided student retention, something increasingly important to the increasingly neoliberal bureaucrats who run second or third level research universities like the University at Albany given the declines in state financial support for higher education. Additionally, the founder of the programme was no longer there to fight for it. Like so many faculty and educational bureaucrats in American universities these days Brannon seemed to be more interested in moving up the corporate ladder to better paying and higher status academic bureaucratic duties and used Project Renaissance to help accomplish this upward mobility bureaucratic feat. Brannon moved to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 1998 where she initially coordinated that university's master's programme in English Education and later became the director of Charlotte's writing programme and the dean of the College of Arts, a position she currently holds at UNCC.

As for my romantic illusions and delusions about academia, they died the day I was wrongly made redundant. I was, as Nick Lowe says, nutted by reality, the reality that academia is just like any other modern corporate bureaucracy in the core nation world and the reality that academic bureaucrats are just like other modern bureaucracies coloured as they are in Niebuhrian grey. The soap opera that is academia is actually, and one should be surprised by this, a mirror of life in general. It. like them, is full of petty rivalries, petty back stabbings, petty blackmailings, petty adulteries, and petty kafkaesque soul stealing bureaucracies. While I am not sure that that old proverb about the less important an institution is the pettier and less important its politics is is true, I am sure of that academia, which is kind of an alternative counterculture that gives academic administrative personnel and its academic faculty a degree of limited and limitedly important power, is, in the final analysis, filled to the brim with a lot of  petty power games that mirror those, if in much less important and impactful form, how governments operate, how economic corporations act, and how humans typically behave. And that ain't romantic at all.

The Books of My Life: One Nation, Two Cultures

 

Polemics and apologetics are, of course, two sides of the same demagogic coin. Demagoguery itself has a long history both inside of and outside of academia. The Athenian leader Perikles, for instance, warned of the potential influence of demagogues during Athens's war with Sparta. Many of the early Christian fathers proudly identified themselves as polemicists and apologists as they argued for the falsity of other faiths or meaning systems and proclaimed the truth of their own. Many true believer monotheists have engaged in polemics and apologetics ever since, though many have not acknowledged the fact that that is what they do. Polemics and apologetics have been central to American, Canadian, and Australian political culture almost since the "birth" of those British settler societies.

The academy, at least since the late 19th century, thanks to the impact of positivism on the hard and soft sciences in the ivory tower, have, at least in their official rhetoric, abjured polemics and apologetics in favour of empiricism, though some might argue and several have that empiricists have proclaimed their value freeness way too often for as Max Weber noted in the early twentieth century what academics choose to study reflects, on some level, the values of the researcher. 

Despite their proclamation of value neutrality academics have, on occasion self consciously and almost messianically waded into polemical and apologetic waters. Historian Jack Granatstein's Who Killed Canadian History (1998 and 2007) and historian Keith Windschuttle's Who Killed History (2000), for instance, are, respectively, apologias for "traditional" Canadian and "traditional" Australian history as they define it--an emphasis on "traditional" political history and the great men who helped make it--and polemics against Canadian and Australian social and cultural histories, which they see as arising out of the cultural ferment of the countercultural 1960s, an era they generally bemoan and see emblematic of the decline of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and so on. An American variant of this argument can be found in historian Gertrude Himmelfarb's One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of the Cultural Revolution (New York, Vintage, 1999, edition with a new afterword, 2001). 

While Himmelfarb trods terrain similar to that of Granatstein and Windschuttle, her polemic and apologetic is more broadly focused than either those two, who focus their gaze on education and more particularly on higher education. Himmelfarb, like Granatstein and Windschuttle, sees academia as impacted by post-1960s social and cultural historical fads. She traces these, as has become common among intellectual conservatives in Canada, Australia, and the United States to the situational pluralism, multiculturalism, and relativism of the sixties counterculture, which, she argues, has now become the dominant cultural strain in late twentieth and early twenty-first century America.

While Himmelfarb claims that the cultural ideologies of 1960s counterculturalists have become the dominant paradigm in the United States since the 1970s, a claim some might dispute given the fact that the US seems evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, exemplars of liberalism and conservatism (really "traditional" liberals) and right wingism respectively in fin-de-siecle and early twenty-first century America and little in the way of bipartisanship in the American federal legislature. Himmelfarb argues that there is also an oppositional culture of dissent from this pluralist, multicultural, and relativist hegemony, an oppositional culture that remains prominent and significant in the United States, the dissident culture of traditionalists, by which Himmelfarb seems to mean those who continue to promote the Victorian values of self-discipline, self-help, family, civil society, sexual morality, patriotism, and religion or morality. She counterpoints these values to the values of the counterculturalists which, she argues, have given rise in late twentieth and early twentieth century America to increased divorce rates, increased crime rates, increased drug abuse rates, increased female headed families living in poverty rates, increased cohabitation rates, increased narcissism, and increases in a host of other immoralities.

As I noted, Himmelfarb's polemics and apologetics have become standard jeremiad fare among intellectual conservatives like Himmelfarb and fellow travellers like Lynne Cheney, William Bennett, and Robert Bork. This world of late twentieth century and early twenty-first century polemics and apologetics, however, seems rather quaint, dainty, and passe in the age of that right wing demagogue who has dominated so much discourse in the early 21st century, Donald Trump. Trump, of course, is someone who has been married multiple times, committed adultery on several occasions, brags of his sexual strategies and conquests to friends and media celebrities, makes fun of the disabled, proffers crazy and delusional conspiracy theories, rages at hallucinated un-American traitors in his midst, fellow travels with racists and Nazis, and who is the supreme example of a flim flam capitalist narcissist. Trump, who is hardly the paragon of Victorian ethical and moral and virtue Himmelfarb preaches, surprised many of the punditariat by winning the presidency of the United States in 2016 and who has become, since his run for the presidency in 2016, the totem figure of a purification cult grounded in a variant of the American nationalist faith, a cult centred on Trump and which has, as one of its major statements of faith, the belief that their great leader is a man called by god or nature to "make America great again". Himmelfarb's polemics and apologetics, in other words, echo an intellectual world that has, at least for the moment, passed just like the age of Victoria has passed.

There are a number of other problems with Himmelfarb's declensional polemic and apologetic. On the theoretical level she argues for a cultural determinism or reductionism that is ultimately similar to and as problematic as the economic determinism of vulgar Marxists. And while culture, which Himmelfarb emphasises, is important, so are economics (class, poverty, we have to eat), politics (status, humans, who have always lived in groups, have to live together), geography, and demography (age, cohort). Additionally, Himmelfarb fails to distinguish descriptive or empirical relativism from normative or ethical and moral relativism, a common demonising strategy used by many conservative and right wing polemicists and apologists or demagogues.

On the methodological level Himmelfarb seems to argue, on the one hand, that the hegemonic postmodernist culture of situational tolerance and its heirs and the dissident culture of "traditionalists", with which she identifies, are Weberian ideal types and that they intersect and interact in a variety of ways in practise. At the same time, Himmelfarb seems to view these two cultures (a riff on C.P. Snow's two cultures of science and the humanities?) as distinct or binary movements engaged in a manichean culture war for the very soul of America. Additionally, Himmelfarb utilises and mixes and matches both quantitative and qualitative anecdotal data, which sometimes makes her argument less compelling and convincing.

On the cultural level Himmelfarb conflates intellectual and popular culture. While the United States does have intellectual cultures, which take a variety of forms in their culture, their politics, and their economics, the US also has a long tradition of anti-intellectualism and anti-academicism particularly on the right, a movement distinct from traditional liberalism or conservatism. Additionally, Himmelfarb, who sees religion as a bulwark of Victorian values, misses the increasing age, cohort, and cultural tensions within American intellectual evangelicalism at places like Calvin and Wheaton (Illinois) these days.

Speaking of the religious culture, Himmelfarb finds greater cultural and ideological coherence in right wing religion than there is. She fails, for example, to distinguish between conservative intellectual Christianity, such as that found at Calvin College, Wheaton College (Illinois), Brigham Young University, and the University of Notre Dame, separatist Protestantism, such as that at Bob Jones University, and mainstream right wing anti-intellectual Christianity, which preaches the anti-intellectual gospel of everyman a Bible scholar regardless of whether they know Hebrew, Aramaic, koine Greek, and Near Eastern history or not, the gospel of free market capitalism, something non-existent in biblical times, the gospel of Anglo-Saxonism, and the gospel of theocratic we are OK you are not OK intolerance.

On the geographic level HImmelfarb's claim that the US is one nation and two cultures is problematic. Joel Garreau (The Nine Nations of North America, 1981), for instance, argues that there are nine nations with varying cultures in North America while Edward Crabb and James Curtis (Regions Apart, 2005) argue that the United States and Canada are really four nations or societies with different cultures: the francophone and the anglophone in Canada and the North and the South in the United States. I would argue that there are at least two nations in the United States, the Northeast and Pacific Coast and the South, and that one can find elements of each in other parts of the US. Austin, for instance, is more Northeast and Pacific Coast than rural Texas. Salt Lake City is more Northeast and Pacific Coast than most of the other parts of Mormon Utah and the Mormon culture region save perhaps for St. George. The South continues to be characterised by strong elements of theocratic Christianity and White identity superiority while the Intermountain West, save for Mormondom, continues to be characterised, in part, by European post-imperialist racism and rebellion against the federal government, which owns substantial amount of real estate in the West, despite the fact that without government intervention, interventions in the form of things like the Boulder Dam, the West would be a very different place.

Personally, I think one can make a compelling argument that there may be more than only two Americas. The American sports world, which can serve as an excellent transparent mirror into American culture and society, is tribal. It's the Dallas Cowboys and their worshipful fans versus the New York Giants and their devoted fans, the New York Yankees and their devoted fans versus the Boston Red Sox and their worshipful fans, the Chicago Bulls and their worshipful fans versus the Los Angeles Lakers and their devoted fans. The US, this sports tribalism suggests, is a land of tribes where national teams, like the US men's and women's soccer teams, are barely a blip on the national radar. It is, of course, different in other parts of the world. New Zealand, for instance, worships its national rugby team, which is central to Kiwi civic religion. Canada worships its national hockey team, a sport central to its public religion. Brasil worships its national football or soccer team, which is central to its civil religion. Generally speaking, one finds, in nations where a national sport is prominent and central, a greater sense of national identity, though there are interesting caveats here. In the US, for instance, the coding of the military and the police as sacred and the myths associated with them play an important role in the conceptualisation of national identity among right wing groups.

On the educational level Himmelfarb treats academia as too consensual. As several surveys have shown over the years there are a number of significant cultural and ideological differences between academics in the hard sciences, the social sciences, humanities, those who teach law, those who teach the medical sciences, and those who teach in other of the applied sciences. Social scientists and those in the humanities seem to best fit Himmerfarb's caricature and stereotype of the "typical" academic.

On the political level Himmelfarb makes the common mistake that the United States is a democracy. Even if one accepts the notion that the US is a republic the reality is that America is, like all core modern and postmodern societies, bureaucratic. As Weber and Michels noted in the early twentieth century, all modern and postmodern bureaucracies are pyramidal in form with structured and inherent inequalities of power, authority, and wealth embedded and institutionalised in them (See GE, Apple, Kroger's, the government of the American state of Indiana). And while one might argue that these structured inequalities are grounded in merit, one of the central myths of British settler societies, the realities of nepotism and structured inequalities related to social and cultural capital, suggest that merit is, at best, only partially at play in American economics, politics, and culture. So, if one is going to argue that the US is a democracy the person or persons making this argument need to provide empirical evidence as to why a society characterised by bureaucracies with embedded structural inequalities and impacted by favouritism are democratic. Personally, I don't think anyone can do this because the US is, by definition and as a consequence of its bureaucracies, an oligarchy and always has been.

Another political level problem one finds in One Nation, Two Cultures is Himmelfarb's failure to distinguish, as I noted earlier, intellectual conservatism from right wing political culture. These two cultures, and subcultural and countercultural variants within each, are different and distinct though there is overlap on some issues. Conservatives, historically speaking, have their origins in the intellectual opposition to the Enlightenment and particularly the French Revolution though one might argue that foreshadowings of it appear in the defenders of the monarchical faith. The right, on the other hand, has its origins in religion, anti-intellectualism, and a culture of white superiority. Both may preach the gospel of the free market but that doesn't mean that they have the same historical origins and that they are the same culturally and ideologically. As for Himmelfarb's conservatism, it is actually old Enlightenment liberalism, the liberalism of Adam Smith, the liberalism, if somewhat tensely, of John Stuart Mill, and the liberalism that was shocked by the French Revolution. 

On the social ethical level Himmelfarb is a bit confusing. Is Himmelfab arguing that counterculturalists have a situational morality, or does she maintain that the counterculturalists have no real ethics or morality at all? Can Himmelfarb admit that some elements of the "counterculture" have as ethically valid and thought out conception of the public sphere and of virtue, a virtue tied to human rights, as conservatives and right wingers? It seems to me that Himmelfarb wants to have it both ways, that she wants to have her cake--yes they do have an ethics and a morality--and not eat it too--no they don't have a social ethics and morality beyond a selective situational ethics and morality, which may be no ethics or morality at all.

Postscript: I am proud to say that this review was banned by Amazon for possibly violating "community standards" though how it violated I don't know because whoever categorised it as such--amateur suits, fundamentalist bots, politically correct ideologues--don't tell you how said review may, and they do use the word may, violates community standards. Whatever the reason it was banned and a censored version was requested, it is clear that autocratic and despotic Amazon is not committed to real freedom of speech and that says it all.

Musings on Right Wing "Analysis" of the Trials and Travails of Antioch College

While I was exploring the continuing problems of Antioch College recently I ran across this little gem or right wing “analysis” of Antioch’s current economic problems by one Reed Alexander in the comments section of Megan Bachman’s update on the continuing economic problems of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio in the Yellow Springs News on 29 March 2021:



"After all these years of “reinventing” itself – Antioch administrators still don’t “get it.” Antioch offers an antiquated approach to education – its sole mission is to indoctrinate young people with leftist propaganda. Other schools focus on providing students with cutting-edge skills to compete for jobs of the future, while Antioch judges success on the number of minds it can infiltrate with socialist ideology. A losing proposition.
A nephew of mine in roughly eight years ago attended Antioch because he thought it would expand his horizons to think more broadly about the world. Instead, because he was wasn’t liberal enough, he was ostracised (spelling corrected by me) by both faculty and administrators. Diversity of thought is not a goal at Antioch. Sad."

 While it is probably sad to some that Antioch College continues to have problems, problems which go back to the 1970s, what is also sad, if not surprising, is the abstract and decontextualised political and ideological correctness that undergirds Alexander’s response to Bachman’s article on the economic and demographic struggles at Antioch College. Where to begin?

First, Antioch is not the only college that is experiencing economic and demographic problems these days. So is, for example, the College of Saint Rose, a small Roman Catholic college in Albany, New York that no longer, to cite one example of curricular cleansing, has a Sociology Department. So did the University at Albany in the same city. SUNY Albany once had to cut its language and theatre programmes among others because of financial problems in the wake of an economic downturn and decreasing state monies.

Second, not all colleges and universities that I suspect Alexander would put in the “liberal” camp are having financial and demographic problems. Reed College in Portland, Oregon, one of the other colleges, along with Antioch and Swarthmore, Burton Clark analysed in his classic The Distinctive College, has a $569 million dollar endowment. Swarthmore has an endowment of over $2 billion dollars. Both have healthy student enrollments, healthy and productive faculty, and healthy academic departments. Another "liberal" university, Brandeis University, has a $1.2 billion dollar endowment post-Madoff.

Third, all cultures, subcultures, countercultures, societies, nations, the military, prisons, corporations, and educational institutions socialise. One might argue, for example, that The King's College (home of demagogue Dinesh D’Souza once upon a time) and Bob Jones socialises its students into variants of right wing Christian ideology. Unfortunately, and unscientifically, those demagogues with a political and ideological correctness axe to grind prefer to refer to certain forms of socialisation, forms of socialisation they don’t like (ah there once again is that pesky emotionalism that dominates right wing “thinking”), in other words, as “indoctrination” or “brainwashing”. A more value neutral and scientific term for the common phenomenon of cultural reproduction of the young or initiation of new members into cultures, organisations, and institutions, is the tried and true one of socialisation. That term, however, isn’t politically and ideologically demonic and frightening enough for right wing demagogues like Alexander.

Finally, the reasons some colleges and universities are having problems these days are multiple. First there are the demographic factors. I give you student decline and greater competition for the potential student pool. Second, there are the economic reasons. Some colleges and universities are poorer than others, some have less endowment monies and other monies to work with, and some are seeing decreases in state support in absolute and relative terms. Third, there are the cultural factors. Colleges and universities have different degrees of social and cultural capital in the minds of applicants and their parents. It is more appealing to those who have been impacted by branding, ideologies of ancientness, and other cultural phenomena to apply to and go to Reed or Swarthmore as opposed to Antioch or Ball State University.

I realise this brief discussion of colleges and universities and their trials and travails will have little and, more likely, any impact on the abstract politically correct demagogues of the world and those who pied pipper and ditto their ideologically grounded rhetoric. Still, people like Alexander, people who seem to prefer their analysis to be ahistorical, contextless, empirically deficient, and ideologically correct, make for, I hope, an interesting blog in the age of Kornbluth’s marching orange tinted bsing morons.

The Books of My Life: The Soul of the American University

Humans are, as well as being economic, political, geographic, and biological animals, cultural and meaning giving animals as George Marsden's The Soul of the American University (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) makes abundantly clear. Marsden's book, which places cultural history at its centre, explores how American colleges, once dominated by sectarian Protestant groups like the Presbyterians and Congregationalists, became, by the twentieth century, universities where "secularism" (or better the sacralisation of certain meanings) rather than Protestantism became the established "faith". 

Marsden argues that the seeds of secular establishment and Protestant disestablishment lay in evangelical Protestantism, the form of Protestantism that dominated American colleges, itself. As evangelicalism confronted the children of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment such as evolutionary Darwinism and evolutionary and historically oriented "higher" biblical criticism, evangelicalism split into the more "traditionalist", at least in self perception, conservative evangelicalism and moderate and liberal and even socialistic evangelicalism. This more moderate and liberal evangelicalism, claims Marsden, created a brand of Protestantism that adapted to and adopted Darwinism, adapted to and adopted "higher" biblical criticism, and tied mission to ethical and moral development and advocacy activism. Over time, the Protestant character of all of these was demagicified or secularised creating the modern university, a modern university shorn of its once dominant WASP Protestant heritage.

Though Marsden seems to place most of the blame for university "secularisation" on science and pragmatism and on academics, reality is a bit more complicated than that as Marsden seems to sometimes realise. Faculty did, as Marsden notes, come to place free speech and free inquiry (autonomy) at the heart of the faculty enterprise. It is not the faculty, however, who ran or who run American universities. As Thorstein Veblen noted in his The Higher Learning in America of 1918 it is capitalist economic interests with their practical need for trained workers and for technocrats who, through university Boards and university administrators, really control and run America's universities. Today, the dominance of universities by economic interests and their fellow travellers who fetishise a particular economic ideology that has been dehistoricised and who worship the holy trinity of Mammon, Greed, and Managerial Professionalism, has provided American universities with a corporate model of governance, a corporate model of corporate planning (the planning is our plan mentality), and a corporate retail model of education where the customer, those consumers universities are trying to attract and maintain, students, are almost always right.

Beyond empirical issues there are problems associated with the normative aspects of Marsden's book. In the concluding chapter to The Soul of the American University, "Concluding Unscientific Postscript", Marsden goes all normative on us calling for and advocating a return of religion, and particularly Christianity, to the ivy covered groves of academe. Using postmodernism in the same way Mormon intellectuals do, Marsden takes a postmodernist approach arguing that if tolerance and diversity are truly central to the academic and intellectual enterprise religion too should be tolerated in a university environment that preaches the gospel of diversity.

There are, of course, several problems with such an argument. In an age where the Bircher/Dixiecrat anti-intellectual and inquisitional variety of Protestantism in both its religious and "secular" form has taken over the Republican Party should universities, with their emphasis on facts and valid approaches to empirical facts (economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic methods and strategies), allow such hate filled paranoid and conspiracy driven perversions of reality to enter the academic playing field? Should those intolerant of any views other than their own and who have made demonic inquisition central to their ideologies and practises be allowed into the halls of academe? Marsden implies they shouldn't arguing instead for the creation of Habermasian like boards of experts who adjudicate what varieties of religion are acceptable on college campuses along with the need for religious groups themselves to agree to certain broad rules of the academic game. Marsden, in other words, accepts that universities should and must have standards and those that violate such standards should not gain admission into university halls. Moreover, as Marsden notes, religious organisations are already present on university campuses. University campuses are full of religious oriented groups that students can join and find community and friendship at if they so wish (see, for example, Conrad Cherry, Betty DeBerg, and Amanda Porterfield, Religion on Campus, 2001). I, for instance, used to go to Hillel periodically when I was a student though less for religious reasons than for community and friendship. If students are not availing themselves of such opportunities is that the fault of "secular" universities or, for example, the fact that many of these religious groups are intolerant of and inquisitorial towards a number of empirically grounded political, economic, and cultural ideologies? Finally, one can and should question whether corporations, like universities, are "persons" with souls.

Now don't get me wrong, I quite like the structure of the University of Toronto, where I was admitted, with its three postgraduate theological colleges and its three religious based federated religious colleges that are part of the public University of Toronto (Canada has taken a different approach to the separation of religion and state than the US). I wouldn't mind if this structure was replicated in the United States and Marsden notes that there were attempts to replicate the Canadian model in the US and that they had limited long term success. It must be remembered, however, that the history of English Canada is different from that of the US and this is one reason religious colleges are affiliated with or federated with public and private universities in Canada. It also must be remembered that a "secular" curriculum is at the core of the federated colleges at the UofT--and should also be if the Canadian system is copied in the US, on the primary, secondary, or higher education level--and that, as D.S. Masters noted in his book on Protestant church colleges in Canada, such federation and affiliation played a major role in "secularising" church colleges in Canada. In Marsden's terms, I suppose, this brings us back to square one once again where we don't seem to be able to pass go. It brings us back to square one for when change occurs, as it, historically speaking, always does, religion adapts to this change and adopts aspects of these changes as both the history of Protestant liberalism and Protestant reactionism well show.

The Magical College and University Tour: Musings on the Abusurdity of Best Colleges and Universities Lists.

I have to admit, I get a kind of horror film like chuckle--funny yet scary--out of these best of lists whether they are the best films of all time, the best TV shows of the 1990s, the best sculptures since time immemorial, the US News and World Report rankings of American colleges and universities, or the CS list of the best universities in the world for 2021. The reason I do is because there are fundamental problems with these lists.

Let's start with reputation. Reputations are, at least in part, intersubjective and are impacted by broader practises associated with social and cultural capital. Reputations, in other words, are, at least in part, cultural and symbolic, and are often, if not generally, impacted by ideologies that are of questionable empirical status.

Second, there are different kinds of colleges and universities. There are, in the United States, for instance, teaching colleges (Siena), research colleges (Amherst), teaching universities (Fort Hays), and research universities (Indiana University, Bloomington, Ohio University). Each of these are somewhat different making comparisons between them, other than the conclusion that they are different, problematic.

I want to focus in the rest of this blog on research universities. When we do this it becomes crystal clear that there are, as a matter of empirical fact, important differences between research universities. There are, in the US, for instance, "elite" American universities like Indiana, Michigan Harvard, and Pittsburgh all members of the elite Association of American Universities. There are also, research universities that are not members of the AAU (Albany, Kent State, Nebraska, Syracuse) because they don't meet the criteria for membership. Comparing "elite" research universities with non-"elite" research universities is possible since they are both research universities, apples. Nevertheless, they are also different and are thus, to continue with the metaphor, rather like the difference between sweet apples and tart apples.

There are also important differences among these "elite" research universities as anyone with a grasp of history knows, a difference that is akin to the differences between sweet pink lady apples and sweet honey crisp apples. One of the differences in elite Association of American Universities universities, for instance, involves the issue of whether these "elite" research universities are all purpose universities with liberal arts, business, agricultural, and engineering schools, like Ohio State, Purdue, Penn State, Michigan State, and Iowa State, all land grant institutions of their respective states, or whether they are liberal arts universities.

America's land grant colleges began life as agricultural research colleges and universities thanks to the Land Grant College Act of 1862 and had the mission of engaging in extensive agricultural research and disseminating this research to farmers in the states in which they were located, states where agriculture was once dominant.

Some of the states where land grant colleges were founded,  however,  already had existing public universities. In the period after World War II many of these eventually grew into  "elite" research oriented liberal arts universities. These non-land grant research universities, such as Indiana University, Bloomington, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Michigan, and the University of Iowa, today are essentially large scale liberal arts universities with business colleges, schools of law, and sometimes medical colleges--Indiana's medical college is in Indianapolis, home to a growing non-"elite" research university, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, IUPUI, adding an important wrinkle to any empirical analysis. Thus to compare Indiana University, Bloomington, which is basically a massive liberal arts university, to Purdue University with its applied agricultural and engineering schools, research and applied research programmes that are research intensive, and with their expanding liberal arts programmes, is problematic and analytical controls must be put in place when comparing them. One must, in other words, compare like--liberal arts at Indiana--with like--liberal arts at Purdue. Any survey that doesn't do this is problematic for what I hope are obvious reasons.

Third, it is absurd to compare some American "elite" private colleges and universities with more selective admissions criteria, and who can be selective in their admissions, save when it comes to legacies and athletes, with state colleges and universities of the research or teaching variety, with less selective admissions criteria because their mission, at least in part, is to serve the residents of that state. Again this is like comparing various types of apples with each other.

Given all this, it is hard to think of these best of college and universities lists as anything other than historically anemic and theoretically week publicity. And that seems homologous with the world of neoliberal corporate capitalism we sadly live in these days, even in colleges and universities.

Alice in Wonderland Goes to College...

So, New Zealand universities collectively are facing half a billion New Zealand dollars in losses thanks, in part, to a decline in its foreign student body due to the coronavirus. If NZ universities are anything like those in the US they are top heavy with administrators who practise the retail model of education, one in which colleges and universities are akin to Walmart's and McDonald's. One study of a college in the US found an over 20% increase in upper level bureaucrats and an over 100% increase in mid-level bureaucrats between 1975 and 2008. Unless the mission of colleges and universities is to hire bureaucrats, some of whom are doing what David Graeber calls "bullshit jobs" and many of whom are siphoning monies away from education, there is some pork that can and should be cut there.

In the upside down world of the upper level corporate educational bureaucrat whose ideology is that only we are essential and whose god is Mammon, just like that of other corporate elite, the decline in student enrollment, for instance, is not their fault or the fault of those corporate managers trained in mush like student personnel who man student recruitment and student retention offices in the corporation. It is instead, in their faultless illogical corporate logic, the fault of those who care for the grounds, who serve students meals, and who teach the classes that were once regarded as central and essential to the mission of colleges and universities. Alice in Wonderland, Franz Kafka, and Vladimir Voinovich are smiling somewhere.

The Books of My Life: From the New Deal to the New Right

Joseph Lowndes in his book From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008) takes on the backlash theory, which argues that the rightward drift of the Republican Party since the 1960s was a backlash to the Great Society and the civil rights and countercultural movements of the era. Lowndes argues that the rightward drift of the Republican Party is not the product of the 1960s, but instead goes back to tentative and selective alliances between Republican conservatives and Southern Democrats or Dixiecrats in the later years of the New Deal.

Lowndes argues that between the third New Deal and today several streams of radical rightism and conservatism merged to produce the Republican Party of today. The first stream, Lowndes argues, was Southern states rights radical rightism, a Southern states rights rightism grounded in the defence of Jim Crow. The second stream, Lowdnes argues, that created the Republican Party of today was GOP conservative small government laissez-faireism. The third stream, claims Lowndes, that created the Republican Party of today, was the increasing anti-communist and anti-liberal ideologies of both.

These three streams, Lowndes argues, were woven together by three sources. The first was National Review conservative intellectuals trying to expand conservatism into the sold Dixiecrat South beginning in the 1960s. The second was Barry Goldwater's campaign for the presidency in 1964, which had some success in the Dixiecrat South. The third was George Wallace, who created a right populism out of the states rights keep your hands off of our Jim Crow, the big government is tyrannical discourse, and the those trying to end Jim Crow in the South are communists discourse. Wallace's rhetoric, which he toned down particularly in the North during his run for the presidency in 1964 and 1968. appealed, it turned out, not only to Southern Dixiecrats enraged about judicial and federal actions against Jim Crow segregation, but also to middle class and working class ethnic Whites in the North, fearful about the impact of affirmative action on their job security and on their and their children's ability to move up the social mobility ladder, and the impact of desegregation on their neighbourhood schools.

It was Richard Nixon, Lowndes argues, who was behind the mainstreaming of Wallace style raging populism in the Grand Old Party. Nixon, always looking for the means to the end of becoming president, selectively stole Wallace's populist thunder and Wallace's ability to talk about race without talking about race in the late 1960s and early 1970s and rode it into the White House. Eventually, Lowndes argues, Nixon took populist rightism to where it had never gone before, namely, into mainstream Republican Party policy and government policy and action, if in fits and starts. In the 1980s, Lowndes argues, Ronald Reagan rode this populist rightism to electoral victory and led a Republican Party, cleansed of most of its moderates and liberals by that time, further right.

I was impressed by Lowndes's focus on culture and the role it played in instutitonalising populist conservatism in the Republican Party and eventually into American governance itself. I liked how Lowndes tied the new conservatism not only to cultural discourses but to interactions between cultural discourse and broader economic, political, and cultural events like the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and Watergate. I found Lowndes critique of backlash theory and the role Southern states rights anti-statism played in the rise of modern conservatism quite compelling. If further proof of Lowndes's thesis is needed may I present for your consideration Republican president Donald Trump. Trump's I am not a racist or a White separatist or supremacist racist rhetoric of rage, which parallels that of the Dixiecrats, clearly shows, I think, that the modern day Republican Party has now been fully dixiefornicated.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in recent American history, New Deal and post New Deal politics, the history of the GOP, the American right, and particularly the modern American right. It offers an interesting peek into how demagogues use fear to manipulate the masses to their ends.

The Books of My Life: Joseph Smith (Bushman)

The name Richard Bushman really takes me back. Once upon a time I was in graduate school. In one seminar I took with Professor Barker-Benfield on some subject, probably history and gender since B-B fancied himself a specialist in that area, we students were supposed to read Bushman's recently published book The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992). I already knew some of Bushman's work. I had read his From Puritan to Yankee: Character and Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (New York: Norton, 1980) earlier and found its argument on the transformation of Puritanism interesting and its utlisation of economic and cultural theory to make the argument about the transformation of Puritan identity even more interesting.

In the seminar I quickly learned that B-B was not a fan of Bushman or his work. As I recall, B-B found Bushman's work too middle class, elite class wanna be. As someone born in England class, you see, was never very far from B-B's mind. I don't know whether B-B disliked Bushman for reasons other than class and class wannabeism: the fact that Bushman won a Bancroft Prize and he never did, the fact that Bushman held a distinguished professorship at a prestigious American research university that was a member of the elite Association of American Universities and he didn't, the fact that Bushman took a more social and cultural approach to psychology than his mentor Donald Meyer--whose work I find too reductionism--or the fact that Bushman was a Mormon believer and he was neither. What I do remember is that I thought B-B misinterpreted Bushman's book on American refinement. He saw it as a paean to the middle class and the civilising process. I, on the other hand, thought, still think, and stated in class, that the real heroes of the book were the dirt poor Smith family, the family of Mormon "prophet, seer, and revelator" Joseph Smith Junior. I still think B-B let his ideology get in the way of a valid analysis of Bushman's book. That, of course, has been and continues to be far too common occurence in intellectual and academic circles past and present.

Another thing I remember about B-B's graduate class was that there was a remarkably ignorant and moronic statement made in the class by one of the other graduate students in the seminar. The student, who will remain nameless because I have simply forgotten virtually everything about her, remarked, during one of our classroom discussions, that she found the Mormon sense of persecution irrelevant. I had and still have a number of problems with such a remarkable, not in a good way, jeremiad. First, such etic statements do not take culture seriously while culture, as social theory and social scientific analysis shows and has shown for a century at least, is important if not central to an understanding humans and human groups and, as a consequence, must be taken seriously, very seriously. As Max Weber and Clifford Geertz realised some time ago, you have to, in order to understand human groups and human social movements, go native. You have to go emic, in other words, to grasp the meanings that often motivate and underlie human actions. That this rather obvious methodology hasn't been understood and put into academic practise by one if not more academic wanna bes, not to mention many academics, tells you something about the dismal theoretical and methodological state of the discipline of history. This statement also ignores the fact that the persecution of Mormons was real, very real. Mormons were persecuted, discriminated against, faced mob violence, and even possible "extermination" in Missouri and Illinois. Such a statement ignores the fact that real violence against "others", such as the real violence aimed at Jews and others during the Holocaust, to chose one example, has had and continues to have an immense impact on human individuals and groups particularly on a cultural and ideological level. Just look at the continuing importance of the memory of the Shoah in contemporary Israel and the Jewish community worldwide and the use of the "holocaust" by some in the Jewish community in Israel and the US as a political weapon that Foucault would have found fascinating. The ignorance, moronicity, and  arrogance at the heart of such a dismissive statement shows that stupidity and anti-intellectualism are sadly not the monopoly of the populist masses but can also be found in the contemporary academy.

So why did all this spring to mind? Because I recently decided to take another spin through Richard Bushman's biography of the charismatic and patrimonial (in Weberian terms) founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith. Bushman's Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005) tries to walk the thin line between believing history and empirically grounded social scientific analysis if not entirely successfully. When push comes to shove, Bushman generally errs in the direction of a faithful interpretation of Smith's behaviour and actions and early Mormon history making Bushman's book more meaningful and valuable to the Mormon true believer than to the dispassionate social scientific analyst who seeks to understand Smith and early or primitive Mormonism in its broader cultural, economic, political, demographic, and geographic contexts better. Additionally, Bushman's book has a failing far too typical of so much historical work and historical biography of the past and the present; it sometimes becomes an exercise in kitchen sink trivial pursuit.

So what did I, a "gentile", a non-Mormon who spent the 1990s and the early and mid 2000s engaged in the study of Mormonism, learn and relearn from Bushman's biography of Smith. I learned that in what was still pretty much a traditional world, honour, something that was central to the traditional culture of honour at the time and in the past in traditional communities, mattered. Smith was embedded in a world of honour and honour mattered to him. Smith wanted to be respected and accepted in a world where gentility was a sign of status. He wanted others to recognise him as a gentlemen, if a "rough" gentleman. I relearned that Smith, was born into a family that had difficulty escaping poverty in a world that was changing thanks to the spread of merchant capitalism, sought financial security. I relearned that attacks on Smith and on Mormons generally were part and parcel of the vigilante violence that was far too common in 19th century America as attacks on Masonry, Catholics, Shakers, the Oneida Community, and Mormonism show. Needless to say, these vigilante attacks by "true Americans" on "others", whether for political, economic, or cultural reasons, continued into the 20th century and continues in the 21st century, making the study of American ethnocentrism and xenophobia a central part of any dispassionate and critical study of the United States. I relearned that Smith thought of himself as Abraham, as Isaac, as Jacob, as Moses, as the prophets, and as Jesus, and that he saw the Mormons as a figurative Israel made literally into the new Israel. Mormonism, after all, was and is a fascinating mixture of, as Smith perceived them, Tanakh Hebraicism and New Testament Christianity. I relearned that culture, particularly Smith's interpretation of the Bible filtered through the economic, political, and cultural present, was central to the construction of Mormonism and the creation of Mormons.

Given that Bushman's book tries to put the Mormon prophet and Primitive Mormonism into its ancient environment--a context that is problematic for those of us who are not believers--and its 19th century economic, political, cultural, geographical, and demographic ones, I can only recommend Bushman's biography to the Mormon faithful. It is likely to be and remain the standard work on the subject for 21st century believing intellectual Mormons for some time. I was, by the way, very annoyed by one aspect of the book. Bushman's footnotes cite only the last name of an author and a partial title of an author. This becomes a painful experience when one is looking for the footnote references in the bibliography where there are, for example, nine authors with the last name Anderson. Given this my award for the most difficult citation apparatus to manoeuvre through I have ever experienced goes to, moment of silence, Richard Bushman's Joseph Smith.

What a pity that Marvin Hill wasn't able to pursue his biography of Smith...

The Books of My Life: Everyday Stalinism

In the wake of World War II the USA and the USSR emerged as the world's only remaining great powers left standing. Though they had helped win the war together they never really trusted one another. The US had a history of anti-leftist and anti-Bolshevik ideology that stretched back to the October Revolution and World War I. The Soviet Union had been invaded by the USA along with others just after World War I and saw the US as the embodiment of late capitalism and capitalist imperialism and saw the US as a threat to the survival of Soviet communism.

In the wake of World War II with tensions between the two great powers on the rise again a culture of anti-communism which saw the USSR as the very embodiment of the communist threat was on the rise again. This anti-communist culture was grounded in manichean antinomies. For many Americans and many elite Americans the USSR was a "totalitarian" land of terror where the powers that be brainwashed their subjects and kept them in metaphorical and actual chains, the very opposite, of course, of the "free" and "democratic" United States.

This manichean tale of good and evil, good "democracies" and capitalists and evil "totalitarians" and "commies" was never, of course, accepted by all of the American population anymore than the manichean tale of a predatory US was accepted by all Soviets. Some Americans of the more apologetic as opposed to polemical persuasion, for instance, saw the Soviet Union as an expression and embodiment of a utopia to come. Additionally, in the wake of the countercultural florescence of the mid 1960s and 1970s some American academics began to break with the dominant manichean tale of good and evil that was dominant Sovietology in the US. Sheila Fitzpatrick's Everyday Stalinism, Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) is one of the many books that attempts to replace the manichean and polemical passion play approach to the USSR with an empirically grounded one.

Fitzpatrick's book, like reality, is more complex and nuanced than those of either the apologetic or polemical manichean schools. Fitzpatrick lets the facts of urban life in Russia during the 1930s do the talking, facts derived from Soviet archives opened after the fall of communism and the rebirth of Russia. In eight heavilly documented chapters Fitzpatrick explores the omnipresence of the Soviet state, the shortages common during the era, how the Russian urban population dealt with these shortages, the utopian ideology of coming plenty that was at the heart of utopian Soviet culture, the situation of outcasts in urban 1930s Russia, the impact of the power of the state and shortages on Soviet families in urban Russia of the 1930s, the attempt by the Soviet state to make new Soviet men and women in urban Russia in the 1930s, state surveillance and denunciations in urban Russia in the 1930s, and the impact of periodic purges against the privileged of the "old regime", the "bourgeoisie",  "kulaks", and eventually Soviet officials and the Soviet intelligentsia in 1930s urban Russia.

What struck me while reading Fitzpatrick's book was how much Soviet culture, like national cultures in general--see the civil or civic religion of the US, for instance--were and are meaning systems, meaning systems akin to another meaning system, religion. The Soviet state had its sacred mission, it preached the gospels of a radiant future of plenty and Soviet communism as the end of history as humans knew it with a missionary zeal. It had its own symbols and rituals such as the red flag, the Internationale and May Day. It had its sacred scriptures such the writings of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Josef Stalin. It had its sacred catechism, the Short Course of the History of the Communist Party of the USSR. It had its heroes such as its Stakhanovites and the heroes of a variety of socialist realist novels. It had its heretics and demons including "foreign counterrevolutionaries", the "bourgeoisie", "kulaks","wreakers", and "enemies of the people". It even had its millenarianism, the golden age that would bring in the radiant future with its Edenic plenty.

Very highly recommended. The best book on Stalinism I have read.

The Books of My Life: Red Flag Unfurled

If I was asked to recommend one book for the interested intellectual, the advanced interested undergraduate, and the interested graduate student on Russian and Soviet history it would be Ronald Suny’s Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution (London: Verso, 2017). Suny’s book does what far too few books do. On one level it explores the discourse, particularly the Western discourse and more specifically the American discourse, on Russian and Soviet history and puts it into its proper broader economic, political, and cultural contexts. On another level, it offers a theoretical approach to Russian and Soviet history and history in general that is analytic systematic, and critical rather than polemical and apologetic, as are so much post-1917 writing on Russian and Soviet history, as Suny notes. On still another level it explores the history of Russia from the late Tsarist era to the Stalin era. Highly recommended.

The Books of My Life: Public Access

What stands out to me about my recent reading choices is the fact that all of the books I have been reading lately have something to do with the American right. Recently, I have read books on right wing perceptions of anti-Americanism, the White separatist and White supremacist right wing, and the conservative Christian right wing. What can I say, it is the age of Trump after all. Given all this it should not be surprising that my most recent read, Michael Bérubé's Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics (London: Verso, 1994) is, in part, focused on the American right wing as well.

 Bérubé's Public Access is one part post-World War II cultural studies and literary studies, one part post-1960s cultural studies and literary theory, one part post-1960s cultural studies and literary studies history, one part post-1960s cultural studies and literary studies in action (including a compelling reading of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey), one part exploration of post-1960s right wing attacks on post-1960s cultural studies and literary studies, and one part call for liberal-left political activism. It is the critique of right wing apologetics and polemics part of Bérubé's book that I want to concentrate on in the rest of this essay.

Bérubé's book does a good job of enlightening its readers about the contemporary American culture war right. Most of the right wing culture war right, as Bérubé notes and documents, are remarkably ignorant of post-1960s cultural studies and literary studies despite their claims that they are the vanguard of manning the barricades to protect America and America's young from its postmodern acids raising the question of how one can critique something one doesn't really comprehend and, in some cases, haven't even taken the time to read. This is, by the way, hardly the first time demagogues have claimed to be protecting someone from something they know very little if anything about. Think of all those anti-Marx folks who never read one sentence of Karl Marx's many writings. Most of the right wing culture war right, as Bérubé notes, really do have a tenuous relationship with empirical facts and empirical reality. The culture war right has consciously manipulated and lied about the writings or conference presentations of those they oppose as a strategy in the contemporary culture war knowing that few of those they aim their screed at will bother to ascertain whether the claims the culture right demagogues make about the "egghead left" are accurate or not. Most of the right wing culture war right, as Bérubé recognises, may claim to be warriors for free speech but the only free speech they vow to protect is their own politically correct right wing speech. Most of the right wing culture right, in other words, are more then willing to limit and ban the speech of those they disagree with and banish those who speak it to a kind of Foucauldian hell. Many in the culture war right, as Bérubé notes, have no interest in partaking of the rational back and forth of scholarly argument or the be fair to arguments you disagree with aspects of scholarly work. Jürgen Habermas we hardly knew ye.

None of this, by the way, is a surprise to me. I have personally seen again and again ignorance, flat out lies, and manipulations from the culture war right along with attacks on the speech of the "egghead left" on social media sites like Facebook. To state the obvious, one shouldn't expect anything else from a group of apologetic and polemical demagogues who self-righteously, arrogantly, and calculatingly see ignorance, a lack of empiricism, and demonisation as the means to the end of the right wing conquest and domination of America.