The Books of My Life: The Founding of New Societies

 

We in the core nations live in a modern and now a postmodern world characterised by specialisation. The workplace, including the academic workplace, is characterised by the specialisation of labour. American historians, for instance, often specialise in the type of history they do, in the eras they emphasise, and in what they focus on within their temporal areas of expertise. However, such academic specialisation has a downside. It sometimes can and oftentimes does result in a parochialism that is the intellectual equivilent of the mythic exceptionalist parochialisms at the heart of modern and postmodern nationalist narrative fictions.

Comparative history, which goes against the grain of this increasing academic specialisation, often points up the fact that nationalist exceptionalisms, whether of the American, Canadian, or Australian varieties, is problematic. While the American, Canadian, and Australian variants of English and British settler societies may think they are unique and may believe that they have been called to evangelise the world with their good news of exceptionalist utopianism, comparative analysis often shows that such messianic ideologies are more cultural myths than reality.

One of the classic texts of comparative history is The Founding of New Societies by Louis Hartz, Kenneth McRae, Richard Morse, Richard Rosencrance, and Leonard Thompson (New York: Harcourt Brace World, 1964). On one level Founding shows that the settler societies of the United States (Hartz), Latin America (Morse), South Africa (Thompson), Canada (McRae), and Australia (Rosencrance) are not unique. They are all, Hartz and his contributors argue, fragments of Europe. On another level it argues that the European settler societies they briefly explore are somewhat unique. Latin America and French Canada were, Hartz and his collaborators argue, feudal reactions to French Revolutionary era Europe. The Dutch Calvinist fragment of South Africa was a reaction to liberal modernity. The British fragment of South Africa, the United States and English Canada were eighteenth century liberal fragments of Europe. Australia was a radical and reformist fragment of nineteenth century Britain. It was, Hartz and his contributors contend, around these reactions and cultural influences that each of these fragments coalesced if in somewhat different ways to produce several of the new societies of the modern era.

The Founding of New Societies is an interesting corrective to perspectives, like that of Frederick Jackson Turner, which emphasise the newness of, in Turner's case, the American settler society. As for the eternal and infinite chicken and egg question both European backgrounds and frontiers contributed, along with a host of economic, political, cultural, demographic, and economic factors, to the making of new societies. Though Hartz is often seen as a member of the school of history that emphasises the economic, political, and cultural consensus of new societies like the United States this collection of theoretical essays and case studies is aware of conflict within nations, whether between Toryish elitists and those of a more democratic orientation, between colonial imperialists and natives and slaves, or between grazers and urban dwellers. And though the book is in need of updating, thanks particularly to the revival of and current hegemony of neoliberalism, a neoliberalism that has changed the cultural character of the US and Australia and brought with it a series of ideological culture wars, it remains a worthwhile and groundbreaking attempt to look at the new societies born out of "tradition" and modernity in comparative terms, something that is absolutely essential if we are to fully understand the new societies that arose out of Europe.

The Books of My Life: Yevgeny Onegin

 

I have noted on this blog before how much I love to read literary fiction especially Russian literature. When I lived in Moscow I used to read Russian fiction on the subway. I read it while I was visiting Russian literary sites like the Patriarch Ponds, which is where the action of Mikhail Bulgakov's Master i Margarita begins. I read it at my home near the Universitet Metro Station. I read it at the pond on the Boulevard Ring near the Kremlin.

I finally got around to reading what many regard as the father and mother of Russian literature, Yevgeny Onegin by Aleksandr Pushkin. So many of my Russian friends talked about this poem to me in tones that were almost sacred and urged me to read it. I don't know why it took me so long to read it given my interest in Russian fiction. I had read Homer's somewhat similar poetry novels the Iliad and the Odyssey in my youth, poetry novels that point up the impact of Greek and Roman (including Byzantine) literary culture literature on Russian literary culture.

I found Onegin very interesting in a number of ways. I found its mixture of what in retrospect we might call its modernism and postmodernism fascinating. I found its detours into debates in Russian culture interesting. But most of all, what I, someone who is fascinated by the translator's art, found most interesting about Onegin, was the public status accorded the different translations of Pushkin's poem-novel.

I read two translations of Onegin simultaneously, the Oxford World's Classics translation by Russian scholar James Falen, and a translation done by Mary Hobson for the Russian School in Moscow and published by the Anthem Press in London. I found reading both of them in tandem, stanza by stanza or canto by canto, helpful as I navigated my way through the formal maze that is the Onegin stanza.

Falen's translation, published by a major press, the Oxford University Press in the 1990s, has gotten a lot of attention from the culture industry. For many critics it is one of the best translations of the epic poem that tries, as best as it can, to keep to the rhythms and rhymes of the original, something the noted emigre Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov thought impossible and criticised the attempt to do so in one of the first post World War II translations of Onegin, that of Walter Arndt. On the other hand, I have heard and read very little about Mary Hobson's translation published in 2011. 

Perhaps the key to understanding why this is the case is the fact that Hobson's translation was published by a small press, Anthem. I have heard and read much about other translations of Onegin published by major presses whether Charles Johnston's for Penguin or Stanley Mitchell's for Penguin. I have heard and read very little about Anthony Briggs's translation for the Pushkin Press, Roger Clarke's translation for Alma, which also includes the Russian text, or Tom Beck's translation for Dedalus, all of which, seem to me, as good, if not better, than the translations published by major publishers. There are, it seems, variations in the cultural capital of publishers and it matters when it comes to publicity and word of mouth.

The Books of My Life: History on Trial

 

History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Knopf, 1997) by historians Gary Nash and Ross Dunn and curriculum studies scholar Charlotte Crabtree, takes readers on a journey through the sometimes wacky world of America's culture wars and American historical correctness. Culture wars, as Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn note, have been part of the intellectual and popular cultural and ideological landscape of the United States since even before there was a United States, while historical cultural wars have been around, in both cold and hot form, at least since the creation of the new nation of the United States.

Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn explore, in History on Trial, America's culture wars and specifically, America's battle over its own history. Early chapters of History on Trial look at the conflicts over America's history between what might be called the myth history school, for whom history is the tale of good guys and bad guys and for whom the function of history is to create politically and ideologically correct Americans, and those who view history more as an descriptive and less a normative discipline and for whom history's function is to capture historical reality as accurately as possible, warts and all. One chapter of History on Trial, "History Wars Abroad", Chapter Six, compares and contrasts battles over history beyond the US in other core nations particularly that of the UK where the Conservative Party, under Margaret Thatcher, deregulated the economy while trying, if somewhat unsuccessfully, to regulate, centralise, and dogmatise the history curriculum of the United Kingdom. Chapters Seven through nine explore, from an ethnographic--all three authors were involved in the writing of these voluntary standards--historical, political, and cultural perspective, the battle over the attempt by several American States and the US government, during the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush in the 1990s, to write voluntary kindergarten through grade twelve national standards in science civics, and, particularly in history.

History on Trial is full of hypocrisies that seem an inherent part of the American and human cultural landscape, contradictions some will find both entertaining and absurd. As Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn note, one of the self appointed leading lights of mythistory, Lynn Cheney, was, while head of the National Endowment of the Humanities, supportive of the attempt to develop voluntary national standards until it became politically expedient, as the Republican Party dixiefied and birchified. to oppose them. Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn also note what has become a central part of the demagogic strategy of the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan, lie, take things out of context, demonise, and play to the emotions of the masses.  

History on Trial is an interesting book, one which offers an excellent short summary of the battles over America's history from the nineteenth century to the 1990s. It is a book that will probably not, however, interest those who think that mythistory is the only true or revealed history. After all, true believers with their our way or the highway approach, leave little if any room for empirical or rational debate.

The Books of My Life: The Image

 

In retrospect, Daniel Boorstin's The Image or What Ever Happened to the American Dream (New York: Atheneum, 1962) is an odd book given its author, its subject, and the year in which it was published. That one of the consensus historians of the 1950s and 1960s, who was not really trained as a historian at all but was trained as a lawyer, and someone who wasn't a fan of Joseph McCarthy--pointing up the differences between American conservative liberals and the radical right--but who named names when called before HUAC, wrote a book in 1962 that prefigures much of the postmodernist theory of the late 1960s and after, seems at least a little bit odd to me.

Boorstin, like many of the consensus historians of the 1950s and 1960s, saw America as a new nation. American consensus historians saw the United States as something very different from old Europe with its conservative, conservative liberal, social liberal, and left wing ideologies, and the seemingly endless culture wars these ideologies gave rise to. In the consensus narrative America not only left behind the old ideological culture wars of old Europe but created, in the process, a land of economic opportunity for all. That there were some in this dream America who had no chance of living the American dream seemed to trouble America's consensus historians only a little. Those who really weren't offered the opportunity to do more than dream the American dream were often elided or only briefly mentioned in the dream world of consensus histories of the United States.

By the early 1960s Daniel Boorstin was beginning to wonder whether the world really was getting better thanks, in large part, to America exceptionalism and the American rise to great power status. Boorstin's The Image is, as its original subtitle suggests, all about the demise of the American dream. Before what Boorstin calls the Graphic Revolution, Americans, well mostly male Americans, like Europeans, mostly male Europeans, had images of heroes they could dream about and use as role models for their lives. They had adventures they could take partake in that provided new and very real experiences, an increase in learning, and that allowed one to prove one's mettle in what was kind of an epic journey almost worthy of New World Odysseus. They had art that was representational rather than an art that was imploding in and on itself and whose meaning, as a result, was as mysterious as the mystery cults of the ancient Hellenic and Roman world. After the Graphic Revolution, Boorstin argues, the world of the image with its simulated pseudo-events and pseudo-images that had no referent outside themselves and which many Americans had confused and conflated with real life, emerged. In this world of the pseudo-event photographs of exotic places, for instance, became evidence that one had been there. In comparison to the narcissistic pseudo-image the real thing could no longer compete with the unreal thing. Given all this I am sure Boorstin would not be surprised that Americans elected a capitalist flim flam man and celebrity charlatan as president in 2016.

Boorstin's The Image is a fascinating read from the vantage point of post postmodernism, from the vantage point of an intellectual terrain in which postmodernist theory has become commonplace in Western intellectual culture. Though it comes from a different time and a different theoretical place than late 20th century postmodern theory it is strikingly similar in its analysis and diagnosis of the postmodernist age of simulated fractured identities and images. For these reasons alone, and because I do think it diagnosis the simulated or tautological "spirit" of the postmodernist age pretty accurately, The Image is definitely worth reading.

Further Musings on the Difference Between Conservatism and the Right Wing...

Where to begin our musings on conservatism and right wingers?

Let's start with definitional accuracy.

Those right wingers who call themselves conservatives today are not conservatives. They are laissez-faire liberals. Classic conservatives, of course, reacted against Enlightenment liberalism and "democracy" along with Enlightenment radicalism.

Right wingers have an unfortunate tendency of being unable to distinguish empirical fact from ideologically correct fantasy, descriptive statements from normative demagoguery and delusions. Whether one likes reality or not is immaterial. Racism is real even though the notion of races is a fiction, whether in the US, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. Class inequalities and gender inequalities are real whether one likes it or not. Any approach worth its salt must begin there, with empirical facts. How one responds ethically and morally to these realities is a different matter. 

There have been and are a variety of social ethical approaches to economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic facts There have, of course, been conservative thinkers. Plato, Burke, Comte, and Tolkien come to mind. Conservatives, generally speaking, opposed--I am obviously speaking normatively here--industrialism, capitalism, and democracy. Conservatives, at least those worth their salt, advocated for the rule of the best, whether they regarded those best as philosopher-kings, the English manorial elite, aristocrats, kings, scientists, or a frankly idealised priesthood of old. They did not advocate for the notion that morons like Trump and his nouveau riche ilk were either the best or the brightest. Conservatives treasured and treasure books; I doubt if a know nothing like Trump has ever read one. 

Because of their normative emphasis on looking backward and treasuring aspects of the past conservatives have offered little in the way of social theory on either modernity or postmodernity other than that capitalism, industrialisaton, and "democracy" were negative in their consequences for "tradition". There has been no Marx, Weber, or Durkheim among conservatives. Right wing no nothings probably have never heard of those intellectual giants who attempted to understand modernity other than to demonise them. All this said, conservative Niall Ferguson has explored the coming of modernity and postmodernity but his work is very derivative. Ferguson's interesting documentaries essentially update Marx, Weber, and postmodernist thinkers. Daniel Boorstin's book The Image--Boorstin was a consensus conservative/liberal a la Hofstadter and Bell who was very critical and dismissive of McCarthyist right wingism--did prefigure much postmodernist theory but conservatives have not really pursued it while right wingers either don't know much about it or simply demonise it as if social theory and one's response to it was or should be a low level theological or dogmatic enterprise.

One thing conservatives historically were not was utopian. This, once again, distinguishes them from contemporary right wing faux conservatives who curiously believe, they are laissez-faire liberals after all, that with capitalism the radiant future has arrived, despite or in spite of the empirical realities of poverty and inequality. True conservatives, of course, would and did defend inequality and rule of the best and brightest, however defined or delineated.

The Books of My Life: Historians in Trouble

 

In his Historians in Trouble: Plagiarsm, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivy Tower (New York: New Press, 2005), historian Jon Wiener takes us on an entertaining, enlightening, and depressing journey through the dark side of academia, specifically the history profession, and contemporary American intellectual culture, and the impact of the wider American culture war since the 1960s on both. Wiener, drawing on essays he wrote largely for the Nation over the years, gives us a picture of the problematic relationship between graduate students, faculty members, and star or celebrity professors (Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's almost master and slave relationship with those under her). He tales the tale of the potential dangers associated with archival work, the problematic use of sources, and the problems of footnoting, by some intellectuals in the academic profession and outside of it (Allen Weinstein, Michael Bellesiles, David Abraham, Mike Davis, Edward Pearson, and James Lott). He explores the problem of plagiarism in academic and intellectual culture (Doris Kearns Goodwyn and Stephen Ambrose). He takes us into the world of lying and exaggeration in the academy and intellectual culture (Joseph Ellis and Stephen Thernstrom).

Along the way, Wiener asks why some academics have escaped punishment and shame (the academic and intellectual scarlet A) while others have been humiliated and been banished from the academy (the black O). He finds the answer in political culture, interest group politics, and the contemporary American culture war. Fox-Genovese, Weinstein,  Lott, and Thernstrom, Wiener argues, largely escaped any punishment for their sexual harassment, questionable acquisition of and use of data, archival and quantitative, and exaggerations of political correctness, and were rewarded for it, at least in the case of Fox-Genovese, Weinstein, and Lott, by political appointments from a right wing president and, in the case of Lott, a job at a right wing think tank. Others, because of their perceived left wing or liberal politics and theoretical approaches, however, as Wiener notes, were hounded out of academia by interest groups that disagreed with them, in the case of Bellesiles, by academics whose work they challenged, as in the case of Abraham, or run out of Los Angeles by boosterist interests, like Mike Davis, who got a job teaching at SUNY Stony Brook. Still others, like Joseph Ellis, who lied about being in Vietnam and involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement upon his return, was punished by the college at which he worked, Mount Holyoke, but was soon back teaching and writing reviews for the prestigious New York Times, because, Wiener argues, there was no powerful interest group that went after Ellis in the way that the right wing gun lobby went after Bellesiles.

Wiener's book is an interesting and easy read for anyone interested in the academy, ideology, politics, and culture wars. I recommend this documented TMZish excursion through the wonderful world of American academe and intellectual culture. Anyone who has been a graduate student, particularly a graduate student in history, will recognise the world Wiener describes.

The Books of My Life: I Do and I Don't

 

Jeanine Basinger, for my money, is one of the most insightful cultural historians and sociologists writing on Hollywood film these days. In her book I Do and I Don't: A History of Marriage in the Movies (New York: Knopf, 2012), Basinger takes readers on an entertaining and enlightening romp through the history of the Hollywood marriage film mercifully free of the psychoanalytic jargon that so often makes academic books on films far more tedious than the films they are analysing, a remarkable achievement in and of itself.  

In I Do and I Don't Basinger explores the history and culture of the Hollywood marriage movie from the silent era of marriage movies, cautionary tales to be laughed at and be sad about, to the 21st century the post-marriage marriage movie. At the heart of the Hollywood marriage film genre, Basinger argues, is the couple, the men and women who are either getting married, the I dos as Basinger calls them, or getting divorced, the I don'ts, and the dramatic and comedic situations impacting the couple in the Hollywood marriage movie, namely, infidelity, in-laws, children, incompatibility, class, addiction, and murder. Basinger explores how the genre with its couples and its situations changed as a result of the impact of the coming of sound, the impact of World War II with its absent husbands overseas and its home front wives fighting to defeat the Nazis, and the impact of the sexual revolution in the 1950, 1960s and after. Along the way Basinger explores the spectacle and ritual of consumption in Hollywood films,  furniture, furs, and hats that populate classic era Hollywood marriage movies, and she explores the fairy tale have your cake--we will show you society's ideal norms and rules, norms and rules you should live your lives by--and the eat it too--please feel free to live your life momentarily through the characters on screen breaking society's norms and rules even though it won't last and everything will return to normal (pun intended) in the end--nature of the Hollywood marriage movie, both of which had appeal to the audiences who paid to watch the Hollywood marriage movie, a sociological approach to Hollywood film that is far more compelling, at least to me, than the oedipal fantasies of todays almost cultic psychoanalytic critics.

As was the case with Basinger's books on the World War Two genre and the women's film, I found I Do and I Don't one of the best books on Hollywood film I have read. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in media history, film history, Hollywood history, approaches to popular culture, and particularly to those who find the hegemonic mode of film analysis these days not particularly enlightening.