·Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: on the Exhaustion of
Political Ideas in the Fifties, revised edition (New York: Free
Press, 1962).
·Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), xiv+205pp., $23.95.
·David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: the New Upper Class
and How They Got There (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000),
285pp., $25.00.
·Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: a Study in Moral
Theory, 2d ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984)
Like ghosts, works of social criticism often come back to their old
haunts long after one had thought they were exorcised. Consider Daniel
Bell's The End of Ideology. When it was published in the 1950s,
its central thesis -- that the grand theoretical systems of right and
left had been rendered irrelevant by the successes of a technologically
sophisticated, centrist liberalism -- was widely and vocally dismissed
by critics on the left. Some of those critics went on to take their
criticism to the streets. The Port Huron Statement, the Civil Rights
movement, the protest against the Vietnam war, and the emergence of the
counterculture all seemed to render Bell's anti-ideological thesis
rather quaint. The dawn of the ideological right in the 1970s and 1980s,
itself an almost dialectical response and reaction to the excesses of
the ideological left, seemed to show the utter obsolescence of Bell's
argument. Here, even more than in the heyday of the New Left and S.D.S.,
the politics of "true believers" reigned supreme, and an
ideological program obsessed with dismantling the New Deal was put into
practice, diligently, at times ruthlessly. (Even Bell himself started
having second thoughts about The End of Ideology: his 1978
masterpiece, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,
exhibited an unease about corporate capitalism and New Frontier/ Great
Society liberalism that did not show itself in his earlier books.)
Yet today, in 2001, The End of Ideology seems to be back
with a vengeance: the political center does not merely dominate but
monopolizes the scene. The rhetoric of "globalization"
confirms the hegemony of corporate capitalism over all aspects of
economic life, while the doctrinaire hatred of government and social
welfare that characterized the Reagan years has likewise seemed to
dissipate. Bill Clinton, the Democrat who likened himself to an
"Eisenhower Republican" without a trace of irony or
embarrassment, set the tone for his dominant Republican counterparts,
politicians like George Pataki, William Weld, and Christie Whitman, who
took every opportunity to distance themselves from the ideological
Reagan-Gingrich wing of their party and project an urbane,
socially-liberal yet economically-conservative image. After drafting as
right-wing a party platform as any in recent memory, the Republican
party's year 2000 candidate (and dubious presidential victor) George W.
Bush kept portraying himself as a "compassionate
conservative," a possibly oxymoronic code word that disowned, at
least rhetorically, whatever the party explicitly stood for, but gave
the solid impression, at least, that he avoided the extremes. (Bush's
subsequent turn to the right after his inauguration has precipitated a
strong backlash, not just among the Democratic opposition, but also
among moderate Republicans like Vermont's senator James Jeffords, who
bolted the party precisely because he felt "the center"
betrayed by Bush's bait-and-switch tactics.)
The new centrism is not just an American phenomenon, either. In
Britain, Tony Blair has won reelection, despite his sagging popularity,
on the grounds that he and his party were equidistant from both Margaret
Thatcher and Michael Foot. In Germany, the Social Democrats' Gerhart
Schroeder sent finance minister Oskar Lafontaine packing for leaning too
far to the left. In Western Europe, only France seems to be exempt from
this centripetal movement. Politicians everywhere seem to rush toward
the center, cheerily touting the virtues of a vaguely-defined
"third way," and in general exhibiting the sort of
ideologically-neutral "pragmatic" expertise that Bell thought
had vanquished all contenders in the modern political arena.
The move back toward the non-ideological center is not, however, a
move back to Bell's 1950s. Politics may have retreated from the grand
schemes of the 1960s and 1980s, but culturally and socially the
landscape has changed beyond recognition, due in large measure to the
transformation of the American economy from an industrial to a
post-industrial, information-based one (the subject-matter of yet
another Bell book, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society).
David Brooks's Bobos in Paradise is, in his own words, a work
of "comic sociology" that tries to describe and understand
those socio-cultural gaps that yawn between the present age and the
1950s, 1960s, and 1980s, by way of an encomium of sorts to the "new
class" of educated professionals that has emerged as a vanguard.
Brooks christens them "bourgeois bohemians," or "bobos"
for short.
Bobos, for Brooks, are the "new upper class" whose status
is fundamentally determined by education, rather than by breeding,
inheritance, or belonging to "the establishment." Their signal
achievement is to have fused the bourgeois mind-set which dominated the
1950s and, in a different way, the 1980s, with bohemian
"counter-culture" values of the 1960s. They are obsessed with
success: workaholics, they have no problem with those aspects of the
"Protestant work ethic" that emphasize diligence, achievement,
and delayed gratification, as long as the gratification is not endlessly
delayed, and as long as the achievement can be viewed as something
inherently noble and good. They are at odds, however, with the
stodginess of the older bourgeoisie: its drive toward conformity, its
contempt for eccentricity, its obsession with conspicuous consumption
and "keeping up with the Joneses."
Bobos are thus avid consumers (a bourgeois trait), but want their
consumption to remain inconspicuous, lest they betray
themselves as rich vulgarians (a bohemian trait). They shy away from
judging others' sexual "indiscretions" (bohemian), but are
puritanical in their zeal against habits like smoking and overeating, on
the grounds that they compromise health (bourgeois). They see no problem
frequenting high-toned and pricey stores (bourgeois), but prefer those,
like Restoration Hardware, that forego ostentation and convey an image
of homey, retro practicality (bohemian). They are proud of their
intellectual erudition and cultivate it assiduously (bohemian), but do
not, as earlier generations of intellectuals did, see themselves as an
elite manning the barricades of high culture against "mass
society": they move comfortably within that culture, discerning
neither difficulty nor moral compromise in understanding the life of the
mind as yet another exercise in self-marketing (bourgeois).
While Brooks is under no illusions that bobos are the dominant class
-- lower middle and working classes dwarf them in terms of numbers -- he
recognizes that they do exercise considerable cultural power,
and have become the class that politicians are most eager to court
(e.g., the "soccer moms" of the 1996 campaign). And it is
arguable that their values are trickling down to the larger culture: if
you are not a bobo, you may very well be a bobo-wannabe.
Throughout Bobos in Paradise Brooks views the bobo nation
with a modicum of sympathy, though he is not beyond criticizing their
flabby sense of spirituality ("flexidoxy"), their endemic
silliness, and their inflated self-image. He admires the way in which
bobos combine sobriety with eccentricity, their ability to temper
idealism with a sense of practical limits, and their willingness to
adjust individuality to community and vice-versa. He concludes his
qualified defense of the bobos' culture by claiming that "if they
raise their sights and ask the biggest questions, they have the ability
to go down in history as the class that led America into another golden
age" (p. 273).
Let's be honest: this is not just hyperbole -- this is nonsense.
Because Brooks writes with sparkling wit, elegance, and panache, because
his observations are droll and pointed in equal measure, and because
virtually everyone apt to read the book will exhibit at least some
bobo traits, he is likely to persuade his readership that bobos as a
class are benign, even admirable and, to a degree, worthy of emulation.
Yet for my part I fear he has only seduced himself. Bobos, who generally
owe their wealth and position not to meeting any genuine, objective
standard of merit or criterion of desert but to the unpredictable wiles
of the marketplace and to the exploitation of educational credentials
and connections (that is, to sheer good luck and brown-nosing), differ
from yuppies only in their reluctance to admit that they are the latest
version of the relatively well-heeled, social-climbing arriviste.
Their newfound taste for "community" -- school uniforms,
zero-tolerance for drug use, regular churchgoing, and so on -- is
toothless, since the community in question consists almost exclusively
of other bobos, making it a "lifestyle enclave," the
counterfeit gemeinschaft aptly named and skewered fifteen years
ago in Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart. Bobos, I submit,
are closet yuppies, which makes them a shade better than flagrant,
proud, self-assertive yuppies. But only a shade.
Consider, for a moment, Brooks's recounting of bobo consumption
habits, and how bobos grade them against those of vulgar yuppies.
Spending $10,000 on a Jacuzzi is "decadent," but spending
$20,000 for a slate shower stall is "virtuous," both because
it is useful and because doing so shows an appreciation for the
"simple rhythms of life." Spending $60,000 on a Jaguar is
vulgar, but spending $65,000 on a Range Rover SUV supposedly is not,
again because all its expensive features are useful and because it
betrays an admirably rugged, outdoorsy frame of mind. And so on.
I do not want to deny those who can afford it the occasional luxury,
nor do I wish to challenge the idea that since you get what you pay for,
it usually makes sense to opt for quality over cheapness. But the sheer
heft of the price-tags that Brooks quotes, and the fact that these are
not occasional splurges but habitual modes of purchasing, go a long way
toward showing up the bobos' pretense that they are anything but
self-indulgent. The point of a car is to get you reliably from point-A
to point-B (absent any other way of making the trip); the point of a
bathtub is to help get you clean. To be willing to plop down over 60K
for the former, or 10-20K for the latter is, to my mind, not so much an
indication of one's relation to the Zeitgeist, but rather a
clear sign that one has too much money. Aesthetics need not be
sacrificed to show that one understands that one has better things to do
with one's money than to fritter it away on excess, whether in the form
of conspicuous luxuries or inconspicuous ego-gratifying
pseudo-necessities. Unlike yuppies, bobos pay lip-service to the virtues
of thrift and humility, but this is a simple, self-deceptive conceit.
They are kin under the skin.
Equally nonsensical is Brooks's favorable comparison of present-day
intellectuals with the '50s circle of "bohemian" intellectuals
who clustered around Partisan Review and other like-minded
general journals of ideas and politics, including the likes of Hannah
Arendt, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, and Reinhold Niebuhr. According
to Brooks, what the latter group lacked was metis, the
middle-level knowledge named and prized by the Greeks, that mediated
practice with high theory. Brooks asks the following rhetorical
question:
Is wisdom best
attained by sitting in a book-stuffed studio on Riverside Drive, reading
Freud and the existentialists, engaging in intense debates with an
insular crowd, most of whom live within a few square miles? Or is it
gained through broader experience with the world, by putting one foot in
the river of mainstream life and then by reflecting on what you found
there? (186)
Thus Arendt, Niebuhr, et al. are charged with standing aloof from the
"mainstream" of American life, which can mean one of two
things: either they were befuddled ivory tower types whose theoretical
bent disinclined them from getting their hands dirty in practical
matters, or they snobbishly rejected the burgeoning
"mainstream" ethos of the Eisenhower-Kennedy years -- that of
affluence, acquisitiveness, fake respectability, and guarded ambition.
About the first option, Brooks is simply mistaken. Niebuhr, for
instance, was for many years a pastor in a rough-and-tumble district of
Detroit before moving on to the loftier precincts of Union Theological
Seminary. His earlier experience, surely characterized by metis,
influenced his theoretical output to an incalculable extent. Howe's
immersion in the culture of European Jews who emigrated to America and
New York is given explicit display in works such as World of Our
Fathers, but also counts at least as much as a resource for his
writing as did his City College education in Marxist factionalism:
another "high culture" intellectual "made" by metis.
And Arendt, for her part, found it necessary to actually go to
Jerusalem for the Eichmann trials. She could have, if she wanted to,
reflected on the transcripts in the comfort of her Upper West Side
armchair, but she did not. She also had a very direct and practical
encounter with the advance of Nazism in her native Germany, which is as
"real world" as one is likely to get.
Concerning the second option, Brooks is right: they did
scorn 1950s bourgeois socio-political complacency. (Howe and Arendt, in
particular, would also come to scorn 1960s self-indulgent bohemian
radicalism, but let that pass.) But they had their reasons for doing so
(good ones, I think), and to dismiss them as thereby being willingly
detached from the "mainstream" begs the question. If they
would seem to be "kooks" from the perspective of the bourgeois
sensibility of their day, I am sure they would have responded "so
much the worse for the contemporary bourgeois sensibility." In
doing so they would merely be doing their jobs as intellectual critics.
A mere ad hominem brief against 1950s culture-criticism is
not quite what Brooks intends. It is the type of social critic
that the typical "high intellectual" was that he wants to take
down a peg. Brooks is suspicious of those who read "the great
books" from on high, then traipse down the mountainside, tablets in
hand, to "enlighten" not the masses but their fellow
intellectuals. He writes:
[With] all due
respect to people like Niebuhr and Arendt, many of the best and most
influential books were written by people who were not considered
intellectuals in their day: Jane Jacobs, William White, Betty Friedan,
Rachel Carson, even Digby Baltzell. In some way these writers and
journalists had more in common with today's pundits and worldly
commentators than with the intellectual mode Edward Shils defined. These
people serve as better models for us today than the highbrows who
self-consciously detached themselves into the realm of high culture,
capital-letter ideas, and bohemian alienation. (188)
Almost every assertion in this paragraph is dubious. Both Niebuhr and
Arendt, like John Dewey and William James before them, managed to write
both in a scholarly mode and for a "general intellectual"
audience -- i.e., a "journalistic" one. Niebuhr's pieces for
the Christian Century and Arendt's for The New Yorker
are cases in point. (Does that mean that even they were not
"real" intellectuals by the standards of "their
day"?) The difference between, say, Silent Spring and Eichmann
in Jerusalem is thus not one of kind but of degree, and I would
claim of rather slight degree. Is Jane Jacobs, whose works on the city
incorporate a lot of what can only be called "philosophical"
reflection and judgment, less "highbrow" than Arendt, who
likewise brought philosophy to bear on current events? Is Friedan really
less alienated from American society than Niebuhr was? (Many
neoconservatives felt comfortable with Niebuhr's political thought --
wrongly, I think -- in a way that would be inconceivable with respect to
Friedan's.) Is William Whyte's Organization Man in an utterly
different universe of discourse from C. Wright Mills's White
Collar and The Power Elite, simply because the latter is
somehow devoted to "capital letter ideas" (and scholarly
footnotes) in a way that the former is not? Weren't all the
above authors regularly reviewed in The New York Review of Books,
which was every bit the province of "eggheads" as Partisan
Review? Brooks's distinctions collapse under the sheer weight of
their arbitrariness. As for Brooks's implicit nod to "today's
pundits and worldly commentators" as role-models for bobo public
intellectuals, I think it speaks for itself. Any intellectual,
"highbrow" or not, aspiring to the level defined by
"today's pundits" -- by the motley cast of Meet the Press
or The McLaughlin Report, the professional chatterers on CNN or
FOX news, or the chic charlatans who wax indignant in columns posted on
www.salon.com -- really ought to consider a change of vocation, not to
mention a rigorous examination of conscience.
Throughout Bobos in Paradise Brooks seems to marvel at the
way in which bobos combine bourgeois with bohemian virtues. I think it
more accurate to claim that they have synthesized their most flagrant
vices. Bourgeois and bohemian cultures, antithetical as they may be in
some respects, nonetheless share certain key assumptions and values.
They are both acquisitive (the former of goods, the latter of
experiences); they are both radically individualistic (the former
exemplifying "utilitarian" and the latter
"expressive" individualism, to use Bellah's typology); they
both view economic, social, and political life as instrumental means
toward an essentially aesthetic end (differing only on the details of
that end and on how to tailor the means to fit it); and so on. Viewed
this way, the bohemian and the bourgeois are symbiotes: the bohemian is
parasitic upon the institutions of bourgeois society (both as something
to rebel against and as a source of potential patrons), and the
bourgeois cultivates the bohemian as a kind of foil, someone who can be
counted upon to deliver the occasional therapeutic shock -- and, more
importantly, someone who can be exploited as part of the bourgeois quest
for ever-expanding markets.
Noticing this latter feature of contemporary bourgeois culture is
Brooks's great achievement: failing to notice its deeper significance,
not to mention its dire awfulness, is Brooks's great oversight. Bobo
culture and bobo society is not exactly a grand Hegelian synthesis,
since the ability of bourgeois society to transform everything into a
fetishized commodity is not aufgehoben but retained in a
superficially new, hip form. The bobo is at home in what the political
theorist Benjamin Barber has called "McWorld" -- the global
capitalist marketplace -- even as she or he claims to stand aloof from
it. As Thomas Frank and The Baffler have persistently and
presciently reminded us, dissent can be commodified, and bohemian
nonconformity co-opted by and absorbed into the late-capitalist culture
of consumption, with relative ease.
Bobodom is indeed Bell's nonideological world, but as nightmare
rather than utopia. But is there, now, a cultural third way between the
bourgeois and the bohemian? Can one escape the homogenized,
self-congratulatory emptiness of the bobo McWorld?
Perhaps. Morris Berman's The Twilight of American Culture
sees, in a way that Brooks's Bobos in Paradise does not, the
vacuity of the American vanguard class's ethos, and proposes a way both
to escape it and to preserve the cultural heritage it is in danger of
obliterating. It is an extremely cranky book, much like Allan Bloom's The
Closing of the American Mind and Christopher Lasch's The
Culture of Narcissism, but unlike the latter two cannot be read
(correctly in Bloom's case, incorrectly in Lasch's) as yet another windy
neoconservative screed. And just as Brooks conjures up the shade of
Bell's The End of Ideology, Berman tacitly invokes the specter
of a very different work of social criticism, the philosopher Alasdair
MacIntyre's After Virtue.
In an early essay of his, "The End of Ideology and the End of
the End of Ideology," MacIntyre cited Bell's book as itself a
specimen of ideological mystification. MacIntyre maintained that while
Bell and his fellow liberals were correct to note and criticize the ill
effects of "big idea" politics, whether of the far Right or
the Communist Left, they failed to perceive that their own desideratum
of an idea-less politics of value-neutral managerial skill, painless
interest brokering, corporate facilitation, and top-down social/economic
engineering was both a big idea and a rather bad one. MacIntyre devoted
a chapter in After Virtue to developing these concerns.
Supposedly, the ideal of social science is to provide value-neutral
skill to the managerial elite of liberal individualist society, who can
then use it to generate the prosperous, satisfied, and agreeable nation
that they and, presumably, all liberal democrats desire. But social
reality is recalcitrant to such analyses. The intentions of people and
the actions they generate are vague and unforeseeable, and resist being
incorporated into a deterministic system of law-like generalizations.
Life is inevitably unpredictable. Thus the cult of "managerial
expertise," even as it extends its reach throughout the worlds of
business, government, and education, is marked by failure and long-run
collapse; more importantly, it masks the reductive, essentially
manipulative view of all social relations that animates the modern world.
If MacIntyre is right about this, bobos should be worried. Their
economic position in society is secured by their being what Robert Reich
called "symbolic analysts" -- the expert clarifiers and
manipulators of meaning for wealthy and powerful mandarins -- and their
self-congratulatory self-image rests on their belief that their
expertise will help make the world a "better place" for
everyone else (thus justifying all the Range Rovers and slate shower
stalls they purchase). But if MacIntyre is right, the claim to expertise
is groundless and the benevolent self-image a delusion. He is saying, in
effect, that the jig is up.
After Virtue was, however, subtitled "a study in moral
theory" rather than in sociology. MacIntyre is impressed (or,
rather, alarmed) by the fact that there seems to be no
consensus in modern societies on specific moral issues (abortion,
capital punishment, war, poverty, etc.), or on the reasons cited to
support a given moral position (The greatest good for the greatest
number? Respect for Human Rights? Obedience to God's will?), or even on
how one could determine whether these reasons are adequate or not.
Consequently, moral discourse vacillates between violent, dogmatic
shrillness and spineless, relativistic indifference -- between talk
radio and Oprah, in a manner of speaking. If MacIntyre is right, then we
live in a time of great moral incoherence, complicated by the fact that
we do not recognize it as such -- we continue to think that we use moral
terms and make moral judgments in a reasonable and intelligible manner.
How can he make good on such a counterintuitive thesis?
MacIntyre sought to do so by showing how a "catastrophe"
struck Western ethical discourse in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, a calamity that also partly explains why people might have
come to believe the mythology of value-neutral social science and
managerial expertise in the first place. In that era, philosophers and
moralists jettisoned the idea of a human telos, an end or goal
proper to human beings as such, which could be discovered by rational
reflection on "the good life" and embodied in the practices
and institutions of socio-political communities. In its place, this
"Enlightenment Project" substituted the chimerical idea of
universally available and necessary moral principles (Bentham's
principle of utility, Kant's Categorical Imperative) which would
stabilize moral judgment in a world that is otherwise characterized by
massive disagreement about the requirements of virtue and the contours
of a worthy life. We life in the aftermath of its failure, a world in
which ethical appeals carry no intrinsic force, and in which they often
serve as a mask for manipulation and subterfuge. Hence the prevalence in
modernity of the rich aesthete, the expert manager, and the therapist as
dominant character-types (note also how all three are congenial
occupations for bobos). We are so accustomed to their hegemony that we
do not notice how they are key symptoms of the degradation of moral
practice and theory alike.
MacIntyre did not flinch from asking the question: "What, then,
is to be done in the face of such wholesale moral collapse?" His
answer was: not much -- or, rather, that any large-scale efforts to
escape the ethically-barren (post)modern world generated by "the
Enlightenment Project" would themselves necessarily be co-opted by
it and forced to operate in a manipulative,
aesthetic-managerial-therapeutic mode. What was needed was a form of
local piecemeal resistance, a preservation of the tradition of the
virtues from "the barbarians" who "have been governing us
for some time now." In the famous concluding sentence of the book,
he counsels us to wait "for a new -- doubtless very different --
Saint Benedict."
It is difficult to believe that Morris Berman was not familiar with
MacIntyre's counsel (although no reference is made in The Twilight
of American Culture to any of MacIntyre's work). Invoking St. Benedict,
MacIntyre alludes to the tradition of Medieval Monasticism as a way of
renouncing the follies of modernity and preserving the best of human
culture. Berman makes this turn to monasticism explicit, and gives some
concrete advice on how such a turn will be "doubtless very
different" from that made at the end of the classical period and
the fall of Rome.
Berman realizes that he has his work cut out for him: the end of the
cold war and the recent collapse of Asian "miracle economies"
in Japan, Korea, and Indonesia have led to a mood in America that is
relentlessly self-congratulatory, to say the least. But Berman is
commendably unmoved: socially, culturally, and politically, America is a
mess. The gap between rich and poor is at its widest point since the
1920s, indicating that its economic success story is misleading at best
and meretricious at worst. The late-capitalist culture of consumption
has "colonized" all of social life, which reflexively defines
value exclusively in terms of selling and buying. Attempts to smooth
over the conflicts generated by a commercial culture, or to
crisis-manage the malignant side-effects or "externalities"
generated by an unfettered economy, are afflicted with the problem of
diminishing marginal utility. Social Security is Berman's star example
of a form of social engineering soon to be swamped by events beyond its
control. Add to this an absolutely astonishing degree of functional
illiteracy (it is dumbfounding that the richest nation in the world
ranks 48th out of 150 members of the United Nations in literacy), the
willful narcissism and stupidity of mass entertainment and the
popularity of vapid "New Age" superstition, and a profound,
widely-distributed sense of nihilistic despair about life, and
MacIntyre's conclusion about the reigning "barbarians" seems
amply confirmed.
Berman, like MacIntyre, contends that America's socio-cultural
"problem" is resistant to large-scale efforts of political
action and reform. Such efforts are likely to be co-opted by the masters
of commerce, packaged, sold as "lifestyle options" (e.g.,
boboism) and thus drained of their critical and effective power. Working
within "the system" to change it will, in the long run, only
change you, and for the worse. The only way to effectively challenge
Barber's "McWorld" is to drop out of it, at least some of the
time -- to cultivate, in MacIntyre's words, those "local forms of
community" in which the practices that define a good, worthy,
humane life can be preserved in the milieu of the present "dark
age." In this sense, the example of medieval monasticism is
instructive.
In fact, according to Berman, twenty-first-century Americans have the
advantage over their medieval counterparts in their ability to
understand and endorse, rather than just transcribe, the cultural
resources that they seek to preserve. The monks transmitted enough of
classical Greek and Roman culture to generate the Renaissances of the
twelfth and sixteenth centuries without championing that culture. While
they saw it as an important part of being learned, they ultimately
thought it a distraction from the proper task of scriptural exegesis and
spiritual contemplation. Contemporary "monks," however, know
what they are doing, and believe in it. When Michael Moore makes films
like Roger and Me that succeed almost accidentally, and do not
tempt him into making more lucrative commercial "product," or
when Earl Shorris endeavors to bring the Clemente course "great
books" curriculum to a small band of the poor and marginalized in
New York, or when Don José Arizmendi creates an economic cooperative in
Spain that actually succeeds in creating a humane and viable "third
way" between bureaucratic state socialism and rapacious unfettered
capitalism, they embrace the monastic option of bracketing the corrupt
wider culture and doing what is worth doing, whether it proves
"successful" or not. They turn their backs on the task of
shoring up a crumbling social edifice, leaving it to collapse on its
own, and devote themselves to carrying on the true legacy of Western
Civilization. A multitude of little, brave deeds will keep the flame alive.
While I think Berman's analysis of our predicament is largely
correct, and his proposed solution the right one, I have two misgivings
about his project, one minor, the other major. The minor quibble has to
do with Berman's characterization of contemporary monasticism as
preserving the values of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which is
threatened by those cultural forms, so prevalent in our day, that
celebrate unreason and easy belief, and dismiss disciplined inquiry into
the truth of things as power-mongering and ideological mystification.
Berman has read Horkheimer and Adorno, and is well aware of the ways in
which the Enlightenment has been perverted, its dreams of emancipation
transformed into a Weberian nightmare of bureaucratic control and
Foucaultian surveillance. He is also well aware of the positive
contributions made by poststructuralist and deconstructionist critics of
the Enlightenment such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Deleuze. They have done
much to demystify the cult of technical expertise and disinterested
managerial "objectivity." But their epigones have gone
overboard. To expose fake objectivity for what it is one needs to affirm
genuine objectivity, and to unmask scoundrels and liars one must be
committed to standards of truth and rationality that are not mere
appendages to brute power. Berman concludes, perceptively, that the
cynical postmodern belief that everything is ideology, that everybody
has a hidden agenda, lends itself to a kind of academic indifference to
the real political world, a posture which in turn is nicely co-opted by
the image-merchants of McWorld obsessed with making the quick buck.
While Berman's distaste for postmodern diffidence is, I think,
laudable, he makes the same mistake that Jürgen Habermas and other
"modernist" critical theorists make: the confusion of rational
criticism as such with "the Enlightenment project." As
MacIntyre and others rightly maintain, that project is inextricably
linked with the attempt to provide universal, necessary, and ahistorical
principles that serve as foundations to all cognition, and which are
available to all individuals capable of reflection. This attempt to make
an end-run around tradition -- to bypass received practices and
authorities and appeal to "the autonomous rational subject" as
if she or he neither had nor needed a historical conceptual inheritance
-- has failed, if MacIntyre's argument is correct, and if one
takes Berman's own tale of cultural decline at face value. But it is not
true that rational criticism was unknown before Voltaire and Diderot.
Socrates was not an enlightenment philosophe, and did not
endorse their suspect epistemologies, but nevertheless stood for the
very rational integrity that Berman champions so passionately. Socratic elenchus,
for example, does not require any commitment to a foundationalist view
of "universal reason": one can start the dialectic anywhere,
with anyone, and generate a clearer view of what anything, from
Courage to Piety to Justice, really is. The fact that one must start
from traditions, from within a given, historically contingent set of
beliefs and desires, does not mean one is stuck there, imprisoned in the
schemata of language, hemmed in by one's horizon or conceptual scheme.
The relativistic, or even nihilistic belief that one is so imprisoned is
intelligible only against the questionable Enlightenment epistemological
assumption that without incorrigible foundations we are cognitively
adrift. The task of preserving rational inquiry and criticism thus
swings free from the Enlightenment project, and we would be well advised
not to view the mission of "monks" to be that of extending it.
My second gripe is more severe. Berman advises those considering the
monastic option to forego any allegiances to "institutions,"
and to go it alone as "individuals." Institutions will
inevitably co-opt the creative soul: the group will invariably stifle
the individual. As soon as an act of resistance in institutionalized in
the modern or postmodern world, it is taken up into the network of
corporate manipulation and commodified. Thus if it succeeds in
articulating dissent and righteous anger, it fails. Better to follow the
example of a Thoreau or John the Baptist, and make one's statement for
one's own sake, crying out in the desert. Groups corrupt, and the
absolute group of corporate, bureaucratic society corrupts absolutely.
Berman's suspicion of institutions is not baseless, but I am inclined
to ask whether they are dispensable for anyone committed to the monastic
project. The solitary anchorite (St. Anthony, St. Jerome) is
often an admirable figure, but on closer inspection such
"individualists" have a reserve of courage and patience only
because of a deep, prior formation in a community of a very special
kind, one which has in some manner institutionalized the ways
in which their distinctive kinds of practical wisdom are handed down.
Medieval monasticism, whatever its defects, could not have succeeded as
the agent of civilizational renewal were it not for the institutional
monastic orders -- the Benedictines, the Franciscans, the Dominicans --
that permitted and encouraged the copying of manuscripts and the
preservation of Greece and Rome in a kind of cultural cold storage. (And
this is truer of those Islamic institutions -- libraries, centers of
education, and the like -- that were even more instrumental in
initiating the twelfth-century revival of learning in the West.)
Moreover, "the individual" as an ideal type is not necessarily
more noble than "the organization man." They may, in our time,
be one and the same. MacIntyre has argued that modernity tends to
nurture "bureaucratic individualists," who, because they care
for nothing other than their own narrow self-interest, easily fit into
the bureaucratic ethos, eager to manipulate others (and easy to
manipulate themselves). Only certain kinds of individualists
are likely to become "monks," and these characteristically
exhibit deep convictions and a sense of identity forged by certain kinds
of institutions. Thoreau would never have retired alone to Walden Pond
were it not for his earlier associations with Emerson and the Boston
Transcendentalists (not to mention the prosperity of his father's pencil
factory). And they, in turn, were made possible by the nurturance of
Harvard University and the Congregational and Unitarian churches.
Institutions cannot be escaped.
The problem therefore is not with institutions per se but
with those institutions likely to self-destruct by drifting into
self-oblivion and kitsch. It is here, perhaps, that religious
communities have an important role to play, one that curiously is not
"doubtless very different" from that played by the religious
orders of the Middle Ages. Serious Jews, Muslims, and Christians have
institutionalized certain resources in their traditions that might
enable them to recognize that which is worthy in "Western
Civilization" but will also alert them to its perversion in and by
the various projects of modernity and postmodernity. They have
institutionalized various means of resisting the cultural decline that
Berman laments, and have been quite effective in nonviolently bringing
the powers to heel (consider Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights
movement, which would surely have fizzled out were it not for the
institutional backing of the African-American Churches). Secularists
would be well advised to devise analogous institutions to these
religious communities if they are as worried about the American Twilight
as Berman is; religious people would be equally well advised to treasure
and protect their own extant institutions. Only if some such
institutions flourish, either above or below ground, can we hope to
sustain those practices and forms of thought that define the achievement
of the West -- or, indeed, of humankind. Only such institutions can
serve as an adequate defense against the onslaught of the bobo troops,
conscripted into mercenary service in the armies of the new
"global" economic order, whose military virtues are a
combination of acquisitive greed, willed ignorance, and smug
self-absorption. Lonely individuals, however noble they may be, do not
stand a chance against a culture of such sublime ugliness.
MICHAEL J. QUIRK teaches in the Adult Division at
New School University and Hofstra University. He is working on a
collection of essays, The Rule of Practice.
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user. Source: Cross Currents, Fall 2001, Vol. 51, No 3.
