Curtis Bowman

No, That's Not Why Reading is at Risk

One of the great things about writing for The New Criterion, I imagine, must be that argument and evidence are completely optional. I've noticed that dogmatic pronouncement usually suffices for publication in that frustrating journal.

Case in point: James Bowman's article "Why is reading at risk?" — from the online only summer 2004 issue. Bowman's essay is his response to the new NEA study on the literary reading habits of adults in the U.S.A.

Just in case anyone is wondering, I should add that Mr. Bowman and I are not related.

Here's the opening paragraph of Bowman's essay:

"Reading at Risk is not a report that the National Endowment for the Arts is happy to issue," writes Dana Gioia, the Endowment's chairman, in his introduction to that lament for the decline of literary reading in America. Maybe so, but they're prepared to put up with the report's sad news, if the alternative is wading into controversy. It's easy to shake the head and cluck the tongue about the fatal allure, particularly for the young, of television and the Internet, but what seems to me to be the primary cause of the public's indifference to literature — namely the way it is now being taught in schools and universities — cannot be mentioned, for fear of antagonizing the professoriate. As George Will put it, "Professors, lusting after tenure and prestige, teach that the great works of the Western canon, properly deconstructed, are not explorations of the human spirit but mere reflections of power relations and social pathologies."

Ah, yes, George Will. He's certainly an authority on the intellectual habits of the professoriate, now isn't he? That man has quite a range of talents, doesn't he?

Okay, now we know where we stand. Remember, we're dealing with The New Criterion. It's probably required prior to publication that all TNC authors sign an affidavit affirming the proposition that left-wing professors are to blame for everything that has gone wrong since the 1960s.

Let's go back to that first paragraph. George Will is not a reliable source of information on the pedagogical and scholarly habits of academics. Consequently, Bowman ought not to have offered Will's statement as an authoritative pronouncement. That he did so indicates that his article is an exercise in ideological ax-grinding.

Keep in mind that this sort of criticism is not directed at all professors. Whenever you hear conservatives complaining about left-wing professors, they're really restricting their attention to the humanities. And they certainly don't intend to criticize the political orientation of any of the faculty in the business schools.

I've never met a professor who has explicitly said to me that the great works of the Western canon are mere reflections of power relationships and social pathologies. Nor have I ever met one who defended a claim that implied such a reductionist view. I've known or made the acquaintance of professors in many different departments across the humanities: English, French, German, Italian, history, philosophy, sociology, art history, religious studies, and so on. No one I've met has ever expressed allegiance to the view that Will insinuates is standard-issue intellectual gear among academics.

My point isn't to deny that some academics subscribe to this view, but neither Will nor Bowman bothers to identify a single guilty party. (But let's not be too hard on Mr. Will, since Mr. Bowman only quotes a single sentence from an unreferenced source.) Instead, we are presented with a sweeping generalization about the professoriate. I've given you reason not to accept the generalization. Don't believe it.

Even the most devout worshippers of the Western canon will admit that some literary works reflect, in some fashion or other, power relations and social pathologies, if only because power relations and social pathologies sometimes make up the explicit content of some works that we still read and take seriously. But the quotation from Will makes a stronger claim, as is indicated by his inclusion of the word 'mere'. That little word does a lot of work.

Will means to imply, I think, that the reduction of works to mere reflections of power relations and social pathologies undermines any claim whatsoever that they might have on us. That is, we don't have to take their overt content seriously because they originated in the nastiness that is human history. As soon as we identify the relevant bit of originating nastiness, we can then dismiss the work because deep down it's really nothing more than an expression of this nastiness.

Let's return to Bowman's article. Here's how he expresses his agreement with Will's view as I sketched it in the previous paragraph:

But now I think it is time for [Mr. Gioia] to speak out against a kind of literary Dutch elm disease that is blighting, and perhaps forever destroying, so much beauty for generations to come. This is the pernicious influence among our academic scholars of the arts and humanities of what we might call neo-Marxism. Marxism itself may be and often is included in neo-Marxism — as they used to say in the dying days of the old Soviet Union, the only Marxists left were in American and Western European universities — but the essential thing about the tendency is its unspoken assumption that all human endeavor is reducible to power relationships. As Lenin put it: Who/Whom? Who is the oppressor and who are the oppressed? Who is the exploiter and who are the exploited? Once the world has been organized according to this pattern it becomes easy to repeat it endlessly.

Thus, just as the classical Marxist identifies the bourgeoisie as oppressors and the proletariat as the oppressed, for the Third Worlder the oppressors will become the rich countries of the West, and the oppressed the poor countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America — many of them now not so poor; for the feminist, the oppressors will be men, and the oppressed women; for the homosexual, the oppressors are sexual moralists, the oppressed any would-be libertines on whom they would "impose their values." You see? It's easy. The world is full of victimizers and their victims, if you only know where to look for them. And so it is that literary criticism, like history, sociology, philosophy, economics, theology, and, indeed, all the humane studies, becomes an exercise in identifying both oppressor and victim beneath the smokescreen of God and religion or duty and honor or love and laughter that the dominant culture always throws up to disguise its various and inevitable adventures in viciousness and exploitation.

Let's grant for the sake of argument that some professors actually do this, that is, that some professors obsessively identify victims and victimizers. But they do a lot more than this. They also talk about plot, character, metaphor, symbolism, and the like. Even if you find the whole victim/victimizer schtick annoying — as I do, I might add, although sometimes a particular work calls for it — it's still possible to learn from scholars who have recourse to it. You just have to be patient.

But we have to proceed on a case-by-case basis. Even if some work originated in some bit of nastiness, it still has to be argued that the nastiness somehow infects the work. We can't simply assume that it does.

I greatly admire Wagner's operas, in spite of the fact that Wagner was a terrible anti-Semite. Why? Because his anti-Semitism is not present in his operas. I deny that it can be found in them. Others have tried to prove that it is there, but I disagree. They haven't convinced me.

I can't say why Wagner's anti-Semitism isn't present in his operas, since he wasn't a casual anti-Semite. Wagner was very serious about his anti-Semitism. I can only sigh with relief that it's not to be found in his operas.

Heidegger was a card-carrying member of the Nazi party, in spite of which I greatly admire Being and Time. I've read the book several times. I've even taught it, and I've begun to write about it. I can't find Nazism in it. I've looked. Fortunately, it's not there. Once again, others have said otherwise, but they haven't convinced me.

Enough academics are aware of the difference between the work and its origin to realize that the reductive proposition that Will attributes to them is thoroughly objectionable. Yes, of course, many academics have recourse to power relations and social pathologies when talking about art, literature, or philosophy. Either they haven't learned how to pay attention to the work at hand, or they don't care to do so. Or perhaps they were never bright enough to understand great works in all their complexity. Consequently, such academics usually have little of interest to say.

I've come across a lot of film criticism that exhibits the tendencies that Bowman rightly deplores. It's not very helpful stuff. In fact, it's even worse than most literary criticism. Trust me.

Why is reading at risk? As you would expect, Bowman blames the academics. Here's how he understands the likely outcome that encountering these academics has on young readers:

. . . if, by some fluke, such a reader arrives at a university with some spark in him of love for literature, still unextinguished by his high school English courses, it is sure to be doused in short order by professors whose attitude toward their subject is not one of the reverence and admiration that even middle-aged people can remember in their own teachers, but one of mere contempt.

This is all wrong. Bowman is so captivated by his own thesis that he can't even identify what young readers will really do when faced with neo-Marxist academics who belittle the great works of the past.

Young lovers of literature will never stop reading, Mr. Bowman. They'll stop taking literature classes. That's what I did.

Bush's Foreign Policy in Light of the Past

Melvyn P. Leffler reminds us that in many ways Bush's foreign policy is consistent with the past, not a sharp break from it. The problem with it, he says, is that Bush has failed to balance means and ends — a criticism that I've made several times on this blog. But I've always added that this constant mismatch of means and ends has caused me to doubt that Bush's policy pronouncements were ever sincerely meant.

Leffler's article echoes John Lewis Gaddis' Surprise, Security, and the American Experience in several respects. Gaddis' book offers the historical details that are largely, though not entirely, omitted in Leffler's essay.

If you haven't read Gaddis' book, then I recommend it. It's just over one hundred pages long. But if you don't have the time, then I suggest that you look at this discussion hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations about four months ago.

Hugo Hamilton on the Loneliness of Being German

I don't know the work of the German-Irish writer Hugo Hamilton, but his recent essay entitled "The Loneliness of Being German" makes me want to start looking for his books.

Hamilton describes a facet of the German character — I apologize for the slovenly generalization — that most Americans probably can't begin to understand:

On a reading tour in Germany, I recently asked students at a secondary school in the southern town of Otterberg if it meant anything to be German. Was there anything the Germans could be proud of? The students and teachers stared back in shock. Nobody knew what to say. I had explained to them that my German-Irish childhood in had been plagued by these questions of nationalism, the ebbing Irish nationalism on my father's side and the legacy of German nationalism which my mother experienced under nazism. I had outlined the language war into which I had been conscripted as a child, forced to speak only Irish and German, wearing Aran sweaters and lederhosen, forbidden from speaking English.

[. . .]

I felt like I had thrown a grenade into the school at Otterberg. Being German was not something they had thought much about before, it seemed, apart from the fact that they all had a German history and German postal addresses. I told them that I had been called a Kraut and a Nazi as a child, that I had been put on trial by other children and that I had also denied being German. I told them I had the feeling that being German was a forbidden identity, that I still have difficulty saying "we Germans" and would rather just say I was Irish.

I lived in Germany a couple of times when I was a graduate student, and I encountered Germans who had similar difficulties with being German. It's not quite right to say that they were ashamed of being German, but they obviously found the weight of the past to be a heavy burden. Strangely enough, though, all the Germans I ever met were more than willing to discuss the past — literally, all of them, if the subject came up — which I always thought was to their great credit.

Most Americans are proud to be American, whereas quite a few Germans, it seems to me, don't quite know what to make of the fact that they're German. It's a big gulf between the two countries that too many people on both sides tend to overlook.

Bush's Neglect of Homeland Security

Despite his campaign rhetoric of making America safer from terrorism, Bush hasn't shown much interest in the Department of Homeland Security, the creation of which, you might recall, he initially opposed.

The war in Iraq absorbed the administration's attention. Consequently, homeland security — and thus not just the government agency officially responsible for it — has been slighted.

Here is a short list of articles that look at this underfunded agency and other related topics:

Stephen E. Flynn, "The Neglected Home Front" — Foreign Affairs, September/October 2004

Matthew Brzezinski, "Red Alert" — Mother Jones, September/October 2004 [Subscription-only]

Michael Crowley, "Playing Defense" — The New Republic, March 15, 2004 [Subscription-only]

Peter Grier and Faye Bowers, "Is the U.S. safer now? — Christian Science Monitor, March 3, 2004

The DNC has culled information from various sources and created this page.

Bush's Ownership Society

As Jonathan Chait points out in The New Republic, President Bush's rhetoric often soars beyond his administration's efforts to implement real policy:

One of the many, many problems with the Bush administration is that its slogans are crafted by powerful and highly competent wordsmiths and strategists, such as Michael Gerson and Karen Hughes, while its domestic polices are crafted by anonymous nobodies like, uh ... say, who is in charge of domestic policy these days, anyway? Thus, Bush frequently finds himself making eloquent pronouncements whose policy ballast is formulated off-the-cuff and discarded just as easily. Early this year, the White House announced a great civilizational commitment to landing on Mars, apparently without consulting any scientists first. Bush declared, "We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the moon, and to prepare for new journeys to the worlds beyond our own." Or not. Bush failed to mention the proposal in his State of the Union address six days later.

The phrase "compassionate conservatism" comes to mind. That was a good one, wasn't it?

Bush is now talking about "the ownership society" in his campaign speeches. Does it mean anything? Unfortunately, it does, says Chait:

Now that Bush is promising to use his second term to promote an "ownership society," the natural reaction is to lump this new idea in with the "responsibility era," the "compassion agenda," and other pleasant-sounding but mostly empty Bush slogans. In this instance, however, the rhetoric actually refers to some weighty proposals. And, unlike the Mars trip and other schemes, Bush may actually stick with them. Why? Because they share one crucial thing with all the domestic policies he cares about enough to invest real political capital in: they redistribute wealth upward.

Chait then provides some of the details of Bush's proposals for Health Savings Accounts, the privatization of Social Security accounts, and further cuts in taxes on investment income. The upshot is that these policies would disproportionately benefit taxpayers in the higher federal income tax brackets (who will get larger tax breaks than those lower down the income ladder) and increase risk for taxpayers in lower brackets (including those who pay no federal income tax at all).

Following Matt Miller, we might call Bush's vision the let-them-own-cake society.

John Cassidy looks at Bush's tax policies, which are slowly moving us towards a system that taxes wages rather than investment income. The disproportionate benefits of such a scheme to the already affluent should be apparent. After all, lower income people usually have little to no investment income. Furthermore, a flat tax on income seems to be a major policy goal. It's clear how that would also disproportionately benefit the affluent, and it would also lead to great reductions in government spending.

How Republicans intend to restructure the tax code, finance U.S. foreign policy, balance the budget, and deal with the looming threat of retiring baby boomers, well, that doesn't seem to be a part of their agenda.

More: This article by Timothy Noah looks at various Bush administration ideas about taxation. The principle future direction seems to be lower taxes on higher incomes. Who saw that coming?

B. R. Myers on North Korea - #1

If you think that you've heard of B. R. Myers but can't quite remember where or why, he's the author of A Reader's Manifesto, part of which appeared in The Atlantic three years ago.

Myers specializes in Korean literature and history, it seems, and he recently wrote an essay on several new books about North Korea for The Atlantic. Unfortunately, the full article is available only to subscribers. Nonetheless, I've decided to excerpt a piece of it that I found completely fascinating.

Since North Korea is moving forward with its nuclear weapons program, we're bound to hear much more about that rather bizarre country in the coming months. Myers' essay contains some interesting observations about the effects of half a century of totalitarianism on the psyche of North Koreans.

At one point Myers turns to the question of how aware Kim Jong Il is of the common people of North Korea. Is he totally isolated from them, or what? That question leads into the following four paragraphs:

It would appear that Kim knows just enough. The border with China remains so porous that even children often sneak back and forth, and yet no more than three or four percent of the population has chosen to flee for good. The regime obviously did the smart thing by publicly acknowledging the food shortage and then blaming it on American sanctions, instead of pretending there was no food shortage at all, as Stalin used to do. The Dear Leader has also deftly exploited the tradition according to which Koreans care for their parents in old age: the masses are told that it is their job to feed him, not the other way around, and his famed diet of "whatever the troops are eating" is routinely invoked to shame everyone into working harder. Never has a dictator been such an object of pity to his people, or such a powerful source of guilt. In 2003 North Korean cheerleaders, living it up on a rare visit to a sports event in the South, responded to a rain-soaked picture of Kim by bursting into a hysterical lament that baffled their hosts.

To concede the effectiveness of the personality cult is not to agree with Selig S. Harrison's startling assertion, in Korean Endgame (2002), that Koreans have a "built-in readiness . . . to accept as truth what is dispensed from higher authority." No regime ever needed to subject its citizens to a lifetime of brainwashing in order to make them follow their natural inclinations. What must be acknowledged is that Kim Jong Il has evinced a genius for propaganda ever since managing the efflorescence of his father's cult in the 1960s. Even so, he cannot cover his lack of charisma completely; it's as if Hitler died and left the Third Reich to Goebbels.

Kim must also be aware that the infantilization of the people has come at a price. Away from Pyongyang's carefully monitored tourist sites, North Korea is a much more raucous place than any dictator could be comfortable with. "One surprising thing," Michael Breen writes in Kim Jong Il: North Korea's Dear Leader (2004), "surprising because you expect robots, is . . . how frequently fights break out." According to refugees, even women fight out their differences, and young female teachers are said to hit children the hardest. This lack of restraint is a problem for many North Koreans trying to adjust to life in the South. Social workers complain that the refugees pick fights with strangers, and storm off jobs on the first day. "I'd have thought they'd be better at controlling themselves, coming from a socialist system," is a common lament.

In short, the conventional Western view of North Korea's official culture as a stodgy combination of Confucianism and Stalinism—two ideologies that prize intellectual self-discipline above all else—could not be further from the truth. Fortuitously enough, this view has so far encouraged Americans to stay cool in the face of Kim Jong Il's missile-rattling. But misperceptions of hostile regimes are inherently dangerous, especially when Uncle Sam is doing the misperceiving, and this one has as much potential to excite tensions as to reduce them. On August 18, 1976, a detail of U.S. and South Korean soldiers at the DMZ were pruning a tree when People's Army soldiers demanded that they stop. The Americans refused, prompting the North Koreans to wrest away their tools. In the ensuing clash two American officers were killed. Unable to conceive that Communist troops could act out of spontaneous rage, Washington assumed that Kim Il Sung had ordered the incident. Troops were set on high alert, and nuclear-capable B-52s dispatched to skirt North Korean airspace. Luckily for everyone, the Parent Leader issued an apology for his children on August 21. As the Americans saw it, of course, Kim had "backed down."

How far up the hierarchy of command does this lack of self-control extend? Myers doesn't say. It might be wise to assume that it goes all the way to the top.

Since I'm beginning to come around to the opinion that the main foreign policy problem facing the U.S. in the coming years is nuclear proliferation, it would certainly help if we had a better understanding of the people striving to obtain nuclear weapons. No credit for deep thinking on my part, of course, since non-proliferation is a long-standing element of U.S. foreign policy, but the issue has acquired much greater urgency in the past three years.

The picture that Myers paints is a worrying one, isn't it?

Update - February 15, 2005: I've added a second post about another piece by Myers that deals with North Korea.

David Brock on the Republican Noise Machine

David Brock, former right-wing attack dog, founded Media Matters for America a few months ago. Its self-appointed task is to monitor the conservative media. Brock has just published a book entitled The Republican Noise Machine. Bradford Plumer recently interviewed Brock for Mother Jones.

I visit Media Matters for America from time to time, but it's highly unlikely that I'll read Brock's book. I think, though, that the interview is worthwhile, and I assume that it contains the gist of the book. I find that my own thoughts are similar to Brock's more complex, insider's view of the media.

Here are two excerpts from the interview:

MJ.com: So it's no longer about who's right, but who can scream the loudest?

DB: Sure. You can't fault some of the reporting in the major papers. But there are so many sources and information, particularly with the internet, that stories like the Swift Boat ads take on a life of their own. The New York Times has much less authority nowadays when they say we don't find the charges valid. So that's the effect of what the conservatives have built up in terms of their ability to communicate a message that they want out there.

Part of it comes from this phony notion of balance -- that we need to hear all sides of a story, and that everyone's entitled to express their opinion. Conservatives have tried to write all this off by saying who can be against their right to say what they want to say? Of course, nobody's against their right to say they don't think John Kerry would be fit to command. But to make specific allegations and then have no records to back them up is a significant problem. And the viewer and casual radio listener may not be reading the 7000-word dissection in the Washington Post. So you've got two medias going on. And I know from my involvement in the anti-Clinton stuff that often the goal is just to confuse people, and to take the political opponent off his or her game, and to not let them talk about what they want to talk about. All those things seemed to have been achieved here.

[. . .]

MJ.com: What sort of impact do you expect Media Matters will have on the media?

DB: I'll tell you about one short-term effect we've had. One of the central ideas behind the organization was to capture the content of the top talk radio show hosts in the country. Radio content is never captured and catalogued in a systematic way, so there's no way to hold radio show hosts accountable for their words. But on the week we launched, the Abu Ghraib prison photos were released, and we had our system in place to record and professionally transcribe Rush Limbaugh's reaction. So we were able to catch a whole string of comments in which he said that torture was a brilliant maneuver and compared the abuse to a college fraternity prank. It was offensive across the board, and showed how out of the mainstream Limbaugh is. That got a lot of attention, Limbaugh spent time defending himself, and in the end, there was legislation introduced in the Senate because of it. Basically, Limbaugh broadcasts on Armed Forces Radio and Television Services -- which is a taxpayer funded service -- and he's the only partisan host to get a full hour of time. So we started a position [sic - Brock means "petition"] to get him pulled off the air and stop propagandizing our troops, and the new legislation that passed in the Senate will at least force the broadcasts to offer opposing points of view.

We have other goals that might be harder to measure. One of the things that conservatives have successfully done over the years is to anesthetize people to the fact that they are extreme. Limbaugh has engaged in a process of mainstreaming himself, to the point where during the November 2002 election, NBC News had Limbaugh on as an election night analyst. But when we monitor his show, we find that he's the same old Limbaugh, making racist and sexist comments on his program every day. It's possible that NBC doesn't even know what goes on in his show, so by hiring him, everybody just accepts the fact that he's a leading conservative and he should be on mainstream television. We want to reverse that mainstreaming process and let people understand exactly who these conservative pundits really are.

Also, when we correct misinformation that's out there, we make an effort to deliver these corrections to people debating on TV. For example, we did some original research on the co-author of the Swift Boat book, Jerome Corsi, and we found that he had made all these bigoted postings to a rightwing website. So we try to deliver that to people, let people know that's out there, and in this case we saw a lot of pundits who were debating the book and saying maybe that's something we should consider when we're weighing the credibility of the book. So that has an impact.

In the longer term, we want to ask whether its possible for those people we're monitoring to be more responsible. Take the case of Bill O'Reilly, who probably has the highest rate of false statements of anybody that we monitor in the media. O'Reilly was on Tim Russert's show with Paul Krugman a few weeks ago. Krugman was able to go to our website, get transcripts of O'Reilly's radio show, and hold O'Reilly accountable for things he had previously said. O'Reilly knew exactly where those transcripts came from, because we're the only ones who are doing that, and he blew his top. Now the question is, if O'Reilly knows he's being monitored, will that induce him to be more careful? Right now, we're too young to really know. Our role is to let his listeners know that they're getting information that is incorrect. Over time we're trying to reduce the impact of the false information on people who are making decisions about what policies and candidates they support.

All that I've quoted above pretty much speaks for itself. I don't need to add any comments. The links in the excerpts lead to some fascinating material.

In the past I've blogged now and again about the media, accusations of bias, and the like. Here's the category link for my posts on the media, just in case my thoughts might be of interest to you.

Advertisements for Myself - #1

This is shameless, but I'm hoping that my readers can assist me in promoting a recent publication of mine.

In May I posted an entry about some work that I had just finished on Moses Mendelssohn. As I blogged back then, I had written an introduction for a reprint of the 1789 English translation of Mendelssohn's Phaedon, and I anticipated that the book would appear in a month or two.

Well, the book came out in July, but I forgot to mention that fact at the time. Therefore, I'm doing it now. You can find information about the book on the Thoemmes Continuum website.

The book is intended for libraries, which accounts for the rather high price point. I realize that very few people can afford to spend so much for a single volume on such an esoteric topic, but I would be grateful if my readers could recommend the book to the nearest academic library.

Thanks! I appreciate the help!