Between Alienation and Conformity, Part 2

“It is not hard to understand why many serious minds have come to find these things more discouraging than hopeful,” Hofstadter remarked in 1964. “Success that seems to have lost its reality is worse than failure. The large, liberal middle-class audience upon which all this acceptance depends now brings to the work of the intellectuals a bland, absorptive tolerance that is quite different from a vital response” (419). There is no better example of this than the history and historiography of American conservatism. While ongoing for some time, the most current literature on American conservatism dates back to the writings of historian Alan Brinkley and his declaration that there was a “problem” in the study of American conservatism. Since then, the subject has exploded in popularity and notoriety largely in response to the election of Donald J. Trump. Bland acceptance, at least in this field, has led to a largely reactive approach to the subject. What I call “the same playbook” genre of long form article has grown in popularity recently as pundits and historians mine the historical record to show that today’s conservatism is using the “same playbook” as it ever has. Ironically, if the grassroots explained the influence of conservatism in American politics at one point in time, then conservative intellectuals have now assumed the greatest prominence in the academic imagination in its attempts to excavate the anti-democratic archives of conservative organizing in post war America.

For Hofstadter, much of the above is the result of a loss of novelty and play. Today, conformity tends to define intellectual work, but it’s not a conformity to society or ideology, per say. Instead, it is a conformity to personal piety virtually unforeseen in the history of intellectuals and their collective labors. “We live in an age in which the avant-garde itself has been institutionalized and deprived of its old stimulus of a stubborn and insensate opposition. We have learned so well to absorb novelty that receptivity itself has turned into a kind of tradition – ‘the tradition of the new’” (418). The sought after exchange of ideas of liberal democracy has largely been replaced with the replication and thus amplification of them. While some have used this venue for the purposes of protecting the historical record, social media itself tends to amplify what it already produces (i.e., outrage, anger, exasperation, mocking, cat videos, etc.). Such adaptation of thought to a powerful means of dissemination has fundamentally undermined the intellect’s ability to compose beyond the instrumentalized venues of online publication. As a result, intellectual work, at times, counterintuitively reinforces the anti-intellectual ends, and dreams, of those who seek to destroy it, intended or not.

In short, today’s intellectual climate is defined by conformity to one’s own idiosyncratic means of career advancement in an anti-intellectual age. While understandable in a context of diminishing jobs and academic resources, this adaptation must be addressed, and soon, if the intellectual is to maintain her credibility in the eyes of her fellow intellectuals: at least those concerned with the balance of piety and playfulness. If left to its own devices, the academy’s dependence on such pietistic work as scholarship will eventually divide the community against itself to the detriment of all. Hofstadter himself predicted that the intellectual community would become polarized into two parts if it were to succumb power: “one part of technicians concerned only with power and accepting implicitly the terms power puts to them, and the other of willfully alienated intellectuals more concerned with maintaining their sense of their own purity than with making their ideas effective” (429).

Regardless of the camp one were to fall into, neither of them resemble the actual task of the intellectual, which is to cultivate a mind that “is capable of mediating between the world of power and the world of criticism.” “What is at stake for individuals is, as I say, a personal choice,” Hofstadter observes. If one decides to engage the world of punditry, don’t be surprised if you’re pulled into “the low ethics of controversy which prevail in our politics and the low regard for privacy which governs our entire society” (37). These are the terms of engagement, not evidence of anti-intellectualism, or undue targeting of liberal academics. They are also the terms of profane engagement with the world as defined by Hofstadter “by mixing in public affairs.” Relative to such acts that take place in the world, the sacred work of the intellectual assumes a different significance. Prophet, scholar, artist versus pundit, expert, commentator- the former speak to intellect on its own terms, the latter intelligence on someone else’s.

The task of the historical critic, then, in an anti-intellectual age, is to balance the insights of her current moment with the longer historical trajectory of her respective subject. Today’s concerns about the radical roots of the Republican Party, for example, are certainly grounded in the academic literature, but the degree to which such concerns become ubiquitous is the product of more ephemeral and at times reactionary worries about the state of democracy. “Dogmatic, apocalyptic predictions about the collapse of liberal culture…may be right or wrong; but one thing about them seems certain: they are more likely to instill self-pity and despair than the will to resist or the confidence to make the most of one’s creative energies” (432). The “same playbook” pieces of which I spoke earlier illustrate this dynamic to the proverbial “T.” Instead of simply writing the histories of such practices, thereby reinforcing the need for you, “the expert,” to explain such things “to us,” push the analysis further beyond the obvious. What can be done with such knowledge in the public square? And why? The present informs the questions we ask of the past, but we need to know why we’re asking them in the first place.

Much of what Hofstadter wrote and thought about was first engaged by the philosophers of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Philosophers and social theorists such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and even Martin Jay, who has chronicled the school’s history in his field-defining monograph The Dialectical Imagination (1973), thought a great deal about the relationship between the intellectual and his cultural milieu. Not unlike Hofstadter, who also borrowed from sociological literatures for his own historical models, critical theory defines the intellectual as one who is in, but not necessarily of, the world in which she inhabits. In other words, the ideal position for the intellectual relative to structures of power, including the university, is somewhere in between alienation and conformity to such structures. According to both Jay and philosopher Max Horkheimer, the founders of the Frankfurt School were united by a common purpose and approach to their research as intellectuals: 1) to formulate the negative in the epoch of transition, and 2) to develop a critical approach to existing society.^[1]

Put more simply, the intellectual must resist the culture industries of American society, wherever they are found (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, FOX News), by forming a critical approach to them in the name of emancipation from all forms of human bondage. This is what is meant by the negative: to negate the power of such industries to manipulate, commodify, and instrumentalize their subjects. This is easier said than done, especially during transitional epochs, but the cause is the same: to explore “the possibilities of transforming the social order through human praxis” (Jay 42). For much of the Frankfurt School, including the likes of Herbert Marcuse, this notion of praxis assumed that “theory will preserve the truth even if revolutionary praxis deviates from its proper path” (79). Hofstadter’s insistence that balance must define the relationship between playfulness and piety in the historical critic’s work speaks to critical theory’s emphasis on the dialectic. In an increasingly mechanized world, it is up to the intellectual to maintain her distance from society while at the same time engaging its various faculties at close range. Hofstadter relied on atmospheres and feelings for his interdisciplinary work; Adorno and others attempted to understand social change within a society “that controlled the consciousness of its members.”

There is no question that we are currently living through what Horkheimer called “an epoch of transition.” At the very least, the contentious election of 2016 inaugurated a new chapter in the history of America’s culture wars: a series of conflicts ongoing since the 1960s over subjects such as church-state separation, race and racism, freedom of speech, and human sexuality. The events of January 6th shook the country to its literal foundations, thereby making this particular chapter in the culture wars the most damaging one thus far to the country’s collective ability to heal itself. While the founders were certainly worried about the destructive potential of mobs in representative democracies, they could not have foreseen the degree to which a minority of Americans would come to resent their respective government offices and their representatives. How intellectuals fit into such socio-economic circumstances is still very much unclear, especially in a renewed age of anti-intellectual sentiment. What the writings of Hofstadter and the Frankfurt School give us, however, are models from which to base our own analyses on as historical critics. At its best, such criticism opens up possibilities of change and transformation as a form of praxis. At its worst, such intellectual labor becomes an exercise in self-indulgence.

“The intellectual is always engaged in symbolic action, which involves the externalization of his thought in any number of ways,” argues Jay. “The critical edge of intellectual life comes largely from the gap between symbol and what for want of a better word can be called reality…by attempting to transform into the agency to bridge that gap, they [intellectuals] risk forfeiting the critical perspective it provides” (xiv). Ironically, as the intellectual becomes simply an extension of his externalized thoughts, either through social media platforms, speaking tours, or op-eds, he begins to become subject to them in a manner that limits his capacity to remain critical. In other words, the intellectual must find a balance between alienation from, and conformity to, such means of dissemination and self-branding. The intellectual should be both attracted to power, and made uneasy by it. The task of the critic is not only to weigh the benefits and costs of assuming power in a given moment as Hofstadter once described, but also to present alternatives in a world increasingly subject to greed, fear, and racial resentment. In such a climate, the role of the intellectual must be “to continue thinking what [is] becoming ever more unthinkable in the modern world.”

Our lives as intellectuals, scholars, and prophets depend on it.

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^[1] Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950, Horkheimer’s Foreword