Re-tooling for Culture Wars
2.0
Mike Waggoner
Supper Club
April 18, 2017
What I am saying tonight is
different from what I would have said some months ago—perhaps not
so much different in substance, but rather in its urgency. Between
then and now, of course, was the watershed event of the November 8 US
election. This event, both the run up to it and the ensuing fallout
from it, has affected me in unexpected ways, but primarily in my
personal stance towards my work. Like several in the room, I am “of
a certain age”—that time when some of my colleagues and friends
are “heading for the exits,” either by way of retirement or the
funeral pyre. It is about that time when some of us may be reaching
what one scholar called the fourth stage of Hindu spiritual
development—the one where the elders head out to the forest leaving
the striving to those younger.
In fact, over the last couple
years I have found myself thinking about stepping away from academe.
I am tiring of the bureaucracy at my university. I am currently on
my fifth president (not counting the four interims) and my fifth dean
of our college. I have seen legislative wrangling toy with
university budgets and have endured various management and
teaching-learning fads as they sweep across the ever-shorter
attention span of administration. I have, to be sure, continued to
enjoy my remaining colleagues and students and particularly my study
and writing. But I thought I could foresee the near-term trajectory
of work in my field and those who could carry it on and that things
would be fine without me. Of course, that is still the case.
But the 2016 election was a
proverbial “wake-up call” for me. I, along with many others,
clearly did not read the near-term trajectory of our politics
accurately. We were not to enjoy the (assumedly) easy transition in
administrations that would continue the albeit hard fought, but
achievable progressive society we assumed was all our goal. “Cold
water in the face,”, “slap in the face,” “fire lit under
me”—whatever the simile, many of us woke that morning of the 9th
needing to come to terms with a new reality. The mean-spirited,
racist, xenophobic, misogynist (and we can go on) rhetoric of the
campaign was rewarded with those attitudes seemingly sanctioned by
the voting public. (At the same time, we can and should console
ourselves that there were nearly 3 million more voters who opposed
these views so we are in the majority--still we also know how our
electoral system worked out). But what does this “wake-up call”
mean for me, for any of us who share this sentiment.
This is pretty political, you
may be saying to yourself, although up to this point I think I may be
preaching to the choir. In our current larger societal context,
however, I would argue it has never been more important in the
history of our country and, indeed, the world for each of us to
martial our knowledge, energy, and resources in the service of the
public good. There is considerable experience and wisdom in this
room that needs to be shared. As the Farmers’ insurance commercial
reminds us: “we know a thing or two because we’ve seen a thing or
two.” Whatever drift I may have been settling into regarding my
own future work arrangements--that changed virtually overnight. I am
awake and I say—to the barricades.
Now, before we all break into
our favorite songs from Les
Mis, we need to review
the landscape for what this means for us, because however mad and
determined to do something that we may be, we do operate in
environments that shape, enable, and constrain, our activity. In my
remarks tonight, I would like to talk about the challenges of the
milieu in which we live and the idea of claiming and exercising our
voice in this time.
A survey of 7000 first year
college and university undergraduates in the US revealed that only 6
percent of them could name the 13 colonies and many of them thought
the first president was Abraham Lincoln, who was also known for
“emaciating the slaves.” This information was reported in a New
York Times article--in
1943. In a similar survey done at the bicentennial, no improvement
was shown. Current assessments continue to show a similar dismal
trend of broad cultural ignorance.
This apparently continuing
deficit in basic knowledge calls to mind an anniversary we can note
that bears on this consideration of the current cultural milieu.
This year is the 30th
anniversary of the publication of Alan Bloom’s, The
Closing of the American Mind,
often referred to as the “opening shot in the culture wars.”
Bloom, a distinguished University of Chicago political philosopher
argued that the distinctive American character was being lost to a
plethora of new and emerging “voices” parading under the banner
of diversity. Education and the larger society were being eroded by
competing (read “lesser”) works being admitted to the university
curriculum while scaling back the traditional canon ridiculed as that
of “dead white men.” This brief foregoing description risks
caricaturing his argument; his work is complex and nuanced and
deserves attention as a serious act of public scholarship, whether we
hold it in high or low esteem.
Its publication proved wildly
popular and produced a flurry of responses and companion pieces,
perhaps predictably among them one called The
Opening of the American Mind
by historian Lawrence W. Levine, published in 1996. It was an
articulate counter argument, one commentator saying that the book
should “put an end to ‘culture war’ talk.” It neither gained
the traction of Bloom’s book, nor settled the argument. Andrew
Hartman produced an excellent 2015 history of the culture wars, A
War for the Soul of America
(the title taken from the battle cry of Pat Buchanan in his 1992
speech at the Republican National Convention). Hartman summarizes
his argument this way:
This book gives the culture wars
a history—because they are history.
The logic of the culture wars has
been exhausted. The metaphor has run its course (p. 285).
I’m not so sure. The same year
Hartman made this declaration, 2015, Mark Bauerlein and Adam Bellow
published an edited volume entitled, The
State of the American Mind,
a collection of 15 essays essentially continuing Bloom’s argument,
just updating it. Bauerlein is an academic—English professor at
Emory--and Bellow is an executive in publishing. (Adam Bellow is
also the son of Saul Bellow the noted novelist and University of
Chicago professor who, coincidentally, wrote the foreword to Bloom’s
book “back in the day”). To underscore its relationship to the
earlier days of the culture wars, this latest salvo also features an
introduction by the famous or infamous, again depending upon
individual proclivities, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., author of Cultural
Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.
Of course, both of these recent books (Bauerlein and Bellow, and
Hartman) appeared before last year’s presidential election where
the continuing divide in US culture was laid bare. If there was any
doubt that the culture wars continue, there should not be now, all be
they in mutated form. Unlike the Thirty Years religious wars of
17th
century Europe, there does seem to be any corresponding Peace of
Westphalia in sight for our 30 years’ culture wars. The following
is some of why I think that is the case.
Andrew Hartman and others point
out that in the nearly twenty years between the end of World War II
and the election of John F. Kennedy, there coalesced a set of
conservative cultural standards, “assumptions and aspirations
shared by millions of Americans, that came to constitute a “normative
America.” These standards included “hard work, personal
responsibility, individual merit, delayed gratification, social
mobility”. . . stringent sexual and gender expectations within
heterosexual marriage, a consensus around white Judeo-Christian
values, and a cohesiveness required in these norms deriving from a
shared, perceived threat of Cold War and alien cultural and ideology
(p. 5).
Hartman succinctly summarizes the
transition ushered in by the upheavals that would occur in the 1960s:
“The new America given life by the sixties—a more pluralistic,
secular, more feminist America—was built on the ruins of normative
America” (p. 6). His announcing the “ruins of normative America”
to me was a bit like Mark Twain’s famous quip about rumors of his
death being greatly exaggerated. This normative America, thought to
be lost to the 60s, would begin to find its voice again in Richard
Nixon’s 1969 reference to the “silent majority,” a phrase we
heard resurrected nearly 50 years later in this past election cycle.
So, in our current cultural
milieu we recognize a pervasive lack of basic knowledge thought to be
necessary to viable citizenship. We further recognize a continuing
50 plus year old cultural divide between the world reacting to and
emerging from 1960s America. There are two other elements in the
environment, newer I think, that we should acknowledge and take into
account as we assess our stance toward what we can do as individuals.
First, more than there being a
continuing basic civic illiteracy, some argue that there is actually
a “campaign against established knowledge,” to borrow a phrase
from Tom Nichols new book, The
Death of Expertise--something
we have, again, seen come to the surface in the recent election cycle
and continue through to the present. There has been proven
distortion and misrepresentation on both sides, and even outright
lies and entirely fabricated “fake news.” Some of the fall-out
from all this showed up in a recent poll that found that 44% of
Americans believed
that media made up stories and
fabricated sources. (By the way, I hope no one here had anyone
injured in the Bowling Green Massacre). But beyond that there is a
deeper current in American culture that has been with us a very long
time.
Richard
Hofstadter argued this in his 1963 book Anti-intellectualism
in American Life.
Though the seeds of this attitude may be seen as early as Alexis de
Tocqueville, in his 1835 and 1840 works Democracy
in America,
it was in the 1952 presidential election between Dwight D. Eisenhower
and Adlai Stevenson that this epithet took hold and was reinforced
and exacerbated during the McCarthy era in the 1950s. (So here we
have another characteristic baked into “normative
America”—anti-intellectualism.). With the election of
Eisenhower, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. put it: “the New Dealers
were replaced by the car dealers.” Schlesinger argued that the
election brought on “the vulgarization which has been the almost
invariable consequence of business supremacy.” He more pointedly,
and provocatively, went on to say, “Anti-intellectualism has long
been the anti-semitism of the businessman.” The mid-50s collapse
of McCarthy, combined with the shock of the Sputnik launch,
illuminating the shortcomings in American science, led to a brief
resurgence of respect for the intellect that led into the 60s, though
that respect was later to be tarnished by the “intellectuals’
war” in Viet Nam—engineered by the best and the brightest led by
Robert McNamara (one of Steve Bannon’s favorite books by the way).
In a more recent analysis of American anti-intellectualism, Susan
Jacoby’s The
Age of American Unreason
brings current similar historical trends with current examples.
The
argument here is that there is a basic tendency to rely on our own
assessment of a situation over rational comment by another with
presumed and credentialed expertise on the subject. This
self-reliance may be, for example, because one had lost trust in
so-called experts because some previous expert pronouncements have
been off the mark. In Nichols book he argues that we have entered a
new stage in this evolution, though the move is a matter of degree
rather than kind. It is one brought on by the “Google-fueled,
Wikipedia-based, blog sodden collapse of any division between
professionals and laymen, students and teachers.” But there is one
further element that threatens to further manipulate this, perhaps,
“socially genetic” American condition of the distrust of
expertise, and it is one enabled by our increasing technological
sophistication which is being used to shape the information we
receive even at a level of which we are unaware.
We are all
familiar with this manipulation at a basic marketing level. We have
all done searches on google, amazon, or whatever only to find later
that ads for those items mysteriously pop up in our facebook feeds or
other online sites we visit. We’re being tracked and profiled.
But this surveillance and ensuing analysis has gone further, much
further. A small US firm, Cambridge Analytica, spun off from the
larger British data analytics firm SCL, specializes in “election
management strategies” and “messaging and information
operations.” SCL has refined their models over 25 years of military
psychological operations (psyops) work in places like Afganistan and
Pakistan. Through the use of sophisticated algorithms employed by
artificial intelligence and using automated bots to rapidly and
tirelessly examine hundreds and thousands of internet sites, these
companies are coming to know our habits, emotional triggers, and
subtle communication preferences of which we may not be aware.
As an
example, SCL, the British parent company to Cambridge Analytica,
built a psychometric model by creating a facebook quiz (admit it,
some of us have taken one), getting a response rate of 6 million
users, thereby producing a remarkable trove of data. They further
found that by deploying the automated bots across the internet to
correlate and corroborate patterns, they could, with 150 ‘likes’
on a facebook page, predict the users behavior better than could
their spouse. With 300 likes, they claimed to know you better than
yourself.
Cambridge
Analytica, the US offshoot of SCL, claims to have 5000 pieces of data
on each of 220 million US voters. What do they know about us and
how have they been using it? They can track our reaction to words
and phrases and then shape their messaging accordingly (think about
the addition of the angry emoji and other more incremental reaction
tools on facebook). The information obtained through
bio-psycho-social profiling is being “weaponized,” to use a
favorite term by former Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon, now White House
strategist and Trump whisperer. The objective is “cognitive
warfare.” Put together with our “google-fueled, Wikipedia-based,
bog sodden” way of life, the stakes associated with evaluating
information on the internet, or any source, go way up.
Now just
to spice up this “milieu stew” let’s add one more ingredient
and that is our current treatment of the idea of “political
correctness.” We heard this used again and again in this past
election. This phrase originated in the 1950s McCarthy era as a
sarcastic reference to Stalinist Russia where one could be punished
for not parroting the “official” line. It became employed early
in the culture wars in the 80s and forward, again, to disparage in a
sarcastic manner, any attempt to acknowledge and show respect for
some other-than-dominant (most often Christian) white-group. It has
morphed during the past election cycle into criticism by the
perceived down-trodden (mostly the Christian Right and poor working
class whites—and there is some overlap) that their rights are being
displaced by minority groups. In connection with this latter
sentiment, religious liberty has morphed from the free exercise of
religion delineated in the 1st
Amendment to the Constitution to the right to use one’s religious
beliefs to defend one’s prejudices.
So, we have
a large portion of the general population that persists in a
low-level understanding of the rudiments of civic knowledge.
Additionally, I argue that we must acknowledge evidence of long term
anti-intellectualism in the United States. Further, this ignorance
and its associated attitude constitutes a condition toward which
current communication techniques and technologies are being employed
to sway public opinion in ways that many of us would say are
authoritarian and inimical to American values. And, words and ideas
are being re-contextualized for differing purposes.
In the
words of Tolstoy: “What shall we do and how shall we live?” I
believe that this is a question that each of us must answer. I want
to propose one starting place to formulate an answer. And that is to
analyze the kind of unique power that each of us has to employ in
this fight, because in the end, I believe that solutions to these
pervasive problems will involve a power struggle—one that begins
with each of us as individuals, giving renewed poignancy to the
phrase: “Think globally, act locally.” We do have power, even
though for some of us, as the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson said, “We
are not now that strength which in old days, Moved earth and heaven.”
Remember: we know a thing or two because we’ve seen a thing or
two.
I
want to use a well-known and serviceable, if old, study of power by
French and Raven that I feel is germane to consider at this juncture.
This is because the strength of one’s impact in speaking out will
be affected by the overall power one brings to the task.
As you may recall French and
Raven identified five different kinds of power in their classic 1965
study: 1) coercive, 2) legitimate, 3) reward, 4) expert, and
association. Coercive does not apply so much to our discussion here
as we cannot make anyone attend to our lofty pronouncements (well, my
wife may have that power over me). This type of power pertains to
more of a military or incarceration situation. Legitimate power is
that which comes from an official position that we recognize as
rightfully held, usually associated with an organization or
bureaucracy. Reward power, as it sounds, involves being able to
bestow some desired result on the recipient. This type of power may
come into play if your audience sees your contribution as valued
return on the investment of their time in listening to you. Expert
power, closely related to reward power, is clearly a pertinent type
of power if you are an independently recognized and desired source of
the knowledge being sought. Finally, there is the power of
association in which a public identifies with speaker for reasons in
addition to other kinds of power be they expert or legitimate: you
may know them personally or there may be some non-rational draw to
them.
For one example, let’s apply
this to my talk tonight. First, I have no coercive power here. I
cannot make anyone follow what I say, particularly this group who’s
not-so-hidden mission is to argue about everything. Regarding
legitimate power, I am a duly invited and elected member of this
august body, so at least I have some minimal legitimate standing to
be holding forth tonight. Any reward power I may have in this
instance depends upon whether, by the end of this talk, you feel like
you have some positive resonance with what I have said or at least
were somewhat entertained--in either case it being a positive
trade-off for your time spent. Expert power is not supposed to come
into play in this group as we are to speak outside of our areas of
expertise, but I suppose there could be some expert power residing in
one’s ability to make a convincing argument. Finally, there is
associational power. Does our individual relationship involve some
dimension that draws you to what I am saying? Is it that my white
hair cries out “wisdom.” Or we’re good enough friends that
you’re extending me a credibility “line of credit” thereby
giving me the benefit of the doubt. Or by the same token, there
could be a negative
attribution arising out of
association. You’ve heard something suspect about me, so you
believe that I’m talking out of my . . . depth. The cumulative
power that accrues in this calculus will determine the extent to
which you as a hearer will be impacted by these remarks. It also
works the other way of course. Who we listen to and are persuaded by
depends upon our assessment of that speaker’s collective power.
As I alluded to above, my wife,
in addition to other kinds of power (aka charm) has some measure of
coercive power as reflected in the saying “ain’t mamma happy,
ain’t nobody happy.”
In a small example of legitimate
power, we all defer to (and count on) Judy’s role in scheduling us
to speak and Mike’s role in alerting us monthly of our meeting.
For reward power, perhaps timely service of food, drink, and
processing of our checks by Tony’s staff. For recognized expert
power in law we would acknowledge Max or Darius, or for questions
within the physical sciences, Lynn or Paul. The power of
association--the self-congratulatory good will extended to each other
in the spirit of “for [insert correct pronoun]’s a jolly good
person.”
I believe that we must consider
each of our audiences in a similar way. We all have circles in which
we move where our influence may be exerted. Again Tennyson, “that
which we are we are, one equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by
time and fate, but strong in will. . .”
I am reminded of the famous Pogo
cartoon where he says “We are faced with insurmountable
opportunities.” Regarding the attitude that we take into this
fray, a couple things come to mind. Cornel West visited UNI last
year and someone asked him: “In the face of all this, are you
optimistic?” He said, “No, but I must do this anyway.” I take
that sober reflection with a longer perspective we should all
recognize from Martin Luther King: “The moral arc of the universe
is long and it bends toward justice.”
