From Eric Alterman's blog Altercation at Media Matters
July 10, 2007
I should have mentioned the other day that the Sidney Hook essay to which I referred [below] can be found in the absolutely terrific new collection The New York Intellectuals Reader, edited (with excellent introductions) by Neil Jumonville. This morning I re-read Nathan Glazer's brilliant and prophetic essay, "On Being Deradicalized," and found myself amazed to agree, intensely, with almost all of it. Yesterday I came across this terrific passage from Michael Walzer, regarding an argument made by Irving Kristol in the early 1970s: "At the very center of conservative thought lies this idea: that the present division of wealth and power corresponds to some deeper reality of human life. Conservatives don't want to say merely that the present division is what it ought to be, for that would invite a search for some distributive principle -- as if it were possible to make a distribution. They want to say that whatever the division of wealth and power is, it naturally is, and that all efforts to change it, temporarily successful in proportion to their bloodiness, must be futile in the end." [i]
[i] "In Defense of Equality," Dissent, 1973 reprinted in The New York Intellectuals Reader, Neil Jumonville edit, (Routledge: New York, 2007) 355-369.
From Media Matters: Altercation by Eric Alterman
July 5, 2007
History in the news:
I've been reading about the history of liberalism, as you may know, and I came across two quotes this weekend that I think bear some further thought. Here is Sidney Hook, writing about the threat to thought from fascism and communism, but scarily, works just as well with regard to the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their ideological allies, both in the neoconservative and religious extremist community. The essay is called "The New Failure of Nerve" and was published in Partisan Review in 1943. (Hook, by the way, is considered one of the founding fathers of neoconservatism.)
[There are] roads to a happy land where we can gratify our wishes without risking a veto by stubborn fact. But of the view that every mode of experience gives direct authentic knowledge, it would be more accurate to say that it carries us far beyond the gateways. For in effect, it is a defense of obscurantism. It starts from the assumption that every experience gives us an authentic report of the objective world instead of material for judgment. It makes our viscera an organ of judgment. It justifies violent prejudice in its claims that if only we feel deeply enough about anything, the feeling declares some truth about the object which provokes it. The "truth" is regarded as possessing the same legitimacy as the considered judgment that finds no evidence for the feeling and uncovers its root in a personal aberration. After all is it not the case that every heresy-hunting bigot and hallucinated fanatic is convinced that there is a truth in the feelings, visions and passions that run riot within him? Hitler is not the only one for whom questions of evidence are incidental or impertinent where his feelings are concerned. If the voice of feeling cannot be mistaken, differences would be invitations to battle, the ravings of an insane mind could legitimately claim to be prophecies of things to come. It is not only as a defense against the marginally sane that we need the safeguards of critical scientific method. Every vested interest in social life, every inequitable privilege, every "truth" promulgated as a national, class or racial truth, likewise denies the competence of scientific inquiry to evaluate its claims.[i]
Notes
[i] Sidney Hook, "The New Failure of Nerve," Partisan Review 10, no. 1 (1943): 2.