(10:06 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Tired of the Anger

To begin, I'd like to apologize for the technical difficulties surrounding Anthony's post immediately below mine. Unable to use Blogger to repair the error, I turned to more primitive methods involving a text editor and an ftp client. I am filled with fear and trembling as I anticipate posting this. [Update: Obviously the post went okay. I have also decided to switch comment providers, since BlogSpeak is apparently dead at the moment. All old comments are now lost -- alas, alack.]

Now, on to the matter at hand: anger. I'm tired of it. I don't mean justified anger; I think that can be productive and energizing. I am mainly tired of petty, overly localized anger, especially when that anger draws on universal principles.

I am thinking primarily of the conservative graduate students with whom I have made electronic connections in recent days. Here, Winston (who commented below, if comments were working) expresses genuine worry about the difficulties his conservative politics will cause him in getting an academic job due to "the dreaded Theory question" at an MLA interview:

According to “the rules,” potential employers aren’t supposed to be able to ask you about your politics. But, given the highly politicized nature of theory, how can the theory question not constitute a question about politics? If I start talking about I. A. Richards’s influence on my work, I reveal myself as a literary conservative. And if I talk about A. C. Bradley’s influence on my reading of Shakespeare, I think that makes me a literary paleo-conservative. Whereas if I mention Foucault, or Said, or Derrida, I’m a fellow traveler. In many ways, the answer to the theory question reveals the candidate’s politics, or at least the candidate’s politics in terms of literary scholarship (though the two generally go hand-in-hand, in my experience).

Does the theory question constitute a political litmus test? I know it will in my case. I can either lie, and pretend to espouse a highly politicized way of looking at texts that, in many cases, runs counter to everything we know about reality and the human mind (yes, I prefer the answers of science, not the empty hypothesizing of postmodernism), or I can tell the truth, and probably blow my chances of getting most of the jobs I’ve been called to interview for.

This is surely a shame. The academic job market is tight, and a political litmus test might prove to be a crippling disadvantage. However, if the members of Winston's interview panel could read this, they might be more justified in moving on to the next candidate:

When I say "sensible," I am talking primarily about criticism that can be used as a tool--that presents a methology for reading literature (or any text) that can be used by the reader without the necessity of adopting a particular ideology or adopting wholesale the subjective viewpoint of the critic (as so many Foucauldians do). Yes, yes, everything is ideology. Go ahead and blog on that. I'll still be here. What it should be grounded in is knowledge. Real knowledge. Not politically motivated fabrications, like radical social constructionism, but real knowledge. Hence my interest in cognitive psychology. Leftist nonsense notwithstanding, cognitive psychology has gained real knowledge about the human mind--the way it thinks, the way it produces language, and so forth--that demolishes a great deal of postmodern philosophy.

He appears to have nothing but contempt for the vast majority of literary scholars, so it's unclear why he would want to work for them. If I went to a job interview virtually anywhere and let it slip that I think the way my potential employers do things is absolutely corrupt and stupid and that I would spend my career fighting to radically reshape the entire enterprise, then I wouldn't expect to get any bonus points. Winston would also do well to note that many of the currently hegemonic discourses in literary theory started out as embattled minorities who thought the entire scholarly enterprise was fundamentally flawed and, given his tone, he would do well to admit that if people like him were in ascendancy, they would treat leftists the exact same way. Except, of course, that the conservatives would be justified in excluding those who disagree with them, because conservative ideals are justified by knowledge, real knowledge:

Human beings have not evolved to live in Marxist regimes. We are competitive creatures, and we work for rewards. Take a hard look at why the Soviet Union was not able to compete with the United States during the Cold War.

It certainly couldn't have been anything like the fact that the United States was much, much richer to begin with and that the Soviet Union lost millions more soldiers in World War II than did the United States -- and it also couldn't be the tremendous waste of human life represented the Stalinist purges. It also couldn't be the Soviet Union's stupidly disproportionate military spending. Nope, it had to be the economic systems. Evolution, you know. It's somewhat similar to the fact that Cuba can never be prosperous, because it's a socialist state -- the U. S. sanctions against it have nothing to do with it. Meanwhile, capitalist nations that are open to global trade, such as Haiti, prosper.

Strange how his "real" scientific theories turn out to be the ones that best support his politics in his mind, and vice versa -- I'd be interested to learn which came first, the conservatism or the scientism. In any case, the fact that he gets to hide his beliefs behind "science" (we fucking evolved to be capitalists?! Did I miss something and we suddenly went back to the Victorian era?) sounds suspiciously like the "politically motivated fabrications" that he so derides, in form if not in content. The difference, of course, is that he's correct.

Meanwhile, not everyone has arrived at their conclusions through the scientific method: the Conservative English Major, a blog-friend of Winston's, has up a number of posts (his/her permalinks seem to be broken at the moment) about "how the strident left-wingism [sic] of the academy can force moderate students to the right." To give some more detail:

The fact that my fellow grad students and my instructors constantly make comparisons between Bush as Hitler, loudly wish he would die, and refuse to see anything he can do in a positive light - this attitude pushes me even further in my support of Bush. Instead of being a slightly disaffected supporter who would critique some of his policies, I find myself reacting to my fellows [sic] extremism and becoming a fairly staunch supporter.

Amazing! Now the liberals are to blame ... for the fact that this person's a conservative! It appears that if the liberals keep it up, there will be no more liberals left, because Lord knows that no one hates anger more than a conservative. The Fox News-viewing American people, accustomed as they are to cool-headed, moderate commentary, will be instinctively turned off by anger -- I mean, I guess that could be true, if we set aside the fact that the contemporary conservative movement is built entirely on anger.

And I am its child. I can relate to these guys more than I'd like to admit -- I know the suffocation of hearing the same thing over and over and over from absolutely everyone, and I have often succumbed to the temptation of embracing a new position simply because it's different. More to the point, I have often succumbed to the temptation of placing myself in a situation in which I know it will be very easy to sustain this feeling of novelty, of being the only one standing up for truth, of being the noble gadfly. Some of us, apparently, enjoy this feeling of being perpetually out of place -- some of us enjoy anger.

Hopefully, at least some of us will outgrow that.

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