I think most people are vitriolic and dogmatic in the extreme—we just differ on who and what we subject to our vitriol. People on the far left are often exposed to vitriol and dogmatic reactions.

If George can read and understand people whose views differ dramatically from his own, he is one in a million. Not too many people on any part of the political spectrum can do this.

I say “disappointing” because it was far too abstract for my tastes and, with its strong emphasis on literary criticism (a genre that, I will admit, has never interested me all that much), almost entirely overlooks the many concrete political issues that George touches on – either directly or indirectly.

Yes, George is that rare kind of intellectual who can say positive things about Chomsky and Cockburn on the one hand and Irving Howe, Michael Walzer and Dissent magazine on the other. And, on one level, this does indicate an unusual and laudatory open mindedness. Yet for those who find Chomsky and Cockburn to be not only dogmatic and vitriolic in the extreme – but even more significantly – two figures who help to give the left a bad name, a more forthright discussion of George’s soft spot for these two guys would have been appreciated a lot more than the near exclusive stress on multiculturalism and/or Said’s opinion about this or that piece of literature.

The point here is that while commenting on George’s views about, say, Said’s literary crit is certainly appropriate for an introduction to this symposium, to so completely ignore the more concrete world of politics that George touches on elsewhere in the book (for better and worse, imho) is more than a minor flaw. Frankly it left me yawning.

For this entry/post I won’t get into the specifics of Chomsky’s views on the Middle East or Kosovo – or of more relevance – George’s implied (or explicit) agreement with those views. Nor will I do more than note how odd I find it that someone who values nuance and complexity as much – and as admirably – as George so clearly does – how he can then turn around and so gushingly admire intellectuals (like Chomsky and Cockburn) who seem to revel in their Manichaen oversimplifications.

Instead, what I would like to stress is the impressive number of ideas, turns of phrases, and wonderful quotations in George’s book that, by themselves, make this volume well worth reading.

And what I found so subversively ironic about some of these tasty morsels of intellectuality is that, if taken as seriously as I am sure George would like his readers to take them, they serve to contradict and thus undermine some of the dogmas that George himself seems unable to fully come to grips with.

The hour is getting late and I suspect I will find myself saying more about all this as the week goes on – that is if, as I believe will be the case, I am taken to task by others and will then need to explain my thoughts more clearly than I have prob done so here tonight…but let me give a few examples of what I see as George’s wonderful knack of capturing the essence of what intellectuals should be all about…and what they should be “GOOD FOR.”

On the last page of his chapter on Randolph Bourne, he (not altogether approvingly) says that Bruce Clayton’s book about Bourne “concludes by speculating that Bourne [had he lived longer] would have become a socialist Reinhold Niebuhr; skeptical unaffiliated, anti-utopian, mindful of human limitations and the tragic dimension.”

It’s wonderful food for thought…and provides, what I believe to be, an exemplary intellectual/political model for readers who are on the lookout to make a bit more sense of today’s wacked out/mixed up world.

At another point in the book, George again astutely (not accidentally) undermines intellectual and political rigidity (of the very sort that Chomsky and Cockburn personify to the utmost degree). On page 71, he (favorably) notes that both Trilling and Arnold held to positions that were, “in essence…” “Yes, but….”…yes to all the important progressive values like “equality, cooperation, tolerance” etc….”but only after listening to everything that can be said against one’s cherished projects, assuming equal intelligence and good faith on the part of one’s opponents, and tempering one’s zeal with the recognition that every new policy has unintended consequences, sometimes very bad ones…..”

Now one can certainly take a more nuanced view than even the one quoted above when it comes to evaluating just how much “good faith” actually exists on the part of today’s Republicans…without doing what far too many on the left do without a moment’s hesitation…which is to completely demonize any and all intellectuals and politicians who hold sharply diff views than we do.

Reading Scialabba is healthy tonic for sharpening all of our critical thinking skills – even if George himself falls glaringly short in a number of his own esaays.

I don’t have a hard time believing this. Connoisseurship, at least as I understand it, involves a lot of practices that would foster citizenship. Reconnoitering an aesthetic field requires you to: constantly gather information, understand how the history of the field interacts with the present, understand the different judgments that other people make, make your own judgments, think about how you would defend them to other aspiring connoisseurs, think about what standards inform your judgments and what judgments inform your standards, remain open to the possibility that you are wrong about an aesthetic question…

I wouldn’t want to bore anyone by dragging out the list, but these steps are all things that train a citizen to think about politics in a critical and engaged way.

Speaking of reading in seriousness: I don’t have the essay in front of me, but I think your second, more generous reading of the lines from Scialaba’s New Criterion essay is more likely correct. That passage reads far more like “inhabiting and ventriloquizing” than it does stating or agreeing with.

Ah, that it renders me incapable of appreciating subtle wit in blog comments? They should say that. My apologies.

Anyway, the reason I chose not to relativize there is that I think it’s damn near impossible to deny that George Scialabba is deeply committed to the employment and articulation of public standards of judgment. Despite the implications of the cover of George’s book, which suggests that intellectuals tend to serve as shills for capital, I think the essays within are pretty good testimony that elaborating public standards of judgment is one of the things (some) intellectuals (might) be good for.

his many contributions to that conversation, then and now, remain so valuable [*]—even, or especially, when his judgments don’t concur with mine.

with the * marking the spot where you chose not to relativize. Of all the things to respond to, I chose a barely perceptible sub-point. (Maybe it’s true what they say about the Web.)

Why the “I’m afraid”? You’re breaking this to me gently maybe? You can, you know, go ahead and explain where and why your judgment concurs with George’s rather than mine.

Harry @ 2: No. The vast majority of us never wrote about a word about them.

Oh yeah, you say that now.

John @ 4: thanks!

Hitchens reflects both the best and the worst of the Socratic gadfly. On the one hand, there is the temptation to cynical sneering and the desire to epater le bourgeois. It is almost impossible for a contrarian to avoid this temptation completely, particular since it is often necessary to treat the conventional wisdom with derision. Hitchens himself concedes that he is particularly prone to this vice, noting that ‘a beloved friend once confided to me that my lip—I think he said the upper one—often has a ludicrious and sneering look, and my wife added that it takes on this appearance just when I seem to be least aware of it’. This unattractive tendency also mars the writing of Gore Vidal, whose contribution to the blurb of Unacknowledged Legislators nominates Hitchens as his ‘successor, inheritor, dauphin or delfino.’. But anyone who contributes more to the public debate than reiteration of one of other of Orwell’s ‘smelly orthodoxies’ will recognise this fault in themselves to some extent or other.
A more serious version of the same fault is found in the tendency to pursue intellectual vendettas. One does not need to be an admirer of Bill Clinton to feel that Hitchens’ attacks on him (and Hillary) went way over the top. Clinton may have been venal and sleazy, but he was far from being America’s worst president and he ended up on the right side of most of the issues Hitchens cares about, notably including Bosnia and Kosovo.
On the other hand, the great Socratic virtue is the unwillingness to accept easy answers. Hitchens rightly denounces, for example, the evasions with which many supposed advocates of free speech responded to the Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie. The same insistence on hard truths, is evident in a fascinating essay, originally presented as a Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture, defending George Orwell against the attacks made on him by Williams. Since Hitchens clearly admires both men, it would have been easy for him, not to mention his audience, to pass over this topic in a few sentences, and devote his time to aspects of Williams’ work for which he felt more sympathy.

For my part, Fanny’s and Austen’s known sympathy for Cowper, and the way that Sir Thomas’s tyranical ways are castigated suggest reform and a critique of empire.

No. The vast majority of us never wrote about a word about them, which is why nobody noticed we were complaining (which we did quietly and without much energy because we were busy with other things).