I thought about those questions, of course, when I wrote my essay. In fact, I thought that for a website run by academics, whose audience I assumed was mostly academics, too, including many philosophers, that I might be providing far too much information about Richard Rorty, one of the most prominent Anglo-American thinkers of the past 50 years. But I put it in, nevertheless. On the other hand, I decided not to follow my reference to the book, Common Ground with a remark like, “J. Anthony Lukas’s classic account of the Boston busing controversy.” I did make the assumption that most people knew what that book was about and that alluding to it by its title was the most economical way of referencing it.

On the other hand, I’m a bit perplexed by the resentment that colors some of these remarks. I understand the idea that it must be frustrating to read about books or thinkers that you’ve never heard of—but why is it so annoying? In another thread, George brought up an Arthur C. Clarke book he had read that had a great influence on him and Michael Berube observed that it had had a great influence on him too. Well, I’d never heard of that book until they mentioned it! But their allusion to it didn’t annoy me, it made me want to learn more about it, and perhaps read it myself. Isn’t this how knowledge is disseminated?

I think this is an excellent example of the kind of shotgun name-dropping Ken was criticizing. I would have to spend quite a lot of time with Google just to figure out what these sentences are actually saying. The only one of these names that I am positive I can identify at a glance is Wells – and only as an author of fiction, which doesn’t get very far in this context. (If the author of The Time Machine has faith in technology, it sure doesn’t show through in that part of his work!)

If you would actually state the points of view you are talking about, rather than using names as stand-ins for the theses associated with them, I think this passage would be more accessible. As it is, it gives an impression (intentionally or otherwise) that you think that anyone who isn’t immediately familiar with who Gray, Lovelock, Ballard, and Wells are and what they said isn’t welcome in this discussion, or has nothing useful or interesting to contribute to it. (Or perhaps that you are unaware that such benighted ignoramuses exist at all.)

There’s a lot more of the same in the original post.

If you are impatient with abstract discussion, if your emphasis is on current issues and the need for a campaign platform, if you take as your starting point the proposition “I am on the Left” and attempt to build out from there, there’s a good chance you already have your answer to the question What Are Intellectuals Good For?
Among George Scialabba’s most attractive traits is the degree to which his thinking resists pigeonholing. For what little it’s worth, Ken, my contribution at #9 is about these cross-currents. I’d imagine that without this approach you’ll find George’s generosity towards V.D. Hanson, for example, inexplicable.

You ask a specific question about cap and trade. I don’t think it’s too hard to figure out a leftist approach that focuses on market failure and that advocates recognising social limits to growth. Such an approach would emphasize constraints on capitalism. For a practical program it would most likely favour a carbon tax set at a punitive rate for heavy polluters. In this context, a market mechanism like tradable quotas is more of a meliorative project – fixing some socially harmful market externalities – which rubs with the grain of modernity and progress.

But it’s equally possible that anti-modern gloominess, derived as it is from a range of potential sources, can point you down a different path. Take John Gray, for instance. He eventually comes round, via Lovelock’s endorsement of nuclear power, to a renewed faith in technology, but one that’s more J.G.Ballard than H.G.Wells. Here’s a Scialabba review from a few years back where, echoing others’ criticisms of Lasch, he ends by bemoaning the lack of a program. Come to think of it, that was your criticism, too.

The Yankees suck, if that helps.

For the most part, this entire discussion comes across as an exercise in intellectual showmanship.

Did you omit some kind of transition between the paragraphs there? ;-)

More seriously: we have here some short posts on a book of essays, each of which itself reviews a number of books and writers. Is it surprising that the posts don’t go into depth on the implications of those many books?

For the most part, this entire discussion comes across as an exercise in intellectual showmanship. Yes serious ideas are being batted back and forth. But the amount of verbal posturing involved leaves me more than a little exasperated.

I wish there was a lot less fancy footwork displayed and a lot more of an effort to actually connect the ideas and writers under discussion to the real world around us.

It shouldn’t be all that difficult to try to think through what relevance, say, Lasch’s ideas might have to the concrete efforts now underway to build a more potent progressive movement in the US than the one that currently exists (a movement that I would contend has been gaining impressive strength in recent years). Or substitute Lasch’s name in the previous sentence and replace it with Rorty’s…or Scialabba’s ….why not put more effort into making this discussion more down to earth and more linear? Why is it necessary to seemingly jump all over the place in every paragraph while naming three different intellectuals in every sentence? (admittedly, I’m exag. to make a point).

I am not saying that every exchange of ideas must ultimately be connected to the debate over cap and trade or whatever…but ….discussions like these seem to exist in a world almost devoid of the real world and of a contemporary Left…a Left that could use a lot of the brain power on display here to draw some concrete parallels between some of the ideas being tossed around and some of the issues we are trying to grapple with on a daily basis.

Naturally, I wouldn’t feel this same sense of impatience if the topic under discussion was, say, the Red Sox vs the Yankees. If that really was the focus, then I’d be fine with just having a good time arguing over baseball stats and strategies. But since everyone involved here is, to the best of my knowledge, on the left (and takes that identity seriously), I have a hard time listening to all of this chatter (some of which is very sharp, very impressive, and very thought provoking) without also feeling like screaming something like…”fine, but what does all this have to do with the price of tea in China” (an expression that I just pulled out of my distant past)…OR to put it more meaningfully, “what does all this have to do with the living standards of the 1 billion people in the Third World who go to bed hungry every night”?

Anyhow, you write:

“Lasch fears the very State that is the only entity capacious enough to circumscribe the power of private interests. He’s all dreams, he’s got no plans, and we want the plans, as Scialabba gently reminds Jacoby in another context.”

This pretty much encapsulates all I see to be amiss with—for lack of a better signifier—“the contemporary left.” For one, the assumption/faith that the State HAS, in fact, in net, circumscribed the power of private interests, or that it has demonstrated any willingness or potentiality to do so, and two, the inability of self-identified left-wing critics (not just Lasch, whatever he was) to come up with viable alternatives.

Which brings me to Dwight Macdonald, particularly his “The Root is Man.” While Chomsky has certainly picked up on Macdonald’s anti-militarism message*, I’m hard-pressed to find an A-league intellectual carrying the flame with regards to Dwight’s domestic state skepticism. You’ve got the libertarians on the right, and I know there are the left-libertarians/anarchists still around somewhere, too (I just never manage to find them), but nowhere do I see a consummate intellectual of Macdonald’s ilk and disposition scribbling and gesticulating away. So what we’re left with, to be perfectly forward, is a public debate that has foreign imperialists on one side and domestic imperialists** on the other… and a few “libertarians” who sleep with Republicans and capitalist oligarchs when the doors are shut.

Which is one reason (among many others) why George is so interesting. He seems to share much of the same skepticism—if not contempt—for the technocratic/bureaucratic elite that Macdonald does, without being nearly as explicit as the latter was in actually opposing that very same elite (except, like Chomsky, when that elite does war).

I understand the “elite” I’m referring to is vast, but it’s not all abstraction either. Spend a considerable time in the right places of Washington, and you get to see all of them in action, across the gambit, enjoying the privilege of democracy together, while the rest of us get to “enjoy,” even celebrate, it from afar. Public Choice Theory only gets at the tip of it.

Now I could use this space to produce a litany of left-libertarian/anarchist alternatives, but I won’t, since I don’t really have ‘em (either), except for words like “localism,” “subsidiarism,” “smallness,” etc. All I can say is that, at some point, all those on the left who still value pluralism as an end in itself (and I fear that number is dwindling) should start questioning whether putting more money and effort into Washington (which is really just the mid-Atlantic heel to New York’s foot) makes much sense. I’m not saying the alternative is much prettier (Rich is right to call out Lasch on the ugliness of certain “local” populations). I just think it makes more sense, at this juncture, to move in that direction, conceptually…

*Although, without picking up on Macdonald’s later doubts concerning the absolutism of such anti-militarism, which is perfectly fine, but worth noting.

**These are my crude designators for right-wingers who seek to squelch pluralism abroad (foreign imperialists) and left-wingers who seek to squelch pluralism at home (domestic imperialists).

A nice summary, Bert. I would throw in some qualifiers and rephrase a few of the above claims, but basically, yes, you’ve got it.

I will have to go read Lasch, I guess.

I may be in a minority in thinking that The True and Only Heaven, despite all its occasionally splenetic and inchoate discontentment, is a wonderful tour de force of a book, a wild, not-entirely-reliable, passionate and, I think, fundamentally necessary revisionist history of 19th and 20th century American social and economic history. But if you don’t want to read that, read Matthew Crawford’s book on motorcycle repair and the life of the mind; its essential message is the same.