When Intellectuals Go to War (updated)

“the commander-in-chief of the country”

The President of the United States is not the commander-in-chief of the United States. He is the commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States. If you are not in the armed forces, he doesn’t get to order you around.

On the intellectuals, is it just war where they think it is all about them? Many intellectuals think that everything is about them.

p.s. I’d also be interested in hearing Corey’s opinion (when he’s arrived at one) of The Rest is Noise, which I haven’t read.

The widespread intellectual defense of the need for our “proactive” attack on Iraq is a terrible moment in American history.

Nearly 100 years ago, Robert Graves signed up for the Great War in the hopes it would postpone his move to Oxford. From his memoir, Good-Bye to All That:

“I had just finished with Charterhouse and gone up to Harlech, when England declared war on Germany. A day or two later I decided to enlist. In the first place, though the papers predicted only a very short war – over by Christmas at the outside – I hoped that it might last long enough to delay my going to Oxford in October which I dreaded.”

It most certainly worked to delay his trip to Oxford.

I don’t think he was really referring to the “battle against retrograde tendencies.” I think it was more about the German tradition, of which Schoenberg’s modernism, with its severity and its strict rules of organization, some of them borrowed from Bachian counterpoint, was really a part.

I read it a long time ago..

That quotation is amazing. It puts a lot of Adorno’s ravings about Schoenberg’s politically-inflected aesthetic merits in perspective.

However, my main purpose in commenting is this. Whenever I see a reference on a blog to M Ignatieff, and especially to his opinions on the Iraq war, I feel an obligation to link to this, which is, in all honesty, one of the funniest things I have ever read. When I feel I need cheering up, I have a repertoire, probably all too limited, of ways of dealing with it. But this is one that never lets me down, and which I allow myself recourse to every year or so, for fear of its power being diminished by excessive frequency.

“As if the Kaiser had read Harmonielehre and decided to march into Belgium on behalf of atonality.”

That was precisely the Kaiser’s rationale for marching into Belgium.

I agree with LFC: it does seem to be more than a bit odd to be throwing the Americans into the soup in August 1914, when they wouldn’t pick sides in the war until 1917. He doesn’t decry the Italians, the one Central Power, which did not join Germany in August, but he’s far-sighted enough to reject the Americans.

I don’t think support for ANSWER had much to do with their ideology – aren’t they a front for the Socialist Worker’s whatever, and supporters of N Korea? – but just because they were particularly good at organizing protests.

David Rees:

…and sent its buckshot tearing into Iraq– tatterdemalion, sanction-wracked– and the rocks behind were splatter-stained with a crimson decoupage like some chromatic inversion of all that is holy and lawful. I kindly reckon we just shot the shit out of Iraq, Ignatieff said. And Friedman said, Lets move in to get a better look at her. And they tried hailing a cab with an anecdotaholic driver but they couldn’t find one because they were stranded in a featureless semantic apocalypse, meaning-raped and apostropheless…

Thanks for that link, Darius Jedburg .

I would hesitate to call the sort of people whose wisdom is published daily in places like the New York Times “intellectuals” because, as we’ve seen, few of them think for themselves. In the instance of the Iraq war, their cogitation seems to have been limited to determining the attitudes of their fellow opinionators and aligning themselves accordingly: my place is to the right of Z and the left of X. Krugman comes across as an oddball because he doesn’t play that game.

La Trahison des Clercs isn’t a general phenomenon. Those whose life is the mind are certainly apt to go off in odd directions, but they’re more likely to buck the trend than the sensual man-in-the-street.

Schoenberg’s influence has been, from what I’ve read, extraordinarily disproportionate to his appeal. Musicians have been complaining for generations about being taught serialism, as if it was the last word, though audiences have always rejected it. Even in my right-wing Southern California backwater, we much prefer minimalism and lionize Adams, Glass and Reich.

Although my SoCal backwater isn’t all that rightwing, so it’s presumably not yours.

Well, there are similarities but also differences. Ross says that Schoenberg soon regretted what he called his “war psychosis” and writes that although most academics and artists were caught up in it, composer Richard Strauss didn’t go along and refused to sign a manifesto denying that the Germans had committed atrocities in Louvain. In our country it was not so much academics and artists who were caught up in war psychosis, but very well paid political pundits, and few of them subsequently have had the honesty to admit, much less regret (like Schoenberg) their former insanity, not to speak of the financial and career rewards that it brought their way.

A few years ago I read several books by Fritz Stern about pre-World War I Germany and had the impression that in contrast to the Iraq war and the Vietnam war, in Germany professors, artists, and writers at that period overwhelmingly supported the German monarchy and its bellicose foreign policy and, indeed, as a group, German academics tended to be even further to the right than their students (whom they routinely incited) let alone the population at large. In this context Leo Strauss’s infamous 1933 letter to Karl Löwith about opposing Nazism from the right, without recourse to what he called the “despicable” principles of human rights is unremarkable: “the fact that the new right-wing Germany does not tolerate us [i.e., Jews] says nothing against the principles of the right. To the contrary: only from the principles of the right, that is from fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles, is it possible with seemliness, that is, without resort to the ludicrous and despicable appeal to the droits imprescriptibles de l’homme, to protest against the shabby abomination [i.e., Hitler].”

godoggo, Dana Rorabacher is my congressman, and for what it’s worth Verklärte Nacht gets a friendly reception in my neighborhood. I’m not sure anyone’s going to believe this, but I’ve actually heard a performance of Webern’s Five Movements for String Quartet which actually sounded good. Nevertheless …

I actually object to the assertion that “A state goes to war for its own reasons.” Invading Iraq did America no good. I suppose it made some sense to our former president and those in his circle, as well as the New York Times and the Washington Post, if not to the Los Angeles Times or nearly half the public. There was general acquiescence in this fiasco, initially, but the enthusiasm was far from universal. Kerry came within a hairsbreadth of defeating Bush in 2004, and Obama cruised to victory in 2008 as the only reliably anti-war candidate.

“L’ État c’est moi” certainly characterizes Bush’s thinking, though it’s unlikely he could pronounce the phrase.

“Invading Iraq did America no good. I suppose it made some sense to our former president and those in his circle, as well as the New York Times and the Washington Post, if not to the Los Angeles Times or nearly half the public.”

I don’t know the real rationale among high government leaders. But the plan that I saw leaked was that we would quickly defeat the Iraqi army, quickly establish a democratic government that would defer to the occupiers, we would get the sanctions lifted and particularly the oil quotas, we would bring in US (and other) oil companies to efficiently produce oil, and the tremendous revenues from the oil (and the many oil jobs) would make Iraq a fairly rich nation with a large middle class, they would not rebel against prosperity.

Maybe it could have worked. But I think when they took Baghdad and looked at the Iraqi Oil Ministry records, they found that the claims that Iraq had the second-largest reserves in the world were only Saddam’s lies. The oil companies refused to do much to develop Iraq’s oil, which they probably would have done if there had been as much oil as Bush etc thought. Suddenly it went from a quick project which might provide the USA with cheap oil for ten years or more and revitalize the economy, to an expensive tar baby we couldn’t get unstuck from. It was still expensive even though we tried to run the occupation on the cheap, cutting corners on everything that would otherwise have reduced Iraqi dissatisfaction.

jazzbumpa @1
No
Mostly, but not always. (Think for instance about the first world war or Granada). Humans are not always so rational, and the evidence is that it in principle never pays.

J Thomas, I remember the Tinkerbell mentality current at the time. I also remember that Iraq was considered an existential threat, which was the most pervasive and probably the most persuasive argument for bombing the hell out of a poor beaten up hollowed out desertified paradise.

The story wasn’t that we’d profit by invading the country, but rather that horrible things would happen to us if we didn’t. Unfortunately, to a majority of my countrymen, this argument was persuasive, and a disturbingly large number of countries arguably less deranged elected to go along with this delusion.

I even visited a number of them subsequently, and their denizens didn’t seem especially deranged. As far as I can tell, invading a far-off country isn’t the sort of thing that bothers the average person.

John@27, I’d discount any concern for human rights or democracy from motivations for the war supporters. Offhand, I don’t recall any of them who seemed to be bothered when the ‘liberation’ turned into hell.

Remarkable too that some intellectuals always seem so keen to parade what they wrongly believe to be solid understanding of music even when it’s not the subject of the OP. I wonder why?

no one has quite the self-deluding capacity of the intellectual.

Artists often say one thing explicitly, and ‘say’ something much more radical – and often completely different or even opposed – in their work. But for the non-artist intellectual, all there is is the former. How sad for them.

I don’t see how anyone can say that the subject is not also music, where we are talking about Schoenberg and Alex Ross.

Schoenberg’s early work, which is quite wonderful, would have been Brahmsian, because the champions of Brahms praised him an exponent of “pure”, absolute music (represented by the sonata and symphony), as opposed to the musical dramatists Lizst and Wagner (whom they considered “programatic”, or literary composers). This was still the deeply-held unexamined modernist dogma of the “intellectuals” of my parents’ generation, who stood for “purity” and abstraction in everything. All these composers now just sound “romantic” to us.

There are lots of really brilliant people about today, but I think we must have passed “peak” intellectual. Over the decades the word has become progressively meaningless.

By “retrograde tendencies of modern music” Schoenberg would have meant Wagner and the inventors of then “new” genres as the tone poem and music drama.

Leon Botstein writes:

Brahms managed to bring new life to forms which Wagner insisted were dead: the piano sonata, the string quartet, the song, and the symphony. Brahms’s example and achievement became an inspiration not only to composers in Germany, but throughout Europe and America, regarding the adaptability of classical and early Romantic traditions of music writing. In the twentieth century, Arnold Schoenberg reinvented Brahms as the father of modernism and of a progressive approach to musical composition. This radical revision of Brahms’s historical role has found many defenders. The “artwork of the future” need not turn out to be the music drama and tone poem exclusively. Brahms’s influence on Dvorák is comparable to Brahms’s influence on a wide array of turn-of-the-century composers, including Schoenberg, who saw the Wagnerian example as more daunting and less encouraging than the inspired achievement of Brahms, who, in his own time, despite staggering success and world-wide renown, suffered the misfortune of being branded a reactionary.

Bad Jim, I’m interested in what the important people might have thought. I can understand the pundits easily. There was maybe room for a couple of anti-war pundits so they could prove that there was no censorship, but everybody else pretty much had to support the war or stop being a pundit. “Where a man stands depends on where he sits.” “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.” I expect there were “important” pundits who decided they were against the war and who I mostly stopped hearing about, but the ones we pay attention to are the ones who found a way to reconcile their brains to necessity.

It’s possible that Bush etc were playing some deep game to determine the course of societies over decades. I don’t believe it.

It’s possible they were working for Israel and didn’t care about the effects on the USA. It isn’t particularly safe to discuss that possibility, so let’s not go there.

The oil is what I have left. If they thought they could spend a lot of money building Iraq up and bribing Iraqis to put up with them, and that would pay off quickly in cheap US-controlled oil, then the rest works out. That would let them *afford* anything else they wanted to do.

If Bush thought of it as a game of no-limit poker, where he’d dealt Saddam a bad hand, that would be an explanation. I don’t see that the war particularly helped Bush in domestic politics. It didn’t help the US balance of payments, it didn’t particularly stimulate the US economy, it used up a lot of oil, it gave us a whole lot of deficit spending that Bush did not use well, etc. The US public would not have demanded we invade Iraq if the administration hadn’t gone to great lengths to persuade them. If it didn’t benefit Bush, or the GOP, or the government, or the nation, who did it benefit? Not particularly the hi-tech military research guys. They got funding cutbacks while we looked for better mine-resistant trucks and better boots etc. Nobody benefitted except Israel, and Sharon told us to invade Iran first because they were the real threat.

Since nobody got much of value out of it, I think it was a mistake. And the obvious mistake for them to make was to believe Saddam’s estimates of his oil reserves.

Of course I could be wrong.

I don’t see how anyone can say that the subject is not also music, where we are talking about Schoenberg and Alex Ross.

I thought the topic was the intellectual’s relatively enhanced capacity for self-delusion.

but..

By “retrograde tendencies of modern music” Schoenberg would have meant Wagner and the inventors of then “new” genres as the tone poem and music drama.

Some of these little skirmishes, and the silliness and parochialism thereof, might illustrate the topic of the OP, now that you mention it.

However, there are reasons for all this German Stuff, and I would say the chief one is the legacy of JS Bach, under whose shadow all the big name Germans – including Beethoven and Mozart, not to mention anybody else in Western tonal music – labored. In some ways, Bach left a burnt up field, and so forever after, composers were obsessed with being perfectly ‘systemic’ and organic and international/catholic like Bach; to create music that sounded as good as it ‘analyzed’ just like Bach’s. You think those early 12 tone guys weren’t obsessed with Bach and fugue? The best composer of them (Webern -IMO) definitely was. They all were.

Really great highly sophisticated music, like a great Bach fugue for example, can give you what might be called an ‘intellectual orgasm’. That sort of exaltation is what Schoenberg and others were after vis a vis the German Line; not abstraction for its own sake, but also against the idea that music ought to be something too verbal, or too literal, or too trivial (e.g. ‘painting a picture’). They were after brain orgasms.

Whether they were foolish or not to feel this way is another argument.

Busoni’s versions of Bach fugues do sound rather bombastic to us today; and we know, too, that Bach’s music was not really “abstract” and “mathematical”, in the way the modernists perceived it, but deeply influenced by two highly emotional 18th century phenomena: Italian opera and religious Pietism. (Moreover the Bach family was not originally German but Moravian — though everyone here knows that.)

@39
In fact, Schoenberg did go to war (at the age of 42!). Of course, he never saw combat, and was discharged after a year. He served again briefly at the very end of the war.

I like his arrangement of “Funiculí, funiculá”, too.

I dunno what Schoenberg said about Wagner (maybe there was something about that in the book, but it’s been back on the liberry shelf for quite a few years now), but it just seems to me that the latter’s music is very chromatic, very non-repetitive, often without a clear tonal center, often with unresolved dissonances, and these are just the qualities that serialism was extending and systematizing (although what appeals to me about Schoenberg is that the system wasn’t the point; I imagine he’d still be considered fairly important even if he hadn’t abandoned tonality). I’d imagine that the sort of modernism he’d object to might have been things like early Stravinsky’s folk-influenced music, or what some consider the flaccid music of the Impressionists.

Busoni’s versions of Bach fugues do sound rather bombastic to us today;

They sound a little grotesque (always!), yes.

and we know, too, that Bach’s music was not really “abstract” and “mathematical”, in the way the modernists perceived it, but deeply influenced by two highly emotional 18th century phenomena: Italian opera and religious Pietism.

Regardless of whether either characterization is appropriate, being abstract and being ‘deeply influenced by two highly emotional 18th century phenomena’ are not opposite things, which is the point I was trying to make before, sort of. You can do a formal analysis of an exemplary piece of Bach and the abstract integrity (whether you call it math or whatever) is all there – like examining a leaf under a microscope. And it also *sounds* beautiful.

Music hides nothing – it’s all there in ‘plain sight’, as it were. But it’s beyond the merely verbal. It’s ‘influenced’ by all sorts of things, but what matters is the result – which is quite as unpredictable as other kinds of influences. For example, one of Debussy’s favorite composers (supposedly) was Weber – yes, as in Carl Maria Von. But look what came out of Claude. Debussy admired Weber’s orchestration technique. I hate to sound snooty about it, but music is its own thing, not a branch of politics or letters or anything else. I am not saying it should be verboten to talk or write about, but…take care!

RE: economic justifications for war, see Norman Angell.
In 1910 he published a book called “The Great Illusion”.
He is sometimes cited as saying that economic integration had made war impossible, right before WWI started.

What he actually says is that economic justifications for war don’t hold up. The corollary being; don’t expect economics to keep the peace either.

Just to wrap up: I know that Adorno objected to early Stravinsky ballets – *Le Sacre* and *Petrushka* and maybe *Le Noce* – because they were pastiche-ish and ‘bourgeois primitivism’ and had the pretense of objectivity, and all the rest of it. But I’m pretty sure the more active musician (Schoenberg) couldn’t help but like some of it – I know Schoenberg liked some Stravinsky pieces. I’m not sneering at Adorno, but I still like Petrushka even though it has a bourgeois whiff.

Well I know Adorno thought jazz was worthless. I also recall that Schoenberg was dismissive of Weill. Presumably the jazz influence had something to do with it. Whatever. His music still sounds better to me than John Adams.

Irrelevant is whatever I don’t listen to.

Pleas note that the expected net value to the people making the decisions is different than the expected net value overall. A lot of people profited immensely from that war.

Wonks Anonymous @47
” And yes, I know the Coase theorem just highlights the importance of transaction costs, but the death (sic) of settling military disputes with side-payments before they grow too large is part of my point.”
(I guess you mean dearth).

I think the Coase theorem, assumes a legal framework, where contracts are binding, this is not the case the military disputes. Paying someone not to invade, just encourages them to threaten you again.

@69
Giving people money directly — isn’t that how Petraeus settled things in the Iraq war? Not that they didn’t do that all along.

My unreliable memory supports the impression that I had an inkling of Hanlon’s razor back in the days of the Nixon administration. I remember my shock at finding out I was wrong, that they were as malicious as we’d feared. I continue to think it’s a useful heuristic, but it’s necessary to keep in mind that malice and incompetence are frequently found together.

I love Sondheim’s lyrics, but for musicals I always go back to the comedic stylings of Da Ponte and Mozart.

(As long as we are having afterthoughts)@58 wrote “Regardless of whether either characterization is appropriate, being abstract and being ‘deeply influenced by two highly emotional 18th century phenomena’ are not opposite things, which is the point I was trying to make before, sort of. You can do a formal analysis of an exemplary piece of Bach and the abstract integrity (whether you call it math or whatever) is all there – like examining a leaf under a microscope. And it also *sounds* beautiful.”

I agree wholeheartedly with the statement above — to the effect that emotion and formalism are not incompatible, but, in defining “absolute music” Hanslick specifically referenced Bach’s *instrumental* music. Bach’s fugues were admired because they were *not* programatic — as also was Brahms’s music (although it is sometimes rumored that Brahms’s instrumental compositions had a secret program). Hanslick even admitted that audiences found Bach’s vocal polyphony wearisome and remarked that many would find the text for say, “Christ Lay in the Bonds of Death,” “quietly irritating.” (Kevin Karnes, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History : Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth Century Vienna [Oxford, 2008], p. 70). For Hanslick the spirit of Bach’s music needed to be translated for modern audiences; and he thought ideal composer to accomplish this was Brahms.

At the same time, however, composers and serious music lovers of the late 19th were everywhere finding that the tempered scale that Bach had done so much to perfect and exploit had become a confining prison of convention, hence the experimentations with chromaticism and tonality (in the vein of Wagner).

Harold — On the basis of a large minority of his works Bach qualifies as one of the most ‘chromaticist’ of composers. Chromaticism tends to undermine the sense of being in a particular key, which was central to the musical language of classicism and, to a lesser extent, of early romanticism. The late (Wagner, Mahler) and certain earlier (Chopin) romantics’ and early modernists’ experiments with chromaticism, and the latters’ with atonality (Schoenberg straddling both groups),were reactions above all against *classicism* (and perhaps certain mainstream currents in the baroque): chromaticism and atonality in classical music is rare enough to stick out like a sore thumb (Mozart’s ‘Dissonance’ quartet; slow movement of his F major piano sonata K533, interestingly described by Alan Hollinghurst in The Line of Beauty as ‘Bach-like’). They were emphatically not reactions against Bach, whose music, more than that of any other composer ever, was unconfined by genre, stylistic language, and even historical period, ranging as it did from uncanny pastiches of archaic paradigms (BWV 669, opening chorus to BWV 121), to futuristic avant-la-lettre modernism worthy of Stravinsky (opening aria of BWV 54, 4th of the canonic variations for organ on the Christmas carol ‘Von Himmel Hoch’ (all later arranged for orchestra by Stravinsky)). On the contrary, these prominent features of late romanticism and early modernism were partly inspired by Bach and self-consciously harked back to him, as indicated by eg Schoenberg’s and Stravinsky’s orchestrations of organ works and Berg’s chorale quotation in the last movement of his violin concerto. It was all a bit like Eliot’s version of literary modernism: back to the future.

Later audiences would unsurprisingly have been irritated by the morbidly Lutheran texts for the cantatas but they were liturgical bread and butter to the congregations that constituted their original audiences. But perhaps you weren’t denying that.

Fair enough Harold!

They were reacting against stale and restricting conventions, not against musical genius.

I suppose the only thing different about Schoenberg and a person like “Gérard Duval, the printer” is that the Schoenbergs of the world not only take the opportunity to search out and compare things in nationalistic ways, but they are rewarded for it. Given the opportunity, a printer or a baker may well compare the state of the art in French typesetting or ovens vs. the German equivalents. If it were not for the special attention and mystique given to the “chattering classes,” we might find just as many similar sentiments among the personal letters of people who are not considered intellectuals, yet these beliefs probably contributed just as substantially to public support for that war.

Mass-media magnification of ‘the intellectual view’ doesn’t mean that the actors seeking their own ends actually get what they wanted (as John Quiggin says) – but being given their time in the sun is not exactly a punishment either.

In Shoenberg’s time, though, I am not sure what significance a private letter would have except as a reflection of the view of elites, in their private world. Yet I would think that one finds similar sentiments being magnified, and providing much popular support for the war, among the apparently less studied views of private tradesmen and laborers. This raises the question of whether more modern mass media capabilities tend to amplify or diffuse these elite-but-not-paramount viewpoints.

To belabor the point unduly – that again shows how sometimes the process of Stuff Happening effectively short-circuits the imagined importance of cranky professionals, artistes, etc. in swaying public opinion. Re-reading the original post, I realize this is basically a restatement of Corey Robin’s point. Kultur was crowing about the intellectual potential of the German establishment – but not in any way that would help the intellectual elites.

And actually the Corporal is an example, I think, of where the close contact of many different “intellectual” types can breed real problems, even when it doesn’t obviously fit into the established power structure, simply by giving support and cover – various people taking a shine to him based on his willingness to promote their theories (on national identity, on Jews, and other issues), reciprocated in various ways culminating with the spectacle of the looting of a continent and its prim gardens and apartment rows being flattened into jagged lines. Very atonal, and jarring as well. But it also presents an accident of history where one of these angry fellows was mostly left alone, while the other was built up to the ruin of empires.