Dear George, What have you changed your mind about?

I applaud John Holbo’s semi-courageous move to kind-of question the point of this seminar on George Scialabba’s greatest hits package.

I would have thought that Scialabba is interesting mainly as a phenomenon rather than any of his particular opinions or how they have changed since original publication. He is a talisman for the collection of people who are attracted to a blog like this: Everyone is very educated but relatively few seem to be in mainstream academia, yet they care about what academia does/says and how that relates to other well educated people outside academia. Scialabba is the poster boy for this general sensibility, which he pulls off very well by treating academics and non-academic public intellectuals with equal (dis)respect, as if they were part of a common conversation.

The utopian forum created in his own text approximates the promised land of the people who dedicate themselves to a blog like this – and here I have in mind mainly the academics, who probably fixate on Scialabba as a nostalgic oasis, illusorily suggesting a time when there were lots of people like himself around who could speak their mind openly and intelligently without worrying about peer review, tenure, blah, blah. But did those halcyon days ever exist? And could they be institutionalised now?

Perhaps my assessment will strike you as cynical, but I don’t mean it that way at all. I think if academics took a little more systematic interest in what is entailed – intellectually and institutionally – by ‘academic freedom’, this discussion of Scialabba’s work wouldn’t carry the whiff of Arcadia.

Really, Henry, aren’t you the troll in this case? Imagine I wasn’t the one who said what I said, and then try to say something sensible. Take your time.

Frankly, I don’t know what it is with you guys’ fixation on ‘sockpuppets’. Is this some condom fantasy gone astray? But since you bring it up, I think one reason why it sometimes makes sense to write in disguise is precisely to avoid the sort of lazy response Henry gave, namely, ‘Oh, it’s Steve Fuller. He’s a bad guy. Therefore let me simply raise this very point to dismiss what he says without having to answer it’. You see, ‘sockpuppetry’ (if I understand this lingo correctly) is sometimes an attempt to inhibit your interlocutor’s worst ad hominem tendencies. Not always, of course. But actually, I think a little sockpuppetry might have helped the discussion along in this case.

I treat you exactly as I have been treated here. And I am happy to let the record speak for itself. You overestimate your generosity of spirit.

To get back to something like the original topic, I find that blogs make it much easier to admit errors and changes of view, if you’re so inclined. That in turn makes it easier to risk error by throwing out statements that may turn out to be wrong. Part of this is a matter of attitude (it’s only a blog post, what do you expect?) and partly the facility of publishing whenever you want to, and linking to the point you wish to abandon/amend.

Three decades ago I was a cosmic optimist and rationalist of the Condorcet/Godwin/H.G Wells variety. The arc of humanity’s progress was still somewhat obscured by irrational throwbacks like the Holocaust, the Gulag, and the Indochina cataclysm, but I thought it emerged unmistakably when traced back farther, to the primitive, prehistoric war of all against all. The direction of humanity’s, in fact the universe’s, evolution seemed irreversible: toward the more and more complete dominance of mind over matter, until eventually all life everywhere would be absorbed in what Arthur C. Clarke, in Childhood’s End, my youthful gospel (or Book of Revelations), called the Overmind.

Ah, now I begin to understand: George, you say this (or, to use the appropriate tense, you once would have said this) like it’s a good thing. I would never have expected this, since there’s nothing even faintly technorationalist about you now. And oddly enough, I once believed something very much like this right around the same time you did, three decades ago, although I was 17 at the time (and I devoured Childhood’s End, too). So you’re saying that your sympathy with modernity’s most ardent leftist critics is, in part, an argument with your younger selves? Well, you know what Yeats says we make out of arguments with ourselves….

Lasch is a compelling critic of modernity, but Lawrence is something else altogether: a mighty antimodern prophet.

Alan Ryan gave that label to Lasch in a wonderful NYRB essay on his last collection of writings. Interesting to see Lawrence added to a list which includes Heidegger, Marx, Freud, Lasch…and perhaps Georges Sorel, Ivan Illich, Wendell Berry, E.F. Schumacher , Philip Rieff, and more. I strongly suspect that Michael Harrington figures in there somewhere, but I’m not a good enough reader to figure out quite how.

Childhood’s End contains its own critique, doesn’t it? The pre-Overmind social systems are destroyed; the people looking on from our viewpoint have to take it on faith that the process will result in something better, but because of their lack of understanding it’s experienced as a purely destructive process. I am not surprised that people who identified with it as their early idiom of progress are susceptible to second thoughts about the whole idea.

I also think that calling it technorationalist is a misleading description, one that obscures how someone can be a “producerist-pagan” at the same time. It’s technologically inflected mysticism. Teihard de Chardin is an instructive read in that regard, because on the surface he sounds scientific, but his view of evolution is just as unscientific as any guided-evolutionist’s. There’s nothing wrong with mysticism per se, but it isn’t technorationalism, and it’s quite compatible with a belief that a modernity that seems to be destroying rather than preserving something good must be a wrong turn.

I would be very, very interested to read your thoughts on Lawrence (obviously I’ll start with the piece you point to). There are other people I take seriously who take him seriously as a prophet.

Pagans and yeomen accept limits—embrace them.

George, now you’re beginning to sound like some of my localist friends at Front Porch Republic. (In a good way, I hasten to add; there’s a strong and unfortunate paleolibertarian streak over there, which I deplore, but also some intelligent defenses of populist sovereignty and participatory democracy, if you look for them.)

Seriously, I need to read you book. (Interlibrary load copy on the way, though!)