Three Dead Critics - Introduction

I want to use the next three or more podcasts to talk about the extremely recent passing of three major writers, all of them critics, all of them kinds of giants of the eras immediately preceding our own whose writing deeply affected the way that readers of our parents' and grandparents' generations thought, and spoke, and decided,... and read of course. It should go without saying that they were white males as was the spirit of their era and every Western cultural era before this one, but it should also be self-evident that like every era, there were giant cleaves of thought, disagreements on what was considered the right way of thinking, of reading, of making art, of what was right and wrong. They embodied three ways to approach it - one generally great, one was generally terrible, and one brilliantly stupid. The usually towering Clive James, the often villainous John Simon, and the sometimes ridiculous Harold Bloom: and for this podcast, a role model, a warning, and a temptation.

I use qualifying adjectives on each them because absolute judgements are exactly where the temptation lies, and therein lies the critical madness that mistakes summary judgement for objective truth, a strong temptation to which I am extremely prone, and therefore like every human with extreme temptations, I yield frequently enough that it must be actively fought.

Part of the reason it's very, very difficult to fight against one's own summary prejudices is that, contrary to the spirit of our time, prejudices are inherent in us for a good reason, it's a necessary human condition that protects us against all manner of malfeasance, and prejudice against prejudice is its own prejudice that opens us up to all manner of exploitation. Do you really want to live in a world where we just assume that people with hateful beliefs, be they white supremacy or Islamic supremacy, fascism or communism, misogyny and homophobia or anti-nationalist terror, aren't willing to act on their beliefs with violent intent, or at very least support and give money to more violent activists than they? There genuinely are some issues on which a lack of prejudice is a mindset which you should make your exception, rather than your rule, and these prejudices go over three-hundred sixty degrees, and these people should sometimes, perhaps even often, be viewed as 'the enemy,' with no excuse made. Even if most bigots of any era clearly subscribe to one set of bigotries rather than the other, both must be recognized for the evil they are. And even if one must make alliances with one set of bigots to combat the greater threat, there can be no forgetting that these temporary allies hold beliefs that can convince them to cut your throat.

But this week, we're not dealing with issues of life and death. We're dealing with the arts, the space of human endeavor we reserve for complexity, for ambiguity; to ascertain what life is in its full meaning. And the arts are only a life and death issue because when a country or historical era insufficiently appreciates the complexity of the arts, it's a sign so often that they don't appreciate the full complexity of life, and are therefore prone to write off whole classes and races as the enemy simply for their identities, rather than their beliefs.

These are three critics who were probably at their most eminent in the 70s, an era that probably seems to my parents' generation like yesterday, but how amazingly different that era was to our own! Almost as close to a precise opposite as the world gives. It was an era when liberalism was the status quo and conservatism, not progressivism, was ascendent in extremis. The great threat to life, and it was a great threat indeed, was the beliefs of left-wing extremists, who threatened to bring the entire world to heel under a cold and monolithically grey dictatorship of fear, informants, sudden and permanent disappearance, and all in the name of giving the world a new and more equal birth of freedom. What more minor wars and dictatorships and breeches of civil liberty would, and perhaps even ought, be countenanced to prevent that?

If so many older people who are overwhelmingly decent in their personal lives seem impossibly, bigotedly, lethally conservative, please try to remember that they lived through the years after 1968, and the world seemed like a very, very different place. Even if Vietnam was a disaster, hundreds of millions believed in the wars like Vietnam for a reason - because Mao and Brezhnev seemed perfectly willing to blow up billions to ensure their dictatorial hegemony, both ideological and imperial. If 58,000 Americans died and 2 million Vietnamese, what a small price that was to pay compared to the payment that might have been. And if so many people in our time seem impossibly, militantly radicalized, and believe that our entire economic system need be overthrown, that a vague and nearly unprovable superstructure of white men exists to keep everyone else down, that American actions around the world are a force for evil rather than good, you have to be similarly tolerant of them if you want to live a decent life. My generation has come of age in the era of Global Warming when American dynamism has brought the planet to the brink of global annihilation. It hasn't occurred to many of them that the democratic dynamism of American auspiced capitalism is also our best hope of solving this crisis, but it's nevertheless true, global warming is fundamentally our creation, and it will primarily affect countries whose immigrants American conservatives are determined to keep out of America. America may be the solution to the world's biggest problem, but it's undeniable, America is also the world's biggest problem.

This was also an era when writing itself was so very different from what it is today. There were far less writers, generally selected from a uniform pool of educated white men, but my god, they could make a good living! They were guaranteed a public! They not only were beloved by small cliques of like-minded lemmings and hated by opposing cliques, they were debated by people who disagreed, and often without rancor! They were engaged with! Readers were allowed to have ambiguous feelings and weigh their strengths and weaknesses.

So many of the best minds today should have been polemicists, but with the death of so many newspapers and magazines, how many could ever make their living this way? They therefore retreat to academia, where the job market is hardly better, but at least colleges are in no danger of folding. Rather than learning the necessity of entertainment, even on the printed page and in the life of the mind, they're forced to spend their time writing unread theses, and their recommendations for employment in the academic world depend upon their theses regurgitating their professors unread ideas. As never before, academia becomes a breeding ground for political radicalism, because why support the beliefs of a general public who rejects you?

We now exist in this weird twilight era when popular culture so subsumes what we used to refer to as 'high culture' that humanities academia has little idea what to study anymore. So rather than learn broadly through our three-to-five thousand year storehouse of knowledge, we live in an era of critical theory, where semi-philosophers, semi-activists, semi-public figures, ....semoiticians, and semi-bullshit artists pre-process the literary world for students, and show them how to view every facet of the mind's life through an ill-informed political refraction with such contradictions . The humanities have been reduced to political propaganda many, many times in history, and rarely did such perceptions do much political good except foretell massive instability in the world. The result is that millions of young intellectuals now inveigh against the evils of capitalism every minute when they're not joyfully consuming capitalism's cultural products by the thousands and insisting the world treat these products with absolute intellectual seriousness, and somehow they live this contradiction with no cognitive dissonance.

Perhaps all this is a straw-man argument, part of my mind is shouting against it even as I write all this down. But consider this: the segregation and mistrust in America between academics and public is statistically demonstrable to be at an all-time high. Just between 2015 to 2017, the end of the Obama era and the beginning of Trump, the level of trust of 'expert opinion' in the Republican Party has gone from 54% to 36%. Meanwhile, the Democrat level of trust in expertise in this time has stayed absolutely consistent at 72%, but polls show that Democratic mistrust has gone vociferously down since 1970.

The only explanation I can think of is decline of the polemical journalist in mass media, who can bridge the gap between academic and public, is the only explanation that circumstantially fits. The intellectual consensus that keeps a society away from civil conflict depends on widely read consensus publications hiring respectable, authoritative voices from around the political and cultural spectrum whom their editorial standards can ensure are well-informed and not conspiracy peddlers, who can pursuade a public, whatever their political orientation, think critically, whatever their ideological filter. The polemical newspaper journalist, be they critic or columnist, is often wrong, perhaps even usually, but their answers are almost inevitably wrong about the right questions. The lack of informed opinion is an enormous portion of precipitation for this crisis in American life, and therefore life on earth, and the reinstitution of informed opinion into widely read publications with genuine editorial standards is what will save us from this crisis.