Symposium: Leon Wieseltier

Symposium: Leon Wieseltier

“I am human and I consider nothing human alien to me”: this statement has always struck me as preposterous. Of course there are human creations and activities that are alienating, or worse. (The famous sentence in Terence’s comedy is in fact spoken in bad faith, as an excuse for an obtrusive neighbor to intervene in a matter that is none of his business.) And to the inventory of alienating human productions one must add a good deal of American mass culture—for its transformation of a citizenry into an audience; for its hardening of an entire population toward the most obscene representations of violence, which we call entertainment; for its grotesque sexualization of an entire society, which has the effect not least of degrading sex, even dirty sex; for the mental passivity inculcated in millions of people who are helpless before its big and little screens, and who mistake screen-experience for experience; for the vicarious and self-estranged character of existences that are fascinated by the celebrity culture; for the surrender of people’s confidence in their own judgment as a result of its barrage of pseudo-expertise and pseudo-authority—I could go on.

But I do not want to be mistaken for a snob or a prude. All of the above debasements notwithstanding, I can think of three good reasons for intellectuals to engage with popular culture. The first reason is humanism: there are wise and deep expressions of the human spirit in popular film, popular music, and even television. High culture has always found inspiration in low culture—Romantic music would be inconceivable without folk songs and folk dances—owing to the discovery by great artists of the human truth in popular forms. And not all of those forms can be high-mindedly reduced to “mass culture.” Is jazz high or low? The question answers itself. Whether or not Monk is like Debussy, he sure as hell is not like Kanye West. The second reason is criticism: if millions of Americans are kindling to a song or a movie, anyone wishing to understand America must become acquainted with that song or that movie. This is the case also with certain (but not all!) bestselling books. The social and cultural critic must be a traveler through the realms. The third reason is hedonism. There is pleasure, because there is life, in mass culture. “I want to be/at least as alive as the vulgar,” Frank O’Hara declared in a poem called “My Heart.” For all I know, he wrote that line at his desk at the Museum of Modern Art, in the very epicenter of cultural mandarinism. And there is no use denying that lifelessness may also be found in high art.

The point, I suppose, is never to confuse the spheres. The championship of mass culture by intellectuals must be vigorously challenged when it is done as an attack upon the legitimacy of the categories and the distinctions—for a leveling end, as yet another gospel of relaxation; or to establish irony as the highest value of culture; or as the cultural program of a political ideology. I must confess that I regard intellectuals who are immune to the power of Winterreise or The Flaying of Marsyas or Modern Love or The Four Temperaments as incomplete intellectuals, insofar as they cannot grasp such refinements of structure and meaning and make of them refinements of their own souls. I think that the life of the mind should be soulful; but that is my own inclination. Otherwise, as I say, protect the differences, find truth and beauty where you can, and slum on.

On the question of the academy, may I take an incomplete? (My rant—excuse me, my meditation—might wound some people I admire and even adore.)

American intellectuals should participate in American politics truthfully, and with a lasting scruple about the integrity of argument. Alone or in a gang, they should say what they really believe, and proceed to justify it. They should espouse their ideas as if their ideas really might come to power—they should neither despise power nor worship it—and they should do so in a language that ordinary Americans can understand. Stifle the aporia and leave the hybridity at home. The analysis of a bill is not the analysis of a poem. They should learn to respect policy, which is less lofty and glamorous than politics; and they should make their contribution in a manner that may be useful to the makers of policy, even if only indirectly, in the clarification of the philosophical foundations. There is no shame in partisanship, though there is often stupidity, and intellectuals in politics have a particular obligation, obviously, not to be stupid. They should deny themselves the ugly thrill of populist anti-intellectualism: derisive talk about elites and the “new class” and so on. The anti-intellectualism of intellectuals is especially awful, and none of us work in the mines. They should not condescend to Washington, as if they themselves live in Athens. Above all, they should never lose their heads. (The ecstasy about Obama was disgraceful, even though he was supportable. Ecstasy is not an intellectual accomplishment, which is precisely why it is so often sought.) They should always be prepared to be disappointed, or proved wrong. They owe their loyalty to principles, not to persons.

A patriot a world-citizen? No, a patriot and a world-citizen. I do not see a contradiction between them, in the way that I do not see a contradiction between the particular and the universal. They seem equally real and equally reliant on each other. Who would want to be, who could be, only particular or only universal? We are too compounded and too complicated for single loyalties. Single loyalties are a human deformation. I have double, triple, quadruple loyalties, and would gladly consider more; an addiction to allegiances, which I can justify not only sentimentally but also philosophically. I am loyal to two countries; to a variety of languages and cultural traditions, though I do not belong to some of them, and am not adequately educated in some of them; and to many principles. (A principle can sometimes feel like a country.) An almost embarrassing number of things—beings and entities and ideas—rightly claim me. I am willing to sacrifice for all of them—not in the same measure, of course, but I cannot be indifferent to the predicaments of any of them. I am willing to “prioritize,” but not to shrink. The list of all that is valuable to which I am indifferent is always too long. All these allegiances I regard as obligations of self-transcendence. Some of them originate in love, some in honor, some in both; and some were acquired as a gift of experience.

I understand that such a collection of causes runs the risk of promiscuity, of a sort of consumerist approach to the most precious things in life; but my conscience in this regard is pretty clear. The difference between dilettantism and multivariousness is work. At this late date in the discussion about identity, almost everybody recognizes that identity is multiple and plural, but not everybody recognizes the burden that this bounty represents—the chores of complexity. Identities are not received, they are chosen; and even the ones that are received need to be chosen. In this regard, too, the great sin is passivity. I understand also that all these allegiances may not add up, but the ideal of adding up is a Hegelian illusion that infects individuals and communities with a totalizing tendency. The political effects of totalization in one’s picture of the self and the world are well known, but even before one laments the danger of the consequences one should lament the falsity of the concept. A monistic account of human existence is a lie. This lands us in the lap of what philosophers call the problem of the incommensurability of values, but I have never been overly tormented by this. For a start, the tension between values that do not go together is a foundation for the development of intellectual judgment. The standpoints expose each other’s limitations, and so they serve as instruments of criticism. Criticism comes naturally to a pluralist universe. There are so many aspects, so many measures.

Isaiah Berlin taught that there is a tragic dimension to the conflicts between values, because they all cannot always go together, and in politics the stakes of decision are sometimes high. I accept his teaching gratefully. I do not believe that we have escaped the rigors of zero-sum any more than I believe that we have escaped the law of the excluded middle. If human character did not change in 1910, as Virginia Woolf foolishly said it did, neither will it change in 2010. But I do not see only tragedy in “value pluralism.” I see also delight. We are not all presidents and prime ministers, and the antinomies of an ordinary life thoughtfully lived are signs also of its richness. The more attachments, the more sorrows; but the more attachments, the more joys. The opposite of patriotism is not cosmopolitanism. The opposite of patriotism is Buddhism. I do not say this facetiously. One who is immersed in the plenitude of commitments can easily understand the fantasy of shedding them. But I used to dream of escape more than I do now. Now a little stillness goes a long way. Now I have a sensation of stewardship, of responsibility for the building and the maintenance of certain institutions of meaning—the elders are almost all gone, it is our watch now, on our world. Which is to say, the world’s hooks are in me for good. So show me the flags.

Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of the New Republic.