As part of his Modern Times publicity blitz, Bob Dylan hawks iPods in a new commercial. Call him a sell-out, but, hey, things have changed. And besides, I have no real problem with iPods…or lingerie, for that matter. And, also in recent Dylanalia, Louis Menand reviews Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews for The New Yorker (courtesy of Ralph Luker at Cliopatria.)
Tag: Louis Menand
Gene Machine.
“The vortex of the late nineteen sixties swallowed up not only Eugene McCarthy. It consumed a whole generation of liberal politicians and radical thinkers and culture heroes, from John Lindsay and Marshall McLuhan to Tom Hayden and Buckminster Fuller — a long list of ‘an idea whose time has come’ types whose time abruptly ran out. The survivors wandered, as McCarthy did, through the decades that followed, caricatures of their former world-historical selves, like old heavyweight champions working as greeters in casinos. You could say that these people failed; but what would success have looked like?” A bit too glib as always, Louis Menand examines Eugene McCarthy (by way of the new biography by Dominic Sandbrook.) I’m not sure if McCarthy is really a very good exemplar of “postwar liberalism,” but this sounds like an interesting read nonetheless. (Via Follow Me Here)
Truth and Consequences.
Misread misanthrope or principled truthteller? Louis Menand and Leon Wieseltier battle over the legacy of George Orwell. Only recently in my readings (in Menand’s Metaphysical Club and James Livingston’s Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy) have I encountered this notion that the pragmatism of the Progressives (such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, and John Dewey) eventually leads to the same moral relativist conclusions as post-structuralism (in fact, Livingston argues that much of the postmodern devotion to figures like Foucault and Derrida is mainly a reflection of the European indifference to, if not ignorance of, American scholarship – James and Dewey came to the same philosophic conclusions decades earlier.) And, indeed, Herbert Croly’s 1909 The Promise of American Life, considered the bible of the Progressive moment, attacks abolitionism for much the same reasons as Louis Menand – that it was dangerous and destructive in its reliance upon absolute moral certainty. (Sadly, to say the progressives had a moral blind spot when it came to America’s racial dilemma is an understatement.) But, then again, the “prophetic pragmatism” of Cornel West is cleary infused with a moral sense that is based on certain underlying truths. (“Like Foucault, prophetic pragmatists criticize and resist forms of subjection, as well as types of economic exploitation, state repression, and bureaucratic domination. But these critiques and resistances, unlike his, are unashamedly guided by moral ideals of creative democracy and individuality.”) So, I’d say that, while I fall somewhere between Menand and Wieseltier on the subject of Orwell, and while I usually find Wieseltier to be a pompous ass (his own attack on Cornel West comes to mind), in the end I side with those who say keep the aspidistra flying. To paraphrase Orwell, all truths may in fact be equal, but some truths are more equal than others. It may involve some intellectual doublethink, but one can recognize that a truth may have some basis in subjectivity and still hold it – and fight for it – with conviction.