With
the logic of Capital, the aspect of
Marxism that remains alive is, at least, this sense of the differend, which
forbids any reconciliation of the parties in the idiom of either one of
them. Something like this occurred in
1968, and has occurred in the women’s movement for ten years, and the differend
underlies the question of the immigrant workers. There are other cases.
~Jean-François
Lyotard[i]
In 1980, Isaac Asimov succinctly expressed a crucial
deadlock of intellectual argument in America.
Specifically, he suggested that intellectualism faces dire opposition
from those who dismiss the very grounds of intellectualism as something too institutionally
complex, something too elitist for the uneducated – and, therefore, something
dangerous to the homegrown and obvious existence of patriotic common sense:
There
is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been.
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our
political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means
that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’[ii]
The cult of ignorance is
more powerful today than ever, I would suggest – fueled by an engine of
populist paranoia and intolerance. Now,
before I leap too quickly and too soon into the cauldron of political
squabbling and rhetorical backwash, let me make it clear: I don’t think the
left is entirely innocent of this ignorance, nor do I think they’re above the
strategies of propaganda. My concern
lies primarily with what I perceive among the contemporary republican base,
which has become more radical as of late and which I will refer to as Trumpish populism, as an ideology of the
immediate: crudely, the idea that if I can’t
understand it, then it’s bad.
Simply put, Trumpish populism is constructed around an
individualistic paranoia, a concern primarily for individual well-being and
rationalism. This all sounds fine until
we begin to perceive the consequences: namely, that the Trumpish version of
personal well-being and rationalism often results in fervent suspicion of
everyone else (ranging from immigrants to Barack Obama himself) and
embarrassing rationalizations of highly questionable strategies. Trump’s populism perceives itself as the
contemporary American underdog, a surreal blend of downhome patriotism and
Hollywood showboating that promises high-society success via a seriously warped
pursuit of “American” values (which include, among other things, isolationism,
xenophobia, and political incorrectness).
These values appear, to those who maintain them, self-evident. Like the truths illumined by the American
Declaration of Independence, they need no argument to justify them. They simply are, and to question them means to identify oneself as a traitor,
un-American, or even a terrorist sympathizer.[iii]
The idea of self-evidence is quite compelling because it
means that we need not look any further.
The answer is right there in front of us, it is immediate. It is an example
of the broader institutional notion that Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams label folk politics, a local, tangible, and
actionable mentality toward political organization:
At
first approximation, we can therefore define folk politics as a collective and
historically constructed political common sense that has become out of joint
with the actual mechanisms of power. As
our political, economic, social and technological world changes, tactics and
strategies which were previously capable of transforming collective power into
emancipatory gains have now become drained of their effectiveness. As the common sense of today’s left, folk
politics often operates intuitively, uncritically and unconsciously.[iv]
There is nothing
inherently wrong with folk politics, according to Srnicek and Williams; their argument
is rather that the current conditions of large-scale social organization exceed
the capacities of localized action. Folk
politics may present temporary and limited solutions, but these solutions do
not address larger systemic contradictions.
They appear successful, however, because their results are immediately
perceptible. We can see the impact of our actions.
This is the rhetoric of Trumpish populism: change that
affects me, change that benefits me – not Obama’s change, the change of
complex systems and institutional augmentation.
Change that, because its effects register on larger scales than the
individual, must be bad; and as the
ones who champion such change, the intellectuals must be the bad guys. The political and rhetorical divide that
occurs here is profound, and it is powerful.
To those who support Trump, intellectual activities and systemic change
can only appear within their vocabulary as resolutely un-American since they
attempt to account for energies and entities beyond American borders.[v] Those who resist the folk political
tendencies of Trumpish populism, meanwhile, can only interpret its purported
nationalism as xenophobic and intolerant (as I myself often do). Language is everything in this
opposition. More than we like to admit,
terminology dictates how we think.
There exists between these two groups, I want to suggest,
something like what Jean-François Lyotard calls a differend.[vi] The differend constitutes a rhetorical
distinction between two modes of thought, each with their own vocabulary, and
between which any settlement or agreement “appears in the idiom of one of them
while the tort from which the other suffers cannot signify itself in this idiom”
(9). In simpler terms, power determines
language; and when a disgruntled group attempts to express its grievances, it
can only do so in the language of the power structure (or structures) within
which it operates. The differend designates
an ideological roadblock, as it were, since it effectively sterilizes communication
between groups, preventing the transmission of grievances.
What I’m describing between the Trumpish populism that
opposes modern intellectualism is not quite the same thing as Lyotard’s
differend, however, since the differend forces disgruntled groups to
communicate in a decidedly non-radical voice – yet communication still
occurs. What manifests between Trumpish
populism and intellectualism is not a line of sterilized communication so much
as miscommunication, or a failure of rhetorical translation. When one group translates the other’s idiom
into its own, it exposes the opposing idiom as premised on political principles
in direct contrast with its own. I claim
that these mistranslations boil down to a determining disagreement: the
populist, folk-political privileging of the immediate versus the
intellectualist privileging of systemic complexity. A reductive yet illuminating bit of evidence
for this disagreement can be extracted from the ongoing debate over global
warming, or the more politically viable term, “climate change.”[vii]
Opponents of global warming often cite localized
incidents and events, record-breaking cold winters or notably cool summers, as evidence
against global warming. These details
are compelling to those who already distrust the science behind global warming
because they resonate with what we as individuals can immediately
perceive. The result, unsurprisingly, is
further disbelief in the “hoax” of global warming.[viii] Yet scientists repeatedly insist that
emphasizing such details is misleading, and that global warming, or “climate
change,” is part of an observable shift in global levels of carbon dioxide – a shift
that cannot be deduced from simply walking outside and noting a particularly
chilly summer morning. It can be
difficult to convince people of this, though, especially when they’ve committed
themselves to an ideology that privileges common sense.[ix] If phenomena occur on a scale beyond the
human senses, we tend to be naturally skeptical, and with good reason; but in
this historical period of considerably advanced scientific procedures, there is
plenty of literature and published findings to sink our teeth into.
Unfortunately,
anti-intellectualism has already made up its mind on such findings. In a Boston
Globe piece from April 2016, Thomas Levenson communicated to his (hopefully
attentive) readership just how dismissive of global warming Trump is. When asked whether he supported a climate
change agenda, Trump admitted that he didn’t believe in it:
“I
think there’s a change in weather. I am not a great believer in man-made
climate change. I’m not a great believer.” That’s not really an argument, of
course — it’s more an evocation of that old Monkees tune. But stripped to
essentials, the GOP presidential front-runner’s stance is essentially the same
as that of his chief rival, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who says more bluntly that
“climate change is the perfect pseudoscientific theory for a big government
politician who wants more power.”[x]
This is the party line
among Trumpish populism: climate change (an already vague and impotent term) is
nothing more than a tactful ploy by leftists.
A ploy for political power. Such
ploys are not limited to climate change, but have become the populist mantra
against any and all forms of even the slightest suggestion of intellectual
thought. Attempts to address issues on a
complex scale amounts to the malign machinations of an elitist few who see such
issues as a means to gain power.
The regrettable truth is that in some cases such paranoia
may not be entirely inaccurate. Issues
such as climate change and gun control have been relentlessly politicized and propagandized
by both sides, enough to make it difficult for dedicated intellectuals to defend
their positions. The sad irony of the
matter lies in Trumpish populism’s dismissal of leftist intellectuals as sheep
enslaved to their political masters, closet socialists with an eerily suspicious
Big Brother vibe. Yet in truth, the
majority of such intellectuals are working desperately to construct models of
the world that embrace its complexity rather than ignore it, and to offer
solutions that in turn get politicized once they enter the wider public sphere.[xi] The myopia that populists attribute to
intellectuals is actually an effect of their own myopia, a glitch in their hardware
that they then project onto the external world.
They exorcise their myopia, their blind spot – their ignorance, as Asimov would say – and reimagine
it as a shortcoming of the world around them.
We all suffer from this glitch. It’s a constitutive aspect of our embodied condition. The key lies in being aware of it.
This too, unfortunately, requires more than common sense.
[i] Appeaing in 1982, Lyotard’s comment
is uncannily perceptive.
[ii] Isaac Asimov, “A Cult of Ignorance,”
Newsweek, 21 January 1980.
[iii] Of course, one of the most
successful elements of America’s founding documents is the suggestion that the
rights they promote somehow preexisted the composition of those documents. In other words, that the right to bear arms
is somehow an immutable, universal, and absolute right, when in fact it was the
Constitution itself that created this right.
[iv] Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a
World Without Work, New York: Verso, 2015, p. 10.
[v] Consider, for example, attempts to
discuss ISIS and other forms of non-Western extremism (the West has its own
fundamentalist firebrands, of course) in terms of geopolitical history and
foreign diplomacy. Almost immediately,
the premises of such a discussion are accused of embracing a terrorist
apologetics. In other words, this kind
of terminology appears to rationalize (and thereby excuse) the existence of
terrorism.
[vi] Lyotard, “The Differend,” 1982, Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings
and Kevin Paul Geiman, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993, p. 8-10.
[vii] For some insight on the weak
construction “climate change,” see Timothy Morton’s short blog post on why he
insists on using “global warming”: http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2013/01/why-i-dont-call-it-climate-change-and.html
[viii]
Conspiracy theories like this
one are powerful among Trumpish populists. See for example this article on the “documentary”
Climate Hustle: http://www.globalclimatescam.com/al-gore/climate-hustle-coming-to-theaters-on-may-2-the-debate-is-just-beginning/
[ix] Common sense being a historically
conditioned and fluctuating concept, despite contemporary common-sense
attitudes that tell us otherwise! It’s
easy to see how such a limited, myopic, and solipsistic view of the world feeds
its own presuppositions.
[x] Levenson, “Doubting Climate Change
is Not Enough,” Boston Globe, 17
April 2016: https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2016/04/16/doubting-climate-change-not-enough/3aBHd9Weo9AxSmzI99LSZJ/story.html
[xi] I don’t want to suggest that this is
a simple, one-way causal route. It is definitely
true that intellectuals and academics are influenced by political agendas. The point I would stress is that our form of
social action is politics, and we have a limited amount of platforms to choose
from – platforms that inevitably place restrictions on our epistemological
vision of the world. Everyone sacrifices
something when supporting a political
agenda. Hopefully, we remember what that
something is.
