Susan Sontag and the 9/11 Haze

I want to build on an aside mentioned in Ben’s great post on remembering 9/11. He noted Susan Sontag’s dissent from the collective response to 9/11. While President Bush believed 9/11 had nearly revealed a union between heaven and earth; Sontag thought something less glorious had emerged—the kind of “soft despotism” theorized by Tocqueville. Below is an excerpt from Sontag’s devastating analysis:

Our leaders are bent on convincing us that everything is O.K. America is not afraid. Our spirit is unbroken, although this was a day that will live in infamy and America is now at war. But everything is not O.K. And this was not Pearl Harbor. We have a robotic President who assures us that America still stands tall. A wide spectrum of public figures, in and out of office, who are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand united behind President Bush. A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defense. But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality. The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.

The Intentional Use of Anachronism

Historical thinking is inherently anachronistic, is it not? The past cannot be encroached upon, no matter how much we seek to understand it. And yet, anachronistic is something historians seek to avoid being labeled, so we steer clear of blatant forms of anachronism, such as describing the First Barbary War as part of the Global War on Terror (to use the first ridiculous example that came to mind). So what then is to be done when our very object of study is an obvious anachronism? Here, of course, I refer to the “culture wars,” the topic of the book I am currently researching and writing.

In the primary sources, as far as I can tell, the first use of the term “culture wars” to describe the ideological conflict over the cultural direction of the nation was by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in a 1970 classified memorandum he wrote to his boss President Nixon. (This might not even count, since Moynihan used the German equivalent, “kulturkampf.”) A Lexus-Nexus search of all major national publications since 1960 reveals that the term first appeared, in reference to the United States, on November 14, 1987, when Todd Gitlin and Ruth Rosen, in a New York Times op-ed titled, “Give the 60s Generation a Break,” argued, in the context of battles of judicial nominations: “The traditionalist side of the culture war wants our authorities—our politicians and judges—either squeaky clean or impeccably discreet, either saints or good liars.”

Still, even after that, the phrase did not get much use. A February 22, 1988 opinion piece on abortion in the Financial Post (Toronto, Canada) by Conrad Black referred to the “Manichaean culture war between promoters of life and advocates of choice,” the first mainstream use of the term in the context of debates over abortion. But that was the only such use of the term that year and there was absolutely nothing in reference to the culture wars in 1989. On July 15, 1990, E. J. Dionne wrote an essay in the Washington Post titled “Who's Winning the Culture Wars? Censorship: Redrawing the Lines of Tolerance.” Dionne argued that, despite the alarm over censorship, the liberals were winning the culture wars. He wrote: “But all the anxiety about censorship, say close students of the culture wars, obscures what is a more powerful reality: In our nation's cultural life, the modern, the cosmopolitan and, yes, the tolerant have won. What strikes many historians, sociologists, theologians and legal scholars is not that Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs and 2 Live Crew's music provoked such outrage—they were designed to do just that—but that they won so many influential defenders.” Dionne cites James Davison Hunter as the foremost expert on the culture wars. His 1991 book, Culture Wars: The Struggle To Control The Family, Art, Education, Law, And Politics In America, which remains, two decades later, the authority on the topic, made the term household.

The recent growth in the use of the term is reflected in this Google N-Gram.

In short, for me to employ the term “culture wars” to describe anything that happened prior to the late 1980s or early 1990s is to intentionally resort to an obvious anachronism. I honestly feel no compunction allowing the label to define this project, since the two words, strung together, have become a national signpost. Is this in any way problematic?

A Quote for Tuesday

I'm bringing back David Sehat's old feature--"A Quote for Tuesday"--at least for today.

"Yes, racism exists, as a conceptual condensation of practices and ideas that reproduce, or seek to reproduce, hierarchy along lines defined by race. Apostles of antiracism frequently can’t hear this sort of statement, because in their exceedingly simplistic version of the nexus of race and injustice there can be only the Manichean dichotomy of those who admit racism’s existence and those who deny it. There can be only Todd Gitlin (the sociologist and former SDS leader who has become, both fairly and as caricature, the symbol of a “class-first” line) and their own heroic, truth-telling selves, and whoever is not the latter must be the former. Thus the logic of straining to assign guilt by association substitutes for argument.

My position is—and I can’t count the number of times I’ve said this bluntly, yet to no avail, in response to those in blissful thrall of the comforting Manicheanism—that of course racism persists, in all the disparate, often unrelated kinds of social relations and “attitudes” that are characteristically lumped together under that rubric, but from the standpoint of trying to figure out how to combat even what most of us would agree is racial inequality and injustice, that acknowledgement and $2.25 will get me a ride on the subway. It doesn’t lend itself to any particular action except more taxonomic argument about what counts as racism."

Adolph Reed, Jr., "The Limits of Antiracism," Left Business Observer

Approaching 9/11/11

The National September 11 Memorial, New York

The day after the killing of Osama bin Laden, I wrote a post on this blog asking whether the death of the chief architect of the 9/11 attacks would mark the end of the Global War on Terror (or Whatever We're Calling It This Week) or simply another (pseudo-) milestone in a war designed to be without end.

Although I found some hope in the celebrations that expressed an evident public desire to (rightly) declare victory in (and with it an end to) our longest war, I suspected that bin Laden's death would bring about no such thing.  And, indeed, it has not.

Now we are less than a week away from marking the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.   And somehow the meaning of those events--and the memories of them--seems more elusive than ever.

Among the many pieces that have already addressed the public memory of the attacks as we approach the anniversary, two that I've read stand out in my mind as particularly interesting for what they say...and what they don't:  David Rieff's "After 9/11: The Limits of Remembrance," which appeared in last month's Harper's and Rick Perlstein's "Solidarity Squandered," published in The American Prospect.

Definition of Internationalism

Another one of my "struggling to explain what I mean in my research, so I'm going to talk it through in a post" kind of post. 

I'm working on moving from an instinctual definition of internationalism to a more concrete one, in general and for the women I study. I'm writing a conference paper for the 2011 Association for the Study of African American Life and History about Juliette Derricotte's internationalism on her 1928-1929 trip around the world. I'm also writing a chapter about Derricotte's internationalism throughout her lifetime for a book about black women's internationalism, which will be my first book. The kernel of it comes from an extended chapter in my dissertation, but is much enhanced by letters from Derricotte to her family that just became available at the Ole Miss Special Collections.

First of all, I use "internationalism" as an umbrella term to denote any of a number of different ways for people to relate to the world outside of their country, including communism, capitalism, globalization, Pan-Africanism/African Diaspora, world-government of some sort, pacifism, cosmpolitanism/world citizenship, tourism.  Usually, internationalism has a positive connotation of cooperation, which rejects militarist ways of relating to other nations. Does universalism fit within it? It seems like the YWCA meant a kind of universal sisterhood--we are all the same underneath our cultural differences and so we should all get along. What about the kind of universalism that says we should all be Christians or all be Western or all be developed or all be x? It seems like imperialism and internationalism could meet in that kind of universalism? Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote an interesting book about Cosmopolitanism in an effort to argue that it is not an imperialist philosophy, but rather a moral way to deal with a planet of strangers. 

Fundamental Tensions In U.S. History, Intellectual and Otherwise

I don't normally spend a lot time thinking about essential, or fundamental, tensions in American history. I think positing these tensions is a bit cheap---a reductionist way of sweeping a lot important details, or contingencies, under the rug. I suppose I should think more about these tensions, however, since they are useful. Many well-known historians resort to them. And many solid historians respect others who resort to these shorthands.

For a long time Hegel, for instance, was important---a force to be reckoned with---in terms of theorizing about history. In case you're forgotten (or are unfamiliar), Hegel discussed a dialectic, or a tension, around the idea of freedom in history. He saw a dialectic of transition, progress actually, in relation to our increased consciousness of freedom. Hegel forwarded the theory that the idea of freedom was coming into being by grades---that there was a teleology of the realization of human freedom in history. See his Philosophy of History for more, or read more about his thought here. I think this is a fair, shorthand way, of characterizing his thought. He saw a tension, and believed it should characterize accounts of Western history. It's whiggish, but past historians of the United States have applied it in their accounts.

But I'm not here to dwell on Hegel. My present thinking about fundamental tensions has arisen because of some side reading in Reinhold Niebuhr.*