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WHY INTELLECTUALS LOVE MARX
PART FIVE:
THE AMERICANIZATION OF EVERYTHING
A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran one of those op-eds purporting to explain why Europeans and Americans had such very different ideas on a possible war in Iraq, as well as on so much else. Like most such op-eds in the Times, the answer was pre-ordained. It was because of our media, naturally, since all the news Americans get is filtered through "corporate" outlets whose owners are determined to support the man in the White House who so represents their interests, that puppet of the ruling class, George W. Bush.
As an "explanation" it leaves a lot to be desired, not the least of which is elementary logic--isn't the Times itself a corporate outlet?--but what struck me about the piece is what always strikes me about such pieces. What most Europeans have instead of "corporate" media is government media. Their major news sources are, at least in the case of television, owned by their governments. Why, exactly, assume that media controlled by the government would be less supportive of the government than media controlled by private companies? Why assume that media that is protected, by law, from competition from upstart small operators will air a wider range of views and opinions than one where no such protection exists? Why assume that countries in which certain points of view are criminalized--as the works of Adolph Hitler are in Germany, for instance--will have a more comprehensive discussion of issues than one in which anybody can say anything he likes?
The only reason New York Times op-ed columnists can claim, with straight faces, that corporate media "dominate" American news is by ignoring all the other news out there, and not letting themselves know just how successful those alternative media are. If they're forced to face the success of that alternative media in one instance or another--the rise of Matt Drudge, for instance, or the enormous range and reach of Christian evangelical news sources--they can write anxious editorials deploring it for being, well, out of the mainstream. Nobody in the mainstream will call them on their inconsistency, and they don't read the other stuff anyway.
What these writers are really trying to say is not that no alternatives to the "mainstream" exist, or that what alternatives that do exist don't reach the public, but that the alternatives that express ideas they like don't attract much in the way of audience. To say that in just that way, however, would be to let the other shoe drop. It's not that Americans have no alternatives to "corporate" news. It's that when they have the choice among alternatives they don't choose left-of-center and anti-capitalist media.
It's much better for intellectuals if they can advance the idea that the only reason In These Times isn't a hugely successful operation is because "most Americans" have been brainwashed by "celebrity journalism" or are otherwise being held hostage--against their wills, even if they think it isn't against their wills--by "corporate media." To say that people freely choose among alternatives and reject what intellectuals believe is right is to come far too close to admitting their real problem in the "Americanized" world.
What American intellectuals really love about European media isn't that it gives "a wider range of opinion" on the issues--it doesn't--but that so much of it is safely insulated from the judgments of its viewing audience. The BBC doesn't have to care if most of its viewers prefer McDonald's to quiche or favor a war in Iraq or would rather see a biography of Eminem than sit through a documentary on working conditions in the Yorkshire. When American television, even American "corporate" television, produces a show that gathers no audience, the show flops, the company loses a ton of money, and the enterprise is quickly scrapped for something that people will watch. If American television is more "right wing" than European television, it's not because evil corporate hegemons are manipulating the news, but because American viewers respond to that point of view and not to the one most characteristic of Radio 4. American "corporate" media have to care what Americans think. European "public" media does not.
You can see the same dynamic at work within the United States itself. When the public gets to choose among art forms and art offerings, it chooses Star Wars movies, hip hop music, and the novels of John Grisham. When elite art is on offer, it's almost always on offer either through government funding or the support of foundations that make it possible for the art to exist with little or no support from actual people. Art museums and literary novels are not expected to make money. On the few occasions when they do, they become immediately suspect. Art isn't art if it's too "accessible."
Let's get real about American society, and American social hierarchies. In the fifty odd years since the end of the Second World War, our society changed radically and fundamentally, and the men who changed it were almost never college graduates. Some of them didn't manage to get through high school. Others either didn't start college or dropped out before they could finish. Ray Kroc of McDonald's, Kemmons Wilson of Holiday Inn, Sam Walton, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Steven Spielberg, even Bill Gates and Paul Allen--the postwar American world has been an object lesson in what a society looks like when it no longer automatically rewards elite education, or punishes the lack of it. In all but the toniest East Coast suburbs, the members of the local country club and the movers and shakers of local society are more likely to be men and women of limited education who got rich through owning franchises than highly educated doctors and lawyers from "good" schools and "good" backgrounds.
For intellectuals, this is the great danger in capitalism--not poverty, and certainly not "inequality." Capitalist countries consistently provide a higher standard of living for their populations in general than socialist ones. Capitalist countries consistently provide more "equality," too, if by that you mean the shrinking of relative differences in social respect between classes of people. Someone once said that Americans don't mind economic inequality, but that they truly hate social inequality. Intellectuals bemoan economic inequality because the same system that provides it provides far too much social equality for their taste. They don't think the local butcher's opinions on art, or education, are just as good as their own. They don't want to live in a world where that butcher can choose to ignore their superior wisdom.
Think about the terms in which intellectuals traditionally discuss democratically successful enterprise--it "panders to the popular taste"; it's based on "the lowest common denominator." The mere fact that a book or a movie or a TV show is loved by millions of people is enough to brand it as worthless. No other consideration but popularity--or lack of it--matters. The prejudice extends even to things like food and lodging. Fast food restaurants and restaurant chains like Chili's and The Olive Garden, motel chains like Holiday Inn and Howard Johnson's, tract housing--they're all "mass produced" and "characterless." Chain stores like Barnes and Noble and Wal-Mart are to be castigated for "driving" Mom and Pop operations out of business and "ruining" Main Streets from Maine to California. Malls are simply undiscussable, so obviously evil and indefensible that it's no longer necessary to mount arguments against them.
No other virtue these places could be argued to possess can wipe away the taint of their mass appeal. No other consideration but the imperative to reject "standardization" and "conformity" is allowed to intrude. Cost, convenience, the relief that comes from knowing what you're getting into--none of it matters. Intellectuals are willing to put up with higher prices and more trouble to "support" "diversity." If the rest of us aren't, we should be required to, by restricting the reach and availability of chain stores and restaurants and popular entertainment, and sometimes by being made to help finance, through tax dollars, those Mom and Pop operations and high art endeavors we don't choose to go to when we're left alone to make up our own minds about how we want to spend our money.
Even when intellectuals claim to celebrate popular culture, they're busy condescending to it, and to the people for whom it is an important and enjoyable part of life. You and I may have seen Episode II: Attack of the Clones because it's really neat to watch those space ships blowing each other up, but our local tenured professor of sociology thinks we're "constructing a transgressive hermeneutics of meaning." You and I may go to Chili's for lunch because it's reasonably priced, the food is both abundant and pretty good, and the kids already know they like it and won't make a fuss when they get there, but our local literary critic thinks we're "negotiating [our] unease with the ambiguities of a multicultural society" by seeking out the safety of conformity and sameness.
For some reason, the one explanation of why people choose what they choose that is completely, categorically, eternally unacceptable is: because they want to.
The anti-American left--whether in the United States or out of it--knows exactly what it's doing, and knows that only by delegitimizing capitalism except in its most controlled and attentuated forms can it survive. That's clear to the anti-American left inside America, and even clearer to the anti-American left in Europe, Canada and Australia. "Americanization" is death, literally, to the "educated classes" as an automatic and unquestioned elite.
What's worse, "Americanization" is proceeding apace, not by conquest and empire, but by the simple fact that in a world made small by the Internet and mass travel, all those ordinary people are getting to make the same kinds of choices Americans make--and they're making them. The reason the French need to negotiate treaties meant to limit the number of American movies and television shows shown in France is because French people themselves won't go to French movies. Much the same is the case with McDonald's and Burger King, Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Given the choice, ordinary people, uncompelled by anything but their own preferences, opt for the Golden Arches instead of the little hole in the wall restaurant at the end of the street--assuming they could afford the little hole in the wall restaurant to begin with. Papers in Britain and Australia regularly deplore the trashy masscult of American life, but the people from Britain and Australia who fill the resort towns of Florida eight to ten months a year head straight for Red Lobster and the Hilton.
People are people, and elite tastes are elite precisely because they're the province of the few. In a truly democratized world, a preference for opera and Brie would be just that, a preference, with no aura of mental and moral superiority attached. That democratized world is coming, whether anybody likes it or not. The only way to stop it is to end civilization as we know it. There are some people who think that's the way to go--the Taliban, for instance--but most Western intellectuals are not among them, and most people, Western or otherwise, most surely are not.
The idea of intellectual as vanguard, whether in the strict Marxian sense or in the softer varieties peddled by Democratic Socialism or the Progressive Movement, is essentially an aristocratic one. It is a resurgence of the belief that the great masses of people are not competent to run their own affairs, but must be guided and instructed by their "betters." For all the railing against the "ruling class," the real attraction of Marxism and its offshoots is precisely the fact that it is the last refuge of the conviction that political and cultural power should be reserved to that small group of people who can be said to "deserve" it by virtue of their superior wisdom, breeding and taste. The only difference between Ralph Nader and Henry Adams is the rhetoric they use to advance their belief in their own special destiny. Thomas Sowell calls this The Vision of the Annointed. He's usually a far too conservative writer for me, but in this case his subtitle hit the nail right where it needed to be hit: Self Congratulation As A Basis for Social Policy.
I'm sure there are people out there who have committed themselves to Marx's ideas, or to offshoots of them, from sincere conviction. I'm just as sure that there are people whose "anti-Americanism" is based on real American policies and actions. Too much of the anti-American left, however, is made up of people looking for revolutionary sainthood on the cheap, martyrdom on tenure and $80,000 a year--and yes, I do know I'm quoting myself.
The bottom line is simply this: there really are problems with mass society, and capitalism, and globalization, and not a single one of them is being addressed by the smug, preening self-satisfaction of "knowledge workers" whose first loyalty is to the preservation of their own elevated sense of moral righteousness. Marxism is not the answer to globalization, any more than it was the answer to mercantilism a hundred years ago. It's a brutal, discredited philosophy whose effects in the real world have been unrelievedly disastrous. The anti-American left represents no-one, and works for the good of no-one, but itself. It has nothing to offer indigenous peoples in the Amazon rainforest, or Detroit factory workers, or women working sweatshop jobs in the Philippines. The indigenous people, factory workers and women know that. The anti-American left tries hard not to even suspect.
Intellectuals love Marx because they have to love Marx. They hate "Americanization" because that's the name they have given to a social order in which they will become irrelevant. The good news is that there's nothing they can do to stop it. The bad news is that they can cause a lot of harm along the way.
In the meantime, the rest of us should stop letting them get away with portraying themselves as compassionate, idealistic reformers who only want to relieve suffering and poverty in the world. That's not what they are, or what they're about, and we know it.
Copyright © 2003 Jane Haddam. All rights reserved.