I have begun building momentum toward my next book, which is one reason why my posts here have become a bit intermittent. I am not yet ready to reveal the topic, or even the working title (though I think it is a good one), because both may well change considerably as things unfold. I also may actually have a co-author for this project, if I can talk her into it. (You know who you are out there!)
But I have hit on the idea of posting a few of my noodlings—fragmentary notes really—here on Power Line as a kind of work-in-progress, thinking out loud, or blog-as-seminar. So here goes.
One of the things I am doing this summer is suffering through some of the foundational texts of the contemporary left, starting with Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. (I do these things so you don’t have to.) This book was one of the first core texts of the “Frankfurt School”—the folks who figured out as early as the 1930s that Marxism had failed. They sought desperately to find a way to rescue it, and came up with the idea that goes today under the banner of “cultural Marxism,” in which culture and other factors take the place of economic forces or old fashioned materialism.
I doubt Dialectic of Enlightenment is much read any more; leftists seem to have moved on wholly to Foucault (whom I’m also reading) and other dense French thinkers, and I have a theory that there might be much mischief to be made against the contemporary left out of a careful reading of their ur-texts.
And so right away on the very first page of Dialectic of Enlightenment appears this:
Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge. Bacon, ‘the father of experimental philosophy,’ brought these motifs together. He despised the exponents of tradition, who substituted belief for knowledge and were as unwilling to doubt as they were reckless in supplying answers.
And already we see a difficulty, for if the sentence, “substituted belief for knowledge and were as unwilling to doubt as they were reckless in supplying answers” doesn’t describe the identity politics left perfectly, I don’t know what sentence would. The left today is a dogmatic belief system unwilling to entertain any contrary arguments let alone have any doubts, and its recklessness is obvious.
I’m thinking, by the way, of wearing a custom red hat on campus at Berkeley this fall that reads, “Make Materialism Dialectical Again!”
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.