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itics. When I was young and in Europe, the great theme of anti-Ameri–
canism was Coca-Cola. We were going to drown the world with Coca–
Cola; now we're poisoning it with McDonald's hamburgers. But this
seems the orthodoxy of the campuses and it has been well-documented
in various places.
I like quoting Orwell. But it's getting to the point where one has to
avoid quoting Orwell the way one has to avoid quoting Tocqueville,
because it becomes impossible to say anything without quoting one or
the other. Orwell, as some of you may remember, wrote a very powerful
attack on pacifism, either shortly before World War II or in the early
stages, and he said something like, "It's all very well to be a pacifist
behind the guns of the British navy." I think that one could say some–
thing similar about people who are not exactly pacifists today, but who
are what I don't hesitate to call anti-American, of whom the worst
offender is certainly Chomsky. But he's not the only one.
Bruce Anderson:
If
back in
1952
intellectuals and producers of culture
had had a broad view of their position, they would have seen themselves
as substitutes for religion, and, whatever their actual political views,
they would have seen themselves as people who actually have a pur–
chase on the political process. That, I think, is something that has died
over the last fifty years.
It
actually means that some of the left-wing
intellectuals have much less purchase than their predecessors did, but it
also means that it is hard to imagine a figure like Lionel Trilling or
F.
R.
Leavis . Perhaps Norman Podhoretz is the last survivor, but that sense of
loss of general intellectual purpose has been swept to the margins of
public discourse, and underpins many of our discontents. One final
point: all culture must depend on a notion of hierarchy.
If
academics at
universities, cultural academics, literary critics, and teachers in schools
aren't teaching their students to distinguish between good and bad, then
there is no purpose in paying them, there is no purpose in using public
funds.
Edith Kurzweil:
Thank you . I'd just like to add that in
1952,
most of
these intellectuals were not in universities, they were out in the culture,
within the country.
Norman Podhoretz:
More than you think were in universities. I mean,
Trilling was, Newton Arvin, I would say at least a third of them were
teaching by then . Richard Chase, Will Barrett, and so on.
