Creek Running North

Am in receipt of Michael Bérubé’s latest, What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education. I’m about 250 pages in at the moment, and it’s a good read.

Full disclosure: I am mentioned in the acknowledgements, and my copy arrived gratis from the author with a kind and generous inscription. It would be wrong, however, to let Michael’s kindness interfere with my review of his book. Generous gesture or no, I cannot in good conscience refrain from saying that this book is the single finest work of literature in the history of the English Language. Which is not to say that it is without its flaws. It has absolutely the perfect number of flaws. With fewer flaws, one might have become suspicious that the book does not actually exist.

And yet somehow I didn’t make the back cover. Bastard.

As I mentioned, I’m not yet finished. It’s quite good so far. Readers of Michael’s work will recognize some of the writing right off. The introductory chapter is a filling out of the author’s notorious Chronicle of Higher Education piece involving John, the disruptive conservative student, a piece that Erin O’Connor and other conservative academics portrayed with shocking disingenuousness as having equated conservatism with mental disability.

In the book, Michael tackles the conservative complaint that Academia is more liberal than conservative by saying, more or less, that:

1) well, duh;
2) but it’s not nearly as bad as you all make it out to be, because look at all those economics and engineering departments that Horowitz and such pundits usually omit from their surveys;
3) besides, when was the last time a conservative theorist had anything useful to add to the discussion of Bérubé’s field, American Literature? A long time ago, because;
4) any useful classroom discussion of a work of literature, which would attempt to inculcate an understanding and appreciation of the work as a whole, necessarily demands at least some examination of the political, economic and social attitudes and realities, stated or imputed, of the author and of his or her social environment, and that while this is not necessarily a liberal technique, conservatives for some reason find it anathema, despite the fact that one could as easily approach the task from a conservative as a liberal point of view, and anyway;
5) aren’t you guys content with running the entire rest of society at this point?

A sensible enough analysis, and Michael limns it entertainingly, though I suspect he’ll get at least a few wingnut Amazon reviewers complaining that they didn’t understand why he went on so long about The Rise of Silas Lapham and the Great Gatsby. The author makes his case painstakingly, describing the process of working with an undergraduate class on nearly a page by page basis. A risky gambit, but I think he pulls it off: his writing is engaging enough that it has the feel of repartee in an animated classroom.

Michael does engage in a bit of shorthand that makes me flinch, and he does so despite my having gone all the way over to his blog on numerous occasions to tell him to stop doing it. But does he listen? Well, er, yes. That’s pretty much what spurred the acknowledgement. But it seems somehow that shorthand is too compelling to give up. To wit: Michael repeatedly conflates the lunatic sectarian and cult-of-personality left tendencies into a nebulous “far left,” or — on occasion — “far, far left.” I find this less than helpful. Of course, I tend to see people like Bob Avakian as significantly to my right, were we to map all political thought onto a one-dimensional spectrum, which is probably a fool’s errand. There are lots of different forks in that arrow, from social democrats who envision a workers’ paradise reached entirely by electoral means (in whose company I think Bérubé secretly places himself on good days) to Marxist-Leninist or Maoist vanguardistas to the very broad range of people who, like myself, are strongly influenced by anarchist thinkers from Bakunin to Chomsky, and who mainly see people like ANSWER as those who would jump at the chance to re-enact Kronstadt with Code Pink and Food Not Bombs in the role of the Russian Fleet.

But that’s not what I came here to talk about tonight. I came here to talk about the draft. parochialism and cosmopolitanism.

In the course of a surprisingly interesting discussion of his teaching the debate between Habermas and Lyotard, Michael writes something that caused a few disparate territories in my mind to bump into one another, plate tectonics style, to form a common, coherent country. He writes:

Lyotard found allies in feminist standpoint epistemology, which championed “local” and “situated” knowledges against the domineering “view from nowhere” from which follows precisely the kind of false universalism that sees dissidence and difference as illegitimate. Yet this knee-jerk academic-left defense of “local knowledges,” I fear, is every bit as strange and as blinkered as the knee-jerk academic defense of language games. I have never run across a fellow academic leftist who regarded Mormons or Islamists as practitioners of “local knowledges”; on the contrary, when we speak of “local knowledges” we tend to imbue “local” with all the warm and fuzzy feelings we progressive lefties have for our local independent bookstores, our local independent food co-operatives, and our local independent media. “Local,” in this sense, is good; it is opposed to “corporate” and “transnational” and “Wal-Mart.” “Local” preserves difference and always offers alternative healing methods and organic produce from neighborhood farms; “universal” is homogenizing and oppressive and puts a McDonald’s and a Starbucks on every street corner. I remark on this not to denigrate local bookstores (I’m as fond of them as anyone) or to claim that Lyotard had food co-ops on his mind when he was writing The Postmodern Condition. I’m only pointing out that just as the academic left tends not to think about whether religious fundamentalists might also be covered by an appeal to the heterogeneity of language games, so too do we tend to neglect the possibility that our defense of local knowledges might also cover the local small-town newspaper editor who supported David Duke for president in 1988. Perhaps, as I tell my students, it is possible to point out that “local is often a synonym for parochial without thereby committing yourself to global imperialism or a career in Wal-Mart’s public relations bureau. For “parochial” is quite literally another name for the local; it denotes the perspective of the person who has never left his or her parish.

It’s not quite so common as it once was that people in my line of work ask why “so few African-Americans are environmentalists.” White environmentalists have gotten slightly more savvy on that score, recognizing that wilderness issues are not the only environmental issues, and that African-Americans are doing huge amounts of work in the arenas of toxic pollution of urban and agricultural areas, of promoting and protecting urban parks, and the like. But I still hear the question asked with regard to those wilderness issues. Go hiking in California, or along the Appalachian trail, and the vast majority of people you’ll meet will be white, with not a few Asians and Latinos in the mix. There are black people that backpack, to be sure, and plenty of them. But as a percentage of total backcountry users, African Americans are underrepresented compared to the population at large.

Why is that? I imagine there are plenty of reasons, of some of which I am almost certainly clueless, and that none of them apply to every single black person who doesn’t use the wilderness. Discussing issues like this, especially as a white guy, I risk both generalization and stereotype. Economics likely plays a role: most of the African-American hikers I’ve known have been middle-class. Then again, hiking need not be an expensive pursuit. Maybe it’s just one of those elusive and not particularly value-laden cultural differences.

Or maybe, as African-American environmentalist Carl Anthony has suggested, it is that for a long time in African-American life, the backcountry has signified danger from whites. The boundaries that divide “small town” from “rural landscape” from “wilderness” are often indistinct. Cities, on the other hand, signify freedom. The migration from the sharecrop farm to Harlem and Detroit and Chicago has its roots in a literal escape from slavery, and later in escape from a system of economic and terrorist oppression that differed from slavery only by way of technicality.

The massive scale, the cosmpolitan nature, the anomie of the city means freedom. The rural, the small town, the wilderness is intensely local, and thus forever intimate. There is no crowd in which you can lose yourself. That local intimacy demands confrontation, whereas in the city one can simply walk away from an opponent and hope never to see them again. It’s not that there were fewer racist whites in Northern cities (or in Southern ones, for that matter) than in the rural South. It was the anomie, the palimpsest of communities in the city that made the difference. If you didn’t get along with a group of people, you could just… find someone else to spend time with. And once the migration picked up speed, having growing Black communities sure as hell didn’t hurt.

And of course, it wasn’t (and isn’t) just African-Americans who are driven out of more local settings, though historically they have certainly had the most pressing impetus to so move. Gays and lesbians and transgendered folks are much more widely accepted now than they were even five years ago, but given the choice between moving to New York or staying in Van Horn with the people who beat the crap out of you in high school, the choice is rarely too difficult. Geeks and goths and nerds do better in cities than in small towns, as a rule. I left my family’s historic territory in rural upstate New York, dragging my parents and siblings with me, because the city offered more educational opportunities. People who are less than contented living with two restaurants, three radio stations, and no museums? They leave.

This is not to say that all liberals, all non-conformists, all gay people have left the rural landscape, any more than it is to say that all Black people abandoned the rural South. But the political and demographic shift within the US over the last century or so is undeniable. Those people who felt the most oppressed by small-community mores, or who simply needed more cultural stimulation than was available in their small town, often pulled up stakes and left. The fact that we left some like-minded people back home doesn’t change that.

We abandoned the local for the cosmopolitan in the physical sense, but we did so in the cultural sense as well. Small communities have always been derided for their insularity. By 1948, when the migration from the farms and small towns reached a new post-war peak after they’d seen Par-ee and Tokyo and London – the year San Francisco native Shirley Jackson wrote “The Lottery,” drawing on her experiences living in a part of upstate New York not an hour’s drive from where I was born – the belittlement of the local had been enshrined in American Culture. Michael writes at length about teaching Silas Lapham, a good example. Lapham, a parvenu, had been given significant wealth literally out of the ground of his Vermont farm. He tries, and fails, to fit into cosmopolitan Boston. Author William Dean Howells treats Lapham sympathetically, as a man of fine moral character, but it’s clear that he is tracking local dirt onto sophisticated carpetry. The dynamic is so familiar that it barely needs spelling out. Refugees of rural oppressions, large and small, often adopted this traditional sneer without a second thought when they moved to the cities.

There has always been countermovement as well, to be sure. The history of American utopian thought shows one experiment after another in rural, intimate living based on principles that were, as often as not, remarkably progressive for the times. From the merely communal such as the Amana and Oneida Colonies, to avowedly anti-capitalist experiments such as the Kaweah Colony, and even including the “back to the land” movement still in progress since the 1970s, some progressives have worked to counter the ceding of the local. They have always been in the minority, excepting some places like Humboldt County in relatively close proximity to megalopoli. Many “Beverly Hillbillies,” if you will; few “Green Acres.”

A glance at the famous “purple map” from the November, 2004 elections shows a result of all this. We have ceded the local to the right. With a few exceptions — heavily Latino rural districts in Texas, a bit of rural New England, the nutbar-right Central Valley cities in California — urban counties went for Kerry, rural counties went for Bush.

We’ve ceded the local not only politically and tactically, but philosophically. The image of the soil, of the local earth and the politics that grew out of it, has changed dramatically. Populism, the usual name for the expression of local-roots politics writ large, was in the 19th century a progressive force, albeit with abysmal race politics on many occasions. Populism today, despite the best efforts of the Jim Hightowers of the world, is instead populated by the Pat Buchanans of the world. Look at the one reference in “What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?” to politics coming from the land, on page 221:

For while there’s a sense in which the faculty of instrumental reason, left to its own devices without any moral mooring, can sit down one day and try to figure out the most rational and efficient method for exterminating Jews, Lyotard underestimates the profound influence of German anti-Enlightenment thought on the Holocaust — the appeal not to universal reason but to emotional, irrational celebrations of “blood and soil.”

That’s not intended as a swipe at Doctor Bérubé, I hasten to add; he accurately describes the Nazis’ philosophy as emotional and irrational, and as celebrations of blood and soil. My problem is that those two separate criticisms are, to so many minds, inextricably linked. But even the hardest-headed rationalist has emotional and irrational aspects of her character, and would be a monster without them. She would last only a few seconds without blood, and not much longer without soil. Blood can symbolize more than spurious racial crackpottery, and soil more than empire.

Let’s face it: even the most committed urban high-rise apartment dweller seeks close-knit community, though perhaps of a more mutable form than to be found among Jackson’s rock-throwing farmers. That rootedness is a source of strength that the right, largely, enjoys and that we the opponents of the right, largely, do not. To point out that much of what that rootedness needs to sustain itself is to be found in the progressive rather than the reactionary agenda is to recapitulate Thomas Franks’ work, and he did it better than I could.

Could it be, though, that the knee-jerk Wal-Mart opposing, the reflexive prizing of locally grown tomatoes over Heinz canned paste, the snide choosing of Peets or Caffe Trieste over Starbucks, are not so much left identity marking as (perhaps halting) progressive attempts to reclaim the local? Less coffee table posturing — though that aspect certainly exists — and more a multifaceted and disorganized campaign to retake an arena that we ceded too readily, though we may have had the best of reasons? That this knee-jerking is but a single inadvertent dance step in a loose party with High Country News and other regionally affiliated media and ten thousand watershed groups and Hudson River Keeper and regional poetry associations and community-based schools and community-based policing all in attendance?

Is it possible, at last, that both modernist and postmodernist literature, the distinction between which Michael admits to chronic difficulty in delineating, might be supplanted by the literature of the local? The Stegners, the Hoaglands, the Boyles and Tempest Williamses? Gary Nabhan predicted, tongue slightly in cheek, that 20th-century American literature would mainly be remembered for its quaint, illusory, and temporary separation from the landscape. Might he be on to something there? 

Because from my perspective, and I’m not the only one who thinks this way, urban globalism in its current form is doomed. The project of modernism feeds on cheap energy. By the time today’s kindergarteners start taking literature classes at Penn State, that era of cheap energy will be solidly relegated to history. In all likelihood, the economic system that allows large cities to function will have collapsed. At worst those cities will collapse. At best, they will truly become what many of the older urban cores already tend toward: very crowded constellations of small, distinct localities.

And the sooner we progressives learn once again how to live, to interact, to work with neighbors and organize and feed ourselves and make art in small communities, the sooner we reclaim that knowledge that we gave up to the right, the more comfortable I think we’ll all be.