Author: Ophelia Benson

There is an amusing post here by a blogger who is eccentric enough to read B&W. He’s just been reading a N&C from back in early January, the one about academostars – which sent him to an article by Scott McLemee in the Chronicle, which prompted some reflections on Stanley Fish’s Reagonomical views of the merits of overpaying academostars.

To be fair, Fish may have a point: his presence in an English department may draw starry-eyed grad students into the department and increase funding for more useless graduate seminars on esoteric topics that will prove of little or no use to anyone teaching at most universities. In this respect, the “material conditions” of the other professors in the department may be improved somewhat (though the graduate students and adjuncts will still be teaching the same thankless classes for the same poverty-level wages). But Fish will still be making 2-3 times what his colleagues do for far less work (most academic superstars teach one course a year, generally a graduate or senior seminar with a small enrollment). Very little of that privileged status will be trickling down to his colleagues.

It’s all very reminiscent of Robert Frank and Philip Cook’s The Winner-Take-All Society, an excellent book on the way minuscule differences in talent can make the difference between a hugely remunerative career and none at all (in professional sports, movie stardom, popular music, for example). Stardom does work that way. And often it has so much to do with – a kind of gas, really. Vapor, hot air, bubbles. Especially in the case of academostars. People become stars because people start calling them stars, and other people hear that and call them stars too, and more people do the same, and more and more. Mass hypnosis. Pretty soon it becomes unthinkable or socially unacceptable to ask ‘Why is this person a star? What’s the big deal? In what way is this one so enormously better than that one?’ It all seems to have far more to do with hype and silly showbizzy attitudes than it does with anything resembling intellectual interests or values.

So here’s Nawal El Sadaawi, saying the demonstrations of women against the French proposal to ban the hijab are a ‘signal example of how “false consciousness” makes women enemies of their freedom, enemies of themselves, an example of how they are used in the political game being played by the Islamic fundamentalist movement in its bid for power.’ I have noticed repeatedly that a lot of Westerners who oppose the ban have an unpleasant (to put it mildly) tendency to accuse supporters and semi-supporters of racism and colonialist ways of thinking – as if there were total unanimity among people of Muslim background. But of course there isn’t. Far from it. Of course many Muslims and people of Muslim background are strongly opposed to the ban, but there are also many who favour it. For reasons which El Sadaawi makes admirably clear.

False consciousness makes women obedient instruments of their own oppression, and transmitters of this false consciousness to future generations of children, of girls and boys. It is lethal because what it does to women’s minds is not visible. Unlike physical female genital mutilation it is an invisible gender mutilation which destroys the dynamism, the capacity to understand what is happening, to react and resist, to change, to participate in making changes. It destroys the essential creativity of the human mind. It instills fear, obedience, resignation, illusions, an inability to decide or else it leads women to make decisions, to take positions, to defend values and ideas inimical to their own interests, to the health and development of their life. It makes women their own enemy, incapable of discerning friend from foe.

False consciousness is a very, very difficult notion to defend, for obvious reasons. The retort is always available, ‘How the hell do you know whose consciousness is false, that X doesn’t really believe what she says she believes, that if only she listened to you she would change her mind?’ And yet we know there is such a thing – we know it if only from our own experience. We know how easy it is to be misled, to be persuaded, to see things through a glass darkly. We know it happens. And this argument between women who cling to the veil and want other women to cling to it too, and women who want to take it off and want other women to take it off too, has been going on for many decades. One can always just shrug and mumble about ‘Their culture’ and let it go at that – but that doesn’t really get anywhere, does it, since ‘Their culture’ itself is riven with disputes over the matter. It’s as well to keep that in mind when the issue comes up.

Something put me in mind of Hazlitt’s famous Letter to William Gifford this morning – so I thought I might as well give you a bit of the flavour of it. It’s a permanent, settled grievance of mine that Hazlitt is so little-known. I think he’s the single most inexplicably obscure writer in English. He ought to be at least as famous as Orwell and far more so than Lamb or Carlyle. He’s an absolutely brilliant, dazzling writer, and he’s no slouch as a thinker, either.

The letter to Gifford starts off briskly:

Sir, You have an ugly trick of saying what is not true of any one you do not like; and it will be the object of this letter to cure you of it.

There are so many people around who have that ugly trick, these days. How one wishes for a few Hazlitts to cure them of it.

You are the Government Critic, a character nicely differing from that of a government spy – the invisible link, that connects literature with the police…The distinction between truth and falsehood you make no account of: you mind only the distinction between Whig and Tory…The same set of threadbare common-places, the same second-hand assortment of abusive nick-names, the same assumption of little magisterial airs of superiority, are regularly repeated…You dictate your opinions to a party, because not one of your opinions is formed upon an honest conviction of the truth or justice of the case, but by collusion with the prejudices, caprice, interest or vanity of your employers.

And that’s just from the first couple of pages. There’s quite a lot more. It’s a little lesson in history and politics, as well as epistemology, in itself.

Update. That was silly – I should have given the link for this wonderful site that has a number of Hazlitt essays (though I don’t see the Letter to Gifford, alas). If you’ve never read a word of him, you don’t have to wait until you can get to the library or bookstore, you can start with Blue Pete.

Corruption in US politics is a hardy perennial issue. Reliable, sturdy, always there; something to count on in a disconcerting world. This is, of course, because nothing is ever done about it, and the people who ought to care about it mostly don’t, and the people who ought to pay a penalty for engaging in it don’t, and the people who ought to be paying attention mostly aren’t, and the people who ought to be bringing it to the attention of the people who ought to be paying attention and ought to care mostly aren’t. It’s all a bit discouraging, frankly. Or to put it another way, it’s completely disgusting and infuriating, and an outrage, and absurd, and blindingly obviously not the way things ought to be done. And yet it goes on and on and on, like the drumming rabbit with the Eveready battery (that’s an advert, for our non-US readers).

The subject came up at Crooked Timber a few days ago when Henry posted about a certain Congressional Representative:

CT extends its hearty congratulations to Congressman Billy Tauzin (R-La), who’s demonstrating his sincere attachment to free market virtues by retiring from politics and selling himself to the highest bidder. For the last couple of weeks, there’s been a bidding war between the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) for Tauzin’s services…The phenomenon of Congressman-turned-lobbyist is hardly a new one; but the openness and extent of the greed on display is unusual, even for Washington. A sign of the times.

The next morning I heard a brief segment on the BBC World Service about the role of what’s euphemistically (and that’s a big part of the problem, I think) called ‘campaign contributions’ in US politics. The segment was pretty good, it did make some of the points that need to be made, but it was far too polite about it all. The words ‘bribery’ and ‘corruption’ were not used. But that’s the problem. This stuff is just flat bribery, but it’s almost never called that. If it were would the great American electorate be quite so torpid about the whole thing?

It’s very simple. It’s not hard to understand. People with financial interests give huge sums of money to political parties and campaigns, and they expect something in return, and they get it. At the very least they get what is called ‘access’ – they get to talk to Representatives or presidential staffers on the phone, while people without satchels of cash to give away have to make do with a Representative’s staffer. The ability of money to buy access is so taken for granted that it’s not even concealed behind those veils of euphemism – the beneficiaries don’t even bother to pretend that that doesn’t happen. The bizarre mantra that is apparently supposed to make all this okay is ‘Money doesn’t buy influence but it does buy access.’ Oh well that’s okay then! Great! Perfect! Rich people have access and poor people don’t, right, that’s the way to run things, that’s fair. Splendid.

Fresh Air talked to Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity about this yesterday. He and a team of researchers have written a series of books, The Selling of the President 2004 (2000, 1996, etc.) It’s worth a listen, and a read. Maybe some day people will start to pay attention. I think I won’t hold my breath though.

This is funny. Hilarious, in fact. A blogger and frequent blog-commenter who is well-known for an unattractive combination of heavy sarcasm and rudeness made safe by anonymity, tries another bit of heavy sarcasm that falls rather flat, and contradicts himself in the process. Compare three statements:

“High-Caste Hindu”: Irreverently Humorous or Casually Colonialist and Racist? Chun Informs, You Decide

Do you assume that Spivak calling herself this would make it any less casually colonialist or racist (if in fact that’s the proper description–about which I, as I wrote, have no opinion)?

I find your points to be cogent, but I believe you must detect a patronizing note in Inglis’s description.

Ah. You decide. I have no opinion. But on the other hand, surely you detect the patronizing note. Don’t you? Surely? Come on, you must, it’s so obvious – not that I have an opinion of course. And not that I ever strike a patronizing note myself. And not that – oh never mind.

This article starts off with a pretty bizarre story.

The other day, I was reading an interview with Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean in Newsweek when I had to stop and check that it was indeed Newsweek and not, say, Christianity Today. Yes, it was indeed Newsweek. And, after a series of questions about a variety of public policy issues, Dean was asked, out of the clear blue, the following question: “Do you see Jesus Christ as the son of God and believe in him as the route to salvation and eternal life?”

Really? Really?? I never read Newsweek, so I don’t know, but that is such a weird question that it strains credulity. I mean, was the reporter Billy Graham, or what? I wouldn’t at this point be surprised to hear that an American reporter had asked a candidate impertinent questions about religion, but that one is really off the deep end.

The real issue, though, is why this question even came up in a political magazine. Do we now have a religious test for public office—something that was explicitly rejected by the Founders of the United States of America?…But in the past few weeks, Dean has been the target of something dangerously close to a religious witch-hunt—and that should concern all of us, whatever our party affiliation or our political, religious, and moral convictions.

Indeed it should, and it does. All the more so since reading that loony question.