Author: Ophelia Benson

This review by Alan Wolfe is an odd mix of insight and blindness, shrewdness and obtuseness.

Wolfe makes some good points about the inherent difficulties of trying to make a progressive politics out of consumer movements, and about the value of thinking big when writing about history.

For the past two or three decades, historians have been studiously thinking small…As important as social history has been, however, it has also been mind-numbingly narrow in its evocation of detail and in its reluctance to consider the larger meanings of its findings. But Cohen thinks big…One hopes that her book will stimulate her colleagues to take similar risks, even the risk of emulating historians of previous generations whose efforts at intellectual synthesis and grand narrative are treated now with contempt by postmodern pygmies.

But there is also a passage where Wolfe draws a bizarre moral from the segmentation of U.S. consumer markets in the post World War II period.

In theory, consumption, whether we like it or not, ought to unify us, because we all become consumers of roughly similar goods. In reality, marketing specialists discovered in the postwar years that the best way to sell goods is to segment the audience that is buying them…Once again, consumption determined politics. We shopped alone before we bowled alone. Segmented into our zip codes, is it any wonder that our politics became so contentious and our unity around a common conception of the good so impossible?

What can he mean? U.S. politics didn’t ‘become’ contentious after WWII, they always have been. The Depression, WWI, strikes and riots, Wobblies and miners and anarchists, the 1890s, the 1850s, not to mention a contentious little item known as the Civil War. And then again what can he mean in any case? What would a non-contentious politics look like? An ant farm? Clone Nation? There is much to be said for communitarianism, solidarity, and such, but it has to be said with caution. How exactly does one distinguish between solidarity and group think, conformity, organization people in grey flannel suits, outer-directed suburban robots, the pressure of majority opinion that so worried de Tocqueville and Mill? The answer is not self-evident, and not easy.

And then there is the last paragraph, the grotesque last three sentences.

It was not just perversity that led Ralph Nader, a hero of Lizabeth Cohen’s youth, to work so hard on behalf of the Republican Party. He must have realized on some level–and if he did not, then consumers certainly did–that if small cars are unsafe at any speed, one ought to buy SUVs instead. And for that ignoble end, conservative Republicans are the ones to have in office.

That is such an odd thing to say that it actually fooled me, I thought for a minute that Nader had in literal fact been a Republican in some earlier phase. But no, it was merely yet another assertion that It Is Forbidden to vote for a new party, a principle that would have left Lincoln with little outlet for his talents. And what a ridiculous non-argument he presents for it! The SUV! Which took over the universe precisely in the years Clinton and Gore were in office. What did they ever do to push Detroit to engineer better gas mileage, or to change the law so that SUVs would have to meet the same standards that non-bloated cars do? Nothing! Not one thing! They went on bleating about the sacred freedoms of the consumer, that’s what they did, but we should have voted for Gore anyway, because…the SUV situation under Bush is just exactly as bad as it would be under Gore. Huh?

I have found something useful for philosophers to do!

Surprising news indeed, but take a look at this paragraph from Helen Salmon, student representative for the Stop the War Coalition.

Never in the field of writing about human confict, have so many bad argumentative moves been made in so short a paragraph. Let’s count!

1. The fact that the US and Britain were willing to back Saddam has no necessary bearing on whether their combined action in Iraq is a war for the liberation of the people of Iraq (they may simply have realised the error of their ways, for example).

2. War against weapons of mass destruction. Oh dear. The problem here is that Ms Salmon’s logic compels her to the conclusion that whether there is such a thing depends on how good people are at hiding these weapons. Bad regimes, good at hiding – no war against weapons of mass destruction. Bad regimes, bad at hiding – the war’s on!

3. Terrible logic in the next bit about North Korea. Indeed, it’s Stangroomesque in its awfulness! No more to be said, really.^*

So philosophers, the challenge for you, should you choose to accept it, is to teach this person to think. Scary, eh?!

*Yes, I know – that’s no kind of argument!

What is it about philosophers that they can’t resist pontificating about things they know nothing about? The examples are legion. Mary Midgley and David Stove wittering on about Darwinism and selfish genes. Simon Blackburn and Mary Warnock making a mess even of amateur political commentary. And Roger Scruton demonstrating that there’s no start to what he knows about popular music.

And the latest example? Have a look at this from an article in Issue 22 of The Philosophers’ Magazine (a title which sounds vaguely familiar):

So who wrote this? Maybe a (bad) GCSE student. Nope. Robert Ellis, a philosophy PhD.

Needless to say, it is absolute, utter tosh. Sociology, for example, is rife with theoretical and methodological debate. Even at high school level, students are required to understand that there are huge differences, for example, between the way in which positivists and phenomenologists do their sociology. Method is an explicit part of the A-Level examination. Texbooks have been put together and organised around arguments about what constitutes sociology proper.

And, of course, it’s the same in the other subjects (at least the ones that I know something about.) So, for example, the history of psychology is at least in part dominated by an argument about the appropriateness of behaviourism as a strategy for finding out about behaviour and the mind.

So here’s my Message to Philosophers: Shut up!^* You’re making fools of yourselves.

* You are permitted to talk quietly, amongst yourselves – though preferably not in public – about your own subject.

Well, this is a fun item for the eve of war. Even, or do I mean especially, if it’s not really true that many Jews worldwide are hailing this nonsense as a modern miracle. Perhaps that’s just a bit of casual journalistic exaggeration, hmm? After all there are only two witnesses, and the fish is no longer talking, to say the least. Surely the smallness, the minusculity, of the number of witnesses ought to give the most credulous believer pause. Two. I ask you. At that rate couldn’t any one of us get any other one of us to join in a fun-loving prank and tell the world any old thing? ‘My garden gnome suddenly recited page 7 of the Nebraska State Highway Code in Finnish, a language I don’t speak.’ ‘My electric kettle sang the Hallelujah chorus as it came to a boil this morning.’ ‘My scone has the face of the Blessed Virgin on it.’ Oh wait, that last one really happened.

Not to mention the interesting and poignant detail that the two witnesses’ reaction to the miracle was to kill the fish. Well there you go. Jahweh incarnates himself as a giant carp in order to shout warnings at a pair of fish-cutters (what better audience after all? Not a couple of journalists or pundits or heads of state, oh no, that would make too much sense for our whimsical deity) and what does he get? Whacked on the head, cut up, and turned into gefilte fish. That’ll teach him. Smarty-boots. ‘If you want to send a message, call Western Union,’ as my high school English teacher used to snarl when we searched for the ‘meaning’ of Wuthering Heights.

Still, the shouting carp corresponds with the belief of some Hasidic sects that righteous people can be reincarnated as fish.

Can be? Can be? What, because this is a reward? ‘Hey, you’ve been so righteous and good and all-around what is needed that you have the option of going back as a fish. Top that! Am I generous or what?’

Oh well, never mind, I never have understood these things, obviously I’m far too shallow and boring and scientistic. I gotta go, the kettle’s boiling.