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Tuesday, July 18, 2006
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UD's Foggy Bottom Lunchmate... ...Scott McLemee, has a smart, brief review (for me, very brief -- I can't get this computer to open up its third page) of Philip Rieff's ideas (I found it via Ralph Luker). Like UD in an earlier post on Rieff, Scott suggests that the conventional reading of a massive moral/intellectual split between Rieff and Susan Sontag doesn't quite get it: Rieff dedicated the book [the first of his posthumous trilogy] to her memory. Some of her late pronouncements could even be dropped into the book without anyone noticing - as if the standoff between her `60s radicalism and his tweedy cultural conservatism had been a strange misunderstanding. Scott also rightly notes that the core of Rieff's thought lies in his defense of a deeply internalized sense of what one must not do -- what he called "interdicts." Parents and teachers all must from the start understand and assume their authority as transmitters of interdictory culture. The failure of these groups to assume their authority has meant the serious decline of culture. Because Rieff considered this process of internalizing interdicts so difficult, intimate, lengthy, and profound, I think he would have found the current academic controversy over, for instance, whether to teach ethics in graduate business courses amusing. First, because (as Martha Nussbaum points out in a post a few posts below this one), far too simple a model of moral apprehension often underlies such courses; and second, if a person by the age of 27 or so hasn't internalized any serious interdicts, he's not going to do so from a seat at the Harvard Business School. McLemee also notes the Rieff - Allan Bloom lineage: His book "Fellow Teachers" (1973), for example, lodged many complaints about academic culture later found in Allan Bloom's best-selling jeremiad "The Closing of the American Mind" (1988). Rieff's writing style is impossibly arch and weird for most readers; Bloom on the other hand was a master of prose style (as I've noted before on this blog). Both men were angry about the failure of universities to transmit culture, but Bloom's anger is straightforward, and straightforwardly expressed, while with Rieff you always have the feeling he thinks it's, well, uncultured, simply to come out with it. In this respect, Rieff has something in common with Michel Foucault, similarly arch and evasive. I think both Rieff and Bloom would see the Frisch, Barrett, and Churchill eruptions (there have been others, and there will be more) as the sort of thing that happens when universities no longer know how to articulate, much less take seriously in a principled way, their founding, constraining principles, their identity as supreme transmitters of interdictory culture. Many have pointed out that the proximate cause of many of such eruptions is an unjust and cynical system of academic labor. The value of people like Rieff and Bloom is that they attempt to explain the larger reasons. |