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Monday, September 25, 2006
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A Peculiarly Bifurcated Book The new Walter Benn Michaels book, The Trouble with Diversity, is both funny haha and funny hmm. A direct and witty writer, Michaels gets a lot of play out of ridiculing liberal elites who think they're solving economic inequality when they're merely effusing about how delightful cultural diversity - including the diversity between people with loads of cash and people with almost none - can be. Though he doesn't like David Brooks, Michaels is noting something very similar to what Brooks notes, in Bobos in Paradise, when he describes a bourgeois bohemian woman who will ceaselessly bash yuppies in order to show that [she herself has] not become one. [She] will talk about [her] nanny as if she were [her] close personal friend, as if it were just a weird triviality that [the woman herself] happens to live in a $900,000 Santa Monica house and [the nanny] takes the bus two hours each day to the barrio. Like Richard Rorty, who can be funny, too, when he goes after academics whose theoretical exertions, in terms of producing anything that might contribute to juster economic and social arrangements, are worth shit, Michaels scores point after point exposing the preening absurdity of diversitarians, and in particular the idiocy of their assumption that all cultures, including impoverished ones, are jest the cutest things: ...The union workers who took a day off to protest President Grover Cleveland's deployment of twelve thousand troops to break the Pullman strike weren't campaigning to have their otherness respected. The idea that people don't want economic justice, but rather want their cultural specificity flattered -- no matter how obvious it is that some specificities are profoundly undesirable -- is ludicrous on its face, but Michaels argues persuasively that it continues to dominate the multicultural pieties of our time, and as a result acts as a massive distraction from the real work of bettering people's lives. He's hilarious on the subject, for instance, of American Sign Language culture: ...[W]e can get a sense of how attractive the idea of cultural equality has become and of how successfully it can function to obscure more consequential forms of inequality by recognizing that even in situations where the disappearance of [disadvantages] would seem to be an unequivocally good thing, some people refuse to let go. [With new medical interventions, more and more people can avoid being deaf and having to use ASL.] ... [S]cholars like ... Trevor Johnston have become increasingly concerned about the possibility of sign's disappearance. [Johnston notes that cochlear implants are causing a decline in the signing deaf community which may lead to a] 'loss of language and culture.' 'It goes without saying,' Johnston remarks, 'that this scenario gives me no joy.' ... The hope for ASL is that inadequate health care and some really catastrophic new diseases could keep it alive for a while longer; the fear is that the the cochlear implant and genetic testing will eventually kill it. Similarly, why mess with poor cultures in America when all cultures are great and should be sustained just because? In any case, Michaels points out, some studies show that many people think they're in a higher economic class than they are. He cites conservative observers who therefore argue that "class and class mobility are functions of how people feel about their position." So [I]f you can get everybody (the rich and the poor) to think they belong to the middle class, then you've accomplished the magical trick of redistributing wealth without actually transferring any money. The Trouble with Diversity is really about focusing our attention on the reality of profound and shameful economic disparities in the United States; like Thomas Frank's book, What's the Matter With Kansas?, it's an honestly perplexed inquiry into why Americans will contort themselves in all sorts of emotional ways in order to avoid an intellectual reckoning with gross monetary injustice. Yet at the end of the book, Michaels overdoes the honesty bit and weakens his case. In a "Conclusion: About the Author," Michaels natters on about himself -- he's Jewish, he guesses, but not so's you'd notice... he'd rather go to Paris than Las Vegas... reads the New York Times... lives in downtown Chicago... And ol' UD's thinkin' - He ran out of things to say but he had a book contract, so he's filling up pages... with cultural self-flattery. In that particularly repellent mode UD calls KISS ME I'M HONEST. Says he's got an enormous household income but wants much more because he wants to be the super-rich he envies in the pages of the NYT ... that the homeless guy outside his house pisses him off rather than inspires him to become Albert Schweitzer... that he thinks he has better taste than other people... When Michaels tells us, in a book about the economic greed, blindness, and insensitivity of American elites, that he himself's an invidious grasping sort, it doesn't humanize him or interestingly complicate the redistribution problem.... If indeed he "does not feel rich" even though he's hugely affluent, one can only conclude that it's because of people like Michaels that we're in the cruel winner-take-all fix he himself deplores. |