Yes, Virginia, We Are Devolving

Eric Larsen has a new book out, and has posted an excerpt on his website... and it's an interesting read.

In A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit, Larsen asserts that we are fucked. We have substituted abstractions (identity politics) of what the world is and means for actually looking at what is there, have allowed corporate greed to shape us into consumers instead of thinkers, and basically no longer have the cognitive tools to create meaningful political, intellectual, or artistic discourse.

Of course, my kneejerk reaction is, "Yup." But of course this puts me out of a job. So... fuck this guy! Surely we can keep thinking and producing our way out of this mess, right? I'm still thinking... you're still thinking. I'm not ready to cue the fat lady.

And it seems like he has no plan for moving past the flattening effect of identity politics on intellectual discourse, except to reject it. This is ridiculous. Thickening the crust of the local Women's Studies Department by asking harder questions and having more arguments seems like a better strategy (ie, it admits that postmodern theory happened).

But man... I can reject what Larsen is doing with his thoughts, but the thoughts themselves are powerful. Read this excerpt of the excerpt:

"the observable pattern is simply this: Great numbers of people will not talk about great political matters that are unprecedented or of the most towering and important consequence. For example, they won't talk about the possibility of interpreting the Supreme Court's intervention in the 2000 election as the equivalent of a coup or the installation of a junta. And they won't talk about the possibility that the Bush administration knew that 9/11 or something like it was coming but did nothing to prevent it since it would be useful to their own political interests. That is, people will not even entertain the possibility of such ideas.

But why on earth not? I'm not asking for agreement on any such questions, but I am asking—no, I'm imploring—that it be permissible to consider them. To make it something not considerable seems to me the equivalent of willful blindness and very dangerous. I have an acquaintance who is an internationally recognized and highly honored senior professor at a major—no, an illustrious—university. Admittedly, he is conservative politically and considers himself so, but it seems to me that conservatism is one thing and denial another. In an exchange, I asked him whether or not law is built on precedent. Yes, he said, in extremely large part. I asked him if the court's intervention in the 2000 election was a first-time thing and unique or whether it had a precedent. A first-time thing, he said. So I asked: Doesn't the Court's action then stand as a precedent in this area of law, making it more rather than less likely that the Court might again enter into a similar electoral matter and that a parallel or corollary finding might be handed down again? No, he said: It doesn't and it won't.

Even my acquaintance's deep conservatism can't explain this simple stubbornness: after all, he's done something akin to saying "a dog is a cat," or "a dog is not a dog." He would never admit that he'd done so, but hasn't he, in effect, said, "A precedent is not a precedent"?

On the face of it, an absurdity. But I think I understand it, at least to some extent, just as I think I understand the refusal of my colleagues, friends, and other acquaintances even to entertain the notion that the Court's action could conceivably be understandable as a coup. And the reason is that the very thought is unbearable. It is unspeakable. In a word, it's unreal.

Indeed it is. And yet that's the very last reason not to speak of it. "