Yesterday, finally, after more than a fortnight of hard
time, my family was able to spring me from the hospital. Purity and simplicity of desire are perhaps
rather rare but I longed to be home “as the hart panteth after the water
brooks”. The old verb may be apt in light
of my (I hope temporarily) iffy pulmonary function, but even more so in the
intensity of its modest objects: to be home among my books, with my long view
of the sloping garden, and the aroma of a good soup from the kitchen.
Contemporary
medicine, of which I have been enjoying the most profligate and privileged
applications, deserves to be called “awesome”—if there is any force left in an
adjective so abused by trivial misuse.
One day I might try to write about my experience of it. But as any of you generous enough to stick
with me today will soon see, I am heading in a “political” direction; and I
shall make in passing only a “political” point on this topic. It is this: the undoubted excellence of
American medicine, and especially the remarkable level of care available in the
large teaching hospitals, would disappear like a whiff of smoke were it not for
significant levels of recent high-skill immigration, especially from
sub-continental and East Asia.
Relief from
the occasional angst and more frequent tedium of medical confinement came in
two forms, television and books. I made
daily recourse to both.
The cable offerings were limited. I may be one of few Americans who had never before
experienced a full daily dose of either Fox News or MSNBC. But I just had a crash course, and it was an
appalling experience. I will not say six
of one and half a dozen of the other.
Fox News is essentially a low-brow propaganda outlet pure and
simple. MSNBC, slightly less vacuous and
somewhat more intellectually serious, is a step up but still pretty close to
the bottom of the staircase of serious journalism. Both shocked me with their vulgarity. I am referring here to the networks’
tediously repeating day-long morning and afternoon panels of talking heads. Some of their prime-time “stars”—such as Tucker
Carlson and Rachel Maddow--are highly intelligent partisan polemicists of
considerable forensic agility. They
provide something of the experience of an Oxford Union debate, which is to say of
engaging sophism that can be quite impressive in its power to confirm the
rectitude of one’s pre-existing political biases. MSNBC has the further ethical advantage of
being able to expose and lambast presidential prevarications, while Fox must
ignore or rationalize them. But don’t
confuse any of this with principled journalism.
Robert Hutchins once remarked of the two most popular “news” organs of
my youth that “America has two great news magazines—Time magazine, for people who can’t think, and Life magazine, for people who can’t read.” Such, roughly was my “discovery” of MSNBC and
Fox.
Fortunately,
there was plenty to think about in
the books I read. I read five books by
Jean-Francois Revel (1924-2006), a magnificent journalist and one of the great
public intellectuals of post-War France.
He was probably best known in this country for his rather amazing book Without Marx or Jesus. Like the great Raymond Aron (1905-1983),
author of The Opium of the Intellectuals,
Revel was a champion of “liberalism” in its European sense—a political
philosophy based in individual ethical agency and in political and economic liberty. (This is roughly what is known in the English
political vocabulary as “classical conservatism.”) Unless you have experienced French socialist
groupthink in its massive, stolid immobility—as I was forced to do with
relation to Arthur Koestler in The
Anti-Communist Manifestos—you can have no conception of the sheer
intellectual courage of these two men.
The
institution of academic tenure in American universities was intended to protect
unpopular or transgressive thinkers from the persecution of political
yahoos. Its effect, on the other hand,
has been to institutionalize a leftist conformism that aspires to absolute
monopoly and a “multicultural diversity” as diverse as any two pieces of
Velveeta cheese. Since the fall of the
Berlin wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the triumph of savage
capitalism in the People’s Republic of China, actual “real world” Marxists are
pretty thin on the ground. But
universities, whether European or American, rarely aspire to quotidian reality. I hope our humanities departments are not all
destined to become the rag and bone shops in which the great achievements over
long centuries of human intellect, art, and science are endlessly stretched
upon the rack of “race, class, and gender,” with occasional further oppressive
hierarchies still waiting to be fully exposed.
Against all this, in its full frontal Gallic form, Revel battled
valiantly for long decades.
Without Marx or Jesus was published in
1970. Its opening sentences are these:
“The revolution of the twentieth century will take place in the United
States. It is only there that it can
happen. And it has already begun. Whether or not that revolution spreads to the
rest of the world depends on whether or not it succeeds first in America.” The one advantage of being fifty years late
in reading the book, as I was, is that I could avoid the suspense. The revolution did not succeed. We blew it all
on a big “tax break”, and the world reverted to the old tribalist
busy-work. “It is clear,” says Revel, “that
the nation-state henceforth can serve only to polarize the most regressive
tendencies of people and their rulers, and that it favors the selection of
rulers from among the most aggressive, cynical, and unscrupulous sort of
men—that is to say, from among those least capable of understanding the world
as it is today and of ameliorating its condition.” Sad.
