Rock Stars and Intellectuals
CrowdSource 6.17.2024
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly, quick-but-deep rundown of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that have piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). A resource for the lover of ideas.
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And we’re off!
Art v. Politics
Composer and Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood angered some fans last month by playing a show with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa in Tel Aviv. The BDS movement accused Greenwood of “artwashing genocide,” consistent with their cultural boycott against Israel.
“No art is as ‘important’ as stopping all the death and suffering around us,” Greenwood responded in an open letter. “But doing nothing seems a worse option. And silencing Israeli artists for being born Jewish in Israel doesn’t seem like any way to reach an understanding.”
In 2023, Dudu Tassa and Greenwood released an album titled Jarak Qaribak (“Your Neighbor is Your Friend”), featuring songs and artists from Beirut, Dubai, Ramallah, and more.
Many artists participate in the ongoing cultural boycott. For years, Pink Floyd bassist* Roger Waters has campaigned for the boycott. In 2021, writer Sally Rooney denied an Israeli translation of her latest novel. In March, Guernica magazine published and then retracted an essay about the conflict written by an Israeli writer, after most of the magazine’s editors resigned in protest.
The situation echoes the anti-Russian cultural boycott. In 2022, Kevin F. M. Platt, professor of Russian studies, wrote: “Support for Ukrainian culture does not entail canceling Russian culture. To adopt such a stance is to support a world of pernicious national antagonisms and closed borders. That is precisely the world that Mr. Putin seeks to create with his war.”
Israeli artist Sharona Katan, Greenwood’s wife, wrote in defense of her husband and against cultural boycotts: “I cannot see how this approach will bring any attempt at harmony.”
The Reckless, the Shipwrecked and the Postliberal
As the Right rises in France, the Netherlands, Germany, and possibly even the United States, intellectuals are sounding warnings about other intellectuals, and the nefarious influence they have on Right wing politics.
In a long review essay, Columbia professor Mark Lilla discusses several recent books written by the so-called Catholic postliberals: Adrian Vermeule, Sohrab Ahmari, and Patrick Deneen. He finds “cloak-and-dagger ideas” about transforming the American regime.
Lilla wrote two books — The Reckless Mind and The Shipwrecked Mind — about how how bright intellectuals with big ideas end up with regrettable political positions.
Lilla thinks the postliberals get a lot of things right: “There is a malaise—call it cultural, call it spiritual, call it psychological—in modern Western societies … And we do lack adequate political concepts and vocabulary for articulating and defending the common good and placing necessary limits on individual autonomy …”
But they miss the point of Christianity: “As long as their focus is on culture wars rather than spreading the Good News, these Catholics will inevitably meet with disappointment in post-Protestant secular America ...” Instead, Lilla sees the postliberals becoming “one more example of the psychology of self-induced ideological hysteria.”
For his part, Ahmari responded to Lilla’s essay: “The unexamined assumption is that the gospel and its reception aren’t inextricably bound up with how we structure power. It’s impossible to partition political community from the ultimate meaning of human life. This is the basic premise of Catholics politics as such, including in the wake of Vatican II.
Lilla seems to think anyone who insists on this must pine for theocracy …”
Ahmari appeared on the Wisdom of Crowds podcast last year to talk about his book, Tyranny Inc.
Another soi-disant Catholic postliberal, Edward Feser, defends his side with a piece outlining “postliberalism without despotism.”
NY State of Mind
Speaking of intellectuals, a new book has caught our eye: Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, about the so-called New York Intellectuals of the last century. In his review, Leonard Benardo offers an astute definition of the “New York Intellectual” worldview: “If anything, the New York Intellectuals’ Weltanschauung, or view of life, was an adherence to ardent writing and the fructifying convergences in politics and culture.”
To celebrate the publication of Write Like a Man, here are four recommendations of New York Intellectual writing:
Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago. Mailer’s vast midcentury canvas. The tragedy and the comedy of McCarthy and Humphrey. Allen Ginsberg chanting while nightsticks are flying, and a drunk Mailer peacocking before a phalanx of policemen. Talk about reckless minds!
Alfred Kazin, Starting Out in the Thirties. Inspiring for the aspiring writer, and a wonderful depiction of Brooklyn and Manhattan life as seen by someone from the peripheries. Plus, an antidote to the “anxiety of influence,” as Kazin was obsessed with the writers of the prior generation.
Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster” in Against Interpretation: And Other Essays. Proves that this big shot intellectuals could write about Hollywood monster movies.
Norman Podhoretz, Ex Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, Norman Mailer. Especially the chapter about Mailer. He should have patched things up with Mailer.
From the Crowd
Comment from reader Andrew Wurzer, about Christine’s article about loneliness, “Come Together!”:
There is a massive difference between solidarity and connection and connectedness. Have good relations and strong bonds does not require solidarity. And the nuclear family is loneliness? I'm confused here. There must be some zeitgeist of papers or thinking I'm missing. While the nuclear family can be repressive and oppressive at times, and even lonely if the family has very bad dynamics, it’s largely not, especially when there are other families within shouting distance that form a community. I understand this sort of thing is not common today; fewer children, more people don't know their neighbors (and children were one of the primary means through which you'd know your neighbors), but identifying it as a source of loneliness seems insane to me. I've been a part of two fairly bad family dynamics (and fairly lonely at times within those families), and I've never been lonelier than I have in the 15 years since my divorce.
See you next week!
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Pink Floyd bores me into a coma
I believe harmony isn’t what is needed to raise the cost of, to throw sand in the gears of, this genocidal “war”, to the level necessary to stop it. Outrage is the appropriate starting point. It’s a house full of people on fire; polite social and artistic expressions of any kind are rather pathetic in this moment.