In Typical Fashion, I First Agree With and Then Am Infuriated by Tony Judt

I took the opportunity of a slow weekend in Koblenz (what weekend in Koblenz wasn’t?) to finally sit down and read Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land, a work intended to spur a younger generation to reconsider their ideals, to more coherently articulate what they want from this world, and, as he writes at the end, “to change it.” I have long admired Judt for being an academic who is deeply engaged with contemporary politics, whether this be Israel, contemporary Jewish identity, or as in Ill Fares the Land, the impoverished, “yes-man” state of our political and economic thought. There are few academics who are willing or able to engage passionately and smartly with the flattening realm of politics. Perhaps another post should be devoted to why that is—Judt’s book argues that it’s a lack of informed interest in issues that prevents the contemporary intellectual from intervening on policy debates, leaving them to take more obvious (implicitly, “easier”) stands on broad ethical issues. I think it also has something to do with the focus, careerism, and patronage system that the academic world demands—though Judt thinks it one of the more selfless professions (and compared to I-banking, who’s to argue), by the time most academics have jumped through all the hoops to reach a stable position, they have either forgotten how or never learned to be an effective public critic. Dagmar Herzog, who published Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics, about the attack by the religious right on the American bedroom, in 2008, and awesomely just appeared on The Daily Show to discount Defend the Family President Scott Lively’s claim that the Nazis were homosexuals, is similarly unafraid to turn her critical historian’s gaze on a world that hasn’t been neatly boxed into the archive.

And with Ill Fares the Land, Judt boldly strikes against the very foundations of how we make political decisions in this world. Satisfied neither with narrow policy issues nor with what he claims are the morally obvious issues of race and war, he demands that we shake off two assumptions. First, that the current economic/political “stasis” is unchangeable (so was communism before 1989 he points out):“our disability is discursive: we simply do not know how to talk about these things anymore,” he writes. Second, and more concretely, more importantly, that we stop analyzing everything around us with a cost/benefit analysis—or that we at least recognize that costs/benefits don’t apply just to the material, but to immaterial entities such as self-respect or community, recognizing that the worth of life, or happiness, need not be defined by how much wealth it amasses, but by things that are much less tangible, more difficult to articulate, which are, in the end, immeasurable. In this way, despite working to be a constructive program, his vision is in many ways deconstructive, attempting to push us out of a dangerously debilitating group think, wherein our politicians and administrators propose, criticize, and defend using only the language of economic cost/benefit.

I could not agree more. His main target is “the growing inequality in and between societies that generate so many social pathologies” which he argues has been the end result of this rationale. Despite his move to get away from the material, he is obviously still talking about the material here, either in opportunity or outcome, and he is not wrong. Starting off at a drastically lower income level than the other half (or 3%) of one’s more privileged fellow citizens determines a great deal about equality in the non-economic sense: the level of education, health, respect, influence, etc. To take just one example, asthma mortality rates in one of Manhattan’s lowest-income neighborhood, Harlem, are five times higher than in the rest of the city, with hospitalization rates 21 times those in the least affected city neighborhoods. This results from the fact that over the years, Harlem, where 87% of the residents are people of color, has become “a dumping ground for noxious facilities and unwanted land uses” with one-third of the city’s public buses operating just in this neighborhood. Also correlating to the income level, Harlem’s infant mortality rate is approximately 2.5 times that of the rest of the city.

When we watch Goldman Sachs deliberately shorting the housing market and observe how “helpless” or apathetic our regulators have been, we can’t help but agree with Judt. Our society’s inability to imagine change leads us to repeat taglines like “too big to fail” and actually believe them. Tony Judt is right to provoke our generation to see instability in our world and to draw two conclusions from it: first, that instability exists in our social and political condition, which means that the world can be changed; and second, that there has been a growing instability in the daily lives of many people due to the ever-widening income gap, which is dangerous and unjust, and thus the world must be changed.

But typically, (and I think this is how he would have it), while I agree on certain fundamental levels with Judt, he simultaneously infuriates me. For all Judt’s talk of looking beyond the material for cost/benefit analysis, his discussions of how trust is built (most easily within a homogeneous society is both his and the textbook answer) and his disparagement of identity politics surrounding race, gender, and sexuality  as “selfish individualism” suggest that he himself is not willing to give non-strictly-economic injustices their full weight.

In his section on the “world we have lost,” he claims that we have fundamentally lost trust in our leaders and fellow citizens, which has tremendous consequences for our society: “The absence of trust is clearly inimical to a well-run society… [and referencing Jane Jacobs] If we don’t trust each other, our towns will look horrible and be nasty places to live.” Without trust, there is no common purpose, without common purpose, according to Judt, our societies become dysfunctional. I agree that distrust has become a staple of our age, but Judt offers no answers as to how we might rebuild this trust. Instead he just points to Europe’s most successful welfare states, which also happen to be “fairly compact and quite homogeneous.” Places like Norway, where “94% of the population are of Norwegian stock, and 86% of them belong to the Church of Norway.” Judt admits that these stats are not transferable, so what exactly are supposed to logically do with the argument “all collective undertakings require trust” and this trust is most successfully found amongst the small and homogeneous? More importantly, what I really couldn’t forget throughout his entire discussion of the wonder of the Scandinavian welfare state was that this symbiotic nurturing of trust and homogeneity served as justification for the state’s coercive sterilization of generally working-class, mentally disabled, or “sexually promiscuous” women into the 1970s. While such a society might look great for those deemed worthy by the state to be admitted into the “people’s home,” what happened to those they wanted to keep out of the family?

Part of the problem is that Judt doesn’t consider such things as sex, culture, and race politics to be as important as the strictly economic. And yet we take a dangerous turn if we ignore factors that are immanent to people’s daily lives, and define the way they are treated by their government. All this brought to mind a particularly crisp letter Judt wrote in 2007 to the New York Review of Books after Thomas Laqueur wrote a scathing review of Fritz Stern’s Five Germanies I Have Known. I am much too much too junior (meaning both too apathetic and scared) on the academic totem pole to get into the rights and wrongs of this type of in-fighting, but Judt ended his rebuke with a particularly snide remark about gender/sexuality history:

[The great questions of the age] haunt Stern’s many books and essays on Germany just as they haunted Camus, Arendt, Aron and others,” wrote Judt. “If Laqueur can’t see this, he should stick to the history of masturbation.

This parting shot was emblematic of those attacks on the history of sexuality that fail to recognize that when talking about things like masturbation, homosexuality, or reproduction, we are talking about the state, democracy, capitalism, and citizenship. Really ironically, in talking about masturbation in Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation, Laqueur was actually talking about social trust. Laqueur begins by asking, “Why did masturbation become a vice at the dawn of the Enlightenment?” His book answers this question: “Masturbation… came to prominence precisely when the imagination, solitude, and excess became newly important and newly worrisome.” Private vice was the sin of an era that created the idea of society as the intermediary between the state and the individual and of an economy that depended on the desire for more and always more, and masturbation became emblematic of all that was beyond social surveillance, beyond the discipline of the market. That is, masturbation was all that threatened a well-ordered world in which citizens could trust each other.

Later in Ill Fares the Land, Judt does bring up the problems of coercive sterilization in Scandinavian society, yet he continues to use these countries as examples of social welfare done well. And to be sure they accomplished a lot, but largely ignoring the part coercive sexual politics played in building such a society is irresponsible.  What I don’t understand is why he doesn’t talk more about Canada. He remarks that it is a mid-sized, and multicultural country with no dominant religion in which “trust and its accompanying social institutions seem to have taken root.” So how did it do this? Canada’s lesson may be more helpful for the US than any other. (Of course taking Canada seriously would ruin a great American national past time, but the sacrifice might be well worth it.)

Even more frustrating, however, is the way Judt discusses the 1960s “identity politics” movements that organized around gender, sexuality, and race. He dismisses their worth by claiming that they are the ur-cause of the individualism that now plagues our society, tearing us away from any common purpose. It’s ominous that he begins the section with a quote from Camille Paglia: “My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses.” While the ’60s obviously involved excesses, such as the Baader-Meinhof group, Judt unfairly dismisses the entire movement: “What united the ’60s generation was not the interest of all, but the needs and rights of each. ‘Individualism’–the assertion of every person’s claim to maximized private freedom adn the unrestrained liberty to express autonomous desires and have them respected and institutionalized at large–became the left-wing watchword of the hour.” It seems that second wave feminists might as well have been Michael J. Fox on Family Ties. Whatever the pit falls, wrong turns, and unexpected legacies of these movements (I am not one to blindly romanticize the 60s and there is more than enough to criticize about second wave feminism), Judt’s analysis ignores the fact that gay, civil rights, and feminist movements cohered within groups of individuals dedicated to a common mission, and that it did so because these exact groups and their welfare had been neglected in the grand postwar consensus. Judt fails to take seriously the inescapable lynch pin of power politics. Thus he disparages “African-American or Jewish students in colleges today” who “form separate ‘houses,’ eat apart, and even to learn primarily about themselves by enrolling in identity studies majors” [my emph.] as an (implicitly debilitating) impetus to live in “private spaces.” As if the other classes and spaces on campus were some neutral ground of infinite and apolitical worth (rather than the creation of the socially dominant–need I state the obvious… white, male, heterosexual, etc…).

And as if these very categories of race, sexuality, and gender hadn’t been manufactured at some (sometimes not so distant) point by that majority itself. While today there may (rightfully) be fragmentation within the category of “gay” or “woman” and their politics, the gay rights movement that began with the Stonewall Riots back in 1969 was united by mutual persecution. This is a good moment to remember that, as George Chauncey records with a treasure trove of empirical evidence in Gay New York, it was just before and during that postwar consensus that state laws began to be enacted against homosexuality, thus cohering through state and police action what had originally been a series of fragmented sexual identities.

Judt’s program would be much more use-able if it would actually go beyond the material itself and recognized the intangible, yet daily significance of things like gender, sexuality, race, etc to people’s non-cost/benefit-determined welfare. And to end with a few scattered thoughts:  I really do think we need to pay more attention to Canadian politics to understand how they embody both social cohesion and multiculturalism. I do not think that a celebration of multiculturalism itself need be, as Judt seems to think, a destabilizing social element that dissolves social unity. Yet it is one of the great paradoxes of contemporary culture: how to recognize and allow for difference and yet maintain certain common ideals. Blind idealism is dangerous, but celebrating certain ideals, such as equality and difference, and accepting, proclaiming that they haven’t yet been achieved, would be endlessly useful to breaking up the current discourse. Quite seriously I think one of the US’s major issues is that a large percentage of our population actually thinks that equal opportunity has been achieved in America. I for one was raised with this impression by my family and teachers, and only discovered otherwise upon leaving my tiny Connecticut suburb. We also need to recognize that difference (which Judt has a tendency to simplistically label ‘self-interest’ outside the few moments that he celebrates it as ‘localism’) is part and parcel of equality: we’re talking equality of different parts, and that difference itself can be made a workable ideal.

However much Judt seems to think that identity politics has driven us apart, I am instead reminded of a bunch of high school students I taught in New York, demographically Hispanic, African-American, and Asian. In a discussion on race, they surprised me with their conviction that within fifty years we would all be “multi-racial.” They were all very aware of their own identities, self-consciously fragmented even within today’s broadly defined cultural-racial groupings. But they believed that via the simple mechanism of marriage and reproduction, everyone would become at least a little bit “multi-racial.” Sure this was naive, but I think their impetus was right. Identity politics might distract us from the economic, but ignoring them within a political discourse leaves room for the state to silently manage these categories as it sees fit. A discursive, exponential fragmentation of identity (and the recognition that we each have multiple ones), which Judt so denigrates, may eventually lead us back to common connectors of shared space and governance, which is where Judt wants to get us in the first place.