Читать книгу Clarence Thomas and the Tough Love Crowd - Ronald Suresh Roberts - Страница 11

In bygone days, it might have been sufficient for the Tough Love Crowd’s critics to rest with the complaint that the Toughs are moral but misguided, or naive but caring. This is no longer enough. The supposedly apolitical ideals that the Toughs follow stand too long exposed. Long ago the “strident” work of Franz Fanon or the “angry” autobiography of Malcolm X had to be championed and rescued as respectable work. Decades ago, Audre Lorde, Derek Walcott, Franz Fanon, Eric Williams, and C. L. R. James, resisting confining protocols in an array of academic “disciplines,” had to explain and justify the intrusion of politics in scholarship and in art, much as one might excuse one’s muddy feet on someone else’s rug. Today, however, it is the defenders of quaint ideals who carry the burden of scholarly embarrassment.

The Tough Love Crowd’s insistent claims of loyalty depend on the soundness of the very same ideas that the Toughs’ new critics have successfully thrown into question. These new critics, Negro Crits, build on “The New Black Aesthetic”⁸ and are further inspired by Gayatri Spivak, bell hooks, and Cornel West. Not only have Negro Crits applied old methods to previously neglected materials on the model of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s masterful work The Signifying Monkey and Derrick Bell’s treatise Race, Racism, and American Law; they have also gone further. Negro Crits have begun the hard work of creating new methods to resist the particular blind spots of the inherited ways. Where Gates “reverse[dj” Audre Lorde and asserted emphatically that “only the master’s tools will ever dismantle the master’s house,”⁹ Negro Crits have successfully pressed further. In path-breaking work like Patricia Williams’s Alchemy of Race and Rights and Derrick Bell’s And We Are Not Saved, Negro Crits have begun to reshape the tools themselves by resisting impersonal ideals and emphasizing the inevitable links between autobiography and scholarship. Older approaches aimed to produce timeless monuments of pure intellect undefiled by the author’s personal story; there the author stood outside the work and pared her fingernails, like Stephen Dedalus. Negro Crits, in contrast, insist that identity and creativity have always been inseparable. When Samuel Beckett was asked why his country produced a wealth of literature, he commented that the British had left the Irish in a ditch, with no other option but to sing. African Americans, too, know why the caged bird sings. And in Trinidad Spree Simon, descendant of a slave, rummaged in a garbage dump, salvaged an oil drum, and created the twentieth century’s only new musical instrument: the steel pan. Negro Crits, pressing this insight in areas previously closed to them, are inventing new tools, like law-and-autobiography. There has been progress, but also resistance. Conservative Allan Bloom (author of The Closing of the American Mind) has described Negro Criticism as “unprofitable hokum.” And this resistance extends beyond such zealots. Negro Crit progress and the continuing resistance to it are both captured in a recent Stanford Law Review’s comment, authored by two reputedly progressive lawyers: “What is new and noteworthy is that [Alchemy], a book consisting of a series of such autobiographical narratives would be hailed as a major work of legal scholarship. . . . Scholars should not be readily allowed to offer their own experiences as evidence” (emphasis added).¹⁰

The Tough Love Crowd is an important additional part of this resistance. Clarence Thomas: “I heartily approve of [Bloom’s] critique of black studies.”¹¹ The Toughs thus enter a political struggle over what counts as culturally valuable. V. S. Naipaul has urged—in What’s Wrong with Being a Snob?—that to civilize a place “you recognize the primitive and try to eradicate it.” The erection and sustenance of the Toughs’ intellectual tastes absolutely require such combative political effort. The Toughs can press their ideas upon us only at the expense of a ravished “culturally disenfranchised” (Edward Said’s phrase). In this setting, the choice of an intellectual approach is itself a moral and political choice with moral and political consequences.

Talk of intellectual morality is sometimes felt to be hopeless given that so many people today believe that everything depends on subjective opinion. Yet contemporary skepticism has exactly the opposite significance: skepticism does not mean that talk of morality in scholarship is gibberish. Rather, skepticism makes moral choice unavoidable. We can no longer run from ethics by claiming to offer simple truth. Drucilla Cornell has, for instance, emphasized the neglected moral imperative generated by what is flaccidly called “postmodernism.” In The Philosophy of the Limit, Cornell emphasizes that “the identification of deconstruction with ethical skepticism is a serious misinterpretation.” Cornell persuasively suggests that attention to the culturally dispossessed is the “ethical aspiration” behind Jacques Derrida’s work. And Edward Said has long emphasized that the chosen manner of beginning scholarship, of choosing what to let in and what to exclude, is “ethical in the widest sense of that term” (Said’s emphasis).¹²

In this setting, the Tough Love Crowd’s old thinking is a moral failing, and it directly raises questions of political loyalty and, alas, of political betrayal. The Toughs are aware of the serious challenges to their old ways. They simply choose to ignore these challenges rather than to engage them. Stephen Carter, who among the Toughs has come closest to facing these issues, only glimpses the problems and retreats. Carter frequently refers to his preferred disinterested intellectual ideal as a dinosaur technique. Carter concedes that his constitutional theory of original intent is “practically anathema” among serious legal theorists. And Carter concedes that his own arguments in favor of a moral obligation to obey the law (of obvious relevance to the de jure oppressed) revivify “a quaint relic of a more primitive era in the development of political philosophy.”¹³ Yet, as though such confessions confer immunity, Carter persists in his self-disparaged ways. Carter has yet to grasp the ethical self-immolation of his ritual admissions.

More generally, the Tough Love Crowd adopts an old ideal best expressed by Julien Benda’s classic work, The Betrayal of the Clerks (1927). The Toughs all assume that intellectual loyalty is always and inherently fulfilled by Julien Benda’s creed of independence. They do not pause to consider the questions, Independence from what? In the service of what? The Tough Love Crowd assumes that an intellectual has fulfilled her moral and political loyalty if she participates “independently” within the prevailing academic culture. Yet mightn’t one suspect that a vague independence is an ideal egoist’s garb? And perhaps egos are in ample supply among intellectuals? Are egotism and political loyalty, then, always compatible? Stephen Carter openly “plead[s] guilty” to being influenced by the “professional reception” of his work.¹⁴ Is this concern really always and automatically compatible with moral and political loyalty to the dispossessed? Carter believes that “to succeed in a profession, one adopts the profession’s ethos, its aesthetic, its culture. One remakes significant aspects of oneself.” He concedes that this will often “feel like a surrender to white power.” Even while declining to join those who are challenging that power’s hold on the criteria of professional conduct, Carter asserts without argument that his position is not really surrender and is consistent with solidarity. The tension between racial-justice concerns and the perceived demands of professional success is entirely explicit in a 1980 Thomas interview. There Thomas said that if

I ever went to work for the EEOC or did anything directly connected with blacks, my career would be irreparably ruined.… The monkey would be on my back to prove that I didn’t have the job because I’m black. People meeting me for the first time would automatically dismiss my thinking as second rate.¹⁵

Again, what about the paradoxical animal, ivory-tower careerism, that Randall Kennedy has recently brought into the open? Among the multiple lessons that Kennedy announces he has learned from the Guinier affair is that “intellectuals who anticipate appointment to high office” should beware that their writings will be taken literally. Guinier herself took a rather different lesson from the experience. Her first law review article to appear since the debacle thanks those who “encouraged me to pursue my ideas, despite the apparent political cost.” Guinier’s resistance to the demands of the jobkeepers is perhaps what led the Wall Street Journal to describe her as a “young, black tart-tongued law professor.”¹⁶ The Toughs are evidently more mannerly.

There is much to suggest that the incentives prevailing in the civic guilds (of law, literature, economics, the judiciary) are frequently opposed to progressive politics. Yet the Toughs rest content with a lethargic faith in the inherited ways. In this, many of the Toughs are political casualties of the quietly oppressive ideals of amateur humanism:

Humanism’s inability to attend to its own involvement, contrary to its expressed desires, in the concrete operations of power—in other words, its naive faith in aesthetic and moral “disinterest” as well as its refusal to recognize the “origins” of reason in power—frustrate its confessed desires for moral or ideological reform.¹⁷

This formulation entirely—albeit abstractly—captures a claim that the following pages will flesh out in detail: the political allegiances of the Tough Love Crowd are frustrated by a relatively unquestioning entry into prevailing ways of doing things (whether in law, literature, or economics). V. S. Naipaul has, for instance, conceded that his harshest opinions about postcolonial places were caused by an unfortunate “romantic igth Century notion of the Writer . . . as the reader of externals.”

The conservative political significance of pursuing old ways is obvious in the Tough Love Crowd’s work. Clarence Thomas adopts the generally conservative legal theory of original intent. Stephen Carter (avowed origi-nalist) and Randall Kennedy (arguably originalist)¹⁸ adopt not only origi-nalism itself but also a manner of legal scholarship that lies well within the old ways. Carter and Kennedy reject not only Negro Criticism but also any other kind of lawyering that challenges inherited custom. They choose to be among law’s tweediest professors and yet assert, without argument, that this choice is morally and politically responsible.

Thomas Sowell, meanwhile, stands by the imagined ability of social scientists (especially economists) to detect underlying realities about the world. Sowell refuses to contend with powerful contemporary arguments that scientific method, too, is drenched in value judgments—that scientists are able to solve problems only because their guilds set solvable problems and suppress askable questions.¹⁹ Meanwhile V. S. Naipaul, in both his fiction and his nonfiction, asserts a degree of freedom from ideology that for a long time—and certainly before “postmodernism”—has been questionable within literary practice. Throughout Naipaul’s career, the deludedness of postcolonial peoples has been a constant theme. And he has rejected a vibrant tradition of oppositional writing that has thrived alongside his own offerings. Finally, as we approach the twenty-first century, Shelby Steele would extend nineteenth-century laissez-faire economics to new terrain. He advocates an “Adam Smith vision of culture.”²⁰ These guys would ensnare us forever in the way things were.