Читать книгу Clarence Thomas and the Tough Love Crowd - Ronald Suresh Roberts - Страница 19

When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets. . . . Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

—Stephen Dedalus, in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Varying degrees of allegiance to untainted truth define the Tough Love Crowd. Clarence Thomas advocates a public sphere governed by reason and untainted by mere passions. Likewise, Thomas Sowell venerates those who “put truth above popularity.” For Stephen Carter, the exemplary intellectual resists “the seductive call of group identity.” Carter allows that racial solidarity is generally permissible, even beneficial, but he objects that race consciousness is treacherous in a person’s role as intellectual. Carter says, “The entire point is that the majority view is irrelevant to the intellectual, whose authority must be the authority of reason. . . . We must worship no authority as absolute, except for the authority of truth itself.”

Carter endorses Benda’s notion that intellectualism is legitimately “an end in itself.” Yet Carter does not renounce group allegiances. Rather, he slides from assertions that constituencies are irrelevant to intellectuals (as quoted above) to assertions that untethered truth seekers are, after all, serving their constituencies’ best interests: “Free thinking is . . . the greatest service individuals can perform for their communities.”

Randall Kennedy, with a similar ostensible heroism, resists the “powerful demand for loyal conformity.” Kennedy instead endorses the “independent claims of intellectual craft” above the methods of those “self-conscious progressives” who fashion their scholarship “into ideological weaponry serving immediate political ends.” Kennedy endorses a Bendaresque “com mitment to truth above partisan social allegiances.” Yet, like Carter, Kennedy’s renunciation of “partisan social allegiances” is unstable. Kennedy has conceded that “all writers seek to make an impact on the world and [that] all writings that reach an audience create some impact—even if nothing but boredom” (Kennedy’s emphasis). Kennedy added that “one surely ought to be concerned with the political implications of one’s work.” Kennedy ceded nearly ten pages of his “Racial Critiques” article to a discussion of whether, politically, he ought to have published the article, given that it was widely criticized within the community of minority scholars and was potentially useful to opponents of racial justice. But whether to publish or not is, in this context, an easy and uninteresting question (just do it). The interesting question is not whether one publishes what one arrives at, but how and why one arrives there in the first place. The interesting aspect of Kennedy’s nine-page discussion is not the question he thinks he is addressing, but the very fact that he is addressing it: the fact that he is ostensibly concerned with group welfare. His kingdom is of this world. Kennedy’s ultimate claim is not that group well-being is irrelevant to his intellectual pursuits, but that the group is better served by his chosen methods.

V. S. Naipaul, likewise, consistently adopts the view that “people with a cause inevitably turn themselves off intellectually.” He proclaims that “I have no enemies, no rivals, no masters; I fear no one.” Yet he, too, is very much of this world. He insists that novel writing necessarily “has to do with a concern for human existence.” Naipaul asserts that his harsh diagnoses are in the true best interests of the peoples he surveys.¹⁵ While Shelby Steele asserts that “politics bore me to tears,” he also asserts that he is thankfully “in the same camp as Martin Luther King,” and he insists that he writes out of love for African America.

Thomas, Kennedy, Carter, Naipaul, Steele, and Sowell can illuminatingly be contrasted with a certain picture of Stanley Crouch. Stephen Carter tendentiously describes Crouch as a reveling iconoclast, exultant in his outcast status and “proud to be a traitor to the black nationalist movement of the late 19605.” Yet there is another Stanley Crouch. This other Crouch (the one Carter ignores) is in no doubt that “the Negro is still at the moral center of American writing.” This other Crouch has unusually thoughtful praise for, as well as unusually insightful criticism of, Jesse Jackson. This other Crouch claims, however (exactly like Carter and the other Toughs), that there have been such marked changes in America that traditional civil rights groups have been overtaken and are still fighting yesterday’s war. This Crouch, like the other Toughs, considers that his duty as an intellectual is to resist “the martial cattle car of presuppositions and cliches” and the blink-ering “mud of racial limitation.”¹⁶

Carter thus exaggerates the difference between Crouch and himself. Carter creates a Stanley Crouch in the image of the treacherous Other—and Carter recoils in horror from this vision of treachery. Carter’s Crouch is invented so that Carter’s reader can see someone crossing a line that Carter ostensibly refuses to cross. Thomas, Kennedy, Carter, Naipaul, Steele, and Sowell each reject the specter of betrayal and instead embrace a rhetoric of concern for the dispossessed.

Carter’s invented Crouch is very like James Joyce’s invented hero, Stephen Dedalus. The young Dedalus is determined to discover “the mode of life or art whereby [his] spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.” Carter’s Crouch might easily join Joyce’s Dedalus in declaring that “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church.... I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave.”¹⁷

The Tough Love Crowd ultimately recoils from such abandon. Although for strategic reasons they employ the language of neobohemian individualism, the Tough Love Crowd embraces, rather than disowns, the political burdens of racial allegiance. It is important to the Tough Lovers that they serve racial justice. They are partisans of racial justice. Carter’s invented Crouch is illuminatingly different. Like Joyce’s Dedalus, this Crouch tweaks the nose of damnation. Dedalus declares, “I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too.” Joyce’s Dedalus and Carter’s Crouch espouse a partisanship to themselves, their art, and only very obliquely, if at all, to any collective (whether family, nation, or church). Their renunciation of American civil rights (Carter’s Crouch) and Irish nationalism (Joyce’s Dedalus) is explicit. Carter’s horror at this idea of renunciation makes him a partisan. Renunciation is, for him and for the rest of the Tough Love Crowd, immoral. When, however, one looks more closely at the work of Stanley Crouch, rather than at Carter’s anxious reconfiguration of Crouch, the sharp distinction on which Carter relies dissolves. Stanley Crouch thus affords Carter no comforting line in the sand. Carter and Crouch share a considerable kinship, despite Carter’s protestations to the contrary.