We are Family

This blog entry is dedicated to Saul Thomas, Anthropology PhD student currently doing his field work in China.

I was sitting in the kitchen today with my housemate Andrew and talking with him about "The Overpraised American." After several attempts to start my blog entry, I was banging my head against the table repeatedly, but thinking, there is something very familiar about this article. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. The symptoms of this strangeness include pop sociological superficiality, grand generalizations on the state of the collective American psyche, and the overriding air of moralizing without any suggestions of how these problems can be fixed.

And then we googled: turns out that this funkiness comes from the fact that Christine Rosen is a member of the preeminant neoconservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, which has supplied a great many staffers and position papers to the Bush administration in its attempt to shape public policy. Maybe the information about the publics we are encountering should not come from such an unreliable source as Christine Rosen. I cannot pretend to understand what this essay has to say beyond superficial praxis and inventory that deals with the problems that a certain class of people encounter everyday. Sure, entertainment and the culture industries cross class boundaries in ways that surpass what one might call the ritualization of visuality into pathologies that result from “passive personalized entertainment.” I think it is clear that we are no longer in the beginning stages of pathologies resulting from entertainment, as this article seems to assume. We are now at the point of nearly 30 years since Lasch’s book, and to merely update it is anachronistic. In her use of vernacular riffs as praxis, Rosen seems to treat this problem in the same light that one might treat something obscure and trivial. Her lack of serious engagement with the experience of the real present is what Annette Lavers calls “the opposite of good writing, not necessarily bad writing, perhaps just writing.” Benjamin Buchloh once wrote, "One of the preconditions of the successful operation of the current discourse of institutional and economic power is thus: that it be able to sever all links with the reality principle of history [i.e., history as structured by class domination], and that meaning and history be constructed according to the topical needs of the moment. And today, under prevailing conditions of cultural anomie and amnesia, traditionalist (not to say reactionary) definitions of cultural production can be asserted all the more readily since all contradictory evidence can be repressed." Apparently for Rosen, social inequality does not exist, just an ambiguous, unified force that exerts pressure on all, but especially on members of her own class. And let’s not forget that religion does not possess a monopoly on moral discourse; the moral stance that Rosen’s employers see as deriving from religious tradition is more likely to exist within an affirmation of atheism, according to Slavoj Zizek in his lecture “The Ignorance of Chicken: Who Believes What Today” at the U of C last Wednesday. Another point Zizek made was that we need to perform rigorous theoretical analysis of the present if we are to advance in our understanding. Sure, the influence of the entertainment industry is not likely to disappear, but what is Rosen doing other than collecting a paycheck? The whole article reinstalls a moralizing, patriarchal, right-wing version of familial normativity, in a stay-at-home-with-your-kids, go-to-church, and be-a-good-woman-by-being-a-good-mother kind of way. Given her professional profile, that seems to be the only “solution,” since she offers no other in the article. The Bush adminstration's moral apparatchiks would eat it up.

About the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the think tank that cuts Christine Rosen a check every month or so:

“The Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) was established in 1976 to clarify and reinforce the bond between the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the public debate over domestic and foreign policy issues. Its program includes research, writing, publication, and conferences.

EPPC affirms the political relevance of the great Western ethical imperatives--respect for the dignity of every person, individual freedom and responsibility, justice, the rule of law, and limited government. It maintains that moral reasoning is an essential complement to empirical calculation in the shaping of public policy.

Although these convictions alone do not make EPPC unique, certain aspects of our approach set us apart from other public policy organizations.

First, we deal openly and explicitly with religiously based moral values in addressing contemporary issues. We work to clarify the ways in which principles shape the choices that political leaders must make in our democracy.

Second, we analyze the moral reasoning and public policy positions of organized religion. We hold that religious bodies ought to be subjected to thoughtful scrutiny precisely because they are--or should be--the custodians and renewers of our most deeply held values.

Third, we strive to deepen and broaden public debate on the ordering of our society and its relationship to the rest of the world, especially in areas where the positions of strident single-issue groups have received inordinate attention in the media and in the academy. While working to advance our own ideas, we actively seek to foster a wiser moral and political debate across ideological barricades.”