Gotham Diary:
Political Imagination
10 February 2015
Writing in the current LRB about Hillary Clinton’s exceptionalist foreign-policy outlook (the United States is “the indispensable nation”), Jackson Lears proposes that
The triumph of fantasy entails the failure of imagination.
An interesting way of putting things, to say the least. What is fantasy but the purest, least trammeled product of the imagination? But for imagination to proceed without trammels, Lears seems to be saying, constitutes a kind of failure. The problem becomes clear if we plug in the word “political.” The triumph of fantasy, which always soars high above politics, is indeed a failure of the political imagination. We do not indulge the political imagination for sheer amusement. Political imagination does not support such assumptions as human immortality, no matter how arguably desirable. Political imagination allows us to conceive of social and administrative arrangements that do not currently prevail, and that might have prevailed so long ago that they are forgotten. (Lears’s example of the latter would be the idea of the “sphere of influence.”)
The case can be made that, prior to 1945, the United States was the indispensable nation, but the cause was more a matter of geography than one of virtue. No sooner was the second World War over, however, than the United States yielded to Cold War hysteria, seeing the spread of Russian communism everywhere. It quickly became a capitalist stooge, acting against its own interest and buckling to the demands of assorted capitalist rentiers. The net-net result of this commitment is today’s shrunken and degraded jobs market. The case can be made that, after 1945, the United States was the paranoid nation.
The fantastical nature of Clinton’s thinking is reflected in Lears’s gloss on a statement that she makes in her latest book, Hard Choices.
Her reflections on Benghazi are some of the strangest passages in her book. She says she appointed Chris Stevens as ambassador to the Libyan rebels’ new government because he knew that the most dangerous places in the world were ‘the places where American interests and values were most at stake’ and seasoned diplomats were most needed. This assertion deserves some attention. Are the most dangerous places really the most crucial to US national interests merely by virtue of the danger? ‘When America is absent, extremism takes root, our interests suffer, and our security at home is threatened,’ she writes. It would be possible to rewrite the same sentence, substituting ‘present’ for ‘absent’.
Does Hillary Clinton really believe this stuff? I have my doubts. She has certainly schooled herself to ignore contrary views, because she wants to get elected. She has a very good idea of what it will take to get elected, and pragmatism notwithstanding, it must be said to her credit that she does not pander to the selfish followers of Ayn Rand. But somebody is going to have to lead Americans out of the murk confected by Cold Warriors and the ugly Chicken Littles who followed them, and Hillary Clinton does not promise to be that leader. If the United States cannot take care of itself without taking on the rest of the world — without absolutely refusing to be “indispensable” — then it is certainly doomed.
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Let me make it perfectly clear that I have no ideological opposition to capitalism. Without capitalism, business development of any kind is difficult at best and usually impossible. But many businesses do not need development — urban bookshops, for example — and many enterprises are not or ought not to be businesses at all — power production, ore extraction, and, in my view, housing. We seem to be evolving toward the view that human needs ought not to be subjected to commercial caprice. We have certainly learned from our Cold War opponents that government does a very poor job of playing industrialist, but there are far more options than the ideological duopoly of capitalism and socialism insists. Consider the not-for-profit corporation. Consider the B Company. Socialism and capitalism are both, after all, philosophies of the universal market. We have begun to realize that many vital transactions occur outside of the marketplace. Instead of value or price, they have worth. They are incomparable.
Many things are incomparable. Most things are only very roughly comparable. No good poem can be accurately translated into another language; the very idea of fidelity crumbles in the translators hands. The incomparability of things, however, seems to be objectionable to many. Certainly our empires of sport have been erected in order to correct this alleged problem. Two teams of so many members, playing against one another according to agreed-upon rules, are as comparable as human organizations can be, and almost everything that they do can be scored. It is therefore easy to determine which of all the teams is best. But this best has no intrinsic meaning.
The notion that the best might be a problem swerved into view over the weekend, as I digested Howard Becker’s What About Mozart? What About Murder? I don’t so much recommend the book as challenge you to read it. Oh, it’s readable enough; there are only traces of jargon, and moments when Becker directly addresses fellow sociologists are rare. The difficulty is that Becker presents his ideas so well and clearly that you cannot imagine what objection might be made to them. And then you realize that he rejects the existence of the normal. Without the normal, there can be neither best nor worst. A very widespread way of thinking about the world gets the heave-ho from Howard Becker.
Mozart stands in for the best. It took all my readerly dispassion to follow the implications of Becker’s response to the question, “Surely Mozart was an absolute genius?” (Similarly, I had to put my Western chauvinism on a leash when Becker analyzed “the classical music package.”) Had Becker chosen Beethoven, I shouldn’t have learned nearly so much, because I’m not remotely tempted to regard Beethoven as the best composer. The fact is that there are musical traditions in which Mozart is not really comprehensible; as the Emperor put it, there are “too many notes.” By the same token, murder only seems to be the worst thing when you don’t look closely. When you look closely, you have to think about self-defense and war.
I want to discuss all of this further, but, for the moment, I ask you to consider how much baggage we should cut free of if we stopped our interminable pursuits of the best and learned to be content with the very good. Now, strictly speaking, you can argue that the very good is better than the merely good but not as good as the best, but that is not what we mean when we say, with feeling, “Oh, this is very good.” The very good will do quite well. It’s piggy to ask for more — and distracting, too.