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What does C L R James mean?

The West Indian Intellectual C L R James (born in 1901, Trinidad) provided an insightful assessment of democracy in the U.S., ‘Notes on American Civilization’ (1950). ‘I trace as carefully as I can the forces making for totalitarianism in modern American life,’ he explained.

Carefully or not, the explanation has apparently been grossly, and repeatedly mischaracterized and misunderstood ever since, as unpacked in this essay:

At the climactic centre of this ominous analysis was the contemporary entertainment industry, which, James argued, set the stage for a totalitarian turn through its projections of fictional heroic gangsters as well as its production of celebrities as real-life heroes. A manufactured Hollywood heroism, he warned, had the potential to cross over from popular culture to political rule. ‘By carefully observing the trends in modern popular art, and the responses of the people, we can see the tendencies which explode into the monstrous caricatures of human existence which appear under totalitarianism.’ Completed in early 1950, James’s proposal remained underground for decades until it found publication under the abbreviated title American Civilization in 1993. Four years earlier, the author had passed on into history as one of the finest minds of the 20th century.

At the base of this ignorance is a 30-year-old tale of radical misreading. Beginning in the 1990s, commentaries on American Civilization have erased its concern with the dark cultural politics of totalitarianism, dismissing the manuscript as quixotic and optimistic, even embarrassingly romantic. James, according to reviewers, fell for the US with the naive zeal of what Trinidadians would call a never-see-come-see. This radical was so dazzled by the North American republic that his radicalism disappeared once he sat down to write about its history and culture. In American Civilization, James was ‘enthusing with the greatest passion about the democratic capacity of the civilization with which he had fallen in love,’ the UK-based historian Bill Schwarz wrote. In a review for The New Yorker, Paul Berman concurred, describing the work as proof that ‘James basically loved the United States’. Yet, far from love and happiness, the manuscript was inspired, we will see, by a concern with the despair and hopelessness of US citizens and by a worry about the political portent of these mass feelings.

James’s basic contention in American Civilization was that a critical mass of the population had become so desperately distressed by the failure of the promises of liberal democracy that they were prepared to give up on it and elect, instead, to live vicariously through violently amoral political heroes. ‘The great masses of the American people no longer fear power,’ wrote James near the end of the manuscript. ‘They are ready to allocate today power to anyone who seems ready to do their bidding.’ This popular disenchantment with liberalism and the accompanying vulnerability to totalitarian leadership manifested in the entertainment industry, according to James. In films, novels, magazines and comics, he identified a contemporary archive of the cultural politics of totalitarianism – not a source of special affection for the modern republic (James actually trashed much of US popular culture as ‘ephemeral vulgarity on a colossal scale’). For him, moreover, the dire US situation was not exceptional but simply a richer symptomatic case of a modern derangement. The conceit that James was seduced by the achievements of ‘American civilisation’ is one of those strange North Atlantic fictions; one that reveals more about those who study James than about James himself.

Read the entire essay, which is really terrific and uncomfortably on the nose concerning how ‘we’ might conveniently misunderstand polemical, and any, language:

Finally, and maybe most originally, James identified resources for totalitarianism not only in the industry’s projections of fictional protagonists but also in its production of ‘stars’ in reality. Since the Great Depression, he noted, a vital development in popular culture involved the professional packaging of celebrities (Hollywood actors, especially) into ‘synthetic characters’, produced by a ‘vast army of journalists, magazine writers, publicity men, etc’. The rise of these stars concerned James because he believed that through them the masses ‘live vicariously, see in them examples of that free individuality which is the dominant need of the vast mass today.’ Celebrities, he wrote, ‘fill a psychological need of the vast masses of people who live limited lives.’ In this regard, James saw an intrinsic connection between the industrial fabrication of these real-life heroes to be consumed by the admiring masses and the conditioning of the public for totalitarian rule: ‘We have seen how, deprived of individuality, millions of modern citizens live vicariously, through identification with brilliant notably effective, famous or glamorous individuals. The totalitarian state, having crushed all freedom, carries this substitution to its last ultimate.’ The entertainment industry’s heavy investment in the production of stars readied the republic for an antidemocratic regime.

Image: CLR James on New Year’s Eve in 1975 © Val Wilmer

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Cutting people off from the Human connection

black and white photo of woman
Hannah Arendt by Fred Stein, 1944

For a while now, it’s been an enduring mystery how so many ostensibly intelligent people can harbor such fantastically reactionary political opinions, believe utter nonsense, vote for incompetent racists, support hatred and bigotry in all its forms. I mean to say, don’t they know any people? Don’t they have friends and encounter strangers, at least once and a while? The great Hannah Arendt explained the relationship between lonely isolation and the inability to think:

Organised loneliness, bred from ideology, leads to tyrannical thought, and destroys a person’s ability to distinguish between fact and fiction – to make judgments. In loneliness, one is unable to carry on a conversation with oneself, because one’s ability to think is compromised. Ideological thinking turns us away from the world of lived experience, starves the imagination, denies plurality, and destroys the space between men that allows them to relate to one another in meaningful ways. And once ideological thinking has taken root, experience and reality no longer bear upon thinking. Instead, experience conforms to ideology in thinking. Which is why when Arendt talks about loneliness, she is not just talking about the affective experience of loneliness: she is talking about a way of thinking. Loneliness arises when thought is divorced from reality, when the common world has been replaced by the tyranny of coercive logical demands.

We think from experience, and when we no longer have new experiences in the world to think from, we lose the standards of thought that guide us in thinking about the world. And when one submits to the self-compulsion of ideological thinking, one surrenders one’s inner freedom to think. It is this submission to the force of logical deduction that ‘prepares each individual in his lonely isolation against all others’ for tyranny. Free movement in thinking is replaced by the propulsive, singular current of ideological thought.

In one of her thinking journals, Arendt asks: ‘Gibt es ein Denken das nicht Tyrannisches ist?’ (Is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical?) She follows the question with the statement that the point is to resist being swept up in the tide at all. What allows men to be carried away? Arendt argues that the underlying fear that attracts one to ideology is the fear of self-contradiction. This fear of self-contradiction is why thinking itself is dangerous – because thinking has the power to uproot all of our beliefs and opinions about the world. Thinking can unsettle our faith, our beliefs, our sense of self-knowledge. Thinking can strip away everything that we hold dear, rely upon, take for granted day-to-day. Thinking has the power to make us come undone.

Read the whole thing, because it is amazingly perceptive about what we’ve been experiencing for a while. And of course, she got there first. Perhaps the single greatest intellect of the 20th century.

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Man Against the Earth


Jill Lepore’s New Yorker article on the great Rachel Carson is amazing, inspiring, and confirms the three intellectual giants of the twentieth century:

Shawn called her at home to tell her that he’d finishing reading and that the book was “a brilliant achievement.” He said, “You have made it literature, full of beauty and loveliness and depth of feeling.” Carson, who had been quite unsure she’d survive to finish writing the book, was sure, for the first time, that the book was going to do in the world what she’d wanted it to do. She hung up the phone, put Roger to bed, picked up her cat, and burst into tears, collapsing with relief.

“Silent Spring” appeared in The New Yorker, in three parts, in June, 1962, and as a book, published by Houghton Mifflin, in September. Everything is connected to everything else, she showed. “We poison the caddis flies in a stream and the salmon runs dwindle and die,” Carson wrote:

We poison the gnats in a lake and the poison travels from link to link of the food chain and soon the birds of the lake margins become its victims. We spray our elms and the following springs are silent of robin song, not because we sprayed the robins directly but because the poison traveled, step by step, through the now familiar elm-leaf-earthworm cycle. These are matters of record, observable, part of the visible world around us. They reflect the web of life—or death—that scientists know as ecology.

Its force was felt immediately. Readers wrote to share their own stories. “I can go into the feed stores here and buy, without giving any reason, enough poison to do away with all the people in Oregon,” one gardener wrote. They began calling members of Congress. E. B. White wrote to Carson, declaring the pieces to be “the most valuable articles the magazine had ever published.” At a press conference at the White House on August 29th, a reporter asked President Kennedy whether his Administration intended to investigate the long-range side effects of DDT and other pesticides. “Yes,” he answered. “I know that they already are, I think particularly, of course, since Miss Carson’s book.”

Which itself brings to mind (my recollection of) Abraham Lincoln’s words when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!”

But back to the 20th century giants, Jane Jacobs:

So perhaps now, on the 100th anniversary of her birth [2016], we should all be asking: what is it that Jane Jacobs made us want to see in the city?

Thinking about this question leads me to focus on the conditions that make a metropolis – the enormous diversity of workers, their living and work spaces, the multiple sub-economies involved. Many of these are now seen as irrelevant to the global city, or belonging to another era. But a close look, as encouraged by Jacobs, shows us this is wrong.

She would ask us to look at the consequences of these sub-economies for the city – for its people, its neighbourhoods, and the visual orders involved. She would ask us to consider all the other economies and spaces impacted by the massive gentrifications of the modern city – not least, the resultant displacements of modest households and profit-making, neighbourhood firms.

How do we see those aspects that are typically rendered invisible by modern narratives of development and urban competitiveness? In the early 1900s, the city was a lens for understanding larger processes – but half a century later, it had lost that role. It was Jane Jacobs who taught us again to view the city in a deeper, more complex way.

She helped us re-emphasise dimensions that were usually excluded – no, expelled – from general analyses of the urban economy. Indeed, I can imagine she would have affirmed without a quiver of doubt that, no matter how electronic and global the city might one day become, it still has to be “made” – and therein lies the importance of place.

And of course, Hannah Arendt

There is almost no politics in “Origins” beyond the decisions and processes that eventuated in total domination. It is a dark book, written in a dark time and reflecting on the darkest moment of modern European (and arguably world) history. But it is not without hope. In her preface, Arendt envisions a new form of transnational governance, insisting that “human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its powerful must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly established territorial entities.” And in her conclusion she insists that there is always the possibility of renewal: “But there remains also the truth that every end in history also contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only ‘message’ which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom . . . This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.”

In her subsequent work, Arendt reflected at length about the revival of a politics of human dignity, autonomy and active citizenship. While she was highly critical of the depoliticizing tendencies of modern liberal individualism, she was a strong believer in the rule of law and in the importance of constitutional and extraconstitutional restraints on political power. This is most clear in her 1972 “Crises of Republic,” collecting four essays written in the midst of the legitimacy crises associated with the Vietnam War, the rise of the New Left and Black Power movements, and the deceit and authoritarianism of the Nixon administration.

What other major figures might outflank them in impact and vital importance to the world as it was then, and as it is now? Russell? Derrida? Keynes? Orwell? It’s not even close. To be continued, hopefully.

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Secret Science Nights

… might make science a little less secret. Imagine going to a rock club (yes, suburbanites, people do actually leave their homes in the evening) maybe a little earlier than a show usually starts. You line up outside the door with generally the same kinds of people you usually see, plus a few others that you might not. You get inside, get a drink, but instead of noticing the first act’s gear set-up on stage, there’s a screen with a podium in front, maybe the little apple is already glowing. Then a bearded fellow comes on stage, fires up his power point and starts bouncing around the periodic table or conjuring Pleistocene megafauna to the all-too-interested gathering. It could happen.

The crowd is young and hip, mostly in their 20s and 30s, eager to gain entry to tonight’s hot-ticket entertainment event. Once the doors open, about 50 lucky people secure chairs, while another 50 stand four-deep around the room, and another 50 are gently turned away at the door.

“This is the third time I haven’t made it in,” a disappointed young woman sighs.

A mixtape of music plays through the speakers and the audience sips drinks from plastic cups while waiting for the featured act to begin. It won’t be the latest indie band, or an up-and-coming comedian. This is not the typical New York club scene. This is the monthly meeting of the Secret Science Club.

Really… what’s the answer to a disinterested/confused populace but making science more available and accessible? Particularly within in the confines of a nightclub. It might turn dull really quickly, but who’s fault would that be? The ‘nerdy’ connection in the article is unnecessary, as is the strict limitation to science (you could just as well sneak in some secret philosophy). But now is when we need to mix it up (in a pugilistic sense) the most, and especially if there is a stock supply of expertise in your town that goes home in the evenings just to sit at home and watch cable. Create a venue and they might come.

Bonus: would there be any side benefits to academicians facing a pop audience? Knowledge-as-power flows in both directions.