The University of Scranton Press may be one of the least well-known academic publishers in the United States. But for my money, it has stepped right into the big leagues by deciding to reissue, in a revised edition, historian Christopher Shannon’s extraordinary 1996 book Conspicuous Criticism: Tradition, the Individual, and Culture in American Social Thought, from Veblen to Mills, originally published by the John Hopkins University Press. (The subtitle of the new edition is slightly altered.) Scranton is thereby performing a public service, and a courageous one, at a time when economic pressures are forcing university presses to become very nearly as bottom-line conscious as commercial houses. A book like Conspicuous Criticism will never be a bestseller. But one dares to hope that with this new edition, Conspicuous Criticism will, after a decade of languishing in the shadows, emerge from its status as a bit of an underground classic, with a following among young Christian intellectuals in particular, and at last begin to get the kind of respectful attention across the intellectual spectrum that it deserves.
Conspicuous Criticism: Tradition, the Individual, and Culture in American Social Thought, from Veblen to Mills (New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History)
Johns Hopkins University Press
224 pages
$6.48
Shannon’s book remains as fresh today as when it appeared, an unusually penetrating and challenging rebuke to the social-scientific outlook on human existence. The social sciences, he argued, have used the anthropological idea of “culture” to unsettle the very basis of everyday life, promoting “a destabilization of received social meanings.” Critical social-scientific analysis, which so presents itself as the heroic antidote to the ravages of “the market,” is in fact in “the vanguard of extending the logic of commodification to the most intimate aspects of people’s lives.” If Shannon is right, the most celebrated critiques of modern American society, from Veblen to Mills, are pernicious failures, launched in the name of a thin and debased understanding of “culture,” and imposing an obsolete and misleading apparatus for thinking about society and culture. If Shannon is right, we will need to change, and change radically, the way we are doing things in the study of human life and thought, if we expect to proceed beyond the current impasse.
Small wonder, then, that the book was almost completely ignored by the relevant tribes of academics and social critics when it appeared. What else were they likely to do with a book that calls them on the carpet, along with everything they do? For all that we academics claim to relish provocative analyses and paradigm-shifting arguments, the truth of the matter is much less flattering to our amour propre. Such claims are often just little more than a rhetorical flourish, or even a self-deluding fantasy. We pretend to love change, and may even believe that we do. But in practice, we have little patience for it, particularly if we are the ones required to do the changing.
As a matter of brute fact, there is no force in the institutional world of ideas more powerful than the inertia of business-as-usual, the familiar pattern of expectations revolving around the core activities of paper-giving, journal-editing, lecture-giving, conference-attending, monograph-publishing, and hiring and tenuring, all under the surprisingly powerful conforming influence of peer review. Even the advent of postmodernism and its avatars has for the most part taken place in a smooth, untroubled, institutionally conservative manner, changing very little about this core structure. Notwithstanding the roiling that always seems to be occurring on the academy’s surface life, or the constant charges of political and cultural radicalism coming from the outside, or the faculty’s proud boasts of “transgressivity” and willingness to “think the unthinkable,” the truth of the matter is that the academy is one of the most procedurally conservative institutions in modern life. By challenging the professional canons, and the assumptions behind them, a book like Shannon’s took a position that is almost unassimilable, hence more easily ignored than engaged.
What, indeed, is our age likely to do with an author who put forward an argument for “the recovery of necessity,” at the very same time that the techno-utopian computer wizard Ray Kurzweil, perhaps reflecting more faithfully the regnant moral theology of high modernity, is assuring us that “The Singularity”—the moment when man escapes entirely from the yoke of biological necessity—”is near”? What can our age make of an author who thinks that the most pressing political question before us today is not the increase of political “participation” but the recovery of the meaning of politics itself, as an avenue for the expression of genuine human freedom, and an escape from the relentless “instrumentalization” of life? An author who argues (much like the philosopher Charles Taylor) for a renewal of our appreciation of ordinary life, but who remains snappishly suspicious of any attempts to over-theorize such a move, contending—astonishingly, to modern ears—that “acceptance of ordinary life requires an acceptance of waste” and requires resistance to the transformation of ordinary life into a “locus of meaning”? Who admonishes us that “all things do not exist to be read,” and that “experience does not have to be written to be valid”?
Let’s stop there for a moment. What, you may ask, could Shannon possibly mean in opposing the exaltation of “meaning”? How can one object to “meaning”? Isn’t this something approaching a modern sacrilege? Isn’t “meaning” precisely that thing for which we are told “modern man” is perpetually questing? Yes, precisely so. But I think it may help flesh out Shannon’s point to consider how it is embodied in a literary example drawn from Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer—itself a story of a questing modern man, the book’s narrator, whose aspirations are diluted and diverted into his tendency to exalt the “textualization” of experience in movies.
The narrator is addicted to the movies because it is only when he sees something in the movies that he can feel it to have been validated as “real.” When he and his girlfriend go to see Panic in the Streets, a 1950 movie filmed partly in the same New Orleans neighborhood where they are seeing the film, they emerge from the darkness of the theater with the certitude that the neighborhood is now “certified”:
Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.
Or consider a passage earlier in the book, in which the narrator observes a honeymooning young couple wandering the French Quarter of New Orleans. They seem unhappy, anxious, aimless, sensing something wrong, something missing—until they spot the famous actor William Holden walking on the street. The young man is able to offer Holden a light for his smoke, and in this brief, impersonally friendly interaction with the hyper-real figure of Holden, a radiant source of “certification” itself, everything suddenly changes for the young man and his wife:
He has won title to his own existence, as plenary an existence now as Holden’s… . He is a citizen like Holden; two men of the world they are. All at once the world is open to him… . [His wife] feels the difference too. She had not known what was wrong nor how it was righted but she knows now that all is well.
Holden has turned down Toulouse shedding light as he goes. An aura of heightened reality moves with him and all who fall within it feel it. Now everyone is aware of him… .
I am attracted to movie stars but not for the usual reasons. I have no desire to speak to Holden or get his autograph. It is their peculiar reality which astounds me.
Shannon’s account of things speaks directly to the condition that Walker Percy has so penetratingly described, a mad compulsion to grasp hold of textual “meaning” as a shield against the “emptiness” of everyday life, a shield which is itself a chief cause of the very emptiness it would counteract, much like the compulsions of a man who takes drugs to alleviate the pains of his drug-taking. Shannon’s challenge to our ways of thinking about culture takes us much deeper, then, than a mere intellectual critique of social-scientific ideas and techniques. It is also an exploration of the ways in which those ideas and techniques have insinuated themselves into the most intimate crevices of our souls.
I would probably never have become aware of Shannon’s work myself, had I not been asked to review Conspicuous Criticism for the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. I had never so much as heard Shannon’s name before, nor had I heard of the book, then only recently published. But something intrigued me about the title, and so I accepted the invitation. The book itself proved to be an utterly fresh and compelling critique of the social sciences, by means of a close and searching reading of a variety of the most influential social-scientific writers of the early-to-mid-20th century, from Veblen to C. Wright Mills.
Such was my introduction to the work of one of the most original of the rising generation of U.S. cultural and intellectual historians. Although a historian by training, Shannon is very much at home in the precincts of social theory, and his work is profoundly informed by his Roman Catholic convictions and commitments. In addition, he has the kind of interdisciplinary versatility and range that were the glory of the American Studies movement at its best. These traits come together in a most unusual way in him. His perspective on the larger subject of modern American culture is difficult to describe adequately. I suppose it would come closest to the mark to say that he has been deeply influenced by the critiques of the Enlightenment launched by Alasdair MacIntyre and others in the same line, critiques that have been especially effective in opening up the problems of “community” and “tradition” in modern America, and in identifying the enterprise of social science, as now practiced, as the most dangerous foe of those things, and indeed, of the very insights it ostensibly seeks.
To put it more bluntly, Shannon thinks it entirely possible that the enterprise of social science is inherently self-defeating—useful in identifying the essential preconditions of social order, but profoundly unhelpful in the end, because it does so by means of a vocabulary that, ironically, makes it impossible to believe in the legitimacy of that social order. Such language may, in effect, rob us of the wherewithal to buy back what we never should have sold in the first place. In that sense, Shannon’s argument reminds me of the witticism attributed to Karl Kraus, to the effect that “Psychoanalysis is itself the disease of which it would be the cure.” For Shannon, the reification and subsequent problematizing of “culture” is itself the great iatrogenic disease of our times, the error at the heart of the social-scientific method, and the source of the very social woes that the social sciences have proved so incapable of curing.
Shannon is, of course, not content merely to critique social science. For him, the roots of the problem represented by social science stretch back much further, to the antinomies and emphases inherent in our modern, Protestant culture. Looking at the effects of the broadly liberal social-scientific outlook on American intellectuals, as seen and understood through their most influential texts, Shannon finds, again and again, the same basic premises: modernist, liberal, rationalist, individualist, “enlightened,” anti-traditionalist, anti-authoritarian, cosmopolitan, and culturally (if not theologically) Protestant.
As a committed Protestant myself, I found myself wanting to quarrel with him about his sweepingly negative view of Protestantism, which seemed to me in need of qualification, and which included many elements that are just as vividly present in the present-day condition of American Catholicism. But I could not help but be stimulated by the boldness of his argument, and at the number of times that he found the mark in ways that more seasoned scholars covering the same ground (myself included) had failed to do. When I began editing a book series in American intellectual history for Rowman and Littlefield, I naturally sought out Shannon to see if he had another project in the wings.
Indeed he did, and the result was his second book, A World Made Safe for Differences, which captured the interest not only of historians but also of a broad range of social scientists, such as the communitarian sociologists Robert Bellah and Amitai Etzioni. To oversimplify greatly, what Shannon did with this second book is demonstrate how the postwar social-scientific understanding of “culture,” while appearing to endorse cultural and individual diversity, in fact imposed an imperial standard of behavior and cultural organization that was even more rigid than the standards it replaced, and all the more pernicious for failing to acknowledge its imperial designs. Hence the book’s title is an ironic one, since it points to the ways that cultural or individual “difference” was reduced to a commodity that was, in fact, fully commensurable with all those things from which it “differed.”
The resulting book read like a cross between the cultural criticism of the Frankfurt School and the constructive impulses of communitarian Catholic social thought—and in fact, Shannon’s work helps one to see that these two stances may not be as far apart as appears at first glance. Indeed, it would not be too far from the mark to label Shannon as a Catholic variant upon the vision of the late Christopher Lasch, the eminent historian who was Shannon’s teacher at the University of Rochester, and from whose spirit of moral and intellectual critique of modernity he continues to derive inspiration.
As I have already intimated, Shannon’s argument is difficult to relate to existing ideological camps. It is radically conservative, not only in its high general regard for tradition but also in its unhesitant condemnation of the American abortion license and its skepticism about the jettisoning of traditional sexual morality. In other respects, however, it recalls the Frankfurt School (and poststructuralist) critique of universalism and liberal toleration, as controlling regimes that are all the more insidious for their refusal to declare themselves as such, and their self-serving charade of “value neutrality.” Its critique of Ruth Benedict’s anthropological view of culture is conjoined, brilliantly, to a critique not only of American modernizing arrogance in Vietnam but also of one of the most scathing American critics of the Vietnam intervention, Frances FitzGerald. There was a deep consensus, Shannon argues, undergirding the relationship between the liberal establishment and the radical counterculture, a consensus that consistently inhibited the emergence of genuine alternatives.
Both of Shannon’s books deserve to make a considerable mark, and could serve even to reorient some of our national discussion of the problem of “community” and the need to recover a sense of the authority of tradition. But Conspicuous Criticism remains especially worthy of reconsideration, precisely because its publication marked the emergence of a voice that has yet to be adequately heard and confronted.
Skeptics will say that Shannon is merely giving us, at bottom, yet another critique of liberal modernity. But I think this pigeonholing underestimates the uniqueness of his achievement. He is relentless in pointing to the ways in which other critics of modernity have merely reshuffled its premises without seriously challenging them, let alone departing from them. It is both radical and conservative, combining a powerful attack on bourgeois liberalism and consumer capitalism with a ringing defense of the place of religion and tradition (and particularly traditional religion) in contemporary society. Writing with moral passion and critical verve, Shannon identifies the forces that isolate the individual in modern society and counters more than a century of efforts by “progressive” intellectuals to displace tradition in favor of a humanism that actually diminishes humanity in the name of freeing its potential.
In a sense, one could say that Conspicuous Criticism is a call to reinstate traditional relations to God, nature, tradition, and the common good. But it makes that call in a most untraditional way. It is not in any way a paean to nostalgia nor a brief for conservatism. Instead, it arises out of a keen sense of necessity, an awareness of the inadequacy of critical discourse, and the unsustainability of the unassisted modern project in all its triumphalist finery. It is a recognition that, when the road forward leads only to a dead end, or over the side of a cliff, the most urgent business at hand is to trace the way back.
Wilfred M. McClay teaches history and humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and is the editor of the forthcoming Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past (Eerdmans).
Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
