“Our urban experts, planners, and social scientists generally . . . are people who are convinced that, if fully employed and given adequate budgets, they can successfully practice the art of making everyone healthier, wealthier, and happier.”
“And a religious person doesn’t ‘believe’ in God, he has faith in God. One’s relation to God is existential, not rationalist. As I learned later from a reading of Kant, pure reason will never get you beyond — pure reason. But the more you pray, the more likely you are to have faith. That is why children are taught to pray, rather than being instructed in ‘proofs’ of God’s ‘existence.’”
Of Clement Greenberg: “I recall vividly, for obvious reasons, his once offering to acquire a large Jackson Pollock painting for $10,000. It was a friendly gesture, but I declined. I didn’t have ten thousand dollars, we didn’t have space in our apartment for so large a painting, and I didn’t like (still don’t like) ‘abstract expressionist’ art. That painting would today be worth millions.”
On what came to be later known as “neoconservatives”: “We considered ourselves to be realistic meliorists, skeptical of government programs that ignored history and experience in favor of then-fashionable left-wing ideas spawned by the academy. . . . The major event of that period was the student rebellion and the rise of the counterculture, with its messianic expectations and its apocalyptic fears. It certainly took us by surprise, as it did just about everyone else. Suddenly we discovered that we had been cultural conservatives all along.”
“As the New Left and the counterculture began to reshape liberalism — as can be seen by a perusal of The New York Review of Books and even The New Yorker — and, eventually, to reshape the Democratic Party, disenchanted liberals began to find themselves harboring all kinds of conservative instincts and ideas.”
On Bill Baroody, head of the American Enterprise Institute: “The emergence of a new group of ‘neoconservative’ intellectuals — the term was invented, in a spirit of contempt for ‘renegades,’ by the socialist Michael Harrington — intrigued and excited him. He calmly ignored the fact that not a single one of us was at that time a Republican, a fact that caused much outrage among Goldwater conservatives who were the main financial support for AEI.”
“I had had an excellent education in communism at City College and in my Trotskyist youth group, and I knew that if you took Marxist-Leninist doctrine as seriously as the Soviet leadership did, the broad outline of an appropriate American foreign policy almost designed itself. To be a ‘hard-liner’ vis-a-vis the Soviet Union or another Communist regime meant that you were likely to be right far more often than wrong. Only people who believed themselves so clever as to be able to outwit those odds could come up with original views on the Cold War. Unfortunately, our universities are well populated by such types. More unfortunately, some of them ended up micromanaging American policy in Vietnam, with disastrous results.”
“It is characteristic of bourgeois culture, when it exists in accord with bourgeois principles, that we are permitted to take ‘happy endings’ seriously.”
“. . . though a commercial society may offer artists and writers all sorts of desirable things — freedom of expression, especially, popularity and affluence occasionally — it did (and does) deprive them of the status that they naturally feel themselves entitled to.”
“It is striking, for instance, that modernist movements in the arts no longer claim to create ‘beauty’ but to reveal the ‘truth’ about humanity in its present condition.”
On art as revelatory: “There are intellectual laggards who believe that culture and art are still successfully performing this function today. Susan Sontag, for instance, has written that art is ‘the nearest thing to a sacramental activity acknowledged by our secular society.’ But if this was true in the age of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, and even (perhaps) Jackson Pollack, it has no relevance to the era of Andy Warhol.”
(Photo source: AEI)
11 Responses to The Remembrances and Wisdom of Irving Kristol
sherbygirl - September 22, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Mark, it’s a good thing you have tenure, because if any junior faculty member in the humanities today wrote a blog post praising Mr. Kristol, they’d be denied tenure so fast…Or in my case, no job. To be a fly on the wall of the hiring committee when they would google my name and come accross a post such a this one. I’m jealous. I wish I could write about what you write about, without fear of “retribution.”
lslerner - September 22, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Kristol and his colleagues personify the physicist’s quantum jump, migrating from the extreme left to the extreme right without passing through the middle.In humans, as in electrons, this is evidence of essential mindlessless combined with an overwhelming attraction to a pole. From admiring Trotsky to admiring McCarthy (though lamenting the latter’s lack of polish) — well, we can only gasp in amazing admiration at the mental — cerebellar — gymnastics involved.
fossil - September 22, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Kristol was hardly the kind of thinker (if the word even applies) to offer as the paragon of the conservative intellectual. He was a zealous partisan of various right-wing enthusiasms who had little taste for careful reflection in the throes of his intemperate polemics.His reflections on “faith”, quoted above, are logically and philosophically vacuous and amount to little more than soothing noises for the theistically inclined. They’re the sort of thing that Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris, and so forth, rightly regard as rhetorical red meat.Some founding neo-conservatives, like Nathan Glazer (with whom Kristol was closely associated for some times), were able to pause in mid-stream for salutary second thoughts. Some social thinkers of that generation, like Daniel Bell, were able to argue for the virtues of cultural conservatism without ever moving toward the political right. But Kristol was an unquestioning devotee of the “crackpot realism” of mainstream American conservatives, and a rather vicious hatchet-man in the service of that cause.
markbauerlein - September 22, 2009 at 6:36 pm
Kristol didn’t go from the extreme left to the extreme right, and he always recognized the damage McCarthy did to anti-communism. If you read traditionalist conservative journals and writers, you’ll find that they often regard neoconservatives as a greater enemy than liberals. For a better appraisal of Kristol than these latter comments, see what Lewis Lapham says of him in the infamous “Tentacles of Rage.”
goxewu - September 22, 2009 at 9:19 pm
Kristol may or may not have been a substantial political intellectual (if he advocated voting for George W. Bush, especially in 2004, then, I would ask, what the hell good did all his putative wisdom do him?), but the quotes on art and religion are embarrassing.Nobody but a philistine puts scare quotes around abstract expressionism (usually, it’s capitalized, as Cubism and Minimalism are), and nobody but a philistine would make the final arbiter of whether he should have bought a Pollock (he did paint small ones, too) the money he could have made off it. “But the more you pray, the more likely you are to have faith. That is why children are taught to pray, rather than being instructed in ‘proofs’ of God’s ‘existence.’” Sure, and the more you, say, march through the streets chanting and flagellating yourself, the more you recite numbing rote passages from some alleged holy book, the more you kneel and bow and scrape and wear prescribed trinkets–all without asking for “proofs” of god’s existence–the more “faith” you’ll have, at least for a while. And, I might add, the more you stay away from universities such as Emory, where they feed you bite after bite from that ol’ Tree of Knowledge and teach you to think and question things, the more “faith” you’ll have.Last questions: How does sherbygirl know all this about retribution for praising a [neo]conservative? And why doesn’t Prof. Bauerlein, who usually asks for proof of assertions from the likes of fossil, ask for some from sherbygirl?
markbauerlein - September 23, 2009 at 11:25 am
Don’t you see the self-effacement in the Pollock story, goxewu? And there are so many stories of conservatives being shunned and worse that the point hardly needs reiterating. (If you’re interested, check out Peter Berkowitz, KC Johnson, . . .)
goxewu - September 23, 2009 at 2:06 pm
No self-effacement save monetary. Did Kristol say, “I could have had a bona fide modern masterpiece on my wall”? No. Did he say he came to like Abstract Expressionism and regretted not having a real example close at hand? No. He said a Pollock would’ve been worth millions. A big difference.sherbygirl said that “if any junior faculty member in the humanities today wrote a blog post praising Mr. Kristol, they’d be denied tenure so fast…” Really? Not because of publishing scholarly stuff that goes against the prevailing liberal wisdom, but merely because of a blog praising an old warhouse like Irving Kristol? I doubt it.And, of course, if you really want to endanger tenure, try publishing something that goes up against the Israel lobby–rather unqualified support of Israel being the 800-pound gorilla in the room no discussion of neoconservatism wants to acknowledge. One can call the left’s progressive disenchantment with Israel since the 1960s slavish political correctness, or cosmeticized anti-Semitism (I’m sure I’ll get that for simply bringing this up), but one has to admit it’s part of the discussion. Which prompts me to ask: Why no Irving Kristol quote on Israel? He must have addressed something to the rafters.Finally, there’s “More unfortunately, some of [the academic Sovietophiles] ended up micromanaging American policy in Vietnam, with disastrous results.” Yeah, right. Our “unleashed” military, led by the likes of Gen. Curtis LeMay, could have “won” (installed Nguyen Cao Ky as dictator? re-established French Indo-China?) in Vietnam if they hadn’t been stabbed in the back by cowardly politicians at home. The Germans and Russians said that during World War I; the Japanese were told that right at the end of World War II; and we heard it in America during the Korean War. Those armies couldn’t have “won” sans “micromanaging,” and neither could we in Viet Nam.
fossil - September 23, 2009 at 3:14 pm
I found Kristol’s Clement Greenberg/Jackson Pollack anecdote to be rather self-aggrandizing. I happen to share Kristol’s dim view of post-WWII art, starting with Abstract Expressionism, and including Pollock, Kline, Rothko, all the way through Johns, Warhol, and Serrra to Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and all those other names that command eight figure prices from Eli Broad and his ilk. Flame away, if you must–but what the hell does this have to do with politics in any reasonable sense of the word?
sbritchky - September 23, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Andy Warhol’s art wasn’t “revelatory”? Why, until I saw his “32 Campbell’s Soup Cans” I had no idea that white men were natural oppressors or that double-rim, solderless tin cans were common in the Sixties — less than 50 years ago.
markbauerlein - September 23, 2009 at 6:18 pm
If people want to look up Krostol’s work, a good place is the archives of The Public Interest, which can be found here:http://www.nationalaffairs.com/archive/public_interest/default.asp
danbloom - September 29, 2009 at 12:09 am
I grew up reading COMMENTARY every month. Too bad his son turned out to be a rightwing conservative.