Belated Book Review: M. Bauerlein's THE DUMBEST GENERATION

This review is rather delayed, and I apologize for the long silence between posts. The Aggie Librarian has been busy re-cataloging lots of books that have been sitting in our collection without holdings affixed to OCLC, an oversight that was to have been corrected "someday", and that "someday" just happens to coincide with my becoming the Catalog Librarian at my institution. I've also goofed off a lot on weekends, watching oodles of Japanese anime, and gone to the occasional gun show here in North Texas (Fort Worth, Dallas, Mesquite--the 3 biggest), dragging along a colleague from a neighboring institution.

Anyway, without further delay, I provide for you my review of Mark Bauerlein's THE DUMBEST GENERATION, which I had the pleasure to read just before school started back up.

As a 30-something, nominally Gen-X, somewhat traditionalist Librarian (Cataloger), weary of repulsing time and again the charge of the All-Digital Brigades proclaiming Lib/Web 2.0, or by now 3.0, ad infinitum, there is much in Bauerlein's critique here that is music to my ears, and I appreciate his compilation of statistics aimed at deflating the hype of Web 2.0 enthusiasts.

However, by about the middle of the book, Bauerlein's own ideological biases begin to overshadow the book, and it's clear he's got his own axe to grind. Like other Right-leaning intellectuals before, he is out to demonize the 1960s, which for him are the habitat of the Ur-Dumbest Generation, i.e. 60s Youth Culture (an estimation I emphatically do NOT share). He casually cites Leo Strauss without further attribution or explanation, which set off immediate alarm bells for me. I know damn well who Leo Strauss is, and while the quotation Bauerlein cites from Strauss is not objectionable, the corpus of Strauss' philosophical work is, in my view, quite odious and not at all in harmony with the American Democratic tradition that Bauerlein expresses such sympathy for elsewhere in his book. He similarly casually mentions David Horowitz without giving much background or context to this highly controversial turncoat ex-Trot.

While Bauerlein and I might agree in common on the philosophical outlook and valid cultural criticism of Neil Postman, he would probably balk at further mention of heroes in my pantheon, men like Paulo Freire, Michael Parenti, Peter McLaren, Richard Brosio, or even James Loewen.

Bauerlein insists on a CAUSAL connection between radical 60s youth culture and the techno-addicted Dumbest Generation of the present moment. While I will agree with Bauerlein on the general sequence of events, I dispute strongly the causal connections that he asserts. He seems to be of the opinion that radical 60s youth culture imploded from within, and that its radical rejection of the past (as if alternating iconoclastic/iconodule dialectics aren't a common feature of cultural history) is what ultimately doomed its ability to continue, thrive and reproduce itself.

He approvingly cites such "voices of moderation" as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Irving Howe...voices urging the US to stay in Vietnam, mind you. Yes, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who would later rationalize arming the forces of Usama Bin Laden in Afghantistan, to use radical Islam as a bulwark against the Soviet Union and raise the stakes in the Cold War by giving the USSR a taste of the Vietnam experience...regardless of the potential for Blowback that eventually contributed to Sept 11, 2001.

So, it was the 1960s young intellectual's own fault that they allegedly did not endure...As if, say, the sheer exhaustion of the American body politic in the aftermath of the Agony of the Vietnam war, the heightened cynicism about government in the wake of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate cover-up scandal, the general malaise of the later 1970s, and the gathering Right wing counterattack that blasted into the open with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980—As if none of that might also have had an impact on the long term viability of 1960s radical intellectual culture, which came under withering backlash assault from the mid 1970s onward. Regretfully, thus, Bauerlein is long on assertion but short on evidence in these final sections of his book. He detests the internet-addicted "Dumbest Generation" that is the object of study in the first part of the book, and also detests 1960s youth culture...and desperately wants there to be a connection, but I don't find his arguments for causality even remotely convincing here.

I also felt he undermined his general case against the so-called "Dumbest Generation" proper by focusing in on and excoriating a young artist for failing to bow down and worship at the altars of the great artists of the past. While I myself deplore the ignorance of basic history among all Americans, and have a healthy respect for the intellectual history of our reining political philosophies and their detractors, in the realm of the Arts, the Artist, it seems to me, is always under the burden to make something new, to be distinct, etc. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail. Abtract Expressionism claimed to be taking on Michaelangelo; And I agree with art critic Robert Hughes's sucinct prouncement on that artistic agenda: “You lost.”

Still, the Dada movement in Germany and Switzerland of the early 20th century, or the Wiener Sezession before them in the Fin de Ciecle of Emperor Franz Joseph's Austria-Hungary were no less rejectionist of traditionalist “academic” art, yet no one today would deny their greatness in hindsight. Sezession artists were quite scandalous in their day, the blatant depiction of sensuality scandalized the Vienese burghers while thrilling the Parisian art scene. Dadaists, in a flush of furious creative impulses, proclaimed a doctrine of Anti-Art, by which they meant Anti-academic, anti-stilted, hidebound traditionalist art which they felt was tainted by association with the corridors of power which unleashed the calamity of the Great War. French Impressionism, so beloved by contemporary middle class Americans today, was itself profoundly radical and controversial at its outset. Of course one must learn the basics of painting, of color, of contrast, etc. But artistic taste is highly personal. I do enjoy visits to museums, and as the saying goes, I may not know much about art, but I know what I like, and what I like less. I respect the technical talent of earlier realist painters, but their works don't move or speak to me very much. So where Bauerlein sees impudence, I see independence that, in an artist at least, we should recognize, respect and nourish. Would it be too scandalous to bring to this youth the art of the Harlem Renaissance of the 20s? Something with which, as a young black American, he might more easily relate to than Rembrant? He might reject that, too, but no artist can expect to make a name for himself merely aping the style of what has come before.

I don't disagree with Bauerlein's general thrust in what he is trying to argue, but I do strongly deplore his selection of the visual arts as a forum to bolster his case, which I think falls flat at this weak point. Perhaps I err in showing preferential, even deferential treatment to artists and artistic temperments. So be it; I admit I am guilty of these biases.

I think Bauerlein is also willfully blind to the wider political economy implications of cultural production, the increasing corporatization of the University, the growth of (mostly right-wing and well funded) Think Tanks creating an quasi-alternative, policy-driven intellectual world that seeks to supplant the traditional academy. Bauerlein buys completely and uncritically the right wing canard, promoted by hacks like Roger Kimball, and Horowitz, et. al. about the campus being utterly dominated by the Left. Even when discussing the real, existing Left-leaning professoriate, He seems not to know either Cary Nelson or Michael Berube or their promotion of community outreach as a legitimate exercise for professors to engage in apart from basic research and which ought to count towards tenure considerations. He claims to see redemptive value in the Culture Wars but can't seem to name the major players on the side opposite his or describe many of the recent events in those struggles. No discussion of Stanley Aronowitz, or even Alan Sokal. Where Bauerlein wants to grill 1960s youth culture, my own inclination is to lob grenades at the wayward excesses of relativizing, irrationalist Postmodernism. I happen to think George W. Bush is the most vulgarly Postmodern President in US History. Frederic Jameson identified Postmodernism as the cultural condition of Late Capitalism, and I believe that point still stands. It's sobering for me to realize that the landmark motion picture THE MATRIX came out nearly 10 years ago, yet still seems like it was released only yesterday. But at least Bauerlein and I can agree that, while both of us know these names and the ideas behind them, we are correct to fear that many of our readers, both of his book and this review, won't have the foggiest idea what either one of us is talking about, and we can agree that THAT is a deplorable state of affairs made ever worse by the distractions of the technophilic, neophillic, multitasking Infotainment screen-media culture.