Lewis Lapham Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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These insights, and your comments on those insights, seem to me to be a path into understand our present political situation, because our people in charge these days in Washington seem to be very attuned to manipulating these differences in print and the media, and in essence they're better at packaging their lies than anybody else.
Yes, they're very good at it. They approach politics in the manner of the advertising business, and the time allowances are very short. I once did a six-part television documentary on the history of American foreign policy in the twentieth century and you would think that six hours was a lot of time but it's not. I had something like 73 words in 43 seconds, or 43 words in 73 seconds, I can't remember which, in which to explain or account for the outbreak of World War II! Not only did I have to fit it to that time and those words but I also had to connect still photographs of the Munich conference in September of 1938 with the bombing of Warsaw in September of 1939. That's the kind of medium that it is.
We have this wonderful toy, but I'm not sure we've yet developed a language that can use it as analog. McLuhan makes that point too, that movable type comes along at the end of the fifteenth century, I think, but it's another hundred years before you get to Cervantes and Shakespeare and Montaigne. So, it takes time before we can learn how to use these forms.
That's one of the confusions that we see happening today: what is the media and newspapers and internet? It's almost the more we know, the less we know, and how do we know what we know? These are epistemological problems.
Your book is a collection of essays which you wrote over a period from 2002 to the present, and at the time that you were writing these essays what you were saying wasn't as apparent to a broad audience. Now everything is hitting the fan, the Bush order is unraveling day by day, and so on. So, I think our audience should go and read your book, but what I want to pull out of you is your insights, because there are many, about structural things that are at work. One of them is what we just talked about, the way the media has changed. He who controls the media, this new kind of narrative, is the one who can have political power.
Another insight that you draw on -- you talk about a seminar you go to, to hear a discussion of Thorsten Veblen's writing, and you go back and do some reading, the good historian that you are, and you were taken by his insights -- I believe he was writing about land developers and the need to sell the land and fool the people, and there would be a pot of gold, and the Emerald City, and so on. So, this is another theme in America that brings us to the present -- the nature of our capitalism and the forms it's taken.
Veblen is an extraordinary, sharp-eyed, and witty observer of the American scene. He is, of course, the man who invented the term "conspicuous consumption," and the theory of the leisure class, and the spending of money in order to prove one's state of grace, really -- not for a utilitarian purpose, but for a display purpose. In that essay what I was talking about was Veblen talking about the economy of a small town in the Middle West in the 1890s, but I used his essay to try to show that there really wasn't that much of a difference between the red state and the blue state. The red state/blue state division that the Republicans make so much of is an advertiser's demographic. It doesn't accurately reflect the way people think in different parts of the country. In other words, in order to assign somebody an attitude simply because of their dress is -- you know, that's the way you would try to sell them a watch but it's really not the way you would try to find out what was in their mind. I was using the essay that way.
As the editor of Harper's for three decades you had a seat to see the changing currents in the literary scene and in our culture. Was being an editor in the seventies different from being an editor in the eighties and the nineties, and into the present? How did the writing change? How did the selection of pieces that you could run change? What were the different constraints, if any? Did America change in that period and did you see it from your position at Harper's?
Yes. When I become editor -- I become managing editor in 1971 and I became the editor in 1975 -- and during the period in the seventies, I was still trying to think of the magazine as the marketplace of ideas. Right? I was trying to think of it in terms of debate. I would publish pieces written by individuals who were on the left and individuals who were also on the right, and during that period of the seventies some of the leading political arguments were on the side of the right -- the early writings of people like William Kristol and David Horowitz who subsequently congealed into hard-shelled neoconservatives. But in the seventies a lot of people of that kind of persuasion were making good points about some of the weaknesses in the American liberal empirium.
Late thirties, forties, fifties, you could say that almost the entire American intellectual landscape was liberal, whether you're talking about the democratic control of the Congress or the attitude in place in the school system, and the foundation in most of the publications. The conservative side of the argument, or what has become the conservative side of the argument, was really "irritable twitching." That's not my phrase; I think it's Galbraith's. But in the seventies, it was possible you could come into arguments and have a real engagement with people on different sides of the question. People could go so far as to say that they were wrong, or that they could learn something, and there was a conversation.
After the Reagan election in the eighties, what had been a more fluid exchange of ideas hardened into more polemical positions, you're either with us or against us, and if you're with us you're going to be writing for either The Nation on the one hand, or National Review on the other. There was a tendency for people to stop talking to each other and to be using words instead of as means of expression as blunt instruments with which to belabor their enemies.
There's also the loss of vocabulary, which is something else that McLuhan points out. [In] 1941 the average vocabulary of a high school senior was something like 9000 or 10,000 words, and four or five years ago when I last saw the statistic it was down to 5000 words. That's a result of television, of the broadcast discourse. Again, when you find that you're writing for television it's hard to use long words, you can't really back into sentences with participial clauses, it has to start: subject, verb, object. It's a kind of Dick and Jane language, and that has an effect. You begin to lose the devices of irony and we now have. I think it's a very big number that the Department of Health and Education places on the illiteracy of the American public. I don't know the number but it's something like twenty or thirty million, or maybe even forty.
I have the quote from Orwell's Politics and the English Language, that "One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end." Do you think we're not teaching our students to write anymore, and that is part of the solution to this problem of restoring the democratic [discourse]? I sense that you believe strongly that you can't have citizens who are active and engaged and thinking unless they can write and talk and have the skills that we used to learn.
I agree with you; yes, I certainly think that. And it's not only the skill and the habit of reading and of writing but it's also the time to allow that kind of a conversation to take place, the kind of conversation that you and I are now having. I can't imagine where on television this can happen, because to stop and pause and seem to think is [audience laughter] a crime, from a television camera's point of view. It isn't only that people don't learn to write, because they don't acquire the habit of reading. It takes time to teach people how to write. You have to learn grammar and syntax, and you must read because there's no other way to learn it. And that's not the way it's [taught] in many of our schools. We're not teaching it that way.
Ten years ago I taught a course at Yale University in writing, and it was a course for credit, it was not just one of these visiting celebrity type things. These are very bright kids, they were juniors and seniors, and I had twelve of them in the class, and I made the mistake of saying -- it was thirteen weeks, and I said there'd be a paper every week. I had no idea how hard that was going to be to correct those papers. These were kids that supposedly wanted to become writers of some sort, and so the first essay I assigned them was "What do you read?" And "very little" were the answers on the twelve papers. I mean, they read one or two magazines and they would read -- let's say as a junior they would read Dickens' Great Expectations and they'd read it very carefully and they'd be able to analyze -- you know, follow the course instruction and analyze it on five levels of allegory and six levels of symbolism, and so forth. And then I'd say to them, "Well, did you ever read another novel by Dickens?" and it had never occurred to them! Of the twelve kids in the class, three could write, three almost could write, and the other six simply couldn't. It was painful. They were very, very bright, but their heads were filled with images.
If you talked to an American boy on the frontier, let's say -- I've seen eighth grade examinations that were given in Kansas in the 1880s and there's no Harvard student in the world that could even come close to passing one of these tests. Because without the phone and without the television, people would read. I, at one point, was going to do a television show on the exploration of the American West in the 1840s, the Western movement, and I read letters, many, many letters from individuals traveling in the trans-Mississippi west, writing back to their families in the east, and they're amazingly wonderful letters. The spelling's not right, but the fluency of the language and the ease -- and these are not university students. But it was a natural language. It was as natural to them to write as it would be to us to talk on the telephone.
I lost the train of thought but my point is about images. People in the nineteenth century, early twentieth century, would have had a lot of literary allusions in their heads. If I was going to try to talk to you, or to try to talk to people in this audience, and I would refer to a characteristic of a person in a novel by Jane Austen, or if I was going to quote a line of Greek verse, or refer to a sentence by Gibbon or long passages from the Bible, it would be a literary text and I wouldn't have to explain it. But today's students, at least on the basis of what I saw ten years ago at Yale, what they have in their head is not text, not those kinds of allusions and references but specific scenes of a film, or of an advertisement, or of a movie. They could look at a scene in a film and they would know exactly what the next shot was going to be. They had a whole archive of those kinds of allusions and references, and again, this goes back to McLuhan, this is what he's talking about. We shape our tools, our tools shape us, and we have yet to come up with a political language that is fully expressive in the new medium.
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