Getting Iraq, Politics and the Academy Wrong

In Michael Ignatieff's exploration of how he got the stance he took on the Iraq War so wrong, he says some provocative things. Among these are that

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting. They have to work with the small number of ideas that happen to be true and the even smaller number that happen to be applicable to real life.

While the argument about the academy would seem to, maybe, apply to the humanities, certain moments in the social sciences and some of the more interpretive/contested areas of the natural sciences, this strikes me as a deeply problematic generalization about te academy.

Imediately after the quote above he argues that

In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.

The disjuncture between this quote and the history of the academic legitimation of racist, sexist, xenophobic, ethnocentric and other forms of hate-filled "play" and policy is rather striking. Furthermore, the absolute silence with respect to recent trends in politics and corporatization of the academic definition of true and false ideas is also rather stunning. In a world where state regulation is increasingly defined by public-private collaborative governance and where life in many areas of Reseach I universities is increasingly driven not by the viability of ideas but by the capacity to draw external, and often corporate, funds the focus on the truth or falsity of ideas is quite misleading.

I’ve learned that good judgment in politics looks different from good judgment in intellectual life. Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. Theory gets in the way.

Here again, this account seriously mis-states the historical conditions of work in universities. In the North American social sciences, where I am situated, an intense empiricism (with an associated deep suspicion of theoretically-driven interpretations) pervaded the scientization of these disciplines after WWII and continues to this day as part of the quantitative-qualitative research fractures in geography, sociology, and anthropology (as well as the political theory vs. government studies dynamic in Ignatieff's own field of political science).

What is meant by the idea that theory gets in the way? If theory means philosophy -- which is most often taught as ideas abstracted from any engagement with material reality... the realm of first principals and traditional ethics -- then this may be the case. However, if theory in the academy and politics means the conceptual product of engaging with the material world in order to abstract trends, tendencies, contradictions and opportunities then theory had better be the foundation of the kind of self-reflexive pragmatic politics Ignatieff spends so much of the rest of the article embracing.

Moreover, putting forth the idea that "[i]n politics, everything is what it is and not another thing" verges on the ludicrous. What is abortion, what is immigration, what defines terrorism, what is welfare, what is socialized medicine, what is science, what is religion, what is agriculture, what is a good education, what is global warming, what are mileage standards, what are taxes... what world is Ignatieff talking about?

He writes:

An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.

Is this really an intellectual's primary responsibility? Perhaps an intellectual's responsibility to to operationalize their ideas in a way that does not support harmful policies? Ignatieff has ideas about the differences between ideas and policy, between the academy and politics, that might have had some viability at the height of modernity but in todays utterly hybridized, synthetic and interdisciplinary world such stances make no sense whatsover. But even if this understanding of the role of intellectuals and politicians made sense once, it was in this period that many of the people who constructed nuclear bombs said: "Hey, I just build them, what the politicians do with them is neither my concern nor responsibility."

Perhaps the deepest problem with this article is that it so deeply feeds American anti-intellectualism at the same time that it promotes a liberal mode of political self-reflexivity. He notes:

As a former denizen of Harvard, I’ve had to learn that a sense of reality doesn’t always flourish in elite institutions. It is the street virtue par excellence. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what’s what than Nobel Prize winners. The only way any of us can improve our grasp of reality is to confront the world every day and learn, mostly from our mistakes, what works and what doesn’t.

The problem is not that a sense of reality fails to flourish at elite institutions and it doesn't matter at all that some bus drivers have a shrewder grasp of reality than some Nobel Prize winners, the problem is that the reality bus drivers, housewives, family farmers, skilled union millwrights and army corporals live is so separate from that of most academics awarded prizes of any sort. The problem is that the character of contemporary society separates so many of us from so many of the rest of us that modernist arguments like Ignatieff's still make sense in the kind of public space that is the New York Times, even though the vast majority of folks outside the academy (or undergraduate students in it) and inside the government (or engaged in working with it) know that these splits are infinitely more "theoretical" than "real."

Blogged with Flock