That was the subtitle of Advice From Pigeons, but only Sofia Samatar got the reference. Maybe Matt Bruenig would have: he has an interesting post up today about how The Discourse marginalizes the people.
I always agree with Matt completely the first time I read his stuff, and then begin to accumulate second thoughts and concerns and objections as I go on. I certainly agree with his critiques of identity politics in this one. He is arguing that the combination of The Discourse and Identity Politics creates a seamless barrier between the working class and the pundit class.
- Lower class people, almost by definition, cannot engage in The Discourse. They do not have the education, credentials, or jobs necessary to do so.
- Upper class people (broadly construed) can engage in The Discourse, but if they do so as a partisan or advocate of the lower classes, they are dismissed because they are not themselves lower class.
This is pretty obviously true. But when I zoom out or in, I have disagreements.
Zooming out, I see Matt’s piece as accepting that the liberal academy and intelligentsia, and The Discourse, are important to social justice. If there’s anything the Trumpening should be making us ask about, it should be this. Working class people have not gone away just because The Discourse has not included them, any more than creationists have gone away because The Discourse doesn’t include them. Matt points out clearly that pundits and practitioners of TD (I am tired of typing The Discourse) are different, become different, from the groups they rose from. What he doesn’t consider is the possibility that they become irrelevant; that TD is simply a way of keeping academic types occupied with themselves, so the rest of the country can go on its own way.
Zooming in, I ask myself if the entire process of education isn’t legitimately about changing people’s approach and language, teaching them to take analytic approaches. TD is the language of analysis, of technical experts who weigh alternatives using abstract terms that apply to all of them, rather than of advocates who are arguing for one alternative over another on far less abstract bases.
Perhaps the problem is not that TD shuts out the people, but that TD speakers insist on bothering the people. If advocates want analysis, after all, we technical experts are available for hire or pro bono; why should we assume that we are assets to movements that have not sought our services? I do not assume that I’d be any use on a hospital floor, even though I could draw a fine flow chart of the patient’s pathophysiology.
I think a lot of what comes out of the academy these days is about our own insecurities and ego issues. The rest of the country is lucky if it gets to ignore our flurrying around as we try to figure out how working in the ivory tower imparts value to ourselves and society, and what to do about the fact that when we come up with an explanation that satisfies our souls, it is usually phrased in The Discourse – so nobody outside the tower either understands it, believes it, or cares about it. Is the answer to require outsiders to learn our language before they can participate in the discussion, or to go and find out through honest research just what our discourse is good for in people’s lives?
In Advice from Pigeons, Charms of Discourse are used to summon demons by flattering them – defining them in ways that lure them into a charmed circle and keep them trapped there, listening to their own stories, until they figure out how to refute the assumptions embedded in the charms. It was true when I wrote it, and it’s still true today.
