Gonna get everything sorted. All right, so how did the war in Ukraine? All right, how did it become a matter of good and evil? How did it become sacred? right and Best way to perhaps understand this is by looking at the Watergate controversy so Watergate in and of itself Not not a big deal. Aha. Yeah, I've got the the good-looking video right back All right now. We're rocking and rolling. All right, so let's look at Watergate as a Is a shift from a grubby New story to an epic battle of good and evil and then you can apply this to great power politics Adolf Hitler had a lot of admiration for the United States because he admired the ruthless way that it expanded The way it wiped out the Indians the way it went to war with the Spanish Went to war with the Mexicans Just carved out all the territory that it wanted and the only thing that prevented the United States From moving south and taking charge of the Caribbean is the the internal American conflict over slavery So that was the impediment but Hitler admired and somewhat modeled himself on the ruthlessness of The American approach Right So that's great power politics what Russia is doing in Ukraine. It's very similar to what United States has done over the course of its history to whoever got in its way So I was just reading an interesting book by Professor Jeffrey Alexander 2003 book the meanings of social life a cultural sociology and so he talks about how grubby was just this I want to get was just this grubby news story It didn't have you know great significance then it became an epic story of good versus evil same to with the war in Ukraine We've got grubby great power politics Russia is doing what great powers do they dominate their backyard And they do not permit peer competitors in their backyard. All right, remember the Cuban Missile Crisis Russia Soviet Union wanted to put missiles in Cuba the United States said no remember the Monroe Doctrine the United States essentially Says that Latin America doesn't get its own foreign policy Latin America has to follow the foreign policy dictates of The United States so if China wanted to set up a base in Mexico, right? It's just not gonna United States is just not gonna put up with that Because it threatens our sovereignty great powers are not gonna permit another great power to You know set up next door Right and that the same with Russia Russia is simply operating out of its own out of its own national interests Okay, I think we've got a sharp video again Here we go. So June 1972 employees of the Republican Party made an illegal entry in burglary into the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC So Republicans described the break-in as a third-rate burglary as neither politically motivated nor morally relevant Democrats said it was a major act of political espionage a symbol of a Demagogic and a moral Republican president Richard Nixon and his staff Americans were not persuaded by this more extreme reaction The incident received relatively little attention and generated. No real sense of outrage at the time. There were no cries of outrage There was in the main difference So the president respect for his authority and the belief that his explanation of this event was correct Despite what in retrospect seemed like strong evidence to the contrary So with a few exceptions the mass news media decided after a short time to play down the Watergate story Not because they were coercibly prevented from doing otherwise But because they genuinely felt it to be a relatively unimportant event So Watergate remained part of the profane world even after the election in November Even after Democrats have been pushing the Watergate issue for four months 80% of the American people found it hard to believe that there was a Watergate crisis 75% felt what it occurred was just plain politics 84% felt that they had heard about it and it did not influence their vote two years later However, the same incident still called Watergate had initiated the most serious peacetime political crisis in American history It had become a riveting moral symbol one that initiated a long passage through sacred time and space and wrenching conflict between pure and impure sacred forms and Watergate ended up being responsible for the first voluntary resignation of a president screwed Said mr. Hermansen who is white? It seems to me we're pretty close to a fair of fall. This is Jeffrey Alexander He was just reading from two dozen voters and key political battleground states Republicans Democrats and independence of diverse ages races and social classes They all expressed worries that their nation has crewed off track With problems no election could easily solve Fiercely polarized over public health public safety and perhaps truth itself Many people are united in their collective anxiety 40 years ago in her book a distant mirror Barbara Tuckman's haunting account of how the black death dropped the curtain on the middle edges The author insisted that quote an event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world And if it does not she argued then quote Disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-discussed That warning issued more than four decades ago Dividly describes the situation we're in today All right, this is Jeffrey Alexander. He's a sociologist at Yale. He's delivering a talk there July 2nd of 2020 the talks called the double wear me trauma Anyway, here he is on Watergate and it fits pretty closely with the same situation in Ukraine So how and why did this perception of Watergate change and how and why is Russia versus Ukraine? Regarded as an epic story of good versus evil and I have no problem with that conception All right, I'm not here to say you should not view Russia versus Ukraine as good and evil. I Find myself very emotionally Siding with Ukraine the plucky underdog against, you know, big bad Russia So why did we have this extraordinary change in public perceptions? Right the actual event Watergate was Inconsequential so facts don't necessarily speak right facts do not speak Watergate could not tell it itself It had to be told by society Right, it was the context of Watergate the change not so much the facts of Watergate Right and say to with the grubby great power politics of Russia invading Ukraine. It's not the fact of that Battle that leads to the news media and and public life discussing this in epic terms of good versus evil It's context its situation its meeting emotional needs and needs for importance Right political life occurs most of the time in relatively mundane levels of goals power and interest now above This grubby level operating a little higher level are norms right wrong Conventions customs laws that regulate political process and struggle then above that you've got values right general Elemental aspects of culture that inform the codes that regulate political authority and norms within which specific interests are resolved if politics Operates routinely the conscious attention of political participants is on goals and interests is just grubby. It's specific So it's just profane and routine right these these struggles Between different interest groups. They're not seen as violating more general values and norms So non routine politics begins when the tension between these levels is felt Either because of shift in the nature of the political or a shift in the general more sacred commitments that are held to regulate them And so we get a tension between goals and higher levels of Morality public attention shifts from political goals to more general concerns to right and wrong to norms and values that are now perceived as in danger So we now have a public consciousness about right and wrong So Watergate was initially seen as just politics by 75% of the American people two years after the break in by the summer of 1974 Public opinion had sharply changed now Watergate was regarded as an issue that violated fundamental customs of morality Right 50% of the population saw Watergate as a challenge to the most sacred values that sustained political order itself And it wasn't Watergate that had changed. It was the context is our society that had changed All right, we had the trial on TV essentially in the US Senate So by the end of this two-year period about half of those who had voted for Nixon had changed their mind Two-thirds of all voters thought Watergate has now gone far beyond politics now threaten the very moral fabric of our society Which is happening with this Russia-Ukraine conflict. It's it's beyond politics, right? This isn't just politics by other means. This is threatening the whole moral fabric of Western civilization So what must happen for an entire society to experience such a fundamental crisis? Followed by a ritual renewal, right? There has to be sufficient social consensus that an event was polluting deviant, right? Not just a mere fragment of the society a strong Consensus by much of society that that we've had an event that is polluting once you get that sufficient Consensus then society becomes aroused and indignant then there has to be a perception by significant groups who participate in this consensus The event is not only deviant, but it threatens to pollute the center the sanctuary the burning core of society the most sacred places Right is being touched in society has been fingered. It's been finger-bombed. What what what are the various? Aphorisms for fingering someone a finger-bombing right society is being finger-bombed in its most sacred place All right, the clitoris of American democracy has been finger-bombed third if this deep crisis is to be resolved institutional social controls must be brought into play so Even legitimate attacks on the polluting sources of crisis have viewed as frightening so we need to mobilize Society to bring the forces of pollution to heal Fourth we need social control mechanisms. We must mobilize the elites Fifth there must be an effective process of symbolic interpretation So many much of the same processes we just learned about in this week's Torah portion We need ritual and purification processes that continue the labeling enforce the strength of the symbolic sacred center of society don't finger the clitoris of American democracy Right because we've come to see the the the center of American society that the White House has Increasingly profane and impure is being fingered As such processes demonstrate Conclusively that deviant and transgressive qualities right the naughtiness of Richard Nixon and his ilk Getting us into trouble Luke wants Ukraine to win because their flags colors are the same as UCLA's So if this deep crisis is to be resolved institutional social controls must be brought into play So in the weeks following the break-in at the Democratic headquarters Watergate existed in semiotic that just means words Sit words of symbols for reality right words of metaphors symbolic metaphors for reality So Watergate was just a denotation the word simply referred to a single event, but in the weeks that followed the Denotation Watergate became more complex it began referring to a whole series of interrelated events touched off by the break-in Including charges of political corruption Presidential denials legal suits and rest so it wasn't just someone making a pass It was like a whole pattern of molesting Impurifying polluting behavior by August 1972 Watergate had been transformed from a mere sign to a symbol right it became a word That didn't just donate actual events, but it can aid to connotated multi for Moral meaning so Watergate became a symbol of pollution embodying a sense of evil and impurity in our midst So the facts associated with Watergate those who are immediately associated with crime the office the apartment complex the persons Indicated later were placed on the negative side of a system of symbolic classification So those persons and institutions responsible for ferreting out and arresting these criminal elements were placed on the positive side So we got this bifurcated model of pollution and purity It was then superimposed onto the traditional good and evil structure of American civic discourse but during 1960s struggles the left invoked critical universalism and rationality and tied these values to social movements for equality and Against institutional authority, including the authority of the patriotic state itself the right evoked Particularism tradition and the defense of authority in the state and the family so in the post 1972 election period Critical universalism could now be articulated by centrist forces wasn't called leftist or Marxist, right? This criticism now could be raised in defense of American national patriotism So we got an emerging consensus and the possibility of a common feeling of moral violation emerged Right, we didn't even realize we'd been raped by Richard Nixon and with it began at the movement toward a generalization and consensus So after the election in a less politicized atmosphere it became safer to exercise social control So the courts the justice department various bureaucratic agencies special congressional committees, but institute Regulations and investigations in a more legitimate way. It wasn't seen as political. It was seen as purifying Right and then the effectiveness of these social control institutions legitimated the media's efforts to spread Watergate pollution closer and closer to central institutions So the exercise of social control and we're getting ever closer to the center of the White House reinforces public doubt about whether Watergate was in fact On the unlimited crime and all this forces more quote-unquote facts to surface So we had never growing fear that Watergate would pose a threat to the center of American society and this spread to increase in portions of the population and to our elites so Question about proximity to the center center meaning the White House Richard Nixon's administration Preoccupied every major group after the 1972 elections. So Senator Howard Baker Articulated this anxiety with the question that became famous during the summertime Senate hearings How much did the president know and when did he know it? but this anxiety about the threat to the center of our society intensified this growing sense of Pollution normative violation we got growing consensus and This rationalized the invocation of coercive social control by the courts and the FBI So we began to realign the good and bad sides of the Watergate symbols which side of the classification System when Nixon and his staff really on So then we got the televised Hearings which constitute what academics will tell you as a liminal experience being a bounded separate experience An experience radically separated from the profane issues of mundane ground grounds of everyday life We got a ritual community created for Americans to share within this reconstructed community None of the polarizing issues that had generated the watergate crisis or the historical justifications that had motivated it could now be raised All right, so imagine someone had been harassing you for years.  There's no context. So now with the Watergate hearings we We reconstitute civic culture which the whole democratic conceptions of political office of dependent We've got this whole new world and the hearings become a word into themselves. They are sui generous They are unique. They are a world without history. His characters don't have memorable pass So this hit these Watergate hearings are in a very real sense. They are outside of time The framing devices of the TV medium contribute to the de-race the nation right removing the the racial and Familiar traditional components that produced this Watergate crisis then we had the in-camera editing the repetition the juxtaposition the simplification other techniques That allow the story to become mythical and that's what we're getting with the war in Ukraine We wouldn't have this mythical battle of good versus evil if we didn't have all this video that could be expertly edited Repeated juxtapose simplified So we get this bracketed experience we get the hushed voices of the announcers We get the pomp and ceremony of the Watergate trial in the US Senate And we have the recipe for constructing within the medium of TV a sacred time in a sacred space and then through TV Tends of millions of Americans participate symbolically and emotionally in the deliberations of the committee just like millions of Americans can participate in this war in Ukraine All right By we can post things on social media to show that we stand with the plucky underdog Ewing becomes morally obligatory old routines are broken new ones are formed and what we see on TV and in social media is A highly simplified drama we get heroes and villains And we're creating deeply serious symbols So Nixon administration witnesses in the Watergate hearings appear to loyalties the ultimate standard that should govern the relationship between subordinates and authorities So the Richard Nixon administration witnesses kept referring to family values and each witness brought his wife and children with him if he had them And you'd see them lined up behind imprim and proper providing symbolic links to the tradition authority and personal loyalty That symbolically bound the groups of backlash culture The overwhelming concern of most Americans, I think is whether a better america will emerge from the trauma of kovat And racial violence that anthony fought you recently characterized as the double whammy If americans do not believe that their agony has produced a better world I think that not only dissolution But social upheaval will follow Now trauma can be physical attacking the body It can also be psychological undermining the emotional security of the self Each level of trauma has been at the center Of american intention these two levels since the kovat crisis exploded in early march Most visible has been the biological in the 14th century Nobody had any idea what caused the black death Or how to treat it much less how to prevent it from ever happening again Today thanks to biological science. We know the pandemic is a virus That it takes over the cellular r.n.a Manufacturing millions of new viral cells. Oh, man. I have collisions complaining that I did the bait and switch jerry alexander speaking pure Torah. You just he's just doing it in symbolic fashion, right? The Torah is there the Torah is lying on the ground Haspa shalom God forbid all you have to do is pick it up And benefit from it all you have to do is drink from it right, so What symbolic work did the u.s senators engage in in the 1973 watergate hearings? All right, they denied the validity of particular sentiments and motives Right, they bracketed the political realities of everyday life and the critical realities of life And just set that aside so at no time in the hearings to the senators ever referred to the polarized struggles of the day Right, we never hear in the news about russia's legitimate concerns about Ukraine and having NATO march up to its borders So the senators by making those struggles invisible the news media by making russia struggles invisible Denied any moral context for the witnesses actions And so just like u.s media has denied any moral context to Putin and russia's actions of invading Ukraine so the strategy of isolating Backlash values the supported by the only positive explanation the senators allowed namely that the conspirators were just plain stupid They poked fun at them as utterly devoid of common sense just like our news media just constantly talks about how mentally ill And depraved and whacked out Vladimir Putin is that no normal person could ever conceive of doing what he's doing So we've got this strategic denial of reality coupled with a ringing and unabashed affirmation of the universalistic myths of the backbone of american civic culture and we see this In the coverage of russia's invasion of Ukraine. We're we're invoking The you know the beauties of democracy and how evil it is to invade another country Even though of course we invaded iraq in 2003 in afghanistan in 2001 So through their questions Statements references gestures and metaphors the senators maintained that every american high or low rich or poor Acts virtuously in terms of the pure universalism of civic society. Nobody is selfish or inhumane No american is concerned with money or power at the expense of fair play. America's never invaded anyone No team loyalty is so strong that it violates common good or makes criticism poor authority unnecessary Truth and justice are the basis of american political society Every citizen is rational will act in accordance with justice if he's just allowed to know the truth Law is the perfect embodiment of justice and political office consists of the application of just law to power and force Max vapor defines power as the ability to force people to do things they don't want to do Because power corrupts office must enforce impersonal obligations in the name of people's justice and reason And we got all these narrative myths that are invoked They're timeless fables stories about the origins of english common law Narratives about the exemplary behavior of america's most sacred presidents john dean the most compelling anti nixon witness Embodied the american detective myth this figure of authority is derived from the puritan tradition An countless different stories as portrayed as ruthlessly pursuing truth and injustice without emotional vanity got other narratives developed The different way for administration witnesses who confessed The committee's priests granted forgiveness in accord with well established ritual forms And their conversions to the cause of righteousness constituted fables for the remainder of the proceedings just like when Russian soldiers give themselves up and surrender and and confess that they don't know what they're doing in ukraine Then they're they're granted forgiveness The senators questions centered on three principal themes Each fundamental to the moral anchoring of civic democratic society They emphasize the absolute priority of office obligations of a personal one Once this is a nation of laws not man was a constant refrain Of course all laws are made by men and they are enforced by men They emphasize the embeddedness of such office obligations in a higher transcended authority The laws of man must give way to the laws of god Whereas sam ervin the committee chairman put it tomorrow stands the ill-fated treasure of nixon's committee to reelect the president Which is more important not violating laws or not violating ethics Finally the senators insisted that this transcendental Anchoring of interest conflicts allowed america to be truly solid a concrete universal As senator law wiker famously put it republicans do not cover up Republicans do not go ahead and threaten god knows republicans don't view their fellow americans as enemies to be harassed There's human beings to be loved and won now No more times these statements would be greeted with derision with hoots and with cynicism just like in normal times Much of the coverage of this russian invasion of ukraine would be greeted with derision Many of the the statements were just plain lies in terms of the specific empirical reality of everyday political life But they weren't laughed at and they weren't hooted down The reason was this was not everyday life russia invading ukraine. It's not everyday life. This has become a sacred conflict Right, it's no longer a power conflict. It's a sacred conflict. It's good versus evil Right, we've got a ritualized and liminal event a separate event a period of intense generalization that has powerful claims of truth That's a sacred time the hearing chambers have become a sacred place ukraines become a sacred space The watergate committee was evoking luminescent values What's not trying to describe empirical fact so on a mythical level the statements could be seen and understood as true As embodying the normative aspirations of the american people And that's how they were seen and that's how they were understood by significant parts of our population That attack the respiratory system while keeping the bodies immune processes at bay Because science understands the biology of our trauma We also know how to protect ourselves from it social distance masks hand washing We do not yet know how to cure the illness nor how to prevent this physical trauma from happening again But the combination of scientific medicine and big pharma capitalism makes us pretty confident for anthony fodgy to a near certainty That eventually we will know these things and be able to resolve covid trauma at the level of the body Emotional trauma has also exploded during the time of covid The human psyche translates fear of biological injury and the separation from others that prevents it into high Okay, so here's the symbolic classification system that was operating in august 1972 Evil the watergate hotel the burglars the dirty tricks as the money raises good nixon FBI courts justice department's prosecution team the federal watchdog bureaucracy an american civil culture Evil was communism fascism shadowy enemies crime corruption personalism bad presidents hiding in grant great scandals teapot dome good democracy the white house americanism law honesty responsibility great presidents such as lincoln and washington and heroic reformers but Two years later the symbols had changed dramatically And once again with russia versus ukraine. It's all about the symbols and separating what's really going on And turning it into a myth so By august 1973 evil He had watergate hotel burglars dirty tricks as money raises employers of creep committee to reelect the president the revolving party Former u.s. Attorney john mitchell secretary of treasury and the president's closest aides good Still the white house the fbi the justice department special prosecutor archibald Cox and senators urban wiker and baker Then In american civil culture good meant great presidents wrote reformers democracy things like that By 1974 the symbols had changed Once again As this whole event becomes ritualized And sacred by anxiety ontological security is undermined by precarity The paranoid imagination once rampant waves of fear and trembling wash over our psyches reports about emotional experience Have permeated factional and fictional media throughout this crisis Here's another quote from that same story in the times a few days ago A third of americans were showing signs of clinical anxiety or depression at the end of april According to an emergency weekly survey of american households carried out by the census bureau In early may half of these of those surveyed said they felt quote down depressed or hopeless double the number Who responded that way in a 2014 survey? This is the scariest thing i've ever seen in my life Said eric weidner 28 the manager of a restaurant in doilstone Pennsylvania on his way to work last week for the first day of the states opening for food servers There's a new genre of called the night news Prescriptions for psychotropic medications are way up. So is alcohol consumption. We know a great deal About emotional responses to this coronavirus Okay, so The war in ukraine has become pictured as a struggle for the for the soul of the world, right? It's a sacred struggle and you on the side of good or you on the side of evil And watergate simply became a battle for the soul of the american republic Watergate had been committed In the name of a cultural and political backlash Values that contradicted universalism critical rationality and tolerance And republicans tried to urge the audience to return to the polarized climate of the 1960s They wanted to justify their actions by appealing to patriotism to the need for stability to Forgo that which is unamerican To the deviant qualities of the govern and the left. They wanted to argue against cosmopolitanism Which undermined respect for tradition and neutralized The commitments to to family into nation and to flag Right. So the administration witnesses appeared to loyalty as the ultimate value Now the u.s. Senators families were utterly invisible. So how did they play the game? He had sam ervin who was always armed with the bible and the constitution the senators and body transcendent justice divorced from personal or emotional concerns And then you had all these rituals such as the swearing in of witnesses raising their right hands each swore to tell the truth before god and man Right. So this had the important function of ensuring moral degradation It reduced the famous and the powerful to the status of every man placed them in subordinate positions piece of e the overpowering universalistic law of the land So the hearings ended without making law without issuing specific judgments Of evidence, but they had profound effects. They established and legitimated a framework that gave the watergate crisis its meaning So it gave americans a clear picture of what is good and evil But the good guys of the watergate process were purified in this sacredizing process through their identification with the constitution norms of fairness And citizen solidarity the perpetrators of watergate Were polluted by association with the symbols of civic evil sectarianism self-interest and particularistic loyalty The hearings restructured the linkages between watergate elements in the nation's political center And now it became clear that the powerful men surrounding president nixon were Implacably associated with watergate evil and nixon's most outspoken enemies were linked to watergate good So the american public found the presidential party and the elements of civic sacredness more and more difficult to bring together Then had archibald cox he was seen as fighting on the side of good president nixon fired him And there was a massive outpouring of spontaneous public anger which newspaper reporters immediately dubbed the saturday night Massacre so americans seemed to view archibald cox firing is a profanation right make profane to make dirty Detachments that they'd built up during the senate hearings the commitments they had to newly revivified sacred tenants and against certain diabolical values and tabooed actors So americans had identified their own positive values and hopes with archibald cox and that his firing made them fear For the pollution of their own ideals and themselves So this event promoted public outrage and an explosion of public opinion Three million letters were sent to the white house in protest over a single weekend weekend So the anxiety of americans was deepened by the fact that pollution had now spread directly to the very figure Who was supposed to haunt american civil religion together the president himself So by firing archibald cox president nixon came into direct contact with the molten law of sacred impurity So the pollution that watergate carried now spread to the very center of american social structure Then you got congressional motions for impeachment Then you had another expansion of pollution occurred when you got the transcripts of white house conversations secretly taped So these tapes contain numerous examples of presidential deceit. They were laced with presidential expletives and ethnic slurs There was great public indignation at nixon's behavior by his words and his recorded actions He had polluted the very tenets that the entire watergate process Had revived the sacredness of truth in the image of america's an inclusive tolerant community So the symbolic and structural centers of american society were separated with nixon Racingly pushed into the polluted evil side of the watergate dichotomy So much of the indignation of a nixon's foul language was informed by conservative beliefs about proper behavior In civil decorum police that are flagrantly violated by nixon's enemies the left during the polarized period That preceded the watergate crisis So here's another bloke That i've been reading i think he's on the organ here Hit it mate Okay, a little bit more here from jeffrey alexander talking about uh watergate as democratic ritual So when we start getting Maneuverings for an impeachment trial in the house the big question was whether president nixon Would be convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors as the constitutional phrase that set forth the standard for impeachment nixon supporters argued for a narrow interpretation And his opponents argued for a broad interpretation that would include issues of political morality irresponsibility and deceit So this was a debate over the level of systemic crisis Was it just legal issues involved or did this crisis reach all the way to the most general values underpinning the entire system? So given the highly ritualized format of the hearings and the tremendous symbolism that had preceded the committee's deliberations Hardly seen possible the committee could have adopted anything other than the broad interpretation of high crimes and misdemeanors And then we we got the media's ever-recurring emphasis on the politician's fairness and objectivity of their procedures Right journalists kept remarking on how congressmen rose to the occasion presented themselves not as political representatives of particular interests But as embodiments of sacred civil documents and democratic mores So this transcendence of white partisan division Was echoed by a cooperation among the judiciary committee's staff Which set the tone for the committee's formal televised deliberations The key members of the staff had been critics of the establishment during the 1960s But the whole partisan background never publicly surfaced during the vast generalistic coverage of the Committee's work even right when conservatives never made an issue of it. Why does this committee? I get set at counterpart a year before existed in a detached sacred place They operated within sacred time their deliberations continuous not with the immediate partisan pass But with the great constitutive moments the american republic they were framed as the great patriots Just like those who signed the declaration of independence created the u.s. Constitution and resolved the crisis of the union that started the civil war So we've got this sacred transcendent space Moved even many conservative members of the committee southerners whose constituents voted for nexon by landslide proportions Who act out of conscience rather than for political expedience and the southern bloc formed the key to the majority coalition That emerged to support three articles of impeachment Then after nexon resigned from office the relief in the american society was palpable president Gerald Ford took over and there were a series of symbolic transformations that indicated ritualistic changes President Ford in his first words after taking office announced that our long national nightmare is over Newspaper headlines proclaimed the sun had finally broken through the clouds that a new day was born Americans effused about the strength and unity of the country Ford was transformed through these special rituals and rites from a bumbling partisan leader into a national healer the Incarnation of the good guy who embodied the highest standards of ethical and political behavior Then within a few months we returned to the grubby normal world of politics and uh jimmy carter was elected as this change but uh many of the The sacred values that supposedly been fought for with watergate. They started getting in the way of getting things done so In the immediate post watergate Period we had this heightened sensitivity to the general meaning of political office What is democratic responsibility? And we got a whole series of scandals right when we when we magnify Our moral vision we see korea gate and and billy gate and wine gate and then later we get moniker gate Then we had a whole series of unprecedented congressional investigations Nelson rockefeller Ford's vice presidential nominee was subjected to a long and heated tv inquiry into the possible misuses of his personal wealth He had enormous televised investigations launched by congress into the secret Of an anti-democratic workings of the cia and the fbi. These are institutions whose patriotic authority had previously been unquestioned But these little water gates extended well into the carder administration Jimmy Carter's chief assistant, but lance was forced out of office or minor minor league Impropriety each of these investigations created scandals in their own right And they followed off and down to the smallest detail and were the symbolic forms established by watergate He got all these new reform movements generated From the watergate spirit. We got the society for investigative reporting All right new organization responded to the spurt of morally inspired critical journalism By those journalists who had internalized the watergate experience It sought to externalize its model He got federal crime investigators lawyers and policemen forming white collar Crime units throughout the united states He had prosecutorial resources shifted away from conventionally defined lower-class criminals to high status office hoarders in public and private domains became An established a priori conviction that many city-state federal prosecutors that office hoarders May very well commit crimes against the product of the public and we should ferret them out and prosecute them And the citizens must remain morally alert So Following watergate we got authority was critically examined at every institutional level of american society The boy scouts rewrote their constitution to emphasize not just loyalty and obedience, but also critical questioning The judges of the black miss america beauty pageant were accused of personalism and bias All these professional groups rewrote their codes of ethics student body officers of high schools and universities were caught to task if the little scandals were created City councilors and mayors were exposed in every city great and small And through it all the vividness of watergate's impure symbols remained strikingly intact Now the spirit of watergate eventually subsided Nixon had ridden a backlash against the left And now there's a backlash against the reform movement the jimmy carter embodied ronald reagan is swept into office on many of the old backlash issues that even in the reagan How to begin his presidency by promising the american people i will never lie to you He ended up by making a strong presidency his principal campaign slogan By the time reagan became president he could openly disdain any conflict of interest laws But the iran contra affair of 1986 87 demonstrated both sides of the watergate affair These events never reached the crisis proportions of watergate But without the memory of watergate Doubtful the administration's actions would have been so easily and quickly Transformed into a mass major affair Then 10 years later another american president learned this lesson with monica gate in a much harder way So the bottom line is scandals are not born They are made Even if this knowledge is less precise than a biological understanding What people suffer from is an anxiety disorder related to traumatic stress something like a real-time version of ptsd There are therapies to treat this condition chemical and interpersonal, but nothing can prevent it from occurring Fear of biological danger and death and maintaining social isolation to prevent it trigger emotional trauma Feeling physically vital and emotionally connected to others is essential to our psychological security There is however another level of trauma that covered has triggered While there's a lot of talk around it. It's rarely been explicitly Thematized either by experts or by people in the weeds of everyday covid life Yes, trauma is biological and emotional, but it can also be social Challenging the collective identity that anchors a group's cultural security The stories we have been telling ourselves about ourselves are turned upside down Okay, so i've been reading some books by patrick b a e r t bayard he's from He is from Is he from belgium, okay? Okay, so i've been reading books on the sociology of intellectuals And one of them came out in 2016 public intellectuals in the global arena professors or pundits So i was also reading on pundits and Think the best thing i read is that we should classify pundits on the basis of their entertainment value so patrick bayard his underlying perspective on on intellectuals is positionism so we're all but His focus is on intellectuals in particular we're always trying to Prior to the 1950s prior to the 1960s. We had authoritative public intellectuals So they thrive in a very particular setting people like john paul sart and bertrand rossol, right? They thrive In societies in which a significant section of the population values intellectual life and in which The cultural intellectual capital is concentrated within a small elite So they thrive in a hierarchical educational context with hierarchical referring to a clear distinction not only between elite institutions and other higher education establishments but also between high and low status disciplines So Authoritative public intellectuals exist independently of academic appointments because of independent resources gained from family wealth or successful exploitation of the media of the time bookwriting print journalism In the first half the 20th century broadcasting in the second half So authoritative intellectuals authoritative public intellectuals surface when the academic setting is amorphous With limited specialization when social sciences are poorly professionalized As a very specific context the authoritative public intellectuals like john paul sart and bertrand rossol had a field day They were steeped in high-profile disciplines like philosophy and mathematics. They had the confidence of an elite upbringing They spoke to a wide range of social and political issues without being criticized for their dilatantism But what has changed since then philosophy has lost status people can no longer make sense of it The analytic philosophy that that dominates the anglo-world makes makes no sense to ordinary people The the trends in philosophy such as postmodernism neopragmatism just Under mind the supposed superiority of philosophy over other vocabularies We've got uh don't do his pragmatism Which is not really a big crowd pleaser and then we've got all these developments outside of philosophy So the social sciences have emerged since the 1950s as a significant force. They've been professionalized That was more difficult philosophers or others without appropriate training and expertise in the social sciences to make authoritative creative claims about the nature of life so ethicists and philosophers Reasoned from their feelings. All right, social scientists are supposedly Data-driven so social scientists have proven to be much more useful And to have much more prestige and much more funding than philosophers and ethicists and clergy So we've got a massive expansion in the ranks of professional social scientists So there are now lifelong specialists in the areas that public intellectual philosophers used to comment on and these social scientists a much better place to contest These generalist interventions and call them what they are uninformed and superficial Also, we have higher educational levels for larger sections of society So the odd distinction between intellectual elite and the rest no longer holds to the same extent With higher education comes growing skepticism towards epistemic and moral authority. So intellectual life tends to consistently develop in ways that make it more and more abstract and Reflexive reflexive means how do I know what I know? To what extent is my situation my upbringing my perspective to what extent is the observant integral part of the data? So more higher education you get more skepticism more recognition of the fallibility of knowledge and more awareness of the existence of alternative perspectives so The authoritative public intellectuals would speak above and at their audience and that's no longer acceptable So print and broadcast media become less differential. They are more willing to challenge the statements of politicians and other public figures And this is assisted by the arrival of journalists with higher education and subject Specialism So we've got all these social forces working against the authoritative public intellectual. So what has emerged in its place the vlogger right and We've got expert public intellectuals These usually public intellectuals drawing on their professional knowledge derived from their research in social and natural sciences And then they're well engaged with wider social and political issues that go far beyond their narrow expertise Social scientists are much better placed to act as expert public intellectuals They are equipped with well-rehearsed methods and specializations in analyzing contemporary social and political phenomena Then we have the rise of the dialogical public intellectual. That's the vlogger Right contrary to both authoritative and expert public intellectuals Dialogical public intellectuals do not assume a superior stance towards their public Do you see me standing here assuming a superior stance toward you? No, I am here in dialogue Right, I believe in radical love and inclusion Right. I am the vlogger as dialogical public intellectual Right. I present myself as an equal. I've got as much to learn from you, bro Philosophy as its practice in the academy is increasingly removed from the rough and tumble of contemporary society When we had that big economic crash that global financial meltdown in 2008 didn't have many philosophers speaking out in a way that resonated with with the public So in the wake of the collapse of communism the general public has also become much more wary of theories about what a future society should look like And now we've got bloggers and vloggers We're channeling the voice of the people. We're offering a more intimate personal kind of authority in place of the impersonal authority of journalists So what we assert through the use of That messages is that there's no difference between Ourselves and the audience that we've got a democratic form of positioning Right, and this provides intellectuals with the necessary credibility To disseminate their ideas. So the strategic advantage of the dialogical public intellectual in the current constellation Explains his rise in various domains So the whole notion of positioning is a significant component of the story. Loponius is in the house Well, speaking of a dialogical public intellectual We've got Loponius in the house man, I have streamed like 40 is so aggressive tonight. I wonder what's up. I'm just excited by these books. I've been reading And I read this great essay by law professor paul hallwitz the blogger is public intellectual, right? This came out in this 2016 book I have the internet and the blogosphere and the youtube the youtubes open up new vistas for public intellectuals Do public intellectuals acting as bloggers and vloggers operate any differently than do traditional public intellectuals? Taking advantage of other conventional communications media The public intellectuals have benefited from the rise of communications media such as radio tv But the blog offers unique benefits And we are opening up new vistas So the ethic of the blog is made up of three core qualities immediacy connectivity and feedback right Blogospheric and blogging norms encourage quick reactions to current events to hot takes Whether these events are occurring in one's own life or across the world A blogger or blogger who sits on an event or an idea risk having that idea a news item becomes stale Stale is a problem in a quickly moving environment like youtube and blogging Where there are countless competitors all of whom operate at low cost and are equally capable of being Accessed instantly by readers of viewers. So the blogosphere and the blogosphere had no place for idle And contemplative writers and bloggers if you have more to say about something you couldn't always write a new post later In the meantime, the race goes to the swiftest immediacy, however is no guarantee of depth The faster ones reactions less likely there to contain any depth at all Many blog posts in light of the desire to be first to link to a new story become simple Aggregation posts posts that do no more than link to a story or to commentary on other blogs without adding any content Other than the obligatory interesting or read the whole thing Initial posts may promise later posts offering more in deeper analysis Such promises are often forgotten in the press of events or superseded by other developments Man that's great stuff.  I mean it's pretty hard right What are some of the downsides of public intellectuals taking to youtube and to blogs many public intellectuals talk about events that are not within their expertise Though there will be time when genuine experts are quick to respond to an event with valuable analysis There is no guarantee There will be any faster than an ever larger number of non experts will be happy to bloviate with stunning rapidity on issues About which they know little or nothing. That's what I look around at the other vloggers And I think come on you blowhards You're just bloviating on issues in which you know nothing Intellectuals are often captive to their own passions, especially when they're responding in real time Now some expert intellectuals are skilled at communicating to a general educated audience. I've got 14 viewers right now Others are not and non experts may be more eloquent or provocative Even especially if they lack more than surface knowledge of the subject Yes, I look around at all these people vlogging and they hardly ever read a book man. Come on Come on man Grace for the attention of the viewer goes not only to the swiftest but also to the most interesting and provocative There's no guarantee that the winners will be mostly thoughtful or expert writers If anything the ongoing academicization of expertise makes this less likely to happen Academic work encourages habits of mind and habits of writing that limits one's audience to other academics and other specialists within the ones I feel that's my problem here. I've got in the chat I've got like 14 viewers and 12 probably are phd's To become an academic is a time-consuming enterprise. It takes years to be credentialed as an academic Still more to gain an academic reputation gaining that reputation requires the academic to write specifically for his peers In a format that is not accessible Either in terms of style or content in straight physical and financial terms in terms of the forum of the publication Even in the internet age academic journals journals are expensive and hard to find We write on narrow topics and we write to be read and understood by the few not the many So the blogosphere and the blogosphere is unquestionably a boon for the would-be public intellectual It is a counterweight to the academicization of intellectual output that created barriers to the flourishing of public intellectuals It offers rooms the non-academic public intellectual And it lowers the opportunity cost of engaging in general public intellectual work by academics It democratizes the function of the public intellectual It offers a way around the traditional gatekeepers allows a much wider range of people to make genuine contributions to a true dialogue This is a place of radical love and inclusion the narrative of public intellectuals In decline there was so much in vogue a mere decade or so ago is now in need of Considerable revision Okay, let's see what some of our greatest public intellectuals are talking about then they laugh at you then they fight you Then you win.  He's just fat.  He's a cokehead They'll never turn on me. I was I was in the debate club.  You're under investigation. You got to testify at january 6 turn over all the documents And you know the optics of saying you're an incel and you're creating 10 000 terrorists Oh, it washes over me. No, it's exciting. It's exciting There is something at the end end of the show very end of the show.  Who knew One tweet They'll never let you in hashtag el chapo Turned into the end of a man's life really And by the way, he was supposed to fly down and do kill stream over our time slot Because we now are the official owners of this time slot. I'm gonna fly down He gets felted by the airline. They cancel it The next day Like it's one and then it goes Looks like I'm gonna try some of these early and he puts a picture of a Of a pack of cigars But then people you know what they did they put dildos instead and started retweeting that so it looked like I'm gonna try out these early.  There are some downsides to Public intellectuals there like uh, Pino Casino and Reis warsky All right, much of public intellectual blogging and blogging routinely involves a good deal of illegitimate trading on authorities on authority Many academics are wrongly convinced that they are smart about everything not just their own Corner of their own subject Now some public intellectuals carefully limit their public writing to their own area of academic specialization But many write about the same broad political and cultural subjects that all public intellectuals turn to and in doing so They are more than happy to flaunt their academic credentials No matter how irrelevant they are to the subject at hand Many public intellectuals are also capable of being ruled by the passions and even though blogging Public intellectuals are much more likely to find a wider audience for their work that audience is not necessarily going to be much more politically diverse so When you grip by the passions the immediacy that is one of the core aspects of the ethic of blogging Exhaust based these tendencies are removing even the slightest time for reflection and incentivizing intellectuals to write quickly in the grip of their convictions They are less likely to write with humility or to second-guess themselves They are more likely to make unnecessary predictions to adopt an unwarranted air of certainty assume the worst of their opponents Right with a hot tempered boy. See what's happening to Kino Casino andy warsky here. Otherwise these these are men are known for for their gravitas For their deep learning But they're they're in the grip of their passions another downside to public intellectuals blogging and blogging is the evanescence The fleeting nature of the blogosphere and the blogosphere Now notice that many academic legal scholars are successful in the blogosphere also economists Do really well in the blogosphere so much of human activity and current events intersects with law and economics So they never lack the subjects legal academics more than social scientists tend to be intellectual Parasites they borrow tools and perspectives from whatever field of knowledge seems handy or trendy So the fast turnaround that the blogosphere prefers is made easier for the lawyer by their main skill Which is to engage in skillful if often half informed logic chopping Me as in lore Oh Now it's crazy now before we Cater in I just want to uh, I show you all something something that was being passed around so you all want to know So what is Ralph's connection with medicare well medicare helped blow up of his show as we all know And then slowly as ralph started fucking up medicare less and less would show up, right? Till we hit this i'm gonna pull this up here ashton you May or may not have seen this All right, let's have a look all right. Here we go. This is from an old kill stream here All right. Do you see this on your screen? I I see it. Um, I'm not sure if I can believe what i'm i'm reading But uh, okay, let's uh, I actually haven't seen this shit I've been kind of busy this week. I got my new place set up.  Yeah His life's back on track folks. He doesn't have to sleep on a couch anymore folks And then we have some dough knows to yeah you congratulations, bro Here we go everyone check this out that golden voice the docile docile tones of of internet aristocrat While i'm hitting it. Yeah, I probably See fantasizing about jim's velvety voice here is Wait ralph no Wait, wait, wait, hang on This is from 2015 by the way He's probably got muscles. He's probably like strapping his foot.  Yeah, that's his example Of an attractive I've never even seen broke back. I didn't even know jake gillen hall is in But he's talking about jake gillen hall shirtless and broke back mountain That was his example of an attractive male. He has to pick the gays. This isn't the first time right?    You can't call yourself an incel. It's not right. It's diminishes This sounds like some like sjw like you're subtracting from the real lived experience of trans people or black people You're my lived experience is important and you're taking that away from me.  I feel like you and I have gone through a lot of the same things You're mayor.    Is that what he's saying? Holy shit, man What black and pussy will do to a man like rpg's in chat um Yeah, he's confirming the chi almost got kicked out of of america first because all he suggested was Maybe we should be looking for women, you know, maybe that's a good idea At least like the bible says that we should be fruitful and multiply and jesus says in matthew 19 that This reason a man and a woman should join together like it's the purpose of life That's like no st paul sat in first carinthian six That it would be better if you weren't having sex Well, yeah, but you have to look at the context of that book that paul's writing to the church at corinth Or the romans are literally coercing christians by killing their family members Persecution of that time was so great. Talk about persecution today was nothing like in roman times There's there's in the united states. You're not being killed for being a christian So it's a false equivalency You have to look at the context of when that letter was written and what it was about and he still says in that letter It would it would be better if you weren't to be married because of the circumstance However, because you burn with lust i permit you to marry that this is not a commandment Oh, it's just baffling what nick's coming up with any takes matthew 1912 out of complete context Whole point of matthew 19 is to establish marriage and the purpose for it And show like our lives on this earth the purpose for our lives is to come together with a woman And form a union and have children and raise a family. That's matthew 19 takes verse 12 About eunuchs out of context. It's like see guys. There's eunuchs that are made for it. It's just sad It's just sad, but we'll get to that when we get to the chai clip stuff But nick doesn't even know He doesn't even know what he's talking about.  It's like you're king.  I wish we were healthy At you That's what you're doing You know, I mean I'm just I'm just gonna steal the valor. I'm just I'm just I'm playing in stolen valor here stolen virgin Valor, you know a vv Like imagine comparing being an incel to being a soldier that risks your life for the military You know conservatives are supposed to for the most part applaud the military. I know it's fashionable today But I mean most normal conservatives out there in the heartland love the troops and would find this very insulting Again, this is supposed to be optical for normal people I'm sorry. Yeah, that's there.  I understand what the veterans must feel like when you're doing that for the veterans Talking about blood gulch I laugh now.    Oh A bigger blacker and better than Beardson for 10 says girls have cooties. I'm ready to shoot up something help me nick Um, okay, mr. Cuckold for five. Hope you're having a great night question for ppp Were you ever a listener or a watcher of true capitalist radio? Ghost or jesus chat line back in the day Also, i'm taking a massive greasy dump and andy is an athelo looking as more Okay, I don't know about those shows. I don't think I've ever watched them. Um Of you. No never heard of them. Sorry about that, bud And paul you the frog 64. What's up paul?  Can anyone confirm if Beardson's No, i'm gonna read that at all. Don't don't read that.    Yeah, thank you everyone for supporting the show.  What's that ring? Yeah, yeah meltdown in front of that joking, but This is how the movement actually operates. They're like con you have a girlfriend.  Do they understand that if they don't have kids The movement will die in this generation. Do they understand that? Well, I was reading patrick Buchanan's uh death of the west this week I read it again because it's one of the foundational books of the america first movement and the paleo conservative movement And the whole thing is about how the west is dying due to a declining birth rate And that women are gonna have to have four children in order to support pensioners in the elderly in the future Or else we're gonna have mass immigration, which they're so opposed to Then they're gonna shame men for having wives and girlfriends and wanting to have children It just doesn't make any sense.    It's from uh an island, right? Oh It was from california Oh, aliyah roger.   This is crazy And if you think it's like this I mean more show stuff for us We'll never run out guys.  He's talking about how he's a full-on revolutionary Can you imagine nick fuentes picking up a rifle and like going into war?  It's just delusional. It's not it's not attached to reality He's just how was he revolutionary? He has his bank accounts frozen or removed.  I was just talking about how to take over so-and-so and remove these so-and-so people on a boat I don't know why you were banned.  This is all going to be used to entrap his followers Get out now if you're still in So crazy by the way, I got a lot of DMs from people Today who are like done with Ralph Like they're like, hey man. Congrats. Congrats. Okay. I'm done with Ralph. Like, you know I was trying to hold on That's three people so far today viking poodle for three got go fellas. Thanks for the keynote This has been one hell of a show. Thank you and for another three says the same thing.     You're in the debate club You're not a soldier. Why is he saying these things like what's the killer? Like you're not a killer, dude. You're not about that life. I'm not about that life either.  You're not about that life.  Wait a minute. What what's going to do more for the movement or for whites or for whatever? What's going to do more having 10 children and being a productive pillar of society?    Yeah, all right. Let's let's briefly. We'll play some of nick. He's addressing the keno casino on america first Once again, first they ignore you then they laugh at you then they fight you then they win We're now at stage two. He can no longer ignore the success of the show Let's face it. We actually have way more organic engagement than nick does Like I would bet i'll say we have more nightly viewers for this show than nick had this past day like for real Like it might say 8 000 but look at the chat Art is moving faster.  It didn't pop up. Sorry tuesday, but Thank you for trying to support us. We really appreciate it But uh, yeah check it out Hitler six thousands is hey nick really great to have you back man Did you see that fat wignad and andy warsky had that female super chatter on a group of real winners?  People love it. I'm having a great time. You're having a great time The internet is enjoying it a lot of podcasts have talked about it. Well, look at our viewer number 14 Now Now we are the wignad yikes Wignad tribe. Okay You take a look at my detractors and it's almost an argument for how awesome I am in itself You know, you've got a drug addict and a fat guy and then you've got this psycho And they're all doing a stream He's talking about daisy. Yeah, daisy the psycho. Oh, she's banned from af Oh Daisy we'll get her on next week too to ask for her take Yeah Tell me I mean that that's the face of the the loyal opposition to america first.  Oh, I he's clearly Pay It's good. I love it. He's giving me like free promotion.  Oh Oh, how times have changed, huh? Oh, how times have changed outers Continue So we have a griper here lethal brawler for three organic viewership y'all just clout chase nick I met both nick and anime right as irl and they pass on free pussy while y'all stay desperate Yeah, yeah, I'll do the classic Ralph. Thanks for the three Thank you Uh drug addicts and uh, no, I wish I was an incel like like nick, you know, I wish I like this is the You're when you can talk about drug addicts fatty like this is the thing I can get on an airplane I can have a bank account I'm not being investigated by the feds. I don't have to testify before congress not an incel like I don't know nick. Um, you're having a tough time bro having a tough time. I'll say Psycho and everybody got on my case. They're like, oh this girl asked him out He had a meltdown and then she goes on the stream and she's like 30 and on anti-depressants You know, even he liked the segment, you know, he's laughing at it He watched the whole segment. He watches the show. He enjoys it But he's like A girl asked him out and he got mad That's not normal. That's not normal. Who heard him?  No, he's this. He's broken. He's this Well, none of us were saying that he needed to date daisy. We were just saying like to politely be like I'm not interested super chats. Isn't the correct forum move on with your show where you're discussing serious politics It's 10 minutes 13 minutes long You know, that's what we were like.  She's been cancelled. Oh, I don't think so And then she's dirty and on anti-depressants Go figure That's my life Whatever So, yeah, that was pretty funny. People wonder why I am the way that I am they're like Someone some girl I've never seen a real man.   It doesn't started 30 years old on anti-depressants by the way, go figure So I'm 23. Yeah, let me shack up with someone seven years older than me It's just what is there even to say? All context removed at the point, you know the whole gay stuff everything The being an incel and then ceding like that is it's been a culmination of everything.   Who's the winner? Nick, you know like what about tim hidekker? Isn't he a winner? Isn't he like a tv show like big time celebrity that people love and adore a multi-millionaire?     Who's the real retard nick?  What book have you been reading? And I've been reading conflict in the academy a study in the sociology of intellectuals. This fascinating book came out in 2015 So in according to a review in late 1980 a minor dispute at cambridge university became headline news Question was whether or not the young lecturer column mccabe His work was heavily influenced by recent developments in structuralist and post-structuralist theory. So structuralism in literary criticism is different than structuralism in International relations. So in literary theory structuralism challenges the belief that work of literature reflects a given reality State of text is considered constitutive linguistic conventions and situated among other texts So structuralist critics analyze material by examining underlying structures such as characterization or plot Attempt to show how these patterns are universal could be used to develop general conclusions about both individual works and the systems From which they emerged for the anthropologist Claude Levy Strauss was an important champion of structuralism As was roman Jacobson, north prized attempts to categorize western literature by archetype as some basis in structuralist thought So structuralism regards language as a closed stable system and by the late 1960s had given way to post structuralism so The so-called colin mccabe affair had swore to heroic proportions drew vast media attention became invested with considerable moral and symbolic Significance generating waves that are still felt in english faculties today There are some highlights from this fascinating 2015 book So we tend to view social conflict as a dysfunctional destructive even Pathological form of social interaction harming individuals and groups through tearing the cohesive social fabric But social conflict is able to serve a variety of productive social functions It allows for the communication of dissatisfaction He finds group boundaries that provides an impetus for more adequate forms of social organization increase the social integration for in-group members And so once the mccabe affair became public social pressure increased of participants to take sides So rather than simply revealing pre-existing divisions controversy Created and solidified them and strengthened and simplified antagonistic identities So public disputes by their nature garner attention And they generate grist for the journalistic mill and this attention enables participants to engage in what norman mail accord advertisements for myself So colin mccabe's subsequent career three years later was head of production at the british film institute Then he was professor of english at the university of pittsburgh and later on professor of english at xeter university Kind of renders the notion of him as a victim somewhat of a misnomer as he readily admits the mccabe affair Nailed me to leave cambridge trailing clouds of glory and an overinflated reputation He writes so his academic writing benefited from events His publishers quickly cottoned on to the commercial value of what was described as Cambridge university's worst academic controversy for a generation With impressive speed and only two weeks after the senate house discussion publishers took out an advertisement in the The tls that's a big book review the Bearing potential customers with the explicitly elusive strap line controversial and original three books by colin mccabe So english literature began to develop as a discipline Just after the great war just after world war one it rapidly eclipsed the classics meaning Learning greek and latin is the central humanities discipline Where the cambridge school characterized by its critical and analytical approach to literature In distinction to oxford's philological and scholarly one philological the meaning of words So the influential zealous bolshevik and highly opinionated fr levis was key in championing the essential importance of the discipline In cambridge and beyond and establish what became the orthodox humanistic approach to analyzing literature until the 1960s now Experienced world war two provoked suspicion toward this belief in the humanizing forces of an education in english literature Since it's now impossible to ignore how little humanistic Occulturation had done to avert the barbarity of war He now know that a man can read gutter a rocket in the evening He can play bark and schubert and go to his day's work at auschwitz in the morning To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ears gross is cant their forces of pluralism Battled their way into the study of english literature In the 1960s and 70s especially outside of oxford and cambridge so Novelist and literary professor malcolm bradbury described his own career through english departments during the 1950s when i was a student The dominant mood in the study of english literature was a moral and humane one Literary studies with the essential humanist subject But with the expansion and increased professionalization of the subject the tune changed There was a hunger for literary science by the 1960s a volatile mix of linguistics psychoan analysis semiotics meaning the study of words and symbols structuralism marxist theory and reception aesthetics Replaced the order moral humanism for the literary text moved towards the status of a phenomenon a socio-psychocultural linguistic and ideological event Rising from the offered competencies of language the available taxonomies of narrative order the permutations of genre The sociological options of structural formation and the ideological constraints of the info infrastructure And the emergence of theory in english departments was not merely an import from abroad such as most obviously france But was also an import from other disciplines such as the social and human sciences So wider society After world war two also began to turn away from poems plays and novels as their primary source of cultural expression and experience And a minority of the cambridge english faculty suggested those media could get attention McCabe was interested in cinema And developed a screen theory so the expansion of the term culture to cover Films and tv and practices and creations beyond the restriction zones what we called high culture Was a characteristically social scientific and anthropological move Now fr leave us had been clear that genuine culture Don't he ever be the preserve of a gifted tiny minority whose role it was to protect against the majority's philistineism Where to guide where possible guide the cultural discrimination of the masses? Do you take notes while reading? Yes, I often do john smith That's how I retain so Though more consequential than the colin mccabe affair as an event the watergate scandal Was even more simple in its symbolic dimension the struggle was over whether the facts of the break-in The watergate hotel were to be taught at the level of everyday goals and interests grubby politics as usual Is the nix administration wished or as eventually took place the more sacred levels of social norms and values Hence signaling the need for fundamental purification and renewal So the majority of the actors in the colin mccabe affair these english literature academics at cambridge Made their living from the professional analysis and use of the english language So they were therefore highly sensitive to the power of drama oration and rhetoric As well as the seduction of linguistic aesthetic that added to the quality and theatricality of the events rendering them particularly amenable to dramaturgical analysis The argumentation by its very nature has a tendency toward rhetorical escalation Process which often it triumphs over whatever pacifying intentions actors may start out with So the pro camp in this fight was the camp the supporter colin mccabe the marxist and structuralist getting 10 year teaching english at cambridge university And they secured the senate house at cambridge is the stage upon which the main debate would be acted out so cambridge Is a highly ritualistic university and the senate house in particular holds a privileged place within the university's ritualistic geography It is the university's burning core. It is distinctly hallowed grass So you've got a stage And you've got tendencies towards the willing suspension disbelief. Now, this is only successful if the actors collude in playing by the script Which accords with the set and the anti's those who wanted to get rid of colin mccabe had no intention of doing so. So the anti's counter strategy Was to lower the tone of the proceedings to de-sacralize the event the private of its ritual status expose the performance as mere playing games and Fake drama and return it to the level of the profane So I remember often when I've been in trouble with the rabbis. They create, you know, very sacred occasions to drill into me How dangerous my writing or my behavior is That one tactic to return the proceedings to the level of profane Is to use humor and casual indifference to undermine the pros efforts towards impression management So in contrast to the sacred and solemn tone that by the austere neoclassical building The jocular triviality with which many of the anti's delivered their own performance Signaled to the 600 strong audience at any sense of security in the knowledge that colin mccabe supporters had already lost the battle But also that the mccabe affair had nothing at all of the sacred about it. So humor Especially when it is widespread evokes Collective and contagious laughter Collective and contagious laughter and has an advantage in symbolic struggles. It encourages shared effervescence It solidifies a sense of community amongst those who are in on the joke And it avoids the necessity to employ outright invective Which runs the risk of losing favor with one's audience So the use of humor if effective in the listing amusement acts as a shield and an alibi for degrees of offense It would be unthinkable in its absence So the capacity of humor to draw factions of the audience and perform it together in shared amusement Often combined with a variety of other rhetorical techniques such as sarcasm Insincere politeness pretends sympathy and surrealism Which draw their performative power from the dramatically potent realm of play now Audiences collude in determining a performance as dramatic success. I could not do this without you All right. I am the dialogical public intellectual All right performers know this so successful performance Is a co-creation. I could not do this without you you and me. We're making this show together So I need your input. I need your feedback. I learned from you So both sides of the social interface that constitutes a performance are required to play along for this symbolic communication to come off effectively You even have reception aesthetics Of course I do bro Okay, so for the pro's case to hold legitimacy that to raise the central issue at stake mccabe's non-reappointment To the level of the sacred that to demonstrate that is failure to receive a permanent Lecture ship revealed that the central values of the faculty and of the university were under threat right So the higher values of fairness intellectual openness of pluralism had been violated So they had to make the case that a crisis had occurred and the ritual purification and renewal is therefore necessary Just like those who say That russia invading ukraine is not just some grubby typical great power Behavior. No, this is a crisis. We're violating all these higher values or these sacred values and we need ritual purification and renewal The counter strategy by the anti's was to disrupt this projected definition of the situation and to desacralize McCabe's non-reappointment by claiming the decision was taken at the profane level of routine appointment considerations So on the performance level that so much attention was paid to the these events was taken as an indication that something untoward Must indeed have occurred Then a decade following the departure of colin mccabe another affair exploded in cabridge with the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to deny the university from awarding an honorary doctorate to the french philosopher jox very da Sometimes a very collective existence seems called into question Cultural trauma is a wound to us. However, this us is defined To take a commonplace example in new heaven where I live It's been a great shock to the community that a restaurant named clark's has permanently Shut down the gritty down at the heels landmark on whitney avenue had been a mainstay vl social life for 75 years To give another example of more serious imports during the crisis the three months of crisis and shutdown Many new yorkers experienced the traumatic disappearance of their city Can this be new york people exclaimed at the site of empty streets darkened theaters lifeless shops But it's a national level of collective identity that concerns me here the cultural trauma that is afflicting america Not as a collection of individual bodies Or psyches but as a social group COVID has challenged the story americans have long told themselves about the greatness of our nation Okay, that will do it for me Take care