What Hofstadter brought to American intellectual life, to use that term loosely, was the same spin. If you respond in a normal or prudent way to Communist threats, you are paranoid. So we see that Hofstadter wasn’t even very original. He took an off-the-shelf idea used by Communists to discredit their opposition, and watered it down by the simple device of substituting the word “paranoid” for the word “insane.” The Communists in Russia call their enemies insane. The far-left in the United States called their enemies paranoid. Same trick.
The word “style” is the important novelty in Hofstadter’s sophistry. Style is something you personally select. It’s optional, it’s superficial, it’s like a new wool suit. If the suit doesn’t fit right, if it itches, if it makes you look foolish, that is entirely your fault. You chose the suit. If you had any brains, the sophistry suggests, you would not choose this particular style.
Hofstadter summed up his insight this way: “The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization.” Yes, Richard, and who started this verbal extremism?
Karl Marx announced that the first order of business was to abolish all private property. The second order of business was to abolish all religion (and force everyone to worship in the Temple of Communism). The third order of business was to abolish most of the things that most people valued about Western civilization. Stalin and his successors were salivating at the hope of overrunning Europe, and eventually crushing America. That was surely the end of civilization, unless people did man the barricades.
The Communists brought a new Dark Ages to Russia. They wanted to bring the same blessings to the entire planet. But the instant you showed the least bit of concern, fear, worry, or hostility, Hofstadter declared you paranoid. And paranoid was bad, very bad.
Now this sophistry seems to me silly, like the visual one when you pretend to snatch a child’s nose, and the child believes you did!
After all, what is the braino professor doing here but name-calling? So’s your old man! How deep is that?
Richard Hofstadter was a member of the Young Communist League and later progressed to Communist Party membership. He was in a tiny cult but wanted to pretend the other 99.99% of the population is sick. It’s natural Hofstadter would write propaganda for his side. What’s not natural is that thousands of professors would use his propaganda in the classroom to persuade millions of students that anyone too dumb to be a liberal was less than human. In sum, Hofstadter came up with a wee bit of logical linguini and it was treated with reverence from colleges in California to universities in Boston, and by all the high-level institutions and publications in between. That supercilious reverence is the problem.
I write a lot about education now; and the bottom line for me is that the decay in the public schools is possible only because so-called “progressives” adroitly manipulate our intellectual life. I’ve argued that American public education is a swamp of sophistry. Everything is sort of a trick that promises one thing and ends up delivering another. Embrace New Math and nobody can count. Adopt Whole Word and kids can’t read. Let Constructivism into the school and kids learn little. Similarly, accept Hofstadter’s thinking and you’ll feel no alarm as clever subversives undermine your culture. Well, praise where it’s due, our Education Establishment does one thing really well, sophistry. The only way we can improve public schools is to identify the sophistries one by one and eliminate them. One good place to start is with Hofstadter’s claim that fearing your enemies is irrational. On the contrary. As far as I can tell, the biggest enemies of public education are the people in charge of it. Until they do a better job, we should fear them.
Here’s another bit of this vacuous essay: “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years, we have seen angry minds at work, mainly among extreme right-wingers.” Methinks Hofstadter doth protest too much. Doesn’t he sound angry to you? And really paranoid? Isn’t he projecting his own bitterness and rage onto the world? He says in effect: “Listen, you primitive people. All we want to do is destroy your society. You shouldn’t be upset. You should be grateful. After all, we’re so much smarter than you, and know all the answers. If you’re upset, that can only be because you’re psycho. Try to get over it.” Along with anger and paranoia, can’t we also detect high levels of arrogance in the professor’s “style”?
(Disclaimer: Richard Hofstadter wrote a lot of famous books and is probably much smarter than I am. My only point is that his essay is a cheap shot and is typically used in a slimy, propagandistic way. For a look at other sophistries popular in college classrooms, see “9: Philosophy Weeps” on Improve-Education.org.)
----------------------------------------------
That's entire article. Title on RightSideNews is: "Education: You Should Be Paranoid"
.
Thanks for posting your whole article.
To get at the roots of education (and societal) decay, you’ve got to go a lot further back than Hofstadter. You need to look back at least as far as John Dewey, Charles Francis Potter’s Humanist Society and the Humanist Manifesto of Sellars and Bragg (1933.)
The beginnings of the erosion can be found mainly around the beginning of the 20th Century, but some aspects of the phenomenon go back as far as the inclusion of “Egalite” in the motto of the French Revolution, which, in practice and purpose became a gross mockery of our own American Revolution.
Then they sent US a statue and a load of cultural bilge along with it.
The problem is the application of ideas in the interest of contemporary politics. Ideas that have some validity in a particular context are overextended to situations where they don't really apply because it suits some people's political desires. "The paranoid style" was an idea that came to be used more as a weapon than as a scholarly analytical too.
Forty-five years ago, you could have had a passionate debate with Hofstadter. Now he's long since been a part of history himself, and seeing him in context is more appropriate than abusing someone who died forty years ago. There are so many living people to get angry at.
Very nice post. Thanks.
by the way, thanks for including our forum fully in sharing your work.