Welcome to Beautiful Losers, Episode 3. This was a super fun one to record, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did. Serindipitously, The Nation recently published a retrospective on Said and his place in 20th century letters. Check it out if you want to learn more about his work.

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Episode In Brief

This week we consider what it means to be a humanist, at least according to Edward Said’s 1978 classic Orientalism. Our discussion lays out some of Said’s key methodological concepts: history, rationality, hegemony, consent, and knowledge-formation. We present these concepts through critique, which is to say that we seek to challenge Said’s assumptions, raising questions about their efficacy today. The last part of the episode utilizes a humanist framework to consider the stakes and forces that are shaping the nation’s response to Covid-19. Questions of censorship and the factors that legitimate knowledge are acutely felt in an era where corporate media and government action are seeking to silence what they claim as bad-faith actors. Does a humanist methodology shed meaningful light on the stakes of such actions?

On Possums, Philosophers, and Beautiful Losers

Seth encounters a dead possum on a path and weeps for joy as a vulture excitedly eats it. An everyday encounter with a biological life-rhythm grounds some aspect of our groundless experience. 

Alex shares an anecdote about Kant and Hegel’s imperial tendencies and the ways that these material conditions are used as fodder to dismiss their thinking. 

We briefly consider and summarily dismiss the criticism of intellectual labor as compromised because of its reliance on market and economic conditions. Such rhetorical moves often rely on a type of outrage-aesthetic that never engages with the actual argument. 

We acknowledge that Kant used cheap and even exploitative labor for his laundry, Adam Smith did indeed live in his mother’s house while writing about the invisible hand, and we dare not even think what sort of things Aristotle was up to. However, it strikes us as the mark of a beautiful loser to let these contradictions invalidate entire schools of thinking.

Such criticisms strike us as bad faith, because to work in the world requires a negotiation and compromise. Does the technology of the typewriter invalidate all philosophy after Nietzsche because it facilitates a more efficient means of production? While we would never dismiss a school of thinking based solely on the grounds of the conditions of its possibility; we also acknowledge that such conditions ought to be considered. However, our media sphere encourages wholesale dismissal of ideas based that are thought to be contradictory or inauthentic. Such is the binary logic of the beautiful soul.

These binary forms of thinking dominate the media today. Contrary to that position, we argue against the assumption that we should dismiss inauthentic and compromised ways of thinking. Edward Said’s description of humanism helps us frame this argument.

Edward Said’s Humanist Rationality 

On today’s show we consider the preface and first chapter of Edward Said’s landmark book Orientalism. Our focus is Said’s presentation of a method for humanist thinking, not Said’s argument about the Orient and the Occident. In Orientalism, Said made a case for how the idea of “the east” is formed and reified through a complex political, social, and cultural history. Somewhat ironically, he uses these political frameworks to justify the practice of literary, textual analysis as a legitimate means for scholarship on objects of inquiry thought to exist in areas of expertise thought to be more “objective” and “useful” than the humanities. 

What, then, does it mean to think as a humanist? 

One way to frame Said’s efforts is as an argument against group-think. His support of the humanities is meant to ground and situate every form of thinking within a specific historical and rational context. It is difficult to break through the layered historical momentum that shapes something like groupthink, but Said remains firm in his belief that the humanities offer the only kind of thinking that can break this dynamic, namely by identifying binary structures and seeking to examine culture from a vantage-point that is not motivated by material interest. Said also seeks to describe and historically situate the material interests that shape thinking. Said’s Humanism comes from a tradition of pure inquiry, knowledge, and understanding for the sake of knowledge. Said is responding to his own version of the beautiful soul, one that is both critical of the groundlessness of postmodern thinkers that seek to dehistoricize all thinking, and one that reflects a classical approach to feeling-based form thinking derived from a “top down” view of culture cultivated in the classic comparative literature and humanities programs of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

Similarly, we do not speak for or toward any one group, but rather sit on the outside and try to understand the dynamics that make any given thought possible. 

This methodology has a complex relationship with the notion of “pure thought” or unbiased truth. In an apparent oxymoron, Said seeks to improve thinking by embracing and naming the various motivations and biases that structure thought as a condition of the possibility of critical thought. Said argues that we can improve thinking by acknowledging and understanding subjectivity, not by artificially trying to eliminate it. Indeed, he argues that eliminating subjectivity is a bad-faith exercise because every belief is grounded in an idiosyncratic history and system of rationality. No idea can exist without a history and a rationality; to understand those histories and systems of reason requires one to understand the biases, motivations, desires, and cultures from which the thinking emerged. 

Contrary to a scientific methodology, which seeks to eliminate supposedly nonessential variables, including the perspective and history of the observer, Said wants to re-integrate the role of the observer within his method for thinking. 

For Said, all intellectual work, no matter how careful, always inflects some world-view or bias. We are poorer thinkers and critics if we do not seek to understand those perspectives in how they shape our ideas. 

However, we also find Said’s definition of humanism equal parts stirring and contradictory. To us, this is apparent in the excerpt below:

“I try to do "humanism," a word I continue to use stubbornly despite the scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated post­ modern critics. By humanism I mean first of all attempting to dissolve Blake's mind-forg'd manacles so as to be able to use one's mind historically and rationally for the purposes of reflec­tive understanding and genuine disclosure. Moreover, humanism is sustained by a sense of community with other interpreters and other societies and periods: strictly speaking, therefore, there is no such thing as an isolated humanist.”

Alex raises the critical question: Does the advent of a post-modern world, one where community is defined through political interest and corporate power render Said’s call for community humanism a doomed project? To what extent can Pandora’s post-modern box be repackaged and sealed?

Our compromised position is that while we must work in defense of Said’s vision, we must also not be seduced by the fantasy of rational humanism as a panacea for the ails of the post-truth world. Reality is messy business and no methodology will change that. 

While not explicitly discussing the political philosophy of Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic (“Justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger”) Said’s call for humanistic inquiry and community is acutely aware of the role of power as it concerns the production and legitimation of knowledge. 

While Said pushes against and criticizes certain apolitical traditions within postmodernism, he is also critical of his own academic formation in comparative literature departments. While he has more sympathy for a practice of literary scholarship that involves learning multiple languages and histories, he also laments that this enlightenment tradition of knowledge came to its natural end after WWII; in fact, he names Eric Auerbach’s book Mimesis as the capstone project for that centuries long study of the human condition.

Said’s modernism: post-enlightenment yet anti-postmodern.

While we admire the careful space that he carves out for his own work, it also strikes us as impossibly idealistic. How can one maintain such a delicate intellectual position?

One answer is found through the sentiment of humility. 

Humility describes the sentiment that drives Said’s prescription of virtue ethics. Given the various ideological and intellectual forces that bear down on thinking from all sides, one must always avail themselves to new ideas and perspectives. Cultivating a humble character means opening oneself up to new or alternate histories and forms of thinking. Said’s humility maintains a level of rigor that pressures every idea to account for its history and its rationality.  

A humble yet rigorous attitude inevitably raises questions of force and political power. In evaluating the history and rationality of various ideas, one realizes that the ideas that carry the most cultural weight always have behind them a sizable amount of force in the form of political or cultural power accrued over time and history. But given that all political and cultural formations are subject to change, the ideas that they motivate will also change. To consider the history and rationality of a given set of ideas necessarily means studying the cultural, political, and social forces that give those ideas legitimacy. It also means studying those forces in order to understand how those ideas will change over time. 

Said takes up Antonio Gramsci’s use of hegemony. We find the concept of hegemony helpful for thinking about the state/cultural technologies that allow for social behavior to be predictably coordinated. This is a somewhat postmodern frame for thinking about hegemony, namely that hegemony constitutes the legitimizing meta-meta-narrative for all meta narratives today. Examples that come to mind are culture-shaping myths like manifest destiny, or war-movies like Platoon, that imbue ideal-nationalist characteristics within a protagonist despite their criticism of foreign policy. More everyday examples include our collective belief about the use and value of a dollar, and our shared commitment toward what the object of money signifies. 

The role of hegemony within Said’s argument about the methodology of humanism is tricky, because the force of hegemony as a technology of power reveals an irrational relationship between an individual and society. Despite Said’s commitment toward cultivating a kind of pan-cultural rationalism that is grounded in history, as a critic of hegemony he is also constantly confronted with irrational forces that shape and structure belief. 

Despite our admiration for Said’s argument, we can’t shake the feeling that it idealizes and presumes the efficacy of human rationality. An over-determined rationality is the poison-pill that sours most progressive humanism. It’s a blindspot that often undervalues the tradition of enlightenment thinking in the vein of Hobbes, Hume, and Nietzsche that emphasize the brutal and irrational forces that shape human behavior and society.

We want to believe in our enlightenment capacities, as Said does, but it seems painfully obvious that our gullibility, reliance on feelings and passions, and tendencies toward violent and irrational power structures present real challenges to constructing something like Said’s version of humanist discourse. 

To make matters worse, the mainstream response toward these anti-enlightenment attitudes does not lead us back toward Said’s humanism, but instead tries to control discourse through mechanisms like censorship, bad-faith arguments, fallacies, outrage, finger-wagging, and other technologies that seek to reinforce a hegemonic idea of proper/improper thinking. These practices are deployed across the contemporary political landscape (on the Left and on the Right); this practice lowers the overall level of discourse and makes something like Said’s form of humanist rationality all but impossible. 

In light of this, we acknowledge the appeal of tactics that we would otherwise describe as sophistic or hegemonic. How to use those tactics in a way that doesn’t ultimately compromise your position or values remains an issue for future discussion. 

While we acknowledge and accept the fatally-flawed components of arguing from a position of rational humanism, we nevertheless aspire toward this mode of engagement; and we do so knowing full-well the flaws and limitations therein, and with a keenly-tuned sense for the bad-faith sophistry that informs most cultural discourse.  

Rational Humanism After Covid-19

As a thought experiment, we turn our critical eye toward the disease-management technologies that are rising in the wake of Covid-19. It seems inevitable that contact-tracing will become an important tool for the management of outbreak, but is there a way to deploy this technology in a way that also upholds individual civil liberties?

Instead of a public discussion about how to deploy this technology in a just way, we are instead mired in a debate about whether or not to open the country. The terms of debate, falling along an axis of friend/enemy relations, foreclose any possibility for nuanced and careful discussion. To wit, the technocratic mindset, which demands fealty under the banners of expertise and quantitative data, creates the appearance of an objective, universal position that acts in the interest of all people equally. 

Grounded as it is in history, rationality, and a study of force, Said’s humanism would argue that every position is always already complicit within a system of values that privileges certain subjects and forms of living over others. Such values often operate through a scientific rhetoric to make legitimizing claims about policy and society that are unproved and unknowable.

Matt Taibbi’s recent article on how corporations and governments are censoring critics and skeptics of Covid-19 is a chilling look at how well-intentioned individuals and institutions can wield their power in ways that threaten civil discourse. A humanist’s humility toward alternate perspectives and histories is swept away in favor of top-down power structures that designate proper and improper forms of thought. 

Rather than occupy the position that designates what kinds of thinking are permissible, it seems to us that the path forward ought to be dedicated toward cultivating a range of thinking positions. Ironically, it is challenging for anyone with advanced education in the humanities to demonstrate a critical attitude a la Said. We think of this as cultivating media literacy. 

In addition to media literacy, we consider how a position of humility can foster a sense of community, or at the very least a sense of interconnectedness across the social sphere. Part of inhabiting the perspective of the other requires one to understand and compare different life-worlds, as well as understand the various contact points that allow one set of perspectives and material conditions to influence and impact other life-worlds. Despite our upbringing within a progressive tradition, we find this attitude to be woefully underrepresented in mainstream progressive politics. 

To put the point more acutely: does the mainstream Left really want to adopt a monologic view of the world? Does the Left really want to channel the rhetoric of expertise to bully and undermine the cultural experience of millions of disenfranchised, overworked, underpaid Americans? On the Left, we are taught to lament the huge swaths of working-class voters that “vote against their interests,” but have we really examined the extent to which their interests and desires have been accounted for within mainstream progressive policy? 

The “both sides” tragedy at the center of this is an us vs. them binary, a friend/enemy distinction (as our old friend from last week Carl Schmidt would put it), that conditions and shapes every interaction. 

Your Beautiful Losers self-identify within a leftist tradition, but from the perspective of that tradition we seek to understand its limitations and faults. 

These considerations lead us to considering the stakes of misinformation. Evidence of the ways that misinformation can lead to preventable death or tragedy are legion, but evidence regarding the fruits of censorship within a political economy are even more terrifying. Although we would rather not have to debate the Alex Jones’s of the world, we would rather engage in careful debate and discussion with bad arguments, than cede the power of determining what constitutes bad arguments to a corporate or political formation.

We also consider the banality of blindly following science. This is a complex issue, one that will merit future discussions. But again, our history is flush with stories of well-intentioned scientific experts coming to bad conclusions. Science is not a concept; it is a method for making truth-claims about the world in a way that can be tested, verified, and adjusted. Science must be properly situated as a more holistic method of inquiry, and the results of that inquiry must be put in conversation with other domains of knowledge. The economic impact of Covid-19, the CO2 emissions reduction, and the financial crisis simultaneously show ways that our system is strained under different conditions. No single knowledge discourse solves all of these crises with certainty.

We find ourselves confronted with an impossible ethical situation. And yet, the situation demands action despite the impossibility of it all.

We conclude the episode by considering that intersecting conditions of public life: health, society, economic concerns, the administration of life and death. These primary, secondary, and tertiary goods and bads all exist in relation to each other in an equiphenomenal sense: one cannot act on the side of one concern without influencing or impacting another.

The herculean task of coordinating all of these different concerns is larger than any single business, a government, or people. Such a massive amount of coordination is rarely seen in contemporary society. Although your Beautiful Losers have no answer for what the path forward looks like, we remain steadfast in the belief that we must try to keep all of these concerns in mind as we consider the outcome of any path forward. 

In lieu of actual government leadership, it falls to us—those that are frustrated with the state of politics and can identify the aporias in everyday thinking— to have these hard discussions and to engage in the difficult work of listening and learning from people around us.

This last point serves as our final call to action. To look at the enormity of the crisis reminds of us of everyday people that have stood at the gates of hell before. We feel that we must brace ourselves for what is to come, because it is a long road and for many people there will never be a “normal” again. Perhaps this position is over-determined and melodramatic, or perhaps such a position relegates us to just another Cassandra—to be blessed with the knowledge of the future, but cursed by having no one believe us. 

Such doubts remind us in the final analysis of the importance of humility and the importance of seeking to listen and to understand the variety of concerns, forces, interests, and assumptions that will shape our knowledge to come. In the end, we turn this critique inward and acknowledge the ways that our own constitution within an academic and political tradition itself is compromised and compromising. 

We want to be the vulture, content with his place in the order of things, but most days it feels like we’re the possum, another victim of this cruel and unforgiving cycle of culture. 

Correction: Seth mistakenly asserted that Thomas Jefferson declared that the state of the union was “bad.” It was Gerald Ford, who said in his 1975 state of the union address, “The State of the Union is not good.”

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