Just Curious

Herbert Marcuse

I used to be a big fan of Herbert Marcuse as as well, when I was a student radical back in college, until I read fellow Critical Theorist Georg Lukacs' characterization of Adorno and Marcuse's brand of latte radicalism as "Big Hotel Abyss." It was then that I realized how much these professors were out of touch with the people they purport to sympathize, and how arrogant and stupid they are by building their fantastic world on ideological categories (but cf. Adam Schaff, "Marxism and the Human Individual," Ch. 2, 3).

I didn't link William Sloane Coffin to Marcuse since I didn't realize their connection. Marcuse was a German exile who came to this country in the 30s (ever wonder being a good Communist why he had not gone to the Soviet Union to build his Communist utopia, as his mentor Lukacs did??), and a Vulgar Marxist in the most V/vulgar variety. William Sloane Coffin, on the other hand, was a blue-blooded Yalie "Boneman" from a privileged New York WASP family. Not sure if he were a pinko or a fellow-traveler but his existence surely had been well-soaked in grande double-shot non-fat soy latte.

But now I realize their similarities. Both men were incredibly self-righteous and intolerant. As Marcuse put it, "Liberating tolerance would mean intolerance against movements from the right, and toleration of movements from the left."

But who is to decide what's "from the Right" and what's "from the Left"? Why, Mr. Marcuse and his fellow Politburo members of the Communist Party of America (Marxism-Latteism) of course! Here's where hireling preachers like William Sloane Coffin come in. As F.A. Hayek noted, second-rate intellectuals (rather than experts who generate original knowledge) are the ones who are gatekeepers of knowledge in the society. They are the ones who allow and disallow certain message to get through their "gates" and reach the young and impressionable. So if Mr. Coffin decide only to include Marcuse but not victims of Communism like Boris Pasternak in his sermons at Yale, he's functioning as an "intellectual." Not that there's anything wrong per se about that. Of course we're all biased, one way or another, except that the message he preached itself is one of intolerance and Establishment bigotry.

So here you go. You have a very narrow bottleneck for information to pass through (there's only one chaplain at Yale), and the information that indeed got passed on was that about thought-criminalization and thought-control. Ministry of Love, anyone??

posted by James Chang @ 9:29 AM