Today is the much heralded 50 year anniversary of Snow’s speech–although the anniversary conference itself isn’t until Saturday. There has been a vast outpouring of commentary: from Seed, New Scientist, Nature, Wired, the Telegraph, and I’m sure many others. All of which makes me feel at least slightly better about not keeping my promise and blogging all the way through the “Two Cultures” lecture itself.
I will have many opinions about all these opinions about Snow–as soon as I’ve read them all, at least. For now, peruse, and share your thoughts…..
May 7th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
I had some thoughts after that Chris Matthews segment from the other day (the more recent one was not as successful). In this Sam Tanenhaus talk from a while ago (which I’ve linked to umpteen times) there’s this point where he talks about Lionel Trilling’s *Sincerity and Authenticity*. Tanenhaus explains Trilling’s point that authenticity can be an effective way to come across, but taken too far it can be a kind of madness. Coupled with this piece on “Anti-Intellectualism in the Modern Presidency: A Republican Populism” and a picture begins to emerge.
Especially with our televisual culture, authenticity can stand in for truth. So “the base is not reality based,” as Jay Rosen has said, but you don’t need to convey reality to be politically successful–you can just be “authentic”–someone people can “relate to.” Hence, you get right-wing populist-sounding rhetoric that tap-dances carefully around the facts to get the right rhetorical effect, but you don’t inform the audience in the least. It’s an apparently “authentic” populism that completely de-emphasizes saying things in a factually informative way (it’s probably either calculation or laziness in different cases). We saw this yesterday with the Matthews interview. Matthews says to Pense that he knows better. Authenticity as a stand-in for truth was George Bush’s specialty. (Memories. Oy.)