In retrospect, The Captive Mind is a great book. Though it could've done without the profiles of Gamma and Delta, two of the writers that Milosz uses as examples of intellectual laziness and moral weakness. The real tragic stories are Alpha and Beta (these are real people that for some reason Milosz did not want to name, but are easily identified). These were men of great feeling and talent who were brought low by the moral morass and intellectual short cuts that Diamat creates.
One can see the parallels between these men and their struggles and the political situation that is occurring in our country today. Whether or not this is a good thing or not is a difficult problem to suss out. On one hand Milosz maintains that intellectuals are easily swayed by counter-intuitive systems (they can justify anything with their intellect, no matter how stomach turning), and on the other, America has no real intelligentsia. The closest thing we have are celebrities and talking heads on the TV news. Chomsky is as much of a joke as Anne Coulter, and no matter how much sense George Clooney might be spouting about Darfur and the peccadilloes of the Republican party , it doesn't change the fact he was in Batman & Robin.
The writers out there are not writing about our social and political problems. Art has become apolitical; either it is completely without substance, pure artifice (Warhol, Pollack, that guy who did the squares), or it is made to titillate and shock (that guy who pissed on a sculpture of Jesus, that sculpture of Britney Spears giving birth). The closest we get as a culture to actual constructive dialog about the state of our country is through mass entertainment (which I just wrote as inert tainment for some reason--damn you Freud), but this is powered more by corporate funding of entertainment than it is by actual concern about the human condition in America (thus Chomsky and Coulter--the two mouthpieces of the political divide).
Where is the American Tolstoy, or Grass, or Mishima, or Orwell? Our writers are too busy writing books that are more about being books than they are about saying something about us. Our intellectuals are too busy thinking up new ways to over complicate things than to come up with ideas that help our society. The days of Twain and Steinbeck, Frederick Douglas and MLK have passed us by and we are left with intellectuals and artists with very narrow lines of sight, such as Andrea Dworkin and Irving Kristol, Jonathan Safran Foer and Don Delillo. These artistic and intellectual navel gazers do a disservice to their country by not engaging the public in honest discourse or, at the worst, engaging them in DISHONEST discourse. This dishonest discourse is the trap of Dialectical Materialism, the trap that Milosz wrote about, but instead of the Stalinist Method, you have a method based entirely of discriminating against the under-educated (which is an artificial scale if there ever was one).
American intellectuals are radical and militant by nature, neither concerned with the everyday problems of the world or with honest practice. Our intellectuals wave their credentials in front of the public's faces, say "I know more than you", and proceed to vent their ideas onto the public with out any course of redress or dialectics--because if you are not a Ph.D. holder or fellow intellectual, you obviously have nothing to bring to the table so you better just nod say "yessir" and bow to my big, overeducated brain. This paradigm is a detriment to our society--it diminishes our democratic system and our populist nature. You cannot have the American flavor of populism with monolithic, discriminatory intellectual practices.
Writers come in all shapes and sizes and types. But the social commentator in American letters has either died out or not changed with the times. Don Delillo recycles the same worn-out criticisms about the very American populism that could save our political soul from the ravages of Dominionism, fascism and intellectual laziness. Foer, the current golden boy among the po-mo writers of America, proceeds to crawl further up his own ass with every book he writes. By not engaging the public in discourse, and recycling old intellectual chestnuts and not developing, they present their works of art as either artistic thought pieces or art for art sake. So the public, criticised again and unengaged by the artistic self-fellatio, buys a Dan Brown book instead (hate to say it, but score one for the public).
Then, on top of all of this, you have a monolithic media culture that does its best to keep the populace somnambulant. American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, ER, CSI, The Office, The Daily Show, Rush Limbaugh, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News--all spewed upon the masses as alternatives to each other when they all just spout the same laziness or encourages it by its very nature. Shows of actual artistic merit are few and far between. It would be better to be a universalist show, describing the human condition on a nebulous scale (ie Seinfeld, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer), than it would be to be a show that encourages the turning off of one's brain. Read Hemingway before you read Dan Brown, watch Buffy before you watch Idol, because the days of Steinbeck and All in the Family (actual commentaries on the America in the era in which they were created) are over.
We are at the point of needing a renaissance for our discourse, a popular culture that has rigor and virility and does not shy away from entering into dialog about society's ills with its audience.
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