progressivism, individualism, and the public ... - Telmarc Group

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The Telmarc Group PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL Even in New York, CCNY became equally populated with Catholics and Jews, not all Catholics went to Fordham or St. Johns, many, like the Jewish immigrants, could only afford a CCNY education. The Catholic Church frankly performed a great social function in New York by setting up schools, hospitals, and orphanages. The City could not handle the social issues presented by the influx of immigrants. By having these institutions, the new working class could productively contribute without costing the tax payers the added amount that would have been necessary for health and education. The Catholic institutions also taught an ethic that reduced crime, it made what the Italian and Irish gangs did sinful and used its social pressure in a manner which we see little of in many of today's churches. Hofstadter then continues: "As one might have expected, the way of the Catholic intellectual in this country has been doubly hard. He has had to justify himself not only as a Catholic to the Protestant and secular intellectual community but also as an intellectual to fellow Catholics, for whom his vocation is even more questionable than it is to the American community at large. Catholic scholars and writers tend to be recognized belatedly by their.....co-religionists, when they are recognized at all. All of this concerns, of course, not so much the antiintellectualism of American Catholicism as its cultural impoverishment, its nonintellectualism. But it will serve as background for a more central point: a great many Catholics have been as responsive as Protestant fundamentalists to that it is against modernity of which I have spoken, and they have done perhaps more than their share in developing the one-hundred per cent mentality. In no small measure this has been true because their intellectual spokesmen-who are now growing in numbers and influencehave not yet, gained enough authority in the Catholic community to hold in check the most retrograde aspects of that revolt, including its general suspicion of mind and its hostility to intellectuals. " American Catholicism for Hofstadter became a pervasive genetic disorder seemingly to infect any person who professes to be Catholic and moreover any person in any way related to the Catholic Church, such as a Catholic High School Graduate. Hofstadter states that the Catholic holds a hostility to the intellectual, namely Hofstadter and his ilk. The hostility is that the Catholic thinker may disagree with them, and this disagreement to Hofstadter is prima facie evidence of dollardism. Hofstadter, and the Columbia clique, somehow view that they are prophetic and without fault or error in their intellectualism, that they solely have seen truth, and that it is their word ex-cathedra from Morningside Heights which contains the truth and the light. The arrogance of these men, and they were all men at the time, is appalling. It fundamentally rejects any other thought process. "A great deal of the energy of the priesthood in our time has been directed toward censorship, divorce, birth control, and other issues which have brought the Church into conflict with the secular and the Protestant mind time and again; some of it has also gone into ultra-conservative political movements, which are implacable enemies of the intellectual community. Catholic intellectuals on the whole have opposed the extreme and Page 142
The Telmarc Group PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL (from the point of view of the faith) gratuitous aspects of this enmity, but they have been unable to restrain it. Indeed, one of the most striking developments of our time has been the emergence of a kind of union, or at least a capacity for cooperation, between Protestant and Catholic fundamentalists, who share a common puritanism and a common mindless militancy ....." He then goes on: "For evidence that Catholic clergy and laymen alike are unusually hostile to freedom of thought and criticism, even on subjects remote from dogma see Gerhardt Lenski: The Religious Factor (New York, 1960)." This is a broadly damning statement. Hostile to freedom of thought and criticism, even on subjects remote from dogma. Catholics at that time were becoming lawyers, scientists, mathematicians, engineers, physicians, and they were certainly not hostile to criticism in these fields. Perhaps they took positions orthogonal to Hofstadter's but that it acceptable in and discourse amongst thinkers. Yet disagreement with an intellectual is anathema. In Hofstadter's Age of Reform he further states 151 : "At the so-called grass roots of American politics there is a wide and pervasive tendency to believe - I hasten to add that the majority of Americans do not habitually succumb to this tendency - that there is some great but essentially very simple struggle going on, at the heart of which there lies some single conspiratorial force, whether it be the force represented by the "gold bugs", the Catholic Church, big business, corrupt politicians, the liquor interests and the saloons, or the Communist Party…" In The New York Times review of the biography of Hofstadter by Sam Tanenhaus states 152 : "These were Hofstadter’s subjects in his most productive years, the 1950’s and 60’s, when he nested among a nucleus of thinkers at Columbia that included the social theorists Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset and Robert K. Merton and the literary critic Lionel Trilling. Together they formed a loose federation of like minds and temperaments. All were secular Jews (or in Hofstadter’s case, half Jewish). Many had weathered chastening experiences on the left. Most were influenced by European social science, in particular by psychoanalysis and depth psychology, which offered more fruitful diagnostic methods than the tired formulas of Marxism and the class struggle. The Columbia group did much to create the vocabulary of midcentury liberal thought in America as it sought to move beyond ideology and toward a kind of broad public doctrine or “orthodoxy,” as Brown puts it. 151 See Age of Reform, pp 16-17. 152 See NYT August 6, 2006. Page 143
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