May 19, 2005
Is hubris contagious?
In the vein of Graham Larkin’s post, I wish to suggest that hubris is not limited to David Horowitz or the ideologues of the Right. I just picked up a rather interesting-looking new tome, Melanie E.L. Bush’s BREAKING THE CODE OF GOOD INTENTIONS: EVERYDAY FORMS OF WHITENESS (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), which deals with the views of students at CUNY (Bush’s home institution) on race and class. The Foreword is written by Joe R. Feagin. Feagin is a well-known Marxist scholar who is a past president of the American Sociological Association and a chaired professor at Texas A&M University.
Feagin starts with boilerplate, stating that Bush’s book demonstrates how “wealthy white elites that still control U.S. society” have “succeeded in brainwashing the majority of ordinary whites into accepting a worldview that even contradicts the latter’s self-interests.” He then segues into self–promotion. “Bush’s analysis of student views is in the tradition of classical social science studies that have described racial and class views of ordinary Americans, such as Gunnar Myrdal’s pathbreaking analysis of racial ideology, AN AMERICAN DILEMMA (1944), and Joe Feagin’s pioneering analysis of antipoor views, SUBORDINATING THE POOR (1975).” (p.ix). Now unless Feagin means “classical” to denote either a) Greco-Roman antiquity or b) pre-relativistic physics, neither of which seems to fit, I can only assume he really means “classic.” Feagin’s extraordinary blast on his own horn in describing his book as a “classic” is as misplaced as it is arrogant—the book Feagin mentions is not even his own best-known work, let alone a locus classicus. He then compounds his statement with chutzpah in equating his own work in importance and influence to that of Myrdal (At least Feagin diverges from his predecessor, Oliver Cromwell Cox, who criticized Myrdal from a Marxist viewpoint precisely for not taking class sufficiently into account!). I confess that I have never read Feagin’s works. Mindful of Mark Twain’s definition of a “classic” book as one that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read, Feagin’s introduction and his description of his book as a “classic” makes me think, in my case at least, that he is half right.
Feagin starts with boilerplate, stating that Bush’s book demonstrates how “wealthy white elites that still control U.S. society” have “succeeded in brainwashing the majority of ordinary whites into accepting a worldview that even contradicts the latter’s self-interests.” He then segues into self–promotion. “Bush’s analysis of student views is in the tradition of classical social science studies that have described racial and class views of ordinary Americans, such as Gunnar Myrdal’s pathbreaking analysis of racial ideology, AN AMERICAN DILEMMA (1944), and Joe Feagin’s pioneering analysis of antipoor views, SUBORDINATING THE POOR (1975).” (p.ix). Now unless Feagin means “classical” to denote either a) Greco-Roman antiquity or b) pre-relativistic physics, neither of which seems to fit, I can only assume he really means “classic.” Feagin’s extraordinary blast on his own horn in describing his book as a “classic” is as misplaced as it is arrogant—the book Feagin mentions is not even his own best-known work, let alone a locus classicus. He then compounds his statement with chutzpah in equating his own work in importance and influence to that of Myrdal (At least Feagin diverges from his predecessor, Oliver Cromwell Cox, who criticized Myrdal from a Marxist viewpoint precisely for not taking class sufficiently into account!). I confess that I have never read Feagin’s works. Mindful of Mark Twain’s definition of a “classic” book as one that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read, Feagin’s introduction and his description of his book as a “classic” makes me think, in my case at least, that he is half right.