Читать книгу Livin' la Vida Barroca. American Culture in an Age of Imperial Orthodoxies онлайн

58 страница из 84

The Powell Memo includes a number of important strategic suggestions, almost all of which were adopted by the emergent Right in the 80s and 90s and which remain as core elements of the Conservative tool box today.

None of these were to prove more important in the long run than his suggestion that Conservatives actively press for the enforcement of “ideological balance” in both university life and the mainstream press.

The stealth power of the suggestion lies in its apparent innocuousness. Since we all like to think of ourselves as fair, why should we object, when pressed, to a request to strive for greater balance in these key institutions?

Very simple. Because no important social institution is, nor can ever be, made up of a perfect mix of the society’s dominant ideological tendencies.

Why? Because each social institution has a history and a daily practice which tend to privilege one way of looking at the world over another.

The training needed to become a university professor or a journalist places a great deal of emphasis on the empirical gathering and analysis of information. This outlook meshes quite naturally and organically with what we in this country call “liberal” thought, that is, the set of political doctrines and cultural practices which grew out of the rationalist revolution known as the Enlightenment which, though it has many forms, tends to privilege individual freedom over the achievement of group identity and group projects. Perhaps more importantly, people in both professions operate with a high degree of autonomy, something that allows much more space than most have to develop points of view which may differ from those of the great mass of society who do not enjoy this same privilege.