where “secular humanism” is routinely treated as a marginal religious sect, while a vast majority of the population claims to engage in direct intercourse with multiple invisible entities such as angels, Satan, and God.42
While the terms may have changed a bit since Sedgwick’s writing in 2003, my own experience suggests that the distance she describes persists. Of course, it is easy to overlook the dimension of privilege in this attitude toward “secular humanism,” forgetting all the factors that ensure Sedgwick’s students do not emerge from an unmarked center, but instead as college students are disproportionately drawn from white, wealthy and highly educated households. It is reasonable to surmise that her students’ attitudes were conditioned by the overrepresentation in that informal sample of a demographic correlated with more secular, humanist and liberal views, as well as with access to public and private resources denied to many other Americans.
But this does not undermine Sedgwick’s central contention that the historical moment is consequential here. Sedgwick’s marker for the difference between her “students’ sentient years” and “the formative years of their teachers” is widely recognized as an epochal divide between two prevailing attitudes toward government in the United States. As Mitchell and Said warned in Critical Inquiry early in Reagan’s first term, his administration marked a major victory in the conservative “counter-attack” that went on to reverse much of the (uneven, incomplete, often grudging) progress made during the era of the New Deal, the world war against fascism and the Great Society. If Roosevelt’s election marked the institutionalization of an era of progressive hegemony, then Reagan’s election can be said to mark the institutionalization of a reactionary era. The victories of the New Right reinvigorated the patriarchal, white supremacist and anti-communist rhetoric of Jim Crow, John Birch and Richard Nixon as discourses of liberty and true Americanism, while stripping away many of the safety nets and safeguards put in place by progressive movements and their allies in elected office. Even in this period of hegemonic neoliberalism, Sedgwick notes, it is still common to hear professors and students in the United States speak as though we live in the “politically correct,” liberal welfare “nanny state” decried for so long by Reagan, Gingrich and others, in which a paternal government is the primary agent of power over our lives and the primary enemy for any liberative project. But this is not the government we encounter inferentially in the relevant data, even if it is the government we encounter as referent for so much political rhetoric.
Indeed, while the positive impacts of Foucault’s US influence are marked in both Said and Sedgwick, his concept of state power, formed in a political context quite different than that of the United States, can easily lend itself to conclusions compatible with neoliberal and neoconservative attitudes toward “state control.” In part, then, Sedgwick’s students overlook the problems of their own time and place because they emulate models provided by professors and influential theorists, whose work responds to other times and places. The students are working on the problems posed by an anachronistic or culturally misplaced conception of governance, rather than responding to problems posed by their experience of the society in which they live. This problem of anachronism combines with the valorization of the hegemonic class culture, especially in environments organized centripetally (to aim at concentration rather than distribution of power) and narcissistically (to focus participants’ efforts on aggrandizing a central figure of emulative identification). Where students are taught to emulate elders, rather than explain their experience, where students are encouraged to universalize a particular cultural tradition and eternalize the explanations of specific historical moments, the problem Sedgwick observes in D. A. Miller’s work will be a necessary consequence, indicating a larger systemic problem of self-universalization characteristic of privilege.
It should not be surprising that academic disciplines disproportionately comprised of a privileged minority of wealthy white people—thus as insulated as possible from the precarity and caprice of markets and power, and conditioned by every prejudice in our society to see themselves as superior to others—have not broadly registered political or cultural shifts with more alacrity than Sedgwick suggests. Writing 15 years before my complaint, Sedgwick is already dismayed by the delay in responding to Reagan, citing an example from 15 years prior:
Writing in 1988—that is, after two full terms of Reaganism in the United States—D. A. Miller proposes to follow Foucault in demystifying “the intensive and continuous ‘pastoral’ care that liberal society proposes to take of each and every one of its charges.” As if! I’m a lot less worried about being pathologized by my therapist than about my vanishing mental health coverage.43
I am deeply grateful for Sedgwick’s confident scoff, which highlights the dramatic irony of Miller’s evocation of a universal welfare state never implemented in the United States. While those reared in the top income quintile of US households might have lived their lives with ample access to medical care, the remaining 80 percent of households have too often had only intermittent or precarious access to it. Writing in George W. Bush’s first term, Sedgwick observes that “since the beginning of the tax revolt, the government of the United States […] has been positively rushing to divest itself of answerability for care to its charges, with no other institutions proposing to fill the gap.”44 With dramatic increases in the discipline’s reliance on poorly compensated casual labor, it now seems certain that far fewer among English faculties have stable and reliable mental health coverage than did at the time of Sedgwick’s writing, though it is also likely that far more of us find ourselves in need of it.
Thirty years of neoliberal national policy since D. A. Miller’s rhetorical emulation of Foucault—a period in which such policies have driven the spread of precarity from manufacturing jobs to professional careers, as illustrated by the changes in English—demonstrates the victory of the counter-revolution Said warned against while Reagan was still in his first term. In the red-state, fundamentalist Christian, white working class subculture in which I was reared, far away from the demographics most likely to produce humanities professors, the words “secular, universalist liberal humanism” are not merely marginalized, as Sedgwick rightly suggests, and not even merely subject to the silence that might attend a taboo, but actively and energetically demonized. In my own experience, these terms seem to be among the more familiar names for what is perceived in such communities as a grand internal threat to the “real America”—one that matches the external threats of the Communist “Evil Empire,” “radical Islamic terror” or the once-always-approaching “migrant caravan.” “Secular humanism” and “liberalism” are titles given to an insidious, “globalist” anti-Christian plot as reviled as any of the racial, sexual and religious slurs with which these terms are routinely connected. Growing up inside (though, in many ways, on the wrong side of) that Real America, making and studying literature seemed like an alternative. Of course, this liberal secular world in which I sought refuge from reactionary moralism is not as diametrically opposed to fundamentalist conservatism as it is often supposed to be.
The examples Sedgwick cites therefore serve, in part, to remind us of the principle that undermines all privilege, the truth that must be obfuscated for privilege to persist: No particular view can also be a universal view. This negative principle implies a positive correlative: Every singularity of experience indicates a universal principle. For example, because the experience of state neglect is applicable to a far larger portion of humanity than Miller’s articulation of “pastoral care,” that paternalistic relation to the state, even if it was his experience, is not definitive of the state as such. But this does not mean that Miller’s experience is not worthy of articulation or indicative of pertinent truths about the state. The political contrariety we are now tasked with overcoming, if we hope to deliver democratic governance to future generations, is a forced choice between the violence of state neglect disguised as liberty, and the violence of state manipulation disguised as care. While I welcome Sedgwick’s “as if!” for the space it makes for my experience in the conversation, the experiences of paternalism that Miller articulates are also necessary to illuminate the ways in which state care can be corruptly manipulative, abusive and controlling. Rejecting both paternalistic liberalism and “tough love” conservatism would
