Here’s a pressing question: if Matthew Crawford’s essay on privilege is as shoddy a piece of work as I say it is, how did it get published?
The easy answer is that Crawford works for the institute that funds the journal that published it, but I don’t think he would have had much difficulty placing it elsewhere. It looks too “highbrow-magaziney” for an editor to turn down. Let me explain what I mean.
First: Though the essay is essentially an opinion piece, it also gives a discursive treatment of some historical facts about privilege in ancien regime France. These facts appear to support Crawford’s argument, but they’re not really vital to it. In fact, they should be seen as purely decorative; they make it seem as though Crawford knows what he’s talking about.
Second: Crawford cites and summarizes an argument by Furet, who’s published a number of books. Furet is French, so he presumably knows what he’s talking about, and that means Crawford isn’t just making things up. A knowledgeable French person agrees with him.
Third, and most importantly: Crawford provides a pithy, counterintuitive, but actually quite simple and easily-memorized position on a major topic of discussion among what the Hedgehog Review takes to be its audience. That makes the essay useful for people who like to have things to say in social situations. The relevant context for deployment of Crawford’s thesis wouldn’t be in a debate about white privilege, since it’s too flawed an argument to stand up to hostile scrutiny. Rather, we should imagine something like the following dialogue:
(SCENE: a crowded porch, evening, summer. White people in suits and dresses are drinking cocktails.)
Rebecca: Did you see the Wall Street Journal article about all the college kids saying that Yale should rename Calhoun College? Something about “white privilege.” I don’t get it.
Nigel: I read a really interesting article about that by Matthew Crawford. You remember, the guy who said kids need to work with their hands more? Anyhow, he said it’s all liberal self-hatred.
Crawford’s ideas are designed to circulate among people who already know that they don’t like to talk about white privilege, but aren’t sure why. The “liberal self-hatred” thesis works to cut conversations about white privilege short in an apparently intellectually creditable way. In this, it functions like one of Flaubert’s idees recues, those obligatory cocktail-party apothegms that express conventional wisdom so well as to block further inquiry. Some thoughts become idees recues as soon as someone publishes them.
That brings me to the question of whom this article is for. I’ve already given some sense of my answer, which is that it’s “for” the kind of people that “X privilege” talk might make uncomfortable if they hadn’t been innoculated against it. Those are the people who read the Hedgehog Review: ivy-league students and their parents, but not the ones who’d read or accept the meritocratic justifications of white privilege on offer in the Weekly Standard or the Daily Stormer. This audience accepts Crawford’s argument as exactly the kind of balm for a guilty conscience that he accuses “white privilege” discourse of being.
How do you write an article like this? You don’t necessarily need to be insincere; you just need to be clever, not too self-aware, and suffering from the same crisis of conscience you want to address in your readership. Then you need to dress up whatever sophistical solution to that crisis lets you sleep at night with facts, figures and authority claims from that book you read a while ago (and note that every such claim on offer in Crawford’s article derives from one book). Cover your tracks – which is easy, thanks to the loose citation standards of highbrow non-academic periodicals – and you’re good to submit to the journal of your choice. The editors (assuming you’re enough of an insider or a Big Name to get them to take a look at your work) will sense that you’ve written something valuable for their audience, which in turn will digest your ideas and put them into broader circulation. The only blowback you’ll get is on blogs, which nobody reads anyway.