Opinion | The Freeing of the American Mind

I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

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I’ve always been fascinated by the period in the 20th century when the American mind just seems to have opened up. It’s an explosive period in which people were willing to consider radically new political structures and ideas and liberation movements and new forms of art, new forms of culture, and new kinds of technology, and all at once, compared to when I grew up in the ‘90s, the end of history period, this period when it felt like the imagination of politics had become sharply constrained.

It always felt like such a time of really different and intellectual ferment. So much more was up for grabs. People felt society could be shaped into such radically different forms. I think a bit of that is returning. I think this era is different than the ‘90s or aughts era. But even so, I don’t think it’s like it was then. I think we feel our path is more set, whether or not it really is.

Louis Menand is a New Yorker staff writer. He’s a professor of English at Harvard and the author of a really fascinating and expansive new survey of arts, politics, and culture in the post-war period called The Free World. And one thing he takes super seriously in the book and that I really appreciated about it was this interplay between art and politics, the way ideas of freedom began driving the arts into new directions and how those new directions helped create the world politically, culturally, socially, that we live in now, both for better, by the way, and for worse. As always, my email is [email protected]. Here’s Louis Menand.

So let me begin here. What’s the difference between how Americans understood the practice of freedom in the 1950s and how we understand it today?

The big difference really is that freedom today is become more of a right-wing slogan, less of a left-wing slogan. I wouldn’t say things were the opposite in the ‘50s and ‘60s. I would say that everybody used the term “freedom” to justify whatever it was they were doing. So, for example, Martin Luther King, Jr. used the term “freedom” all the time in his civil rights speeches. In fact, in the “I Have a Dream” speech, he uses the word freedom 20 times. Of course, that’s the refrain of the speech, as you remember. Uses the word “equality” only once.

But George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor, used the term “freedom” to justify states’ rights and resistance to enforced integration. John F. Kennedy used the term “freedom” all the time. But so does Barry Goldwater. I think one of the most famous sayings of the 1960s is Barry Goldwater saying at the Republican National Convention 1964, extremism and the defense of liberty is no vice. So one of the things that I learned in writing about this period, which is roughly 20 years after the Second World War, is that basically, it’s used to justify everything by everybody.

Today, as I said, it’s a little bit more, we think of it more as a right-wing slogan. So freedom means not having to wear a mask. Freedom means being allowed to carry a gun. And on the left or liberal left, the slogans are much more about equality and social justice, considerably less about freedom. So I think that’s a major shift.

So let me take the left-wing side of this and try to challenge that. There was certainly a need to cloak every political demand in this era in the language of freedom. Because you have the Soviet Union there as the opposite. The equity becomes totalitarianism opposite.

But there’s certainly been, in recent years, an effort to say that the sanitized version of Martin Luther King, Jr. we have now is wrong, that if you look at what he was saying, he took equity very seriously, that a lot of what he was demanding from universal basic income to recognizing that if you ask a man who’s starting 200 yards behind in a race to catch up, you’re simply asking him to fail, was demanding a level of government involvement and a pursuit of actual fairness that many people would say should be understood as in pursuit of freedom, but certainly in the way we talk about it now isn’t.

So is part of this simply that you had to say more things were freedom because of the Soviet Union creating a pressure on that, but maybe the battle lines weren’t all that different than they are now?

You’re totally right about King. And the reason that you give I think is the correct reason, which is that the language of freedom just had a lot more resonance in the Cold War period than the language of equality did. Because Americans tend to think of equality as implying redistribution. And that’s not a very popular concept in American political culture, whereas they think of freedom as something you can spread without losing anything yourself. You just create more — it’s like lighting candles or something.

So King, as you said — it’s totally correct — believed in equality. That’s really what the civil rights movement, his civil rights movement, was about. The pre-King civil rights movement as well was about equality. But I think he understood that in Washington, DC, and that period in the early 1960s that freedom was the language that people would listen to. So some of it is just trying to get the attention of politicians and so on. So from that point of view, you’re totally right.

But on the other hand, I think that we tend to think of freedom and equality as trade-offs today, such that if we want to promote a progressive agenda that creates more equal conditions for people, we want to create conditions of anti-racism and so forth that the considerations of freedom have to take second place to those imperatives. I think in the ‘60s and the ‘50s, people who thought that way thought that those were compatible goals. That is to say, you could have equality. You could have an active government. You could correct the injustices and inequities of free market capitalism in a proactive way. But you could do that consistent with maintaining individual liberties.

What someone like the composer John Cage viewed as freedom, it’s really, really different from our political definitions of freedom. It’s like not the freedom of Freedom Fries and the Freedom Caucus and Pete Buttigieg speeches. So tell me about the John Cage approach to freedom. Who is he? And why is he in your book under this rubric?

Yeah, so John Cage was an avant garde composer. And probably everybody knows his most famous piece. The title of it is “4’33” [four minutes and 33 seconds] but you probably know it as the silent piece for piano in which the musician — it’s usually a pianist, but could be basically performed by any musician — is silent for four minutes and 33 seconds. So that’s the piece. He composed that piece in 1952.

John Cage believed in freedom not of the artist, but of sound. So he was very influenced by Arnold Schoenberg, who he studied with in California in the 1930s when Cage was a young man, who created the 12-tone system of composition. So in the regular scale, there’s 12 tones, right? And in normal classical music that Western ears are accustomed to, there’s a tonic that is said — there’s a key that the piece is composed in. And eventually, everything resolves to that key. So it starts in the key of C. It will end up in the key of C. And the ear expects that to happen.

In 12-tone music, all the notes of the scale, all 12 of them, are treated equally. There’s no dominant note or dominant key or dominant chord. So to Western ears, that sounds atonal. And that’s what people used to call it. So what Cage thought was that, well, Schoenberg has freed up musical sound so that they’re all treated equally and none as dominant. I’m going to do the same thing for all sounds and silence. So I’m going to treat musical sounds, noises, and silence as all equivalent in my compositions.

So he made these very zany pieces, which incorporated musical sounds, noises — sometimes they were recorded on tape — and silences, which were all programmed into the music so that you would be listening to all those things and giving equal attention to all of them. So his notion of freedom had to do with freeing up the materials of music so that none of them would be subordinate to another one.

To ask the obvious question here, but who cares? So I happen to be fascinated by John Cage for all kinds of reasons. I’m a sort of a John Cage stan. But I definitely think that you could hear this conversation about a guy holding piano concerts where somebody only pretends to play the piano or just doesn’t play the piano and say, that’s just a curiosity for intellectually masturbatory elites. But so you write about him in this book about American post-war power and cultural influence. So what matters here? He’s establishing a kind of equality of sound within his own work, but what role does he have to play in the evolving American conception or exported conception of freedom?

So he’s the one who pushed the boundaries farther than anybody else was comfortable pushing them. So when I started writing about him, I didn’t really grasp how important he is. But he’s really an important figure all through this entire period. So let’s just take the silent piece for piano because it’s true. And this you could say is about a lot of the art in this period: that it was very shocking when it was first performed or first exhibited. Now it seems rather banal to us.

So the silent piece for piano, it can seem like a gimmick or can seem almost like a joke. But actually, Cage had a very serious intention with it, which is that when you’re in a concert — so let’s just say you go to Carnegie Hall to hear Lang Lang playing the piano. You are concerned that you have a good seat so that you could hear the sounds that the piano is making. You’re completely focused on the performer and the instrument and the sound that’s coming out of it. You screen out everything else in your aural and visual fields to focus on this.

We go to classical music concerts. People sit as though there’s kind of a broom up them because they don’t want to move at all because they’re completely focused on the music. So Cage is saying, suppose you could just silence the music. What else would you hear in that environment? We hear all kinds of other sounds that you don’t think of as interesting to the ear, but actually, they are if you start paying attention to them.

So the first performance of silent piece for piano was in Woodstock, New York, at an outdoor concert hall called Maverick Concert Hall. It had a kind of corrugated metal roof on it. But it was exposed. The walls were exposed. And there was a concert of avant garde musical pieces. And the silent piece was one of the pieces performed. And during the piece where the piano is silent, you could hear the wind in the trees. There was a brief patter of rain on the roof of the shed that it was inside of. You could hear noises of other people in the audience. By the time the piece was almost over, people were starting to leave. They were really annoyed by it. So Cage was saying, all this is like music. I say all of this in your environment that you’re not paying attention to most of the time is actually going on without you. And if you could just refocus, you’d be amazed at what you can hear.

One thing that it struck me your book was about was this 20-ish year period where the American mind, psyche, culture, freed itself to take a much wider range of ideas and movements and people seriously, from liberatory movements politically to unusual forms of art like John Cage or Jackson Pollock or the Beat poets, to different kinds of literature, to very, very different political structures, right, all the way from socialism and communism to totalitarianism to more intense forms of libertarianism and democracy.

And that there’s something going on in this moment, where a collective mind, the collective psyche that had been pretty straitlaced in what it was willing to take seriously, what it was willing to admit into consideration, explodes open. And you get all these things that sometimes they look weird when people look at them now or looked at them then. But there was a willingness to bring it in, Andy Warhol being another example. Is that right? And if so, what was the condition for that? Why did the American mind open up all at once for this period?

That’s exactly what the book is about, Ezra. And as you say, it’s about two kinds of opening up. One is cultural or artistic, expanding the range of things that you take an interest in. And the other is social, which is personified by the civil rights movement and then the women’s movement. And it’s the opening up of American life, really, that you see in this period. Why did that happen? I think there’s two reasons for it. One is the Cold War because geopolitics put a lot of pressure on the United States to demonstrate its true commitments to freedom and equality. That’s what we were standing for.

Then we had to address the problem of race relations. We had to address the problem of gender relations. We had to address the problem of censorship. We had to show that we were serious about equality and liberty. So I’m one of many scholars who think that the civil rights movement would not have been as effective as it was if not for the geopolitical pressures put on the American government by the fact of decolonization.

So around the world, all these former colonial states are becoming independent. They’re all being governed now by people of color for the first time in history almost, in our modern history. And the United States has to show that it’s committed to the same values as these new independent states are. So that geopolitical pressure I think helps to explain a little bit of what’s going on.

But the other part of it is that this is a period when, after 1945, the United States was actively engaged with the rest of the world. There was very little isolationist sentiment in the United States in that period. And that engagement with the rest of the world had its good sides and its bad sides, obviously, politically and economically.

But it was very beneficial to the United States culturally. Because we were open to the influence of thinkers from other countries, of artists from other countries, of entertainment products from other countries that helped to pollinate American culture itself and really transform it into something very interesting. So one of the things I try to emphasize in the book is the extent to which all the things we think of as American culture in this period really was the result of influences from all over the world.

How much do you think that the two world wars figure in here? And there’s something very specific I have in mind, that the single best art exhibit I’ve ever seen, I took a vacation in Spain once. And I went to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. And they had this exhibit on how modern art develops. And what they did in it was they tracked all of these artists from before particularly World War II to after.

And I actually get emotional just talking about it. You watch the representational nature of art melt. You watch people making the most beautiful, classical, crisp paintings. It almost looks like scribbling, but you begin to realize it’s trying to get at an unrepresentable level of horror. It’s like the first time I understood some of these changes like cubism ever.

And one question I always have with it is part of what happens here is that so many people have seen now that the world can become so much darker, so much more savage than they possibly imagined. The strictures on civilization are so much weaker than so many people thought at that time that, well, who’s to say what does and doesn’t need to be taken seriously? Who’s to say what can and can’t happen? That the imagination of the possible has been blown out towards the dystopic, but that also blows it out in all directions kind of simultaneously.

Yeah, I think in 1945, the world had been through a depression that lasted almost 10 years and that it had been through a World War that lasted almost six years. And the Germans called 1945 zero hour. It’s just everybody wanted to turn the page. And everybody felt there’s an opportunity for a fresh start, but we don’t know where it’s going to go. That’s a very exciting moment to be in.

I have to say that when I finished the book, which was about a year ago a few months after that, Biden was elected. And I felt — and I still feel that to some extent — that this is a fresh moment for the United States. We could really think about ourselves differently as a country. We could really think about the role government plays differently from the way we’ve been thinking about it for the last 30 or 40 years. We could really create public programs that help people. We could really be tolerant of people from other places and welcoming to them and ideas from other places. Or we could go back to the closed world of Trump.

And I think people felt something like that right after the Second World War, particularly in the United States. They didn’t know where history was going to go because history had been in a terrible place for almost 15 years. And now they were looking at an opportunity to make the future for themselves. And those were exciting moments as sort of moments of feeling a new dawn. And I think that persisted really up through the period of the Civil Rights Act.

Why do you think culture mattered so much during this period? You have a sequence in the book where you write, “Most striking was the nature of the audience. People cared. Ideas mattered. Painting mattered. Movies mattered. Poetry mattered. The way people judged and interpreted paintings, movies, and poems mattered.”

I think implicitly, you’re saying there that these things, these movements, don’t matter as much to the American mass audience as they did then. So I can understand in the aftermath of the world wars, of the depression, the opening up of the political imagination. But why was cultural production so intermingled here, artistic ideas so intermingled here? That’s such a big part of your book. Why was the audience different then?

So this whole period is a period of great economic growth all over the world in Western Europe and the United States. And that creates all kinds of opportunities for people to pay to publish and exhibit art and watch movies and so forth. Because there’s a kind of built-in structure for that that’s developing. So those are very exciting things. And along with that are people who say that doesn’t count as art. That doesn’t count as poetry. That doesn’t count as cinema. And then you get arguments about it. So that’s just part of how culture kind of works dialectically, is that something new provokes a backlash or reaction to it. And then there’s an argument about what counts and what doesn’t count.

Another issue, though, I think has to do with the fear that people had, which I think we discount a little bit today. Because we think of it as kind of a vulgar anticommunism. But the fear that intellectuals had, regardless of their politics, that the future would be totalitarianism, that’s the image that George Orwell creates in “1984.” He’s not saying this is what communism is like. He’s saying this is what the future is like. Everybody’s going to be living this way in the future because that’s the tendency of modern history. People took that seriously. And I think for good reason, they were very worried about that. So if the future could be “1984,” the world that Orwell depicts in that novel, this kind of dystopic world, what could cause us to get there faster than something else? That could have to do with any kinds of choices that we make as a society. So it’s very important, in other words, that art not be a form of brainwashing. That’s a big concern in this period.

So people want to think about an art that allows people to be free and not an art that brainwashes them or propagandizes them to the dictates of a state. So those become really live issues. I’ll put it this way. The atmosphere is very charged. Everything seems to matter. Every choice that we make in society — behavioral, cultural, political — seems to have potential repercussions that could be very bad. So I think we feel that way today, but about different things.

I don’t think we worry today about what kind of art you like. I just think that’s not much of an issue. People like to argue about their favorite movie. But that’s not quite the same thing as what was going on here. But with the other things that we do think, we take very seriously and we do worry about.

So I want to go back to Jackson Pollock here. You have an interesting set of readings of Pollack, of the Beat writers. I think people look back on them now. And it’s all spontaneous. Pollock is just flinging paint at a canvas. The Beats are all taking acid and hanging out. But you make this argument that Pollock’s drip paintings are these very technically sophisticated and very meticulously planned projects. Allen Ginsberg is this cultured Columbia man, to some extent, performing the role of “beat.” Kerouac is this intense workaholic — very, very, very type A, in a way. So what do we miss about them in the way they’ve come to be culturally narrativized?

Yeah, they’re serious artists and writers. I mean, that’s what they do. Andy Warhol, too. Knew a huge amount about art history. I mean, they get portrayed in a kind of popular way as not really serious. But they were very serious people. I think the thing that’s misleading about people like Pollock and Kerouac has to do with the kind of mythology that grew up around their famous works. So in Pollock’s case, he was a very ambitious painter. And he struggled for quite a while in New York City, trying to get a gallery interested in his work and get people to buy it and to write about it. And he got married in 1945 and moved to Long Island with his wife.

Lee Krasner is also an important abstract painter. And the story is that he found the wall of the house was too small to stretch a canvas. Because he was starting to paint big canvases, like mural-sized canvases. So he put it on the floor. And then he started dripping paint on it. He used a stick. So he’d have a can of paint, get paint on a stick, and then he kind of waved the stick over the canvas. And that would create the drips. Sometimes he would use a brush or other things. And he liked it.

So they converted a barn on the property into a studio. And he started repeating that and putting the canvas on the floor of the studio and throwing paint on it. And these works became known — I think his first drip show was 1948 or ‘49. And people started noticing that this guy was making paintings out of drips. And the show failed. Nobody bought any of the work. People couldn’t quite get what it was about.

But photographers were interested in his technique. So they would go out to Springs, and they would photograph him painting in his studio. And his photographs got printed in Life Magazine, so Pollock became very famous for these images of himself throwing paint on the canvas. And Pollock became identified as this painter who approached the canvas and then kind of impulsively flung paint on it. And that’s very misleading about Pollock’s actual technique, which is that he very carefully meditated about what he wanted to do with whatever was on the canvas and what the next move was going to be before he did it.

And if you look at these paintings very closely, if you see it at a museum, they are incredibly intricate, elaborate works. And they’re inimitable. If you think it’s just easy, try making one yourself. You can’t do it. They’re very hard to imitate. So Pollock really was a craftsman. He knew what he was doing. And he took his time doing it. He was upset, I think, that in these images of himself painting, it gave the impression that it was spontaneous. But it wasn’t any more spontaneous than any other painters’ work would be. It’s just he applied the paint in a different way.

So Kerouac’s a similar story because — or the story about the composition of “On the Road,” which is, of course, his big novel, which was published in 1957. He actually wrote that novel in 1951. He’d been struggling for a long time, trying to create a novel based on these trips he’d taken across the country with his friends. And he’d had big notebooks. He tried writing a conventional novel based on the stories. And he was very frustrated.

And then, in 1951, for various reasons, he got inspired. He taped together rolls of architect’s paper. He was staying in an apartment that an architect had lived in. And so it was one continuous scroll. And he put the scroll in a typewriter, and he just kept typing and didn’t go back. And he typed the whole novel on this scroll, which still exists. Sometimes it’s exhibited. It’s quite interesting to look at it, just this huge piece of paper. And that, too — and Kerouac actually use this term, unfortunately, to describe how he did it — is referred to as spontaneous composition.

But that also is extremely hard to do. It’s very hard to write when you can’t erase what you’ve just written, just as it’s very hard to paint when you have to deal with wherever the paint fell the last time you waved your stick on the canvas. It’s a discipline to create that way. Not many people can do it. Now, Kerouac, once he finished it, retyped it and edited it and so on. It’s not like that was the finished product. But just to create a whole novel without ever going back is the opposite of spontaneous. It’s very hard to do.

So, Ginsberg as well, the manuscript for “Howl” exists. It’s full of corrections and changes and so forth. It’s not like they just spewed it out of their minds when they were writing it. So a lot of the stories about the cult of spontaneity, same thing is true of jazz. It’s hard to play jazz solo. It’s not like you just push any note, unless you’re Ferris Bueller on the saxophone. You have to know what you’re doing. So there’s a kind of myth of spontaneity that’s associated with the culture of this period. It actually doesn’t describe very well how it was created.

Even I think of example of Cage. The “4 Minutes and 33 Seconds,” he actually composed that. So there was a score. And the pianist who performed it at this concert hall in Woodstock had a score on the music stand that he turned the pages of while he was timing the music. It was all written out with measures and everything. It’s just that there weren’t any notes on it. So it took Cage a long time to actually compose it using his various techniques that he used to compose it. So all of the silences are a particular length that add up to 4 minutes and 33 seconds. So that also is not easy to do.

It’s wild. This is a little bit touchy, but one thing I was thinking about reading the book is, today we don’t culturally code, I think, poetry or painting or some of these other disciplines as particularly masculine pursuits. Not to say men don’t do them, I just don’t think they’re coded that way, particularly poetry. But they were then. It’s all these — in your book, it’s all these alcoholic, philandering men smoking cigarettes and getting into fights and flipping over cars. I’m curious what you think changed there.

I think the big change happens in the early 1960s, just focusing now on American culture. And that has to do with two critics who I think are just crucially important to understanding what happened in what we’re describing as the opening up of American life. One is Susan Sontag, and the other is Pauline Kael. And what Susan Sontag, what she’s famous for, among other things, what she’s famous for in this period, is calling for what she called an erotics of interpretation.

So what she’s trying to say there is that people tend to appreciate art in a cerebral way. They try to figure it out. And what we should be responding to is a much more bodily way. We should be experiencing it in a sensory way rather than just an intellectual way.

And Pauline Kael said the same thing about the movies, is that people are worried too much about theories of film and so on. They should just enjoy the movies. Actors are great to look at. They’re sexy. Movies are exciting. They’re entertaining. They’re funny. Those are the values that we should have about that. We shouldn’t worry about what they mean in some kind of intellectual way.

I don’t think it’s as significant that both of those critics were women. So I think they were saying something that no male critic could say in that period. They didn’t speak as feminists. In fact, both of them were rather hostile to the women’s movement and not like to think of themselves as women writers at all. But I don’t think men could have said that.

At the same time that Sontag’s writing these essays — we’re talking about 1964, 1965 — there’s a whole burst of art movements that are all body based, so works in which the artist squirms around on the floor, covered in mud and paint, works in which the artist’s body is included in the artwork and so on. And a lot of those artists also are women. So I think some of this has to do with a kind of switch in the role that gender plays in intellectual life that I associate that with the birth of the women’s movement, with Betty Friedan’s book, “The Feminine Mystique,” in 1963.

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You have an interesting argument that you make kind of quickly in the book, that there was a big shift in this period from intellectual and culturally critical life, where it moved from journals and small circulation magazines into universities, and that that had to do with the expansion of the universities and them opening up to other kinds of people like Jews.

But that you really did lose this more informal, slightly more popular, somewhat less professionalized space. And I was trying to think about whether or not I agree with that. Because when I think about even recent decades, when I think about blogs in the oughts or Twitter now or even small circulation journals like The New Republic in the ‘90s, that they still felt very influential to me. But I wanted to hear you make the case here at a bit more length.

Well, no, they are still influential. And I think, obviously, with the digital revolution, the whole critical economy has changed, which we could talk about separately. But I think in this period, one feature of the post-war years is the expansion of higher education. It just, in sheer numbers, the number of undergraduates doubled in the 1960s, and the number of doctorates awarded tripled. And new campuses are being created all the time, mostly public universities.

And that’s a big shift in intellectual culture because it creates more opportunity for people who are interested in, let’s say, art or literature to pursue an academic career and follow up their interests in an academic setting. So that’s a good thing, in a lot of ways, as you suggest, because the university opens itself up to certain kinds of people who basically would have been excluded — Jews for a long time, women for a long time — and then other groups that were underrepresented. And that’s a big shift. That’s a good thing. It means that more Americans are going to college than had gone to college in the ‘50s or the ‘40s.

And that creates a bigger educated class of cultural consumers who go to museums and buy novels and argue about movies and read little magazines. But I think it also had the effect in the ‘70s and ‘80s of creating a kind of class of critical writers who spoke only to each other. I think my field is English. I feel it’s largely the case that English professors write for English professors. They don’t really write for anybody else. And that’s something that you see starting to happen in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

So the university kind of colonizes that, the world of criticism and small magazines, and colonizes the world of creative writing by creating all of these MFA programs, such that now, most American writers have gone through an MFA program. Many of them teach in MFA programs. I think it colonized, to a certain extent, the world of dissident political opinion. So now those people tend to be housed in English departments and academic departments, as opposed to bohemian enclaves.

So there’s a shift that you see in this period. It doesn’t mean — you’re completely right — that little magazines don’t have cultural influence or aren’t important. A lot of the contributors those magazines now are professors, but not all of them. And they do play a role. But of course, since the internet, that’s all completely changed because now everybody’s in the game. Everybody’s a critic.

When I started out writing for magazines in the 1980s, there were only a few magazines where, if you wrote something critical about a book or a movie or something, you got a lot of readers. There were maybe a handful of things that people read. So there was a very narrow gate to get into that critical conversation. Today, everybody’s in the conversation. There’s no dominant medium. There’s no dominant journal. There’s no dominant set of opinions. I think that’s a good thing. But it’s not something that you see in the immediate post-war period.

You have an extremely cynical take on English literature departments. You argue in the book that the whole style criticism that emerges, like New Criticism, where you’re really taking the text on its own terms and not trying to read into the moment or the artist’s intentions, you really argue it’s functionally a protection racket to make it clear that English literature departments are needed. And so that we are all kind of sitting in the aftermath of something that looked like an intellectual movement and was actually just an occupational protection scheme. I’d like to, one, hear you talk a bit about that idea and then, two, hear how your English literature faculty colleagues reacted to that idea.

OK, and I don’t call it a protection racket, and I don’t think I’m cynical about it. But it’s true that a way of thinking about understanding poetry that arises with the modernists like T. S. Eliot around 1920, let’s say, was not an academic, had no interest in English departments — a way of thinking about poetry as being about poetry. And it should be discussed as poetry rather than as either social commentary or reflection of the feelings of the poet or the historical period in which it’s written, but just as a poem and their correspondence, ways of thinking about art and so forth. We call this formalism.

Now that does get taken up by critics in the ‘30s and ‘40s, who are professors. And it becomes a justification for English departments to focus on teaching poetry separately from other areas of knowledge. So one of the premises of this kind of criticism, which we call the New Criticism, is that people don’t naturally know how to read a poem.

Because they don’t understand how poetic language works. They tend to read poems literally. They don’t understand how to read language figuratively. And they tend to think of poems as some kind of unmediated expression of the feelings of the poet. They don’t think of the poem as a kind of independent artifact. It’s created by a poet, but does not necessarily reflect that poet’s own feelings or biography and so on, so that people make these mistakes when they read, and they need to be taught how to read properly.

So my point is just that for 3,000 years, nobody thought you needed to be taught how to read a poem until these professors came along and said, you don’t know how to do it. So to that extent, it is a justification for English departments. Because it says, here’s something that people need to be taught how to do. We are equipped to teach them how to do that. We have various techniques for doing that. We have various vocabulary that we use to explain how poems work. And that’s a justification for having literature departments. I don’t have an objection to teaching people how to read literature. My objection is just that I don’t think literature should be separated from context or biography. I just think that’s part of what makes it what it is. So just in general, in my book, I try to contextualize everything. I try to say, here are the reasons why it was possible for this person with this life history under these social conditions to produce a drip painting or “On the Road” or Elvis Presley. It doesn’t mean that the person doesn’t have talent. Of course, they have talent. They have something they could do that other people can’t do as well. But the conditions have to be the right conditions for that talent to emerge. And then how people understand what those people have done is also a function of the social and historical moment that the work is produced in.

Let me move to something else going on, on campuses during this period. I’m very curious how you compare campus radicalism today and in the ‘60s. So you write about the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. It’s called, of course, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Today, the cultural fear that you get everywhere is that campus radicals, they don’t care that much about free speech. They’ve subordinated that idea to other concepts of justice. Do you see these movements? Do you see left campus radicalism in that era and in this era as really in opposition? Or is there more throughline than some of the branding would suggest?

Yeah, that’s a good question. As you suggest, it’s pretty complicated. On the one hand, it’s true the Berkeley Free Speech Movement was literally about free speech. So this happens in 1964. And the administration at University of California at Berkeley banned political tables on campus. Political tables were like card tables that students would set up with political literature on them to promote civil rights or other causes. And the university banned those from campus. And the students revolted and occupied the administration building, Sproul Hall, and basically forced the university to back down.

And it was called the Free Speech Movement because that’s really what the stakes were in that particular protest. But for a lot of the people who were involved in the protest, for a lot of the students involved in the protest, there was a bigger issue, which was the nature of the post-war university. And they regarded the university as treating them as basically human material to be manufactured to serve the needs of government and industry.

They felt that they weren’t being given any say in their own educations. They felt the questions about values that they wanted to raise in the classroom were ruled as not empirical or not important. They felt stifled by the intellectual environment of the post-war university. So those students do have something in common with students today.

Because what the students today are often protesting is something about the nature of the institution itself that say the modern university is perpetuating or failing to address problems of social injustice and racial inequity and that they want to hold the university to account for that failure, as they see it, and also, in many cases, like at Harvard, for its own history of complicity in the regime of white supremacy. So to that extent, there’s a similarity. I think in the free speech thing, obviously, the balance has shifted in the other direction.

One thing that struck me as a continuity, although in a complicated way, is, you quote one of the critiques being made by the Berkeley Free Speech Movement as the universities become soulless, that it has no values, right? Partially, this, you’re trying to make me a cog in the machine idea. I don’t think that critique would hold as much today. I think it’s clear that universities do have value so that particularly, they want to be antiracist. Their broad values are left, even if not always as left as some of the students may want.

And then, in many ways, the critique of the universities. like the fight on the universities, is whether or not they’ve gotten too into their own values. Now, of course, these things coexist with STEM education and a very, very heavy commercialization of the universities and a customer focus. But is there a way in which the modern fights reflect the campus radicals of the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, somewhat getting what they wanted, and now you have universities that try much more to be at least somewhat value oriented institutions, although in ways that end up being then complicated in practice?

I think they are much more value oriented. And I think that’s a good thing. And it is complicated. But universities, particularly elites, which is often what we’re talking about here, want to be inclusive. And they go to enormous lengths to make students feel welcome and comfortable, regardless of their backgrounds, and faculty as well. And that has become a big focus of universities in a way that probably people didn’t even care about in 1960 or so. So that is a big change. And I think that’s a change that grows out of those student movements, as you suggest it does. So to the extent the university is more soulful, has got more soul, that’s true.

I think on the other hand, that elite universities tend to turn out people who are very good at doing things in the corporate economy that make a lot of money. And they go to Wall Street, and they go to Silicon Valley. And they go into consulting and so forth. And they become well-off. And their values may be progressive or not progressive. But it’s not as though the university is persuading them that there are more important things in life than being successful.

So I think there’s a tension there. And students feel it, too. I think they feel conflicted about what they know is important in life on the one hand, and on the other hand, what their education is funneling them towards. And that’s something that faculty often feel with students, too. It’s frustrating because especially where I teach, the students are unbelievable. I mean, they’re incredibly talented people. I’m astonished talking to these 18-year-olds and think what a callow nitwit I was when I was 18 years old. And they’re very articulate. And they have great values.

But what’s the outcome of this education that they’re getting is basically an opportunity to do well in an economy, which is grossly unequal. But these are all just tensions, just like the inclusion question is a tension. Inclusion makes some people feel excluded and so on. Yeah, they’re hard things to work out. But universities are designed to accommodate those tensions ideally.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I want to talk a bit about how markets and freedom can be in tension. And let me use modern cultural production as an example. Today, like the industries that you write about in the book, they’re unbelievably huge global exports. But also, you’re seeing ways in which that reduces freedom. I mean, we create lots of movies for the Chinese market that are functionally censored here in America because we’re worried about Chinese backlash. I mean, we just saw John Cena, the wrestler and actor, give this groveling apology in Mandarin because while promoting the “Fast and Furious 9,” he said Taiwan is a country.

And I think it gets at this way in which we frame the markets as carriers of freedom, as, in some ways, in the Soviet Union period, is synonymous with freedom. But they actually have their own incentives. And they’re not free. So I’d like to hear you talk a little bit about that tension in culture between potentially markets overwhelming the kinds of freedom of action and freedom of production that maybe were flowering in this earlier period.

I would say a couple of things. One is that it’s true that this period I’m writing about is the great triumph of consumerism. And consumerism means consumer choice, what they used to call consumer sovereignty. So when I go online to buy a pair of headphones for this interview, I can immediately comparison shop every available headphone on whatever company I’m buying it from. And there’s all kinds of ratings and so forth to enable me to make the best choice.

And that’s something that you see starting in mid 20th century and these economies is consumer choice. People experience that as a good thing. They experience that as freedom. I get to decide what kind of car I want and what kind of a washing machine I want, what kind of headphones I want. And the economy is giving me more and more choices.

So from that point of view, I think consumerism and freedom are compatible. Now, the issue that you raise — this is an important one — which is that there’s something about the dynamic in which neither party is completely free. Because I’m caught in that web of comparison shopping, whether I want to be or not. And I’m forced to make certain choices that I might not want to make or not be competent to make. And then the supplier is also caught in the web of trying to understand what my demands are. Now they do it by algorithms, figuring out what exact product they want to show on my computer screen. Because that’s the kind of thing I’m likely to buy.

So it does become this kind of self-consuming artifact. In the case of the cultural industries, I think a slightly different way of putting it is that it’s true that the book ends exactly at the moment, in my view, when culture becomes global. And the United States went from being a country in 1945 — people did not think of it as a major player in world culture. People liked American movies and jazz and so forth, but not really a major player in world culture, to being at the center of an increasingly international world of art and ideas.

What that means is that social media, music, movies, literary fiction, all these art forms go around the world, but they pass through Los Angeles and New York. Those are the financial distribution centers for world culture. And that’s the role of the United States now. It’s not like we generate culture that’s American. What we do is distribute culture that’s global. And as you suggest, that’s a tricky business because to the extent that there’s a big market in China or India, which are huge markets, I understand, for a lot of these companies, they have to tailor the product for that market. And they have to make sure that they’re dealing with the sensitivities of those regimes. And that’s a price that’s paid for expanding these markets.

I would say still, on the whole, it’s better that culture circulates globally even with some constraints on it than it not. And it’s better that we think of culture in international rather than nationalist terms. So I think on the whole, those are positive developments.

I think it might be better the culture circulates globally. I’m not sure I think it’s better that it circulates globally quite so commercially, if that makes sense, that the weight of market expectations and need to make billions back on your movies, that’s a lot of pressure. Something I was thinking about reading through the book, was the way in which our idea of freedom was warped by our competition with the Soviet Union. And I think this is true in culture, but I think this is generally true for how we think about markets.

I mean, you have this whole chapter on the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the way he tries to argue that freedom from certain kinds of deprivations, freedom from not having health insurance, or freedom from being impoverished leads to forms of tyranny. And I do think the big blind spots in the American conception of freedom, at least, in part, come from wanting to create this version of freedom that was a very sharp ideological counter to the Soviet Union. But that then gets picked up by the market.

And it’s like, yeah, now freedom is being able to buy consumer goods. And I mean, obviously, there is real freedom in this country in profound ways. But there’s also a lot of ways in which people are profoundly unfree, but they’re mostly because of, in my view, at least, the way our needs are subordinated to the market or manipulated by the market. And that’s a complexity.

I do think we’ve over associated freedom with a kind of hyper individualism and consumerism that does not leave people feeling all that free today. I don’t think if you look around in political theory, people are just sitting here marveling over how free everybody feels and really is. And so I wonder how you think about that. I mean, is there a little bit of a poisoned legacy here?

Yeah, well, you’re describing neoliberalism. In the 19th century, liberalism meant free markets and individual freedom. Those two things went together. And the crisis of the Great Depression, which caused a lot of these anxieties about what the future might hold, was the conclusion a lot of people reached in Western Europe and the US that capitalism had failed. This is the crisis that Marx had predicted. So, a lot of the politics of that period, the immediate pre-war period, is wrapped up with this idea something has to replace free market capitalism because it doesn’t work.

And then as we know, Roosevelt saved capitalism through the New Deal, changed the relationship between markets and the state somewhat. But he enabled it to survive. And then there’s a period right after the period I write about when I think there’s a pretty good balance between the government or the public sector and the private sector. And this is also a period of historically unprecedented income equality. So the levels of income inequality and wealth inequality that we’re familiar with were much reduced in that 20-year period. So there’s a good balance.

And then, as you know, the free market gets revived. It’s kind of what Reaganism is about, among other things. And we get what we call now neoliberalism, which is a revival of this old idea that free markets and individual liberties somehow always go together. You’re right in saying that they obviously don’t and that that creates a bit of a conundrum for us because we’re so, I think even still, wedded to this idea of the free, that we have a hard time coping with the fact that a free market doesn’t necessarily conduce to individual liberty. But I think that’s the inheritance that you’re talking about.

But this is why I bring up China and culture in this context. Because I think that one of the — you could call it more optimistic theories. But certainly one of the theories was that market choice and market values really do lead to freedom. And we would export this, and it will lead to more freedom in other places, too. And I think China particularly shows how that’s not working out, how the market ends up being a lever that others can use, whether that’s China or whether it’s just people with a lot of economic power to make other people act in ways they want.

I mean, “Fast and Furious 9” is by no means the only example. Look at the contortions of the NBA over the past couple of years, as people occasionally say something about overwhelming levels of political repression in China and then have to apologize or shut up or whatever it might be. And so that’s, I think, one example. But I think it speaks to something that is failing a little bit. I mean, it’s really interesting to me how much culture is a weaponized ideological export in the 20th century. Part of the point of exporting our culture is not that it’s going to make a bazillion dollars. It’s that it’s going to prove the supremacy of our values.

Now, though, because the point of the exporting of our culture is to make a bazillion dollars, we often curb those values. There’s much less, I think, weaponized culture in that way. And maybe that’s good in certain ways. Certainly, the culture is just propaganda. It has its own set of problems, just geopolitical propaganda. But it’s hard not to feel like you’re seeing something a little dangerous here.

But this is also evident in a lot of other areas of life that we did a really good job, or at least, somewhat of a good job, freeing ourselves from different kinds of government dystopias and government restrictions on freedom, although, of course, not all of them, but that we don’t even have a very good language for the way the market affects freedom. I mean, because it’s still a choice we ended up making, isn’t that free as long as you make a choice? And yeah, I mean I think you’re right that this is broadly sort of neoliberalism reasoning. But it’s also a way in which it just kind of failed, in which it, over time, the theory that it would lead to more and more freedom is, it seems to me, is sort of beginning to turn back on itself. And that’s where we get to I think some of what we were talking about right at the beginning of the conversation. The ways in which freedom and equity got cleaved apart from each other as sort of opposites, as opposed to things that you needed in some rough equilibrium in order for both of them to work strikes me as real wreckage of this era. So I mean, the left doesn’t maybe talk enough about freedom. But the equity, at least it sometimes talks about, does strike me as a prerequisite for it, whereas the right talks a lot about a kind of freedom that has very little equity in it. And so it doesn’t end up being very much of a real freedom. And that’s true in the individual realm as much as it is in the commercial and political ones.

I think you’re right that one feature of the Cold War era over this 20-year period that I write about is what you’re calling the weaponization of culture. I wouldn’t quite put it that way. But let’s just say, using cultural exports and circulating cultural goods as a way of promoting the ideals of American society and that that was self consciously done. Historians who write about this tend to take a very negative view of that, of using culture as a kind of propaganda. I don’t have a problem with it. It’s better than bombing people, sending Louis Armstrong over on a goodwill tour. And it’s healthy to circulate culture.

And of course, when you use cultural diplomacy, you’re branding the cultural good with your national identity. That’s why you do it. Louis Armstrong is an American jazz musician. That’s why we sent him around the world. And people like the music. So there was a belief that this was a good way to win the hearts and minds of people in other countries by exporting our products. And with exporting them, we were exporting our values as well.

I don’t see that now as a motivation for cultural distribution. I think it is about money. And there are so many platforms now that lots of different kinds of cultural products can be distributed and consumed on the internet, all kinds of streaming services and social media, and you name it. So there’s a lot of opportunity for stuff to get out there, but I don’t think any more that we think of it as a form of converting people to liberal democracy. That’s stopped. And people did think that in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

The book is so much about this incredibly explosive period in American cultural creation. Do you think right now we’re in a period that is as rich culturally? Or are we in a more fallow one?

I think we’re in an interesting place because the world of artistic expression has gotten so large. And the barriers to entry have gotten so much lower that there’s, I would say, a kind of democratization of art and ideas that didn’t exist 50 years ago. More people have access to those media. And they can express their views. We may be sorry about some of those people’s views. But there is an opportunity to do that. So it’s a little hard to say that things are different in a bad way. They’re just different. I would say even the same thing is true of criticism. I think criticism is in great shape because people like to consume criticism. The internet is filled with criticism. A lot of it is very learned, educated, interesting, sophisticated criticism of movies, music, whatever — TikTok, whatever is going on. And that’s a good thing. The fact that there are very few dominant critics or critical voices is also probably a good thing.

So I just think we’re in a different political and cultural landscape than we were before. I think some things, we could look back on and say, well, things were more interesting then. Maybe things were more predictable then. Maybe arguments were sharper, more significant then than they are now. But we have our own things that we argue about today.

I think that’s a good place to come to a close. Let me ask you always our final question, which is what are three books that have influenced you that you recommend to the audience?

OK, so I do have some books to recommend. One of them is a pretty old book. And it’s a book I talk about in “The Free World” is “Tristes Tropiques” by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist who went to Brazil in the 1930s when he was young. He was teaching at the University of Sao Paulo, and he made these field trips into the interior and studied these indigenous peoples. And eventually, he developed what’s known as structural anthropology from these studies. So “Tristes Tropiques” is basically a memoir of his trip to Brazil when he was a young man and then his lessons that he learned there.

The reason I recommend it is, A, it’s just a beautifully written book. It’s just a huge pleasure. I’ve read it several times. It’s really a huge pleasure to read. B, because it’s interesting. He has kind of a mordant take on his field trip, field work that he did. It’s interesting about the peoples he met. It’s also an introduction to structural anthropology if you’re interested in understanding what that was all about.

But the most important thing is that it’s actually about the Anthropocene. Lévi-Strauss is interested in the idea of the human race as a kind of species that will die out inevitably that comes into existence in a certain moment in history and will disappear and that the Earth is kind of this abiding place. So what he has to say about the Anthropocene, about decolonization, about globalization, is 1955, he writes this book. It’s still very relevant today. So I recommend it to your listeners.

A book that’s about the period I write about, but from a different point of view, point of view of political history and European political history, is a book called “Postwar” by Tony Judt, published in 2005. And it’s filled with fresh insights. It’s amazingly comprehensive. It covers all the European countries. And it’s a great way to understand where Europe is today, to understand where it came from after 1945. And the big theme of Judt’s book is central European nations coming to terms with the Holocaust and what we would call kind of national memory. So that’s also really, it’s a great book.

And then a book that I happened to read when I was working on Cage that I was infatuated is by Carolyn Brown. And it’s called “Chance and Circumstance,” published in 2007. That’s also a memoir. And Carolyn Brown was a dancer with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. So Merce Cunningham was the partner of John Cage. He was a choreographer and dancer, a great dancer. And he formed his company in 1953 at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. She was one of the original members of the company. She toured with Merce Cunningham, who took company all over the world for 20 years.

And this is a memoir that’s basically about that community of avant garde figures. Cage, Cunningham, and two painters they were very closely associated with, both of them worked for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. I knew very little about dance when I read it. I was starting to work on my chapter on Cage. And I found it really an absorbing memoir, “Chance and Circumstance” by Carolyn Brown.

Louis Menand, your book is “The Free World.” Thank you very much.

Thank you, Ezra. [MUSIC PLAYING]

“The Ezra Klein Show” is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Roge Karma, and Annie Galvin; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; and mixing by Jeff Geld.