The Freeing of the American Mind

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 15 June 2021

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Free minds. Freedom fries. Free speech. The Freedom Caucus. Freedom from. Freedom to. What do Americans really mean when they talk about freedom? Louis Menand’s “The Free World” is a 700-plus-page intellectual history of the Cold War period that traces the opening of the American mind to new ideas in art, literature, politics, music, foreign policy, criticism, higher education and campus activism. John Cage was making silent music, Jackson Pollock was throwing paint on canvases, Pauline Kael was giving us permission to actually enjoy movies. Thinkers like James Baldwin, Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt were arguing over what it meant to be free. Liberatory movements were trying to actually make Americans free. But what did it all get us? Out of all this ferment and conflict, what forms of freedom did Americans secure, and which did we lose? It’s hard to think of a writer better suited to explain the art and intellectual culture of the Cold War than Louis Menand. In his writing for The New Yorker and his Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Metaphysical Club,” Menand has shown how ideas are born out of interactions between individuals and larger historical forces, and how philosophical traditions like pragmatism, Transcendentalism and abolitionism continue to profoundly shape our world. In this conversation, we talk about the opening of the American mind, the rise of the American market and the narrowing of American politics. We discuss the avant-garde artists of the age and why Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision for equity has been lost. Oh, and how today’s elite universities are built atop the legacy of 1960s campus radicalism, whether the Beat writers were actually the rebels they’re remembered as, why John Cena is apologizing to China for calling Taiwan a country and more. Mentioned in this episode: “The Free World” by Louis Menand Recommendations: “Tristes Tropiques” by Claude Lévi-Strauss “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945” by Tony Judt “Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years With Cage and Cunningham” by Carolyn Brown You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Mr. Clan and this is the Ezra Clancho.
0:17.5	I've always been fascinated by the period in the 20th century.
0:21.2	When the American mind just seems to have opened up, it's just an explosive period in which
0:27.0	people will need to consider radically new political structures and ideas, liberation movements,
0:32.4	new forms of art, new forms of culture, new kinds of technology, and all at once compared
0:37.7	to when I grew up in the 90s, the end of history period, this period when it felt like the imagination
0:43.8	of politics had become sharply constrained.
0:46.2	It always felt like such a time of really different and intellectual ferment.
0:51.7	So much more was up for grabs.
0:53.2	People from all society could be shaped into such radically different forms.
0:57.6	I think a bit of that's returning.
0:58.6	I think this era is different than the 90s or odds era.
1:02.5	But even so, I don't think it's like it was then.
1:04.8	I think we feel our path is more set, whether or not it really is.
1:09.1	Louis Menand is a New Yorker staff writer.
1:11.4	He's a professor of English at Harvard and the author of a really fascinating and expansive
1:17.4	new survey of arts, politics, and culture in the post-war period called the Free World.
1:22.2	And one thing he takes super seriously in the book, and that I really appreciated about
1:25.6	it, was this interplay between art and politics.
1:28.6	The way ideas of freedom began driving the arts into new directions and how those new
1:33.2	directions helped create the world, politically, culturally, socially, that we live in now,
1:39.9	both for better, by the way, and for worse.
	...

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