How to Love Enlightenment

Lisa Fluet How to Love Enlightenment (onJohnMichael, Anxious Intellects:AcademicProfessionals, PublicIntellectuals, and Enlightenment Values [Durham: Duke UP, 2000]; and Zadie Smith, White Teeth [London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000]) Unlike many others around this time, Joyce felt no shame about using the term "middle class." In the Chalfen lexicon the middle classes were the inheritors of the enlightenment, the creators of the welfare state, the intellectual elite and the source of all culture. Where they got this idea, ifs hard to say. Smith, White Teeth An articulated belief in the responsibility of intellectuals, as a justification for pointed intervention into other people's lives, drives much comically ineffectual behavior in Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth. Smith's depiction of relations between three North London families concentrates a certain amount of sarcasm on the white Chalfen family's eager educational and therapeutic "involvement" in the adolescent lives of Anglo-Jamaican Me Jones, and Bengali Magid and Millat Iqbal. Joyce Chalfen, their earth-motherly Mrs. Ramsay, manifests all the varieties of dass snobbery, radsm, cultural pretension, and generational conflid that we probably no longer find surprising in stories about white boomer liberals triumphantly assuming responsibility for underprivileged, mixed race, "delinquenf Gen-Xers. We should, in short, find Stilton-eating, flower-power lefty Joyce Chalfen comically naive, in her serene refusal to feel any shame over the middle-dass assumption of credit for the Enlightenment, the welfare state, the intellectual élite, and "all culture" (White 372). The dubiousness of the inheritance assumed here by Joyce and her kind preoccupies much of White Teeth's action. Why would a good, left intellectual willingly claim the Enlightenment as a class inheritance? The welfare state does not have so tarnished a history, but then, White Teeth charaderizes the welfare state primarily through uninvited Chalfen parental interventions into the lives of Irie, Magid, and Millat, prompting Irie wearily to suggest , in tones Lily Briscoe would have appredated, that "we all try a policy of non-involvement for once? A little laissez-faire?" (373). "A little English education can be a dangerous thing" (307), as Alsana Iqbal observes—and the little-ness of such interventions, their inadequate incompleteness, really drives the novel's critique. In contrast to Irie's complaint, therefore, the impulse to intervene actually surrenders all too easily to laissez-faire, as eager would-be enlighteners like the Chalfens prove, recalling the ghosts of numerous temporarily "involved" white colonial educators in Irie's family history. "Miseducation" results when the student no longer interests the teacher and is left to wander the world with what little she has been al- 292 the minnesota review lowed to know, one instance among many (literally) unfinished projects of modernity. Yet amid the panoply of Enlightenment deceptions taken up in the novel —colonialism, eugenics, Nazi euthanasia and sterilization, the Chalfen "Futuremouse" project of genetic perfectibility—White Teeth inrriguingly resists the available option of Enlightenment critique. Instead, it actually disables Enlightenment's twentieth-century scariness by concentrating sarcasm on those people, like Joyce, who derive a sense of group identity from its exdusive inheritance. She should be ashamed, we can assume, but not of the Enlightenment. Class consdousness is her real crime and the willful joining of such consdousness to ideas that might otherwise be good, could they dissociate themselves from the insularity of "Chalfenism." The dosed-off, self-sustaining quality of middle-dass intellectual families thus comes under the same amused narrative scrutiny that the novel's other depictions of intense group consdousness suffer, like Jehovah's Witnesses, Islamic fundamentalism, and animal rights activism. White Teeth's choices are "Encydopedias or God," as one character suggests early on—not merely because each dialectically inhabits the other, but significantly because each offers a means tosating persistent, yetfundamentally suspidous, desiresfor membership and represent-able publics. JohnMichael'sAnxious Intellects: AcademicProfessionals, Public Intellectuals, and Enlightenment Values opens with the eye-catching injunction: "Forget Populism." Michael diagnoses "the very condition of intellectual work in the realm of popular politics today" as one in which intellectuals "must write and act, take positions and make polemics, in the absence of dear answers to basic questions about their own positioning, authority and prerogatives" (1-2). In failing to recognize and...