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A Few Words from the Editor
Obviously, a lot has changed since the first words of
this issue were conceived. The cornerstone of Fall 2001 was to have been
Tom Bertonneau’s welcome revisiting of the ever-controversial Oswald
Spengler. Tom has long been prodding me to read Spengler, an endeavor
which I kept evading in the deluded belief that I would one day
"have time" for it. I finally took the bull by the horns—or,
I should say, the tiger by the tail, for Spengler takes one for a wild
ride and sends faint hearts shrieking through the forest canopy with
every step. I could not entirely share Tom’s enthusiasm (though I must
confess that my reading of Spengler cannot compare to his in
thoroughness), but I found in The Decline of the West a highly
provocative range of ideas which focused my own about destiny and
freedom. I dare to include some of these latter in the present issue, as
well, that readers may enjoy a productive disagreement and retreat to
their cloisters for further meditation. As the Highlanders used to say, chan
fhiach curam gun a choradh—"no party’s any good without a
quarrel."
What overtook us on the morning of September 11,
though, was no quarrel: it was mass assassination. I had little
difficulty soliciting early responses to the appalling events which our
oracles persist in calling a tragedy. (Sorry, but a tragedy involves
some degree of the victim’s direct moral collaboration: it is a
self-fulfilling prophecy, though the prophet failed to forecast either
its magnitude or his own role as the central target. Whatever you may
feel about our collective responsibility for the attack—and theories
range from the academy’s slavering anti-Western claptrap to Falwellian
apocalypse to fiddling-while-Rome-burns oblivion about security—we
were not implicated with a properly tragic immediacy. Now, if one of our
domestic carriers had accidentally wiped out a tower… well, hybris
goes before a fall, as the chorus warns Oedipus.) Naturally, I decided
to lead off the issue with two of these reflections, one penned just
hours after the events, the other slightly later as the Ivory Tower
stood rock-solid and lofty over the misunderstood bad boys with blades.
I noticed that Gianna DiRoberti had
slipped in a reference to the Taliban at the end of her literary essay
on bad boys of fascist and Stalinist varieties. It was highly effective,
and I’m glad that the parallel to current events appeared to her. I
also think, however, that the journal’s other contents are not
irrelevant to our nation’s present reviewing of priorities. In fact,
there could scarcely be a better time to weigh the Spenglerian notion
that cultures are isolated within their differences. Even if this were
so, it could not waive the necessity of one culture’s responding to
another when they collide, as is happening right now most dramatically.
Since the Spenglerian position potentially resembles multiculturalism,
as Professor Bertonneau demonstrates, one cannot reflect upon Spengler
without reflecting simultaneously on the campus’s almost univocal call
to "understand" Islam. (Of course, Spengler’s essential
insight is that we are unable to understand, a posture which academics
will both strike and shirk, depending upon their objective.) Certainly
it is no easy matter to understand even your neighbors. The poems which
I included from Ralph Carlson this time seem to say as much, though they
also say far more. (I’m leery of selecting poetry on the basis of
theme, as all those freshman comp anthologies do: the whole point about
poetry is that it doesn’t have a specific point!) Likewise, Mr. Moseby’s
short story is unusually strong in how it insinuates the layers within
layers which complicate ordinary relations. At the same time, however,
it grasps tirelessly after some thread to lead us out of the
labyrinth—and what else, after all, can we do? I regret that I
cannot pose that question to Oswald Spengler himself, for it seems to me
that simply "fulfilling our destiny" is a very poor answer to
it. What else are all of us afraid of right now, but that our own
society and a certain prominent contingent of Islamic society will
proceed to fulfill their all-too-apparent destinies?
For most of us who read Praesidium, I believe,
were deeply concerned about our culture’s destiny long before
September 11: we didn’t need a terrorist to tell us that we have
problems. Indeed, the terrorists have actually succeeded in pulling our
attention away from our internal problems, and so have assured that we
will be the longer in putting our house in order. Praesidium has
never been coy about its distress over the West’s susceptibility to
relativism and hedonism, its subjection to material toys and giddy
change, and its indifference to past lessons and to its own traditions.
Ironically, the crowd which has most succeeded in giving our downward
spiral a sophistical rationale is also the most vocal apologist of the
terrorist perspective: the professorial class. In other words, those
among us who claim to feel the terrorists’ pain most keenly have done
the best job of advocating what the terrorists most despise in us.
I propose, therefore, that we dedicate the first
issue of 2002 to examining our cultural malady—to offering an
alternative diagnosis, that is, in the face of our esteemed colleagues’
rants about Christianity, the Crusades, and the embargo of Iraq. Mrs.
DiRoberti has already told me that she would like to continue
translating from Pierre Lasserre’s magnificent Romantisme Français,
to which I proudly introduced her this fall. I see no inconsistency
there. Lasserre seems to have got a headstart on our autopsy as soon as
he noticed the acclaim with which Rousseau’s nuttiness was received. ~J.H.
**************************************
Rest in Peace, World Trade Center:
Live Unsettled, Mankind
by
Peter T. Singleton
At this very instant, the destruction of the two
World Trade Towers is almost exactly seventy-two hours old. Many more
instants will have passed before I put the finishing touches to my
ruminations, and a great many more still before this piece passes under
the eyes of others. As a student of our troubled culture (like all Praesidium
readers), my mind is fertile with ideas. Rather too much so—I can
think of at least three or four irreconcilable tangents which are
tempting to chase. Yet within this fertility nestles the sterility known
well to most writers. Too much is often not nearly enough, and little
short of everything may end up being little short of nothing. The
ineffable haunts us before any subject which surges beyond the bounds of
human comprehension in every direction, and our best efforts to cry out
some part of that ineffable only bear despair down upon us.
Not that I am straining after some literary
equivalent of a media montage, where reporters babbling hard facts
outside the Pentagon are salted into heart-wringing interviews with
survivors, adrenaline-surfeited briefings from rescue workers on the
trot, presidential press conferences, and Q&A with Secretary Smith
or Jones back at the studio… all of it wrapped in a slo-mo video
signature where a jet slams into a skyscraper and captions like
"Attack on America" and "War of Terror" are luridly
unpeeled across the screen. I have actually found the television
coverage of the event to be highly informative and comparatively
tasteful. As little inclined as I am to sit through tear-jerking
reunions between separated twins or an amnesia victim and his family, I
nonetheless viewed these tears in a different light. The former are
certainly staged, if not manufactured, for a populace apparently starved
of any profound emotion and reduced to parasitizing the shrieks and sobs
of others; the latter are not remotely staged—the faces on camera are
indeed struggling to retain their composure rather than quivering on
cue, and their all-too-ordinary distress (no kidnapping at birth, no
loss of memory: just a phone call after an explosion) must surely help
to shake that same mesmerized populace out of its stupor. The real, the real
real, has entered our lives this time with such a palpable shock that
the news hounds have scarcely been able to blunt its impact with their
egomaniacal posing and framing of actors and events.
As a cultural commentator, however (for those are the
bounds within which I confine my remarks), I could not help but notice
how often the electronic fantasy-world was gestured at as a referent
during the first chaotic hours. "It was just like a movie"…
"I thought they were making a movie"… such utterances kept
surfacing throughout the day on September 11. I was reminded of a young
man at Wedgwood Baptist Church who had said precisely the same thing
after the homicidal shooting incident there: "We thought they were
making a movie." Perhaps because I have written about the subject
of desensitization so often, I tensed every time the simile was used. It
is a deeply disturbing response. I would most certainly not charge that
most of the people in the streets who voiced it were, in fact,
desensitized to the misery which ensued: but to the initial horror, yes—I
think their perception that something truly horrible was afoot required
seconds instead of milliseconds. They had first to rend the dense film
of "entertainment" conditioning before they could confront the
raw reality. For the young people in Wedgwood, these precious seconds of
delayed recognition may have been fatal, either for themselves or for
those they might have assisted through quick thinking. I don’t suppose
there was any similar cost paid on the streets of New York: the
thunderbolt had already been thrown. On general principle, though, I
remain indignant that our culture has so programmed us that we must
shake a few cobwebs out of our heads before we can meet sudden
extraordinary occurrences. Our brothers and sisters, our husbands and
wives, are dying before our eyes… and between us and the memory of
their death will forever flit the ghost of Towering Apocalypse Part
II. We had a right to see every split-second of the flame’s
ghastly flowering: the clarity and precision of our recollection may
have much to do with how soon we come to peace with it. The boundary
between our lives and eternity has been limned with gaudy tinsel. It’s
cheap—it’s trashy.
At this point I consistently lose one of my strands.
Western culture’s (and especially America’s) utter enthrallment to
Hollywood-style portraits of life is odious to me. I wish it would
change, and I understand why other cultures around the world—for
instance, Islam—find it outrageously offensive. I have often wondered
why some reasonably cultivated group of Muslims doesn’t put its
concerns to us in the form of a quid pro quo which our shakers
and movers could neither mistake nor resist: "Look, you want our
oil, and we want a degree of your technology—but sanitized of certain
features which are morally repulsive to us. Stop exporting your sick
flicks and we’ll knock 10% off every barrel of crude."
Of course, I don’t really wonder: I just
make-believe. The truth is that no such influential group of reasonably
cultivated people exists within Islam. People of that caliber have been
killed off, imprisoned, and otherwise strongly discouraged. With America
you get freedom close up, in all of her moles and body odor; with Islam
you get rigorous devotion to the law carried to extremes that would turn
any decent person’s stomach. I suppose we were fated to clash. There
doesn’t seem to be much basis for compromise in all the leagues of
middle ground which stretch between us like a Sahara.
Except that such argumentation is entirely misleading
in the case of the terrorists. These are not pious Koranic scholars who
have transformed themselves into mujahiddin as a medieval knight
might have joined the Crusades. Their leaders are more like Pol Pot of
just yesterday than like the epic Saladin. Their boys are whisked away
from the cradle into a climate of Manichaean black-and-white reductivism,
raised with guns and bombs instead of soccer balls, tutored in extremist
fanaticism without any peep of a dissenting voice, and cheered on by
peer groups whose members yearn only to be next for the fiery furnace.
Nothing new in all that, you say? But the guns are new—the kind and
number of weapons, many of which fell into terrorist hands courtesy both
of American largesse and of Russian carelessness. The technological
sophistication which must accompany such weapons is also new: that is,
it is fully Western. We are no longer redcoats with Enfield rifles
fighting sheikhs with scimitars naively held aloft. Increasingly, we are
fighting ourselves: surface-to-air missiles, infrared tracking systems,
biological warfare, and the rest. The other side’s professed hatred of
our culture is deceptive on this score. Its overlords have fallen
head-over-heels in love with every effective instrument of destruction
we ever created, and where we flee from developing certain ones as if
being chased in a nightmare, they weave their favorite dreams. As
diehard atavists, then, they are bogus. Very possibly, they do not yet
realize this much about themselves, but it is true. They remind me more
of the frightful bipeds we are producing in some of our high schools
than of Omar Sherif’s band in Lawrence of Arabia: shooting
e-mails back and forth to co-conspirators, building world-domination
websites, hacking into classified documents, playing with high
explosives, poking around in places clearly marked as "off
limits"… don’t look now, but this could be your neighbor’s
brat teenager. It seems that a CD-Rom exists which simulates the cockpit
of a jetliner flying straight over… yes, the World Trade Center and
Pentagon! Though the hijackers may have used the disk to train, it was
produced in the good old U.S. of A. And how many times, I wonder, did
these young saboteurs who drilled themselves on our soil with our
facilities unwind of an evening by going to the movies rather than
reading the Koran? In which employment do you think a twisted
mind is more likely to be confirmed in a taste for vast conflagration?
Which leads me, with the greatest regret and
trepidation, to a most disturbing insight. I should like to be able to
write with complete conviction that American boys (and I mean boys:
children who are no longer children, nor yet men) would ever do such a
thing as snuff out five thousand randomly chosen non-combatant lives.
But what would be the basis of such a claim? Could an adolescent who
sprays with bullets a crowd of boys and girls (some of whom are still
children in every sense) before shooting himself be expected to have
bristled with horror at the thought of steering a passenger jet into a
huge office building? On the contrary, it seems only too clear that
Messrs. Clebold and Harris (of Columbine infamy) would have found the
events of September 11 "totally cool"—and it seems painfully
likely that their successors in spiritual nullity throughout our vast
locker-lined halls of fungus must have looked on with just that
response. Right now, as far as I can surmise, the only thing protecting
us from a hailstorm of young morons in Cessnas attempting kamikaze
attacks with fertilizer payloads on board is the relative expense and
complexity of the operation. If our typical street gang enjoyed the
mentoring of some diabolical ex-commando with a grudge and the generous
funding of (say) a Colombian drug cartel, I have to conclude that every
month would have a September 11. The suicide pilots were punks and
gangsters who, on a given day, looked like the guy hooking up your TV
cable and sounded like the Holiday Inn reservations clerk. They may not
have been the kid next door… but the kid next door could readily
become one of them.
Navigating these sober reflections was made no easier
for me by the assurances of newscasters that people are really good and
that these attacks, consequently, could only have been the work of a
mind so warped that the statistical probability of its existence lives
far right of the decimal point. We were spared such claptrap for the
first day or so. (Like those five or six stages of grieving which we are
all told to magnet to our refrigerators, journalists seem to have their
revered hierarchies in times of crisis: replay disaster, look for new
angles of disaster, replay all recovered angles, stick mike in survivors’
faces, let winsome but dictionally challenged youngbloods wear down any
abiding reluctance among public to say "surreal", and then—only
then—assure world that most people are good and religious fanatics/fatcat
execs/gun-friendly politicians are root of all evil.) Only Peter
Jennings, as far as I know, undertook to assure us on the evening of the
11th that the footage of Palestinians dancing in the streets
did not reveal that population’s true feelings. (Having recently
completed a junket to Egypt or Lebanon or some such place, he promised
us that he knew all about Asia Minor’s heart of hearts.) I could have
done without the "thoughts and prayers", too, of
anchor-persons who apparently don’t know which god they pray to—to
all of them, I guess, whoever’s up there or out there, just to keep
the bets hedged. I won’t say that I begrudge the struggling agnostic a
straining after the metaphysical in moments such as these: I say only
that I don’t find it at all informative, let alone cathartic—only
pathetic, and a little patronizing. Diane Sawyer was uncomfortable
enough wearing sackcloth that she just had to indict wincingly Jerry
Falwell’s remark that homosexuality and feminism played a part in
bringing down the Towers. Though tarred in the idiom of those who see in
every flat tire an expression of God’s will, the proposition is
otherwise not outlandish: Muslims are disgusted by ostentatious
flirtation beyond decorum’s pale. Why not just drop the subject of
prayer entirely if you can’t resist using it as a bludgeon on sinners
against PC? Co-anchor Charles Gibson covered Diane’s stumble (when it
became apparent that the attack on feminism incensed none of the
mourners on screen sufficiently to lay aside those other attacks):
wouldn’t it be nice, he opined, if churches around the country would
invite Muslim congregations to ecumenical services, as was happening in
Portland? Hang it all, why should anyone want to be alone with his own
faith at times like these! That’s the attitude which got us into this
mess… isn’t it? Why not have a priestess of the Great Goddess
preside, in propitiation of Falwellian heresies?
There goes another strand over the edge with me. What
I originally meant to point out is that the ivory-tower utopianism which
permeates both the academy and the network news remains adamant even
after such a hit as this: there’s one tower that will never fall! At
the time, it infuriated me almost as much as the attack itself: I have
since recovered some humor and resignation. But honestly… how much
more deeply could anyone’s face be rubbed in the sordid evidence of
human nature’s corruption? The Palestinians cheering in the streets
are not nice people, any more than we are perfectly nice over
here. They are ignorants who have allowed themselves to be exploited by
megalomaniacs—and some of them are outright fools. Islam has a long
tradition of encouraging people to see things in black and white: good
over here, evil over there. In my humble opinion, it is flawed as a
religion in that respect—and I offer that sentiment only as an
opinion, but one which I should surely be permitted to treat as a
conviction in the practice of my own faith. Naturally, Christians are
also exposed to the same siren-song of reductivism. I once heard the
Reverend Falwell with my own ears declaring that a minister should not
offer a lift to a pretty young woman in a rainstorm lest parishioners
see and gossip… such sad distortions of the Message. What we
desperately need to distill from the present horrors is not that
we may once more fantasize about utopia having removed Osama bin Laden—as
we did Slobodan Milosevic, as we did the Soviet party bosses, as we did
Adolf Hitler. It isn’t coming together we need while the video-arcade
brigade nukes one more dangerous crackpot: it’s withdrawal into our
closets, to examine ourselves. Nobody is particularly nice—yet
reasonable men and women, knowing of their dark side, can lay down
civilized rules and agree to abide by them. Spare me the Jennings Weltanschauung.
Just give me a little sobriety, and maturity.
The world will never be the same, our talking heads
keep telling us. Well, it hasn’t been the same for some while: we’re
just beginning to wake up to the fact. One cannot live with any modicum
of safety in a technology-riddled environment and still afford the
luxury of childishly facile hopes about human nature. We are now and
have long been exposed to incidents of mass kill-off whose
"fuse" resides in the degree of power we have delivered from
our weary hands into automation. A prolonged power outage, a collapse of
the Internet… a poisoning of the water supply or of the air in some
densely populated skyscraper (remember Legionnaire’s disease?)… car
bombs in city centers, Cessna bombs raining down on the next U-2 concert
(terrorists are not always devoid of irony) or the next Million Man
March… none of these shadows is going to disappear with the mortal
coil of an Arab genocidist. Our one good chance, ultimately, is to slow
down and live moderately. Wait longer for fewer flights that travel less
comet-like. Take more time to transmit and receive less information
whose content has been more lengthily pondered. Compress smaller human
swarms in fewer central locations which rear their heads less
arrogantly. Make the trip to Yellowstone or Vegas once a decade instead
of once a year. If this is surrendering our American way of life and
letting terrorism triumph, then include tornadoes, hurricanes, and
earthquakes among the saboteurs, for they, too, will be somewhat
neutralized should we ever recover some of our ability to stay at home
and read a book. On the other hand, don’t forget to include utopian
idealism on the same list of assassins, for such extravagant naiveté
nowadays falls well within the bounds of criminal negligence.
back to top
**************************************
Academentia: Terror in the Tower
by
Mary Grabar
On the orders of a physical therapist, several times
a week, I pedal, lift, and stretch in the Ramsey Center of the
University of Georgia. From the stationary bike, I stare at the row of
silent and captioned television screens, my cultural voyeurism through a
medium I have refused to pay for at home.
On this bright September day, rows of stair-climbers,
skiers, rowers, and bikers keep their faces fixed on footage more
fantasy-like than usual in its content: the toppled World Trade Center
Towers and ruined Pentagon with captioned phrases containing the word
"war".
On other screens, the usual: numbers flash for
psychic hotlines; over-packaged, over-priced products to make one’s
body, car, house, or toilet smell good bounce around; perfectly coifed
and muscled bare-chested men express ‘feelings’ to wide-eyed,
just-as-perfectly coifed starlets as preludes for the bedroom scene on
which the episode will end; men who have recently learned that the
little ones toddling toward them are their progeny sit between the new
girlfriend and child’s mother and make promises to a TV
hostess/surrogate mother; the latest rap ‘artists’—muscled,
tattoed brutes with harems of gyrating women sidling up in what a few
decades ago would have been rated pornography—gesticulate menacingly.
The only sounds are the whir of the machines and the guttural groans and
guitar grindings over the speakers of young males expressing what they
can only imagine is angst. (Oh, please, give me the disco of my youth
instead; at least the decipherable lyrics had no pretensions and were
accompanied by a beat.) But the wails of the newest rebels without a
cause are what the student managers choose to play most of the time, and
as long as the pseudo-authentic expressions of despair don’t get too
loud I don’t complain. Besides, my complaints would arouse the
patronizing compliance that I have to come to expect from those in
positions of authority who are half my age.
Today, even the cries of misunderstood adolescents
seem to come at a lowered volume. And the squeal-punctuated happy
reunions of pony-tailed, half-naked girls are subdued. (The soccer
heroine’s baring of her sports-bra encased breasts a few years ago—interpreted
by many commentators as a feminist statement—seems to have given
freshman girls permission to do the same. The frat guys,
enthralled more with the images of their biceps in the mirrors, barely
give a glance.)
I stare more surprised than usual at the television
monitors.
Next to one screen showing New York City’s tallest
building brought down is another screen showing the rapster mouthing
obscenity-strewn complaints against the ‘system’. I remember that on
my desk at home is one pile of freshman essays and another pile with
chapters from my dissertation. Both wait to be marked up in red.
It is September 12, 2001. Seeing television on a
sporadic basis and in this manner starkly highlights certain images that
serve as metaphors of our culture. A thought flashes through my brain:
the fundamentalist Muslims do have reason to be critical of our
culture. Tyranny lies in wait, constantly vigilant for moral anarchy, as
Plato said.
I would not get to see and hear full television
coverage until I went to a friend’s house the next day. When I heard
from the wide-screened TV the screams from the victims as the plane
smashed into the building, I was reminded of our screams as my son and I
were hit from behind in a car accident last year. Fortunately, we
suffered only minor whiplash as the little Civic spun off guard rails
and into two cars in the lane next to us. Miraculously, no one suffered
serious injuries in a four-car accident that totaled two cars, mine
included. I wondered how far the human imagination could go in dreaming
up such an act and deliberately doing this to thousands of people. This
had been an act of pure, unmitigated evil. A plane deliberately flying
into a building? Seeing the footage confirmed my belief in a Satanic
presence.
I had lunch with a colleague that Friday. Since his
classes had been in session on that fateful Tuesday, he had found
himself needing to discuss the topic in his freshman composition
classes. He told me he was thoroughly informed on the issue: he had been
reading The New York Times cover to cover. As he explained to his
students, the resentment against the U.S. and the West went back to the
Crusades. While he like everyone was saddened by these acts, he
cautioned his class to look at both sides of the issue and attempt to
understand the motivations underlying the acts of terrorism.
I was reminded of an episode of All in the Family
where the Meathead beat himself up for having hit a man who was
attacking Gloria (his wife) on the subway. The Meathead, instead of
trusting himself to protect the weaker (Gloria was a lot smaller
than the hulk), tried in the manner of postmodernist critics to
"understand" why a man would be made desperate enough
to attack an innocent and obviously weaker human being. Though Norman
Lear did not intend it, Archie Bunker came off looking good in that
episode and, in retrospect, despite the producers’ efforts to make him
appear a bigoted, bumbling buffoon, emerged overall as a decent person—especially
in contrast to the mooching and agonizing, and appropriately named,
son-in-law. Fetching a beer (as Edith did routinely) does not seem like
much of a sacrifice to make for someone who would risk his life in
battle, whether in the mountains of Afghanistan or the subway, to defend
a loved one.
The weekend was spent driving my son and his friends
(some of whom are draft age) to and from Boy Scout camp. On Saturday I
went to a bluegrass festival in the North Georgia mountains. Many flags
were displayed in the audience of Southern Archie Bunkers. I got
teary-eyed as "The Star Spangled Banner" was fiddled out by a
man in blue jeans and cowboy hat against the backdrop of a giant
American flag.
I have often found myself in similar surroundings
when I attend folk dance weekends: in a camp nestled in the
Appalachians, a ring of close, heavily treed hills cradling a peaceful
group of people who have gathered to carry on a traditional American art
form.
But such a setting, I thought for the first time that
weekend, leaves its participants extremely vulnerable. Tents, cars,
stages, and camp buildings would provide woefully inadequate protection
against bombers or even the puddle jumpers that fly out of Athens. I
found myself frequently glancing at the sky.
One commentator in the days immediately following the
attacks declared the end of cynicism. Tragedy had brought the country
together. September 11 would be remembered by all Americans. Our lives
would be changed forever. I gave a donation to the Red Cross and put a
flag on my mailbox.
It took only a few days, though, for reality to hit.
The commentator does not work in academia, where cynicism and political
lunacy rule the day. Still reeling from the shock and new sense of
vulnerability, I was surprised to find the following week an analysis by
Noam Chomsky forwarded on a graduate student e-mail list. By this
writing, a month later, his and like arguments have been analyzed by
conservative commentators and have been called everything from
insensitive to traitorous. Even the murder of thousands of innocents on
our soil could not stop the Marxist-postmodernist academic machine from
grinding out the predictable analysis of how American imperialism
(terrorism in its own form, according to these hip theorists) had
brought on these "acts". The academic solution was to
capitulate to the terrorists: send "aid" and hold workshops on
"understanding Islam". (The latter seemed to be
self-contradictory since the same exponents who implored us to
"understand" Islam were largely the ones who claimed that
terrorism is not a part of "real" Islam.)
More of course was to come. Protests against military
action were held on campus here and on campuses across the country.
Roundtable discussions by "experts" were convened. Interviews
on public radio were conducted with kindergartners who had experienced
anti-Arab "harassment". A psychologist on the same station
offered her advice to "forgive" these perpetrators, go through
some kind of healing process or "stages" and, of course, try
to "understand" the other side. However, other than the
gratuitous acknowledgements that prefaced Marxist diatribes, no one from
the Left seemed to remember that real people—screaming and jumping
from buildings—had been killed. Their numbers were compared with the
numbers who had supposedly suffered at the hands of U.S. imperialism.
The overwhelming feeling I got from additional e-mail
missives, notices, and bulletins was that I was to atone for my lack of
"understanding". I got the impression that more than ever I
was expected to investigate my sins of omission against an oppressed and
misunderstood group. Notices for workshops on "understanding
Islam" sprouted on bulletin boards.
I longed for the simple folk who had come out to hear
a gospel tune and some old-time fiddling.
On the e-mail list a few daring voices suggested that
the time and place were not right for disseminating one’s political
views (though only one graduate student would dare to question the
leftist assumptions of those views). One student pleaded to the senders
to refrain (even after a few weeks) from sending the political
announcements: she had friends and family who had had to jump out of the
Pentagon building. Her and others’ calls for restraint were met with
profanity and belligerence. I chimed in and asked for civility and
respect for the dead. I was called a fascist.
These Chomsky-ites are the same ones who put up the
notices for the peace-ins. They dedicate themselves to perfecting the
world—in their own image. They march for the proletariat and animals
and for choice in abortion and euthanasia. They would scoff at my
suggestions that dance numbers which mimic sexual intercourse be
censored from television, yet they refuse to teach Huckleberry Finn.
They celebrate through documentaries, radio interviews, and newspaper
articles cultural diversity and openness—even and especially—such as
that displayed by Tobias Schneebaum in his attempt to
"understand" Peruvians by engaging in their cultural practice
of cannibalism. However, even the reportage on a documentary about
Schneebaum’s return to Peru fifty years after this cultural exchange
does not escape an accusation of Western privilege by an academic, the
editor of the special edition of South Atlantic Review entitled
"Being Global: From the Enlightenment to the Age of
Information" (Spring 2001):
The issue of access, however, remains tangled. Take
for instance, the story about Tobias Schneebaum [in the New York
Times Magazine] who returned to Peru recently... to relive his
days spent with the natives. This second journey took place not
because he wanted to go back but because he was urged to do so
by two documentary film makers.... Agency is far more difficult to
locate in this instance for reasons that are not hard to find.1
What Schneebaum did with the Peruvians,
however, is not in the least questioned or criticized by this editor,
Mita Choudhury:
Shedding his Western clothes and identity,
Schneebaum had lived quite comfortably among the Peruvian natives who
generously shared their lives with him, taught him bits and pieces of
their language, painted him in red dyes, and we learn additionally
that "the Arakmbut men welcomed him into a warm body pile."
The natural expression of Schneebaum’s (homo)sexuality amid this
"natural" setting is handled with delicacy in the
article.... The section that deals with cannibalism, however, takes on
a more breathless quality. Short sentences that describe the ritual of
the killing, dismembering, and wrapping in leaves lead up to the
terse, one-sentence paragraph... that reads: "He put the human
flesh in his mouth and ate it." 2
No mention is made of who was killed.
Illustrating Satan’s reversal of "evil be thou my good", the
act of murder is celebrated as cultural practice and the description of
it is criticized for its terseness. That the New York Times Magazine
presented this cultural practice without the due respect owed to the
original practitioners, the natives, is the object of Choudhury’s
critique. The magazine is criticized for having presented a
"mediated" version, through Schneebaum’s "gaze":
Zalewski’s article and the documentary film...
are two examples of heavily mediated3—and mostly faded—images
of the distant Peruvians. Schneebaum lends himself to psychological
and all sorts of other analyses because while his experience makes him
unique, his identity as a New Yorker, as a sufferer of Parkinson’s,
as a man with an oversize nose, and ultimately Everyman, makes him a
fascinating and rare bridge that is hard to find. The medium becomes
the message. The objects of his gaze, the Peruvians, on the other
hand, are fascinating but only because Schneebaum has lived to tell
their story.4
The act of cannibalism, it is implied, should be
accorded rightful respect due its native practitioners and presented
through the natives’ perspective—not the gaze of a Westerner, no
matter how open he tries to be. Apparently, the documentarians and
reporters, by presenting this practice through the experience of one of
their own, were not "understanding" enough of the cannibals.
One wonders what the response would be to posters
hung up in campus buildings advertising "understanding
Christianity" in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Would
professors dare to suggest to non-Christian students that they learn
about this religion and culture to foster "cultural awareness"
at a time of "great tragedy"? To present an alternative view
to the primitive pagan one that killing, dismembering, and eating those
believed to be made in God’s image is a sin? One wonders what would
happen if other cultures would allow the presentation of these ideas as
well as such ideas as equality and sanctity of all human life—which
includes protection of the young, the old, and the weak; the honor for
parents; the promotion of monogamous marriage to replace the idea of the
harem; and the injunction against killing. What if this view were to be
adopted by those around the world? Indeed, what if such workshops on
"understanding" could simply be held in all parts of
the world?
Unfortunately, the Professor Meatheads who now run
the academies, like the mullahs, preclude even the dissemination of such
ideas. Before September 11, they were concerned with giving due respect
to cannibals. I guess I should not have been surprised by their
insistence since then to give similar respect to terrorists.
back to top
**************************************
"After Professor McKay reads statements from the
Militant Liberation Army of Smeralda and the Holy Warriors of
Muzhikistan—whose spokespersons have been detained by our fascist
government—we will vote on the best flag to represent world unity and
combat this present outbreak of American nationalism. Again, many thanks
to Vitalia for chairing the Flag Committee. Coffee and doughnuts will be
in the foyer after this session."
**************************************
The Jargon of Mock Ethnicity:
Multiculturalism and Diversity
as Virtual Thinking
by
Thomas F. Bertonneau
I
Among the books in which I ruminate whenever a
dyspeptic mood disgruntles me, the two glowering volumes of Oswald
Spengler’s Decline of the West, published in 1919 and 1922,
loom large. As my friend Steve Kogan once pointed out to me, The
Decline’s encyclopedic character makes it especially fascinating
and re-readable; it always offers something new that one hadn’t seen
before, an implication, an observation, a citation from this or that
erudite source. A perceptive reader can dismiss Spengler’s thesis—that
the West has entered its moribund, or "Civilized", phase—and
still take nourishment from his dazzling learnedness and his
determination to advert to the specific and the concrete. Easily does
one see why Spengler exercised such compelling power over his younger
contemporaries, and not only in Germany. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry
Miller, and John dos Passos, among Americans, read him. (Fitzgerald even
referred to himself as "an American Spenglerian.") The British
novelist Malcolm Lowry (see Under the Volcano) read him and so
did the once-famous Finn Mika Waltari (see The Egyptian). The
painter Oskar Kokoschka swore by him as did the film-maker Fritz Lang
and the orchestra-director Wilhelm Furtwängler, among dozens of others
equally noteworthy. Spengler clearly knew more and thought more deeply
about the issues dear to him (and conspicuous in his context) than did
his readers, a fact that they willingly acknowledged. The very
organization of The Decline tells eloquently of Spengler’s
breadth of education.1
No one talks much about Spengler these days. The
erroneous notion persists, for example, that he sympathized with or
abetted National Socialism. In fact, he took care to insult Goebbels as
bitterly as possible when the Propaganda Minister suggested to him, in
1934, that he should take up service as an apologist for the regime; and
he would certainly have become either a refugee or a casualty had he not
died of a heart attack, aged fifty-six, in the year of the Berlin
Olympics. What does this have to do with multiculturalism and diversity?
What does it have to do, that is, with the current élite obsession
about difference and ethnicity? My title suggests that a connection
exists. It is this: I have occasionally wondered, while perusing
Spengler’s dense yet insightful pages, why The Decline has not
appealed to and been exploited by the multiculturalists and
diversitarians. While I admit to being chronically afflicted by bizarre
thoughts, let me hasten to add that this suggestion by no means courts
the comic or the absurd. On the contrary—and here’s why...
In addition to claiming that the West was headed to
Hell in a hand basket, Spengler also set forth in detail his theory that
the "Great Cultures", as he called them, were all but
impermeable to one another, cognitively speaking. Modern Westerners,
even academic specialists, might flatter themselves that they understood
Greek or Arabic or Chinese culture, but they most likely, they almost
certainly, did not. What they did rather was blithely and uncritically
project their own habits and prejudices on the objects of their study
and thus mistakenly see, so to speak, a comprehensibility that did not
really exist: "The ground of West Europe," Spengler wrote,
"is treated [by such people] as a steady pole, a unique patch
chosen on the surface of the sphere for no better reason, it seems, than
because we live on it—the great histories of millennial duration of
far-away Cultures are made to revolve around this pole in all modesty!
It is a quaintly conceived system of sun and planets." In place of
this quaint conception of the solar West and its non-Western (Mandarin
or Hindu) satellites, and in place of what he considered to be the naive
historical scheme of a universal progression of ancient, medieval, and
modern, Spengler posited something else, something rather dizzying, like
those abysses of which the Derrideans and their deconstructing brethren
are so fond:
I see [he wrote] in place of that empty figment of one
linear history which can only be kept up by shutting one’s eyes to
the overwhelming multitude of the facts, the drama of a number
of mighty Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the
soil of a mother-region to which it remains firmly bound throughout
its whole life-cycle; each stamping its material, its mankind, in its
own image; each having its own idea, its own
passions, its own life, will and feeling, its own death.
Here indeed are colours, lights, movements, that no intellectual eye
has yet discovered. Here the Cultures, peoples, languages, truths,
gods, landscapes bloom and age as the oaks and the stone-pines, the
blossoms, twigs, leaves—but there is no aging "mankind."
Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which
arise, ripen, decay, and never return. There is not one but many, each
in its deepest essence different from the others, each limited in
duration and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its
peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline.
While Spengler’s prose remains remarkably free from
jargon (as a stylist, he follows Goethe and Nietzsche), this passage
ought to indicate that much in his thought might be congenial to the
discourse that we, in the onset of the twenty-first century, know by the
dual designation of multiculturalism and diversity. There is the
notorious T-Shirt, for example, that admonishes us that we "wouldn’t
understand"; there is the claim of affirmative action proponents
that only women can suitably instruct women, or blacks blacks, or
hispanics hispanics; there is the insistence that, despite our motto of
"e pluribus unum", we are in fact a congeries of
nations, in the strict plural, and not one nation, in the
prescriptively offensive singular. All of these dogmas might, with great
ease, find impressive authority in Spengler’s assertion that Cultures
(his "Great Cultures", with a capital "C") are
monads, "self-contained", in his phrase, that uniquely ripen
and express themselves and then die away in splendid isolation from all
other Cultures. If one wanted this or that supposedly distinct culture
to be protected against trespassing occidentocentric claims, then
Spengler’s vision would go some appreciative distance in guaranteeing
one’s prophylactic desire. So why, then, do academic multiculturalists
and diversitarians (as if there were any other kind) prefer to stake
their case in the unreadable, name-dropping, essays of Cornell West or
the much-padded pamphlets of Jean-François Lyotard, as published with a
preface by the radical-du-jour, courtesy of the University of
Minnesota Press?
Shall I count the ways? I’d bet that most of them
are obvious, but for the sake of my exposition, I’ll be explicit.
First and foremost, Spengler is difficult. He knows a great deal
as author—apparently he did little else in life save read and write—and
he supposes some preliminary information on the part of his readers. I’d
say that, at minimum, he expects his readers to have a Gymnasium-level
humanities education, to know the classics with some familiarity, to be
versed in science, history, geography, national economy, and politics. A
modicum of Bildung is required for entrance. Just as, in Spengler’s
conception, the "Great Cultures" confront each other with
Sphinx-like indecipherability, so then will The Decline
implacably confront the parochial, the uninformed, reader with a
countenance of mocking opacity. Without basic schemata, Spengler’s
mass of facts (and he is as much for the facts as Sergeant
Friday) will strike the novice reader as a chaos. The references to the
phases of Cathedral-building in Europe, to the alterations of plastic
style in Greece, to the development of hydraulics in Mesopotamia and
Egypt, will necessarily appear as so many disconnected enigmas. It’s
much easier to assimilate pandering representations of the contemporary
self or allow oneself to be stroked by the mongers of esteem than to
wrestle with a grand, if eccentric, vision. I am reminded of a reference
in Saul Bellow’s novel The Dean’s December, where the
eponymous Dean remembers from his Chicago boyhood a Polish barber who
lectured his customers on the intricacies of The Decline. The
customers quickly stopped listening and treated the barber’s interest
as an amusing, if somewhat tedious, quirk. A recent biography of Bellow
confirms that the memory is actually his. When contemporary academics
take any notice of Spengler, which is rarely, they treat him, precisely,
as quirky and obsessive and, therefore, as "infra dig."
Or not really knowing anything about him, they invoke his supposed but
nonexistent totalitarian sympathies. Even so, one would think that
Spengler’s denial of "one sculpture, one painting, one
mathematics, one physics" would recommend him to people who
deny that there is "one sculpture, one painting, one
mathematics, one physics." Or, broadly, that there is one
of anything, like the truth about two plus two. Spengler, despite being
European and dead, seems tailor-made for their uses.
If one look back to the longish passage that I cited,
however, one can discern another reason, apart from his difficulty, why
Spengler would likely pose a problem to the multiculturalists and
diversitarians, should they accidentally take notice of him. Recall
that, in addition to denying the universality of the arts and of
civilization, Spengler also denies what he calls that "empty
figment of one linear history" which the modern Western mind
has inherited proximately from thinkers like Bossuet and Hegel, and that
Hegel bequeathed, quite beyond his control, to his slavish nemesis and
successor Karl Marx. It was Marx who claimed, with vehement
history-closing finality, to have turned Hegel topsy-turvy and in doing
so to have revealed the inevitable final stage of social development.
Spengler locates the origin of the unilinear idea of history (so
prominent in Marx) in the fourteenth century, among the mystics,
beginning with Joachim of Flora. "It would appear, then,"
Spengler says, "that the Western consciousness feels itself urged
to predicate a sort of finality in its own appearance." The author
of The Decline ("that sinister Kraut", as Bellow calls
him) then goes on to say that:
It is a quite indefensible method of presenting
world-history to begin by giving free rein to one’s own religious,
political or social convictions and endowing a sacrosanct three-phase
system with tendencies that will bring it exactly to one’s
standpoint. This is, in effect, making of some formula—say, the
"Age of Reason", Humanity, the greatest happiness of the
greatest number, enlightenment, economic progress, national freedom,
the conquest of nature, or world-peace—a criterion whereby to judge
whole millennia of history. And so we judge that they were ignorant of
the "true path", or that they failed to follow it, when the
fact is simply that their will and purposes were not the same as ours.
Spengler, possibly the greatest critic of ideology
since Joseph de Maîstre, and rivaled in our own century only by José
Ortega y Gassett and Eric Voegelin, here articulates an item of analysis
that must strike the proponents of multiculturalism and diversity (those
voluble proselytes of what they like to call critical thinking)
only—I say only—as an intolerable scandal: I refer to the
conclusion, in fine, that the perspective of some particular present is
necessarily circumscribed, parochial in the most reductive sense, and
arrogantly incomplete. Multiculturalism and diversity are nothing, after
all, if they are not aggressive claims to complete an incomplete
history, made from the perspective of the hardest imaginable and most
narrowly bracketed present. From the scene of this history, the
much-put-upon particularities that the illuminated purport on their own
word to represent allegedly have been (and allegedly still are)
excluded. One result of this exclusion—according to the doctrine—is
that the reigning conception of humanity has remained morbidly partial
rather than salubriously whole. "Let the healing begin." The
therapeutic, the transformational, notion indeed lies at the heart of
all the justifications of multiculturalism and diversity. Thus
"students who interact with peers of different backgrounds or who
take courses with diversified curricular content show greater growth in
their critical thinking skills than those who do not do so," says
Jeffrey F. Milem in his article "Why Race Matters" in the
recent "Diversity on Campus" number of Academe, the
journal of the American Association of University Professors. Such
students, Milem adds, "also tend to be more engaged in learning and
are more likely to stay enrolled in college, to report greater
satisfaction with their college experience, and to seek graduate or
professional degrees." Milem gives not a shred of evidence to
support this assertion, but as the conclusion depends entirely on perspective,
since it possesses the character of an article of faith rather than of
an item of knowledge, why should he worry about evidence? Or as Milem
himself subsequently puts it: "Students educated in racially and
ethnically heterogeneous institutions assess their academic, social, and
interpersonal skills more highly than do students from homogeneous
colleges and universities." It’s the self-assessment that
gives the game away. Multiculturalism and diversity quite blatantly
construct and then rationalize themselves in the mode of ex cathedra,
or perhaps ex vacuo, pronouncements. "We are that we are,"
so to speak, and if we assess ourselves as morally superior then
certainly we must be morally superior.
Thus does diversity, so-called, herald its own advent
and thus does it address the awaiting multitudes as the undoubted summum
bonum of cognitive formation: The demographically gerrymandered
campus and the rigidly catechetic curriculum then constitute their own raison
d’être, for (pardoning the tautology) we assuredly cannot see
their necessity until we have submitted to their necessity. One needs to
emphasize this closure in the two linked doctrines. They do not
seek to persuade (because they are intrinsically unpersuasive); they
seek rather the provocation of a perverse leap of faith—and it is this
above all else, this promise of justification, that enables us to
identify them as ideologies, as substitutes for faith, in the
paradigmatic sense.
As Strother Martin says to Paul Newman in Cool
Hand Luke, "You’ve got to get your mind right." It is
the unique and self-proclaimed role of multiculturalism and diversity,
as our guides out of benightedness and bigotry, to lead us willy-nilly
into our new moral splendor. Make no mistake about it, the voice does
call on us to become saints; either that, or to suffer damnation. (Which
can be arranged administratively.) Although Milem doesn’t say how he
knows the truth of it, he does assure us that the beneficiaries of the
multicultural and diversity regime "are more likely to engage in
community service" than their presumably deprived and possibly even
depraved counterparts. They will graduate, that is, into the bland
beatitude signified in the liberal imagination by the phrase
"community service". "Diversified environments,"
Milem argues, "give students opportunities to develop the skills
and competencies that they will need to function effectively as citizens
of an increasingly diverse democracy." Thus not to embrace
multiculturalism and diversity amounts, borrowing Spengler’s
summation, to an unforgivable "ignorance of the ‘true path’"
or a flagritious disinclination to follow it. Who knew, for example
(again I quote from Milem), that "women faculty and faculty of
color... are more likely to use active pedagogical techniques, which
have been shown to improve student learning?" "Active
pedagogical techniques"? As opposed, I guess, to the putatively inactive
pedagogical techniques preferred by dead white male faculty.
("Professor Whitehead seemed a bit stiff today, don’t you
think?") But it’s no use looking for definitions, for evidence,
or for logical consistency. The whole argument takes place within a
circle, a viciously hermetic circle, I need hardly add.
Despite their claim to deconstruct the
hide-bound parochialism of "the dominant culture",
multiculturalism and diversity in fact hedge intellectual life within a
narrowly circumscribed horizon which establishes its impoverished
epistemology solely on accidents, such as geographical origin and
skin-color. Multiculturalism and diversity also seek to ensconce
themselves in our minds as the liberating terminus of human
development, a sure sign of what Spengler, long before Voegelin,
identified as gnostic self-certainty, the claim of knowledge without the
benefit of experience—hence without evidence and even in the face of
contradictory evidence. Of course, evidence is inconvenient, and
convenience is essential to petty dogma. Multiculturalists and
diversitarians, in Spengler’s words, "posit the finality of their
own appearance." They also expel, or make the concerted attempt to
expel, everything from their purview that is not congenial to their
self-annunciation.
II
Let me return to the theme of difficulty. I
began by invoking the intellectual challenge of The Decline of the
West, a book so thick with facts that one wonders how its author
managed to cram to much learning into so short a span of time. (Spengler
wrote The Decline between 1911 and 1919, just about.) Part of the
answer lies in Spengler’s modus vivendi, that namely of a loner
who lived in cheap rooms with little social contact. He seems to have
spent what money he earned in acquiring mountains of erudite books, all
of which he systematically read and annotated. He knew languages, Greek
and Latin, of course; but he also seems to have learned, quite on his
own, rudiments of Chinese and Arabic. He knew mathematics and indeed
made a meager living briefly as a teacher of high-school calculus.
Of the several chief characteristics of the
multiculturalist and diversitarian curriculum, the one that has always
galled me the most is its insouciant attitude toward knowledge—toward facts.
One would presume, given the argument that "learning about
other cultures" is of such paramount importance, that the designers
of the new mandatory course of study would insist on languages, for
there is no fact about other cultures more adamant than
the fact that they speak in another tongue than our own.
Insisting that we should study other cultures, one would think that the
apologists of the project would put languages at the very center of
their syllabus. We know (alas!) that this is not the case. In fact, as
the traditional humanities core curriculum has disappeared and as
universal requirements have dwindled down solely to those that bear on
multiculturalism and diversity, the status of languages, ancient and
modern, has diminished. I could be wrong, but I’m fairly certain that
no branch of the Michigan public universities (Michigan being the state
where I live) any longer requires foreign-language study for all
students, no matter what their field of specialization. At Central
Michigan University, where my wife teaches French, the administration is
frankly hostile to foreign languages, although one of its pet projects
is a "global education" program, whatever that means without a
working knowledge of Turkish or Pashtu or Chinese. If readers will
pardon a brief excursion into autobiography: the Board of Directors of
the Santa Monica Unified School District made foreign language study
mandatory where I went to junior high school. Between junior high
school and high school, I took eight semesters of French (six of them
under compulsion) and got so that I could parler with some
similitude of competency. I took a year of German in high school and
continued to study German in college. I got kicked out of UCLA a couple
of times in the 1970s, but when I finally earned my B.A. (in 1983, if I
remember), I took it in Germanic and Scandinavian Languages, after which
I ruined my life by going to graduate school.
It is my sense of languages, and above all of their
irreducible centrality to intellectual growth, that makes me suspicious,
in fact, about Spengler’s more radical claims, especially the claim
that the "Great Cultures" remain absolutely impermeable to one
another. People can learn languages other than those that they acquire
as children. Romans learned Greek; Greeks learned Hebrew. I once met a
Hausa whose smooth and precise English put mine to shame. He had learned
it, he told me, under a corrugated tin roof held up by four wooden posts
in a remote corner of Nigeria, about the time of the Biafran war. He was
currently writing a dissertation on one of the medieval Popes, about
whom he spoke with great enthusiasm and understanding. If that is not
the penetration of one perspective by another, and if it does not put
the lie to the absolutism of geographical origin and ethnicity, then I
do not know my own face in the mirror.
I can give a humbler example of the same phenomenon.
I devoted four terms, in graduate school, to Old West Norse, the heavily
inflected tongue of medieval Scandinavia. (Never mind why—it wasn’t
entirely by choice.) Anyone who has studied a foreign language can
attest the necessity of concentration and diligence; it’s hard work.
Especially given a complicated grammar, like that of Greek or of Latin
or (God forgive me!) of Old West Norse, one must apply oneself with real
discipline to the rote memorization (there’s no other way to do it) of
the paradigms and the syntax. One must learn thousands of vocabulary
words by heart. Now I do not assert that I have ever achieved a
perfectly transparent Vulcan mind-meld with the consciousness of the
thirteenth century author of Orkneyinga Saga, but I have read it
in the original, and I believe that I have a respectable idea of how the
saga-writers of the medieval period thought and felt, what judgments
they made about people and what criteria they applied in order to make
them. I can attest that, in many ways, those men thought and felt
differently from the way we do, made judgments that strike us as
unwarranted, and exercised some dubious criteria to make them. I believe
that I know this better than someone who merely reads the story in
translation, and here, to quote Spengler, appear those "colours,
lights, movements, that no intellectual eye has yet discovered"
that has not first submitted to the basic philological
discipline. A wonderful chapter in George Eliot’s Adam Bede
comes to mind, where the titular main character visits his
scholar-friend Bartle Massey at the latter’s night-school for the
local tenant-farmers and their employees. Bede sees "three big men,
with the marks of their hard labor about them, anxiously bending over
the worn books, and painfully making out, ‘The grass is green,’ ‘The
sticks are dry,’ ‘The corn is ripe’—a very hard lesson to pass
to after columns of single words all alike except in the first
letter." Learning is hard. It begins with facts like
the letters of the alphabet. We do not make up our own letters; we take
them as they come to us, in their settled form. When two arithmetic
students show signs of not having drilled between lessons, Massey
castigates them for "whistling about and tak[ing] no more care what
you’re thinking than if your heads were gutters for any rubbish to
swill through." Education entails both discipline and
discrimination.
An additional anecdote: over the last five years, I’ve
tried to make up my ignorance of Greek. Recently, I set myself the task
of reading and understanding Sappho’s fragment "To Anactoria",
the longest surviving sequence of her verses. I sat with my dictionary
and my grammar at hand and did the tedious philological work of
comprehending the lines. I made a number of (entirely non-original)
discoveries about features of the poem that simply would not have
revealed themselves if I remained dependent on a translation. In
principle, it’s no different with reading a tough book—George Eliot’s
Adam Bede or The Mill on the Floss, let’s say, or one of
Kant’s Critiques, even allowing that one reads the latter in
translation. To understand the rural English psyche of the late
eighteenth century, as Eliot describes it, or the deductive procedures
of the notorious "antinomies" in The Critique of Pure
Reason, requires significant concentration and persistence. The
Indian philosopher Nagarjuna offers as much difficulty, and as much
reward, as the Greek philosopher Plato. I can avow as a sometime teacher
of college-level literature courses that the typical American freshman
of today, brought up on television and popular music, finds the
lily-white milieu of The Mill on the Floss to be quite as foreign—as
"other", to borrow the neologism—as the
Tibetan Book of the Dead, or the medieval Turkish Alexander
Romance. I mean, by the way, that the white kids find it as strange
and incomprehensible as the black kids or the Mexican or the Puerto
Rican kids. Who the kids are doesn’t much matter. They all watch the
same television shows and listen to the same bad music. These things
tend to sum up their knowledge and in the summary, despite what the
multiculturalists and diversitarians would have us believe, they are as
like as peas in a pod. The most "other" of other things
for any living person is always, I believe, the implacably other "otherness"
of past centuries. I would willingly endorse Camille Paglia’s claim
that the past is, in fact, the only thing that we can teach; and
that when we try to teach the present, we become (to borrow from Eliot)
mere gutters for raw offal to swill through. But, as I confess, I am
dyspeptic. I sleep badly. Spengler gets it right, I’d say, when he
underscores the difficulty of extricating ourselves from our own
temporal perspective, from our native parochialism. With that aspect of
Spengler’s case I find myself therefore in full agreement, even though
I don’t follow him as far as the radical opacity of Great Cultural
differences. But I was writing of diversity.
The fraud of "diversity" (and fraud is
a rather mild term) lies largely in its swindling ease, in its pandering
lack of any demand on discipline or concentration. Multiculturalism
calls us, for example, to celebrate the fifteenth-century Zimbabwean
fortress-civilization, but never suggests that we tackle the
philological or ethical problems of fifteenth century Zimbabwean
culture. (What language did the fortress-builders speak? How did they
organize their society? What did they believe? The cheap gimmick of
"celebration" flies from all of that. And the celebrants might
well be embarrassed by what they discovered if they actually pursued the
questions.) Again, every branch of the Michigan public universities
devotes a week or more every academic year to the celebration of
Hispanic culture, but none, as far as I can ascertain, insists that all
students should study Spanish. (A suggestion that I would heartily
approve, even though, for sentimental reasons, I prefer French.) Nor,
let it be said, do they celebrate Spain, or Don Quixote, or the
baroque architecture of Madrid. No. That would be "Iberianism",
which the politically correct adamantly disdain. The lexicon of
multiculturalism and diversity is grossly deceptive in this way,
blatantly abusing language in order to wrest terms from common usage.
Again, multiculturalism and diversity parade before us an endless train
of the representatives of "difference" (just look at the
speakers’ roster of any campus events program), but conveniently
provide that all of them speak the idiomatic infinitive-splitting
English of late-twentieth century North America. The
"differences" turn out to be phony, not only because the
witnesses for "oppression" comport themselves in dress,
demeanor, accent, and credit-card habits pretty much like everyone else
in our consumer society, but also because they invariably enjoy the
privilege of university appointments. They belong, in other words, to
the most pampered class in our amazingly affluent and upwardly mobile
society.
It is also depressing how convergent, how invariably
the same, the message of these alleged representatives of
"difference" tends to be. With absurd facility, without
effort, one can list the formulas: We live in a racist, sexist,
homophobic society constructed, as they say, by the Patriarchy of white
males to exclude all points of view that might erode the power of the
hegemonic class; our institutions conform structurally to this bigoted
norm, and compel us to bigotry on our own quite apart from our
intentions. Women and homosexuals and "people of color" are a
priori the victims of this bigotry. Only the scathing revelation of
these truths can salvage the masses from the deformations inflicted on
them by the malevolent system. Part of the Patriarchal deformation is
what the more sophisticated of these testifiers will designate as "Logocentrism",
a supposed obsession at the core of Western culture with the uniqueness
of discrete and inalterable truths that are, "in truth", not
there. (The abyss ever yawns.) We should cast off our notion that
there are singular truths and that reality itself teaches us what these
truths are, and we should replace that false idea with the revelation
that truths are both multiple and constructed and that they are
entirely subject-oriented, with the additional stipulation that
individual subjects partake in a kind of group-consciousness determined
(although nothing is supposed to derive from a fixed substrate of
reality) by sex or skin-color. These positions, bolstered by frequent
adversions to Foucault and Derrida or their epigones-du-jour,
might appear to be cheap rip-offs of Nietzsche, who is sometimes
appropriated by "postmodern" discourse. But the author of Zarathustra,
a serious thinker, ought to be protected from the association. In fact,
the real origin of these assertions lies in the crude sloganeering of
Karl Marx. Consider the opening paragraph of The Communist Manifesto:
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and
serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed,
stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an
uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended,
either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the
common ruin of the contending classes.
The rhetoric of culture, too, appears in the Manifesto,
as when Marx states the following:
All objections urged against the Communistic mode
of producing and appropriating material products, have, in the same
way, been urged against the Communistic modes of producing and
appropriating intellectual products. Just as, to the bourgeois, the
disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production
itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with
the disappearance of all culture.
Marx thus sees the proletariate not merely as the
bearer of a new type of economic organization but of a novel culture
hitherto oppressed and inarticulate, which is in fact the
"true" human culture. This new culture differs from the old in
its moral perfection and so completes the history implicit in the
long-drawn struggle between guilty lords and innocent serfs.
Consider once more that timely number of Academe
from which I have already drawn several illustrations. In an article by
Christopher Edley, Jr., entitled "Intellectual Workers and
Essential Freedoms," the author takes for granted that the agenda
of multiculturalism and diversity consists in "our evolving quest
to perfect the norm of equality or anti-discrimination." Edley
complains that critics petulantly insist on criticizing multiculturalism
and diversity rather than accepting it in grateful silence.
"So," he says, "our revolution continues, and our ideals
must struggle against the human tendencies and the social forces that
would cause our experiment to founder and fail." If it’s an
"experiment", of course, then it can hardly "fail",
its conclusion being in principle unknown beforehand. Edley does not
distinguish between an experiment and an agenda. In an antepenultimate
paragraph whose rhetoric waxes cosmic, Edley commits the usual gesture
of sealing the argumentative circle: "The absence of diversity
corresponds with deficits in the content of our teaching, our research
products, and our mentoring for a diverse student body destined to lead
in diverse communities (throughout the solar system)."
Evelyn Hu-DeHart, in her article on
"Institutionalizing Multiculturalism or Managing Differences,"
protests that the practitioners of traditional scholarship grudgingly
refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of "ethnic studies", and
that they do this "mainly by withholding respect for the work of
ethnic studies scholars, whose approach to scholarship they do not fully
comprehend." What "approach" do the practitioners
of "ethnic studies" take to scholarship? Hu-DeHart defines it
this way: "Ethnic studies scholars perceive as their primary
responsibility interrogating any and all received wisdom—particularly
those truths presented as universal without regard to the context or
perspectives of the people generating them. Equally important is
demonstrating alternative ways to construct knowledge, so as to redefine
the nature of knowledge and how it is used to understand the physical
world and human condition." Constructing knowledge, by the
way, means making up new facts when the real ones prove
inconvenient. Marx and Engels indulged this propensity liberally, as W.
O. Henderson and W. H. Challoner showed as long ago as 1958 in a book
which no on will find on any contemporary graduate school reading list.
Hu-DeHart’s contentions recreate Marx’s argument,
previously quoted, about "producing and appropriating intellectual
products." She also manages to incorporate the
"oppression" theme (there’s a conspiracy of disrespect
against us) and the social-determinism theme (truth depends on sex and
race) that circulate in Marxist discourse. Note the double-standard
implicit in Hu-DeHart’s scheme: the duty falls hard on "ethnic
studies" scholars to question everything; but when people from
other, longer standing, disciplines question "ethnic studies",
this qualifies as a conspiracy to withhold honor. Note also how her
definition of what "ethnic studies" scholars do depends
on the verb to perceive. The perceptual world of surfaces means
everything to multiculturalism and diversity; of depth, of an interior
or any substance, on the other hand, one detects not a trace.
Remark, finally, the egomaniacal inflation in
Hu-DeHart’s rhetoric. When she tells us that multiculturalism and
diversity propose nothing less than "to redefine the nature of
knowledge," she waxes almost as cosmic as Edley, with whom she will
perhaps one day join in imperial co-regency over the solar system.
III
These observations bring me back to where I started,
in the intimidating work of Oswald Spengler. The great man’s last
book, The Hour of Decision, from the fateful year 1933, forms a
belated appendix to The Decline. In its pages, he submits the
then-current socio-cultural condition of Europe and North America to his
"physiognomic" analysis. While much has changed since the
mid-century, much also remains the same. One paragraph from midway
through The Hour might indeed be taken as a prescient comment on
the jargon of mock ethnicity that supplies the discourse of
multiculturalism and diversity:
One of the reasons why the Marxian system became
the most effective [of utopian systems] was that it was the last.
Anyone who today draws up political or economic programs for the
salvation of "mankind" is out of date and tiresome. He is
near to being ridiculous. But the upsetting effect of such theories on
blockheads—who in Lenin’s estimation amount to ninety-five per
cent of all humanity—is still very great (and is actually on the
increase in England and America), except in Moscow, where there is
only a pretence, for political purposes, of believing in it.
Drawing on the Spenglerian insight and taking into
account the professorial apology for multiculturalism and diversity as
we have been sampling it, I propose the following consideration.
Multiculturalism and diversity, far from being the revolutionary
completion of humanity’s cognitive and moral development, as their
proponents so grandiosely proclaim, far from being a respectable
intellectual enterprise of any kind whatsoever, amount to little more
than a species of ritualized pseudo-cognition; not real thinking at all,
but the reiteration of fossilized topics and hoary bromides drawn not
even from the edifice of Das Kapital but from the shallow feuilleton
of the Manifesto. In this sense, they form but part of a broader
phenomenon that has overtaken higher education at the end of the
twentieth century, the dissolution of a mandatory, cognitively rigorous,
knowledge-based curriculum and the installation in its place of a buffet
of disconnected, affect-oriented "experiences",
"work-shops", and "mentoring occasions" all heavily
infused with the biological reductionism of sex and race. The
Association of American University Professors and the American Council
on Education make this quite clear in the summary of their joint Report,
Does Diversity Make a Difference, published in that handy recent
number of Academe. "Racial and ethnic diversity in the
classroom is necessary," the Report states, "but not
sufficient in and of itself." The other ingredients of the
diversity-formula make up a litany of contemporary pedagogical fads:
"(A) a learning-centered rather than teaching-centered philosophy,
in which the faculty member is considered only one of the classroom
participants; (B) interactive teaching techniques, such as small group
discussions, student presentations, debates, role-playing, problem
posing, and student paper exchanges; and (C) a supportive, inclusive
classroom climate." The Report thus explicitly links the
multicultural content of pseudo-ethnicity to the affective,
knowledge-displacing classroom practices cooked up in the ideological
kitchens of our schools of education.
The yoking of easy content to facile method should
not come as a surprise. Multiculturalism and diversity indeed resemble a
kind of virtual thinking, of the sort necessarily marshaled by
any authoritarian doctrine. Like the virtual planetary system
in the video game, the thought in multiculturalism and diversity
never changes—and, if one will allow the paradox, it’s not
really there anyway. The screen lights up when you drop the coin into
the slot, and then you get to shoot down lots of Imperial Star-Cruisers
(piloted by dead white males), but nothing in the real world has been
altered. Indeed, in their ritualistic-formulaic nature, multiculturalism
and diversity together exhibit a hostile aversion both to facts and to
thinking. If we accept that thinking is the most essential human form of
doing, then we might well say that multiculturalism and diversity
substitute being for doing: while they indict the alleged
passivity of the traditional curriculum that they despise, they place no
mental obligation on their own constituency. Merely to be female
or "of color" or to be able to lay claim to
victim-status becomes the sign of one’s authority, sidestepping the
painful process of actually learning or knowing anything, or of
adverting to any appellate authority outside oneself. The autobiography
of the freshman (or more likely of the professor, mercilessly burdening
the student) becomes the new approved text of the nebulous curriculum sans
livres. What books still end up in the hands of students—yesterday
those of Alice Walker and today those of Toni Morrisson—paint a
libelous picture of the human scene guaranteed to exercise an
"upsetting effect", as Spengler says, on people who have read
little else and perhaps do not even read very well.
Being is perfectly natural and even the dead
can do it. Doing, especially the doing that we call thinking,
makes quite unnatural demands. High culture, as Spengler well
understood, consists of a broad range of unnatural, mainly cognitive,
requirements placed on the natural person, beginning with the
arbitrariness of toilet-training and the abecedary. In the
twentieth-century triumph of democracy, as Spengler argued on the very
eve of totalitarian accession in his own country, "the preference
of otium cum dignitate to boxing matches, the appreciation of
fine art and poetry, even the delight in a well-kept garden of flowers
and rare fruits are things to be burnt, smashed, or stamped out.
Culture, because of its superiority, is the enemy." Does old
Oswald protest too much? I think not, for, after all, a renowned
drama-teacher recently lost his job in Arizona because he preferred
Shakespeare to Betty the Yehti. The NEA has funded a Crucifix
immersed in urine on the claim that it is art; and pre-modern
(destructively tribal) attitudes about race have become ensconced in our
institutions of higher education, not to say elsewhere as well. There
isn’t a single job-description in the MLA list that doesn’t feature
the booby-trap of affirmative action rhetoric. We know, do we not, that
when Backwater Seepage University advertises that they want an expert in
the nineteenth-century American novel who can also teach the seminar in
post-colonial discourse, what they are really interested in is, not the
nineteenth-century American novel, but post-colonial discourse. You
would think that Backwater Seepage University would be distinct, swampy,
in a word, different. As far as that were the case, we would
admire Backwater Seepage University. With the advent of multi-culturalism
and diversity, however, it joins in Anschluss with the
increasingly homogeneous, not to say monolithic, world of the American
Academy¾ with what columnist Joe Sobran
trenchantly calls the Hive. Are multiculturalism and diversity
really sub-proletarian reactions, as Spengler avers, against such basic
civilized precepts as form and decorum? Isn’t that going
too far? Let me briefly revisit Hu-DeHart’s Academe essay. In
it, she takes up two paragraphs to denounce the concept of
"civility" as applied to the implementation of
multiculturalism and diversity. Administrators subvert multi-culturalism
and diversity, she says, "by studiously avoiding discussion of
structural inequalities... by failing to distinguish between individual
and group differences, and by stressing the role of civility above all
else in creating a diverse environment."
Between the absurdity of Edley’s claim that
multiculturalism and diversity seek their telos in the governance
of the solar system and the malevolence of Hu-DeHart’s attack on
civility because it inconveniences her program, we have before us the
undisguised horizons of the multiculturalism and diversity Weltanschauung.
Diversity—let us mince no words—serves as a euphemism for stifling
conformity and for a radical reduction of intellectual boundaries while
multiculturalism proffers us little, if anything, in the way of culture.
Remarking that they possess culture, by the way, is not a
particularly significant method of differentiating people, since
everyone absorbs this or that culture in the very air that he
breathes. If you speak a lingo and you live in a place, you have
culture. Thus the remotest New Guinea highlander has as much culture
as the most amply landed British aristocrat. What every newborn lives in
want of, however, if he hopes for pharmacology to see him through the
otherwise killing infections, if he wants to enlarge his mind while
passing through childhood and adolescence, is not culture, but,
in a word, civilization. Her Majesty’s faithful knight might be
as much in want of civilization as the New Guinea highlander. (There are
a number of recommendable Monty Python sketches on just this subject.)
The monk in his cell on Skellig Michael in the eighth century A.D., on
the other hand, is practically as remote from Greece and Rome as the New
Guinea highlander, but he has his Greek and Hebrew grammars to hand, and
his Dionysus the Areopagite, and possibly even his Plato and Aristotle,
and he thus has civilization. Civilization, High Culture, is not
a matter of passive being but of active doing. One must
rise on tip-toes, as Thoreau says, to meet it.
Permit me to make an end by means of one more
autobiographical self-indulgence. I owe my original familiarity with
Spengler to an eleventh- and twelfth- grade English teacher, Gary
Johnston, whose courses I took at Santa Monica High School between 1969
and 1972. Johnston also taught German, although I studied that flinty
tongue (as the poet Borges calls it) with someone else. (Frau
Something-or-Other, efficient but unmemorable, at UCLA.) Recently, I
established communication with another former student of Johnston’s
who had returned to Santa Monica High School in the mid-1970s as a
teacher, and got to know our former instructor on a collegial basis.
Johnston has long since disappeared, no one seems to know where, but my
acquaintance has expended considerable effort in tracking down the old
syllabi of the college-prep courses that the vanished gentleman taught.
One course, called "Western World Ideas", explicitly addressed
the role of "outsiders", as Johnston called them, in a
sequence of historical societies from Bronze Age Mesopotamia through
Greece and Rome to the European nineteenth century. The
course-description mentions the central place of homosexuality in
Mesopotamian epic, of the non-European in European Romantic literature,
of the criminal in the novels and dramas of the mid-twentieth century
existentialists. It touches on the power of the feminine in Plato’s
dialogues, and actually invokes the term "patriarchy". In
addition to all of this, the syllabus sets forth the required reading.
(This is a high-school course, mind you.) I’ll simply cite the
list: "Plato’s Phaedo, Brossard’s The Bold Saboteurs,
the Sumerian Gilgamesh epic, Sophocles’ Oedipus
Tyrannus, Richard Strauss’ opera Electra (with libretto by
Hugo von Hoffmansthal), Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, portions
of the Old Testament, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs (in a
parallel German and English text), Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, O’Neill’s
The Iceman Cometh and The Hairy Ape, Brown’s The
Brig." Not listed, but made available, were extracts from The
Decline of the West. I remember that semester vividly; I remember
the difficulty of it, but also the excitement, the sense that a tough
assignment had toughened my mind, the giddy feeling that I had glimpsed
a world as different from the one I knew as some faraway planet is from
the familiar green earth. Uttering prescribed formulas would have been
impossible. Virtual thinking simply would not have sufficed. The demands
of the reading, and—dare I say it?—the diversity of alien
views in the great range of the assignments, would have (and did) put
fakery beyond reach. The only course of action consisted in rising
hopefully and strenuously to the material.
That, my friends¾
the intellectual arduousness of it¾ is the
true definition of a real education, and that is what is missing
in the counterfeit enterprise of multiculturalism and diversity.
back to top
**************************************
The Arduous Path Up Spengler’s
Decline:
An Idealist Responds to Destiny
by
John R. Harris
For in the dialogues he understood justice to be a
rule of the god also, as a powerful force in resolving men upon the just
course of action lest, having done evil, they come to a reckoning after
death, as well. Whence he has been considered by a few as too fond of
myths; for he mingled in his writings such stories that men might
refrain from committing injustices in recognition that what follows
after death is unclear.
Diogenes Laertius (3.79-80) on Plato
If the function and purpose of the eyes cannot be
fulfilled without eyes, it is nonetheless true that the eyes can
sometimes not fulfill their purpose. But once a person employs his eyes
so that he may see the truth, he then possesses a sense of sight which
truly sees.
attributed to Cratippus in Cicero’s
De Divinatione 1.32.71
When PBS recently aired its latest version of the
pageantry that (apparently) was Rome, The Roman Empire in the First
Century, the contributing classicists ran true to form. I have
written in these pages on another occasion of how the academy’s
betrayal of Western tradition has undermined even Classical Studies,
that most crusty (or venerable, depending upon your perspective) enclave
of atavism in the Humanities. Despite appearances by such Old Guard
scholars (mostly European) as Karl Galinsky, the series as a whole
allowed such textual sources as satire, invective, and graffiti to
upstage epic, law, and philosophy. The tyrant wasn’t neglected in
favor of the shopkeeper: the distinction does not cut along the
simplistic axis of class struggle (graffiti notwithstanding). On the
contrary, tyrants have fascinating personal lives, while shopkeepers are
almost as boring as serious philosophers. What we got, rather, was the
licentious instead of the abstemious, the bawdy instead of the grave,
the lurid instead of the sublime, the scatological instead of the
quotidian. The Empire and her standard-bearers were racy, ruthless,
shocking, and—from a safe distance of two millennia—highly
entertaining. In short, they played rather like the rest of Primetime
TV.
Yet I repeat that this is a phenomenon of the
academy: heavy applications of the outlandish and the outrageous were not
laid on by Hollywood. (After all, this was PBS!) On the other hand,
perhaps my opening remarks were unfair in implying a particular novelty
about the academic cult of the exotic. Ever since studies in dead
languages and the far past have been the province of a distinct
professional class rather than of wealthy amateurs, that class has drawn
social odd balls and misfits. I think of the great classicist Paul
Shorey, who belonged to the generation which preceded the intellectual
debacle of the sixties. As a boy, Shorey was a runt, prone to being
harassed by playground bullies. He learned Greek so that he could abuse
his assailants in an incomprehensible tongue while safely poised among a
tree’s high branches. Or take the insolubly enigmatic T.E. Lawrence
(of Arabia). Though World War I altered permanently a course which would
have swept him into the academic life, the young Lawrence was no
stranger to archaeological digs, and the reluctant hero of later years
would translate Homer’s Odyssey in its entirety. General
students of literature may care to wander back even farther to Gustave
Flaubert—who, again, was no academic in the strict sense. Flaubert’s
Salammbô, however, shows a stunningly thorough knowledge of
antiquity in some respects. One chapter even lifts from Vergil’s Aeneid
the lone soldier’s daring penetration of an incredible escape from
the enemy fortress.
Salammbô! No more exotic work was ever
written—nor, perhaps, one more contemptuous of bourgeois decorum. For
this unique novel’s creator was also Emma Bovary’s: his loathing of
civilized decency is all the two works share, yet it is quite enough to
make my case. To wit: disgust with bourgeois existence is the common
denominator of the literary professional class. Victims of playground
bullies, of uncaring parents, of complex dispositions and neuroses, or
of mere intelligence (than which few deformities isolate one more),
these people carry a heavy baggage through life which includes numerous
axes to grind. They haven’t the pleasure and support of lovers,
friends, and families which the dully prosperous merchant or insipidly
popular under-prefect seems to enjoy. In revenge, they savage the whole
system—or, more conveniently (and pusillanimously) , celebrate every
trace of otherness they can mine from those systems long dead and buried
whose autopsy only they are qualified to conduct.
You know what I’m talking about, hypocrite
lecteur, mon semblable—mon frère. If you are or have ever been a
member of this "privileged underclass" which we call the
professoriate, you have surely attended conferences where papers are
endlessly read, doughnuts endlessly consumed, and the jargonal sparring
of one-upmanship endlessly renewed. They are the oddest gatherings in
the world. I often wondered, in the days when I was a steady
participant, if a single one of my hundred or so fellow conferees had
passed a remotely normal childhood and adolescence. (I know I
didn’t.) Former wimps and nerds now hiding in tweed jackets and
closely clipped Van Dykes, former plain-Jane stay-at-homes now exuding
aggression from shoulder-length earrings and cropped hair more spiky
than a grad student’s stubble… they were an agonizing bunch among
which to attempt circulation, and I myself hadn’t the confidence to
burst through the densely fortified, lovingly maintained barriers of
formality squeezing me from all sides. A man with a patently sincere and
uninhibited laugh or a woman with genuinely regular and unmutilated
features drew a strangely mixed gaze of envy and admiration (I suspect)
from us all, and was sure to enjoy the advantage in any bid for
organizational office.
Among such as we, in short, the anomalous was the nomos.
Even the most conservative of us (and a conservative professor of
literature is as rare as a shark with table manners) had still failed to
find lucrative employment, failed to dazzle elegant young women, failed
to build muscle with an honest day’s work… and hence failed to break
into life’s mainstream, either at a higher or a lower level, and to
snap up any of life’s big fish, whether the rare or plebeian variety.
We were suspect, probably more to ourselves than to anyone else. We just
didn’t belong—we couldn’t belong: and so many of us decided
not to try. The mainstream? How crass!
The bourgeois mainstream, you know, is crass
more often than not, at least in matters of taste. I have more faith in
its moral lights than most of my academic confrères ever did. I believe
in the common sense which motivates our basic human regard for fair
play, perhaps because I saw the "superior" spirits of the
academy so besmirched with egotistical pettiness. But when it comes to
providing such common sense with its proper pedigree—to navigating
rationalist philosophy and natural theology back to a mind created to
worship eternal goodness… no, this was not a path that ordinary
intelligences could easily follow. We intellectual types would have been
quite élite enough—far more legitimately so than we are now—if we
had remained Aristotelian contemplatives. Great heavens above! Can you
imagine anything more extraordinary than that in this day and
age? A contemplative philosopher!
As a group, however, the professoriate chose raw
shock effect over a disdain of the mainstream. The scholars among whom I
matured in the seventies and eighties, especially, chose to play to the
mainstream. They needed it desperately—they craved its grimaces of
bewilderment or horror at their antics: they were as much its prisoner
as if they had been condemned, after all, to work at Dad’s bank or to
marry money. And so they taught me Ovid instead of Vergil, Cicero’s
speeches or letters instead of his treatises on morality or divinity,
doggerel and graffiti instead of Stoicism. No doubt, they knew the
latter regimen well enough; no doubt, the curriculum bequeathed to their
mentors by the Victorians had reiterated its nobility and transcendence ad
nauseam. But those were not my lessons: my generation
had no link whatever to antiquity’s tiresome, stodgy fascination with
absolute virtue. We were raised as if that aspect of the ancients—that
quest of the unconditional for which we call their works
"classic"—never existed, or not sufficiently to be taken
seriously even in their own time. Serious was their ripping off
extravagant cutlery from rich hosts or staking out some lovely young
matron’s doorstep while her husband was in the provinces. They were
serious at their play, apparently.
I will not entirely surrender my assertion,
therefore, that the late sixties and seventies brought on a qualitative
deterioration of the academy. A traditional, even congenital grudge
against bourgeois decorum became a debauch of exhibitionism wherein the
weaknesses of decorum were never considered. One needed only to be
indecorous. The contemplative life, though far removed from
respectability’s servitude to sedative stupor and obsession with what
the neighbors might think, was not outrageous, not incendiary. It was,
indeed, almost invisible. It would never do—not after 1967!
I wish to pursue this accelerated decay of loud
counter-conformity into the realm of literary taste, where it has
wreaked havoc upon our understanding of reality. (Nowadays, in a
literary context, the word "realist" is almost synonymous with
"shocking".) First, however, let me clarify the alternative
view I seek to recommend. I am not in love with some anemic, high-brow
Never Never Land where garlanded figures drink tea to strains of the
harpsichord, yet my defense thus far of idealism may seem almost so
silly. That acid critic of naïve, self-blinding convention, Oswald
Spengler, would surely have categorized my remarks above as—in his
word—ideological, just as he judged those of universalist thinkers
from Goethe to Nietzsche:
Much that was Classical they chose not to see, and
so they saved their inward image of the Classical—which was in
reality the background of a life-ideal that they themselves had
created and nourished with their heart’s blood, a vessel filled wi |
