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"True or false: our
lives have slowed down and acquired more civility and meaning since
September 11… sir? Sir? Madam? Excuse me…"
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A Few Words from
the Editor
Sometimes we begin projects fully aware of their
rationale, then find ourselves having to make change after change in
response to obstacles, and finally realize that what remains of our
original design is not remotely fitted to our original objectives. So it
has been with me and the quest for the Center’s tax-exempt status. I saw
a chance to do a job that needed doing (and that I loved doing) without
demanding extraordinary sacrifices of my family. Specifically, I thought
that with 501c3 status in my hand, I could elicit generous gifts from
large foundations and—among other things—pay myself a few thousand
dollars a year in salary. I was later asked very pointedly by the IRS
inquisitor, however, if the main reason for pursuing the exemption were to
get myself some money: the strong implication was that an affirmative
answer would be crushed under an "application denied" stamp and,
possibly, initiate charges of high treason. I must say that I grow quite
irritated when looking back on that epistolary encounter. I was not
requesting permission to pick the government’s pocket, or even to ease
its fat fingers out of mine: I was only asking to be allowed to eat while
serving a worthy cause.
In the ensuing months, I mentally trimmed my petition
down to the bare bone as I contemplated re-application. I now see that my
doing so has dispensed with all advantages of having the coveted status.
Last year the Center spent about $450 (more than half of which came from
donations: the rest trickled out of my wallet). Much of this, actually,
was paid out before Praesidium went online, so the figure for 2002
may well be even more paltry. Merely to apply again to the Charitburo
would cost me $350; and, on the unlikely assumption that Comrade
Commissaire would wave me through this time, I would be freed only to
solicit a few hundreds here and there. That mythical "generous
grant" would indeed land me in enormous trouble once I had achieved
charitable status by projecting exiguous budgets. Since I can already
raise the necessary hundreds annually even without offering a tax
deduction as an incentive to donors… well, as you can understand, to
continue would be folly.
The Center for Moral Reason remains a Texas non-profit
corporation, and I stand firm in my determination to provide a printed
copy to those who want one, even if they have donated not a dime. What
this means practically is that we shall continue to exist on modest
donations—my own and others’—rather than on subscriptions or sales.
Quite frankly, experience has taught me that people more readily donate,
and in larger amounts, than they subscribe. There is much food in this for
meditation, and I offer it to you without further comment.
Should we manage to interest any bookstores in the
journal, I shall simply allow them to pocket the profit. Customers may of
course send a check to Texas if they feel so moved—and this raises
another advantage to conceding the feds their little victory. If Praesidium
can politely ask for contributions, it can also drop the name of Arcturus
Press from time to time. My personal connection to both enterprises was a
constant source of embarrassment while I was being federally interrogated:
the state of Texas only demands that I keep the accounts separate and
remember that the proceeds of one must never pay my household bills. I
know that the CMR Board of Directors will no more begrudge me an
occasional plug for the Press than will readers of the former Arcturus—references
to which document, by the way, I was getting most awfully tired of
suppressing!
I shall include here the further confidence (lest I
seem to be shamelessly "poor-mouthing") that my wife’s
paycheck now very nearly equals the largest one I ever brought home as an
Associate Professor. Her associate degree may soon outstrip my Ph.D. in
the salary sweepstakes. Students of victimology would do well to ponder
the many profound lessons herein about educational and gender privilege.
As for those statistics which show how much higher on the hog
graduate-degreed professionals live than peons, they only prove that
people on the two coasts (where such surveys are taken) have their own
planet.
The present number of Praesidium was intended to
explore, in the wake of several terrorist assaults upon unsuspecting,
non-combatant Americans, just what may indeed be said to have gone wrong
with our nation. The backdrop for this soul-searching, of course, is the
academy’s almost immediate and utterly tasteless rush to the rostrum
with bloody bodies of terrorists lovingly hefted over our bleeding sons
and daughters. We had this coming, professors harangued around the
country: we’ve been bullying innocents for years, centuries, millennia—it’s
in the male European genetic code—and we should expect more of the same
until we humbly embrace some version of the professorial utopia. Homer’s
phrase "tongue of brass" began to take on a new meaning.
Well, I realized in putting together the following
pages that they look a lot like all the pages we’ve done before.
Answering the question of what ails Western culture is our typical modus
operandi, it turns out. So our present offering is at most a little
more intense than usual. As ballast, Professor Carlson’s poetry and Ms.
Maskell’s short story seem to me to tender a rare dose of pleasant irony
and gentle humor. May you enjoy and profit from it all!
~J.H.
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Toward Anthroponomy:
How Western Culture
Has Become Its
Own Worst Enemy
by
John R. Harris
"The special cherishing which the ideal of a
morally perfected humanity enjoys has not lost and cannot imaginably
lose anything of its real draw upon our actions through the
counter-example of how people now behave. Anthropology, which stems
purely from knowledge of experience, will not destroy anthroponomy,
which is posited by unconditioned and obligating reason."
Immanuel Kant
Exactly one year ago, I dedicated an essay to
explaining the reasons behind the christening of The Center for Moral
Reason (see Praesidium 1.1, Winter 2001). At that time, I not only
defended my devotion to the words "moral" and
"reason", both singly and in tandem, but also shared my
apprehensions about the terms "liberal" and
"conservative", whose fierce dynamic has had so much to do with
pulling perfectly respectable words to pieces. I enjoyed another ride upon
the whirlwind recently when I associated myself with a Website whose
address features the signature, "conservative books". (I leave
the precise nature of my association and the site’s exact address
unstated, for I must not seem to advertise either in the present context.)
Objections from certain female academics were quick and strong. I suspect
that many of their male peers were just as outraged, and I do not imply
that the latter were more courteous and the former more termagant. Maybe
so, maybe not. Maybe the women were just more open and honest, or maybe
they found conservatism more of a threat to their careers in their special
capacity as outspoken feminists (for such were they who decried my choice
of words). In any event, I came away with ample cause to conclude (if I
had needed further cause) that the very word "conservative" is
now reinlich verboten in many academic settings, having achieved
about the same PC-offense value as, say, "niggardly".
As I pose myself the question of what is genuinely,
profoundly wrong with Western culture—of just what it is about us that
might justify the hatred of the Third World or Islam or the self-appointed
liminal voices of the campus—I cannot resist starting with this blare of
witless vituperation in which we seem to pass our days. Blare itself is
bad enough, and we at Praesidium have written critically of it
before. The cars, the TVs, the public address systems, the
ghetto-blasters, the leaf-blowers, the cheering admonishing serenading
computer screens and voice mail and domestic cybermaid services… I have
longed more than once for someone to invent an interminably running silence-track
which could be turned up full-volume to drown the din and allow one to
hear one’s own thoughts.
Racket, however, was not an American innovation. When I
was in Dublin more than a decade ago for a Celtic Studies summer program,
I had to cut short my visit due to sleep deprivation: I felt as though the
ATF had cornered me in David Koresh’s compound. My Irish contacts, of
course, were appalled that any Yank (as they call all of us) could imagine
their quaint capital city cacophonous, and a few seemed indignant that I
should dare to have passed sleepless nights among them, considering where
I hailed from. No doubt, Cairo or Bangkok would have been far worse, even
before the Industrial Revolution. Especially before then. For the West
only rivaled the East in sheer noise when we began to grind out iron
behemoths belching smoke and steam; and America, I suppose, being the
world’s leading producer of such monsters, won the title of The Great
Polluter, though the East greedily devoured our monsters and tortured
their bones for a few more thousand miles, a few more million casts and
prints, long after we would mercifully have melted the old terrors into
sleek new models.
No, I see no seeds of a bellum pium et iustum
there. The whole planet is a noisy, polluted wreck, and our pioneering
technology is in fact its last credible hope for a face-lift. If the East
wants to inveigh against us for having seduced it into laying railroad
tracks and developing a taste for Coke and Big Macs, it might as well
denounce itself for being so susceptible despite its panoply of ascetic
traditions. (The full measure of the accusation’s surly childishness is
implied in the Japanese experience of firearms: Japan was the world’s
greatest producer of guns during the centuries we call the Renaissance,
yet it resolved as a culture shortly thereafter to give them up entirely.)
What I find far more indicting of our Western way is that we seriously
listen to such frivolous indictments—that we egg them on, quite frankly,
encouraging Western-educated Easterners to go home and broadcast or print
them among a populace which, at first, can only scratch its collective
head. I am bothered, not by our contemporary taste for self-criticism—for
we have none, inasmuch as self-criticism requires fine analysis and
honesty—but by our incendiary love of perverting rational argument for
ideological ends. When I say "ideological", I mean
"selfish". For ideology is nothing other than the
misidentification of egotism with altruism, the devious representation of
self-service as service of others; and this, I would allege, is a
peculiarly Western contribution to the miseries of the last century
It is also a distinctly liberal contribution. (Never
fear: I have much of a chastening nature to say later about conservatism,
or what passes for such today.) Classical liberalism has played an
invaluable role in Western culture. It was by no means opposed to
tradition—only to the blind reverence of unexamined tradition. It
recognized that the tradition’s vibrancy, the very appeal of certain
writings and beliefs which allowed them to weather the erosive winds of
time, depended upon particular unconditional vectors of human nature:
e.g., the aspiration to live above selfish interest, the desperation over
human vanity’s omnipresence, and the duty to secure the former’s
victory over the latter. These ineradicable tendencies created a body of
universal human law which paralleled, and in some ways counterpoised, the
universal laws of nature. Insofar as they were essentially human, more or
less observable in all times and places, such laws were also
non-traditional, since pure tradition originates in accident (or, as some
would have it, in revelation—but what can a revelation reveal to a heart
not already inclined to receive its truth?)
Yet this science of human universals, which might be
called rationalism, was also tradition’s champion. By pondering the
traditional, the contemplative could explicate it and renew it for those
who had not noticed its true revelations—its special comforts, warnings,
and exhortations which do not change in urgency or relevance as generation
succeeds generation. Traditions are also always in need of refinement—all
of them. Several conservative editorialists in recent months, for example,
have made a drum out of bellicose passages of the Koran, which they beat
in a harrowing tocsin. "The Muslim holy book overtly calls for war
with the infidel," they say, and say correctly. Yet many Muslims are
equally insistent that their book calls upon them to cultivate peace and
practice mercy. No doubt, the Koran does both in different places: so does
the Bible (specifically, the Old Testament). The proper response to such
literary contradictions, which of course are insurmountable to dogmatic
literalists, must be to meditate in the spirit of the document—in that
spirit which lives in all of us yet does not strictly belong to any of us—and
distribute emphasis accordingly. In religious circles, such flexibility is
often called liberal interpretation. What I should like to know is, how is
a great tradition to be kept alive merely by conserving its
letters, non-sequiturs and all? Isn’t the true work of conservation
properly one of breathing spirit into the letter?
This, as I say, was once "classical
liberalism", a vein of spiritually liberating thought whose roots
extended back to Socrates, the Academy, and the Stoa. To remark that
contemporary liberalism has strayed from the stars which once guided it
would be to court falsehood with generosity. In no uncertain fashion,
today’s liberalism has aggressively repudiated its commitment to seeking
the universal beyond the conditional. It is, indeed, openly hostile in all
settings to the notion of universality (or "essentialism", as
its votaries say with a sneer). Arbitrary tradition, if not Western,
fares very well, by comparison. The contemporary liberal can behold
infanticide or slavery or (as Mary Grabar detailed in Praesidium
1.4) cannibalism with equanimity as long as the practice belongs to a
non-Western, non-Christian culture. The very injustices which he or she
most deplores in Middle America—keeping the wife at home to raise a
family, inflicting corporal punishment upon children, exacting full
communal participation in religious observances—are stoutly defended,
even in extreme forms involving bloody reprisal against dissenters,
wherever English isn’t spoken and frozen yogurt isn’t sold. The
neo-liberal (if I may so designate this counterpart of the similarly
unsavory neo-conservative) hasn’t suddenly discovered an affection for
quaint customs and hoary rites, of course. My best guess is that he or she
simply does the contrary of everything the bourgeoisie may be seen doing.
This exhibitionist counter-conformity has gone on for
most of my lifetime: it dates back at least as far as the late sixties, at
any rate. It has been especially visible in sexual attitudes. In the late
sixties and throughout the seventies, ordinary parents were still outraged
if their daughter moved in with her boyfriend at college, ordinary
neighbors whispered torridly if a housewife conversed for too long with
her insurance agent, and ordinary citizens grew irate if the local theater
started running too many R-rated films. Liberalism assumed its positions
accordingly. Bright young people lived together without benefit of clergy,
either partner among enlightened couples tolerated (or even encouraged)
the other’s brief affairs, and scuffing up the line between art and
pornography became a solemn duty. Then things began to change somewhere in
the mid-eighties. All of the liberal behaviors just described had become
more or less mainstream with incredible alacrity. One would have expected
the official liberal position now to be one of satisfaction—perhaps
complacent delight—that the message had been so obediently heeded.
Instead, the avant-garde liberals in the campus culture ignited a stunning
phenomenon: they staged a reversal of sexual attitudes in the PC movement
so thorough that its severity far surpassed anything ever observable in
sixties suburbia. Any overture or protracted stare from a male could be
considered attempted rape, kissing on the playground won the boy (never
the tender maiden) instant suspension, and a nude female figure portrayed
in a centuries-old oil painting or sculpture qualified as harassment.
Middle America had grown sexually liberal only to find that liberalism had
grown passionately, even furiously repressive.
I have oversimplified. A tendency to sexual restraint
is still somewhat typical of the middle class, while a tendency to
libertinage is still easy to identify among the academic élite. The very
survival of these tendencies, however, makes the liberal position all the
harder to accept as a position, deliberated and arbitrated, rather
than as some kind of involuntary reflex. Middle America has actually moved
toward the center, coherently and decisively. On social issues, it is in
fact moderate-liberal: the most troubling aspect of its shift is simply
that it perceives no shift and considers itself to be preserving
traditional decorum. This is either disingenuous or just plain obtuse,
depending upon what degree of self-analysis you think the average American
capable of. It is not, at any rate, irrational. The liberal vanguard, on
the other hand, will grind out handbooks for coed freshmen on happy
"hook-ups" and force all campus newcomers into coed dorms at
the same time as it pursues boys relentlessly for date-rape and offers
seminars which warn that all men have always been ravenous sexual
predators. In other words, no clear line exists between the "free
love" crusade of the sixties and the "all sex is rape"
crusade of the nineties: both refrains occur in the same song. The
irrationality of a single voice’s raising all these conflicting appeals
and alarms has not escaped the faithful of neo-liberalism any more than
its critics. The former have indeed adopted irrationalism as a plank of
their leaning and weaving platform; and when the latter seek to debate
with them, they seize upon superior logic as a longstanding instrument of
oppression and try to fume their opponents into silence with the shame of
having made sense!
Conservative commentators, in my opinion, are therefore
mistaken to read the diffusion of liberalism throughout Western culture as
"do your own thing" independence run amuck. World War II was
scarcely past when Richard Weaver wrote, "Individualism, with its
connotation of irresponsibility, is a direct invitation to selfishness,
and all that this treatise has censured can be traced in some way to
individualist mentality." I am inclined to believe that his
understanding of individualism was rather tendentious even at the time. An
individualist, I should say, is someone who knows that ultimately only he
is accountable for his actions even when he follows the group, and that
all actions he performs are only his even when he imitates everyone around
him. He grasps that the circumstances of his socio-cultural conditioning
may mitigate, but cannot excuse, any errors of moral judgment he makes—that
a socially mandatory behavior is still a choice, and that a bad choice
remains bad despite its having been socially sanctioned. Nevertheless, the
Right has not been shy about applying Weaver’s dim view of individualism
with a vengeance to the conduct of the Left since the late sixties. We are
to imagine that recent advocates of liberalism have simply been scratching
more itches in more public places as one barricade of propriety after
another came crashing down.
This view, I repeat, does not convince me. It
entirely fails to account for that virulent anti-rationalism so prominent
in today’s avant-garde. After all, mere hedonism can be quite
deliberate: it is probably the oldest ethical system of all—or the
oldest ethical imposter, I should say, whose facing down was the first
task of true ethics. (One can see the fight joined in Plato’s Gorgias,
for instance, when Socrates struggles to convince Polus that doing wrong
is a worse evil than being wronged.) That arch-Tory, Thomas Hobbes,
reminds us that the calculations of the sybarite can be made with utter
lucidity. Many who wish to conserve the comfort, security, and privilege
of traditional ways are very familiar with such balance sheets. The bottom
line may well favor a life nestled warmly among the herd (as Hobbes
argued) rather than the cold, dangerous isolation of the rogue
non-conformist. Preoccupation with animal pleasures adds up to communal
participation (however shallow or duplicitous), not general resistance.
What we see happening on the Left today is much closer
to the antithesis of a zeal for individualism, and often resembles an
irrational frenzy of self-annihilation. When campus firebrands cry for
liberation from sexual pressures, liberation from boring duties,
liberation from social discomfort, and the rest, their chorus may sound
like one of "I want what I want," but their longing’s
essential characteristic is precisely that it speaks in chorus. The
phenomenon here borders on mass hysteria. Individualism is jealous of its
elbow room, its private time: it has to think things out. In contrast,
today’s liberal élite explicitly mistrusts and loathes calm reflection.
It is Dionysiac. It wants ecstasy—the special ecstasy of being swept up
in a vast surge, a swarm of waving hands and ululating voices that could
become a blood-dimmed tide in an instant.
To my mind, this dementia is the single most alarming
symptom displayed by our ailing society—the single Worst Thing Wrong
with America. Dionysus has always ruled somewhere, of course, or (better
yet) has always ruled in some wild corner everywhere. To define
civilization as an etiquette which limits his crazed reign as much as
possible would not go very wide of the truth. Our problem is that we have
thrown open the gates to his tiger-drawn chariot. Not our most ignorant
and unintelligent, but our best and brightest seem to have pledged their
lives to his worship. As long as American culture tolerates rant and
rodomontade in places where serious discussion should be going on—as
long as we permit ourselves to be governed by sound-bite and shouting
match—the infection will only spread. On our death bed, we will end up
looking very like those who now hate us most: a body whose energies are
concentrated so consumingly on keeping its moribund appendages in minimal
obedience that it cannot so much as sit up straight.
Because I regard our internal war against rationality
to be of supreme concern, and because neo-liberalism has chosen the wrong
side in this war, I usually describe myself as conservative. Yet it is
impossible to exonerate the Right’s intellectual ineptitude fully when
one attempts to explain the Left’s intellectual disintegration. We are,
after all, one body. If the legs are too shaky to walk, perhaps the spleen
is at fault for not providing enough red blood cells. The neo-liberal
infatuation with delirium is an extremely complex phenomenon requiring an
extremely intricate diagnosis and treatment. I shall not attempt such
intricacy here. Others have cited the dissolution of the family and its
impact upon children who grew up viewing themselves as unwanted by one or
both parents. The divorce culture itself, obviously, was fueled by the
major components of the sixties uprising: raw hedonism, male cowardice and
loss of purpose, female discontent with traditional roles, and so forth.
Why these forces should have come to a head in the late sixties is, by
comparison, little discussed. I have seen Howard Schwartz and Peter
Singleton reach about the same conclusion from very different directions:
i.e., that the American family—and especially the woman at its center—lost
respect for the male breadwinner when he became a "company man",
seldom seen at home, always weary, never able to demonstrate or explain
with pride to his children just what he did all day. Ironically, this is
the lackey’s existence which Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem
"freed" their sisters to pursue. No wonder they continue to feel
shortchanged!
The Company… The Corporation… the private-sector
Big Brother… the villain in so many film noir classics made just
after World War II: is this not supposed to be the driving force of
conservatism? It isn’t to Richard Weaver; but to the so-called
neo-conservatives who began to emerge as early as those fateful late
sixties and burgeoned until they took over the eighties, full-throttle
capitalist growth is indeed the white knight of the romance. Market forces
are supposed to topple all despotism worldwide as (it is claimed) they did
the Soviet Union, to lure the indigent out of a torpid despondency in
which the welfare state has only mired them more deeply, to sustain
domestic prosperity by concocting new "necessities", and to
contribute to universal health by making the progressive conquest of
mortality immortally profitable. To my ear, much of this sounds overtly
anti-conservative. It is almost exclusively economic conservatism—and
exclusively a defense of private property wedded to a laissez-fairism
governing the acquisition and exchange of property. Yet this is an uneasy
marriage. In my lifetime, the unscrupulous acquisition of property has
steadily vitiated the meaning of property itself. Unfettered development
and aggressive marketing, for instance, have placed my present residence
under continuous assault by noisy, smelly vehicles and garden equipment
and have rendered my neighbors incapable of staying at home. My books cost
more and more, yet their paper is cheaper and their print less legible
than ever; and much of what I want is out of print, besides, since little
of any depth gets published today. At the grocery store, producers of
breakfast cereal are so eager to addict me to sugar that they seldom allow
me to choose my own dosage; and indeed, I find that most of what lines the
shelves resembles a spoiled child’s birthday gift on the outside as much
as it does his birthday cake on the inside. I can’t get the quality I
once knew out of this brave new world, the old favorite things I possess
are often degraded by their coarser surroundings, and a product such as a
book which requires silence and stasis to enjoy is scarcely even dreamt of
now. I live in a constant and unnecessary flux whose alterations threaten
every pleasure I take in life more and more. That the whole dizzying
career toward the outer darkness of uniform vulgarity and inanity should
be styled "conservative" in any sense of the word would strike
me as outrageous if it were not so manifestly idiotic.
How does this "neo-conservatism" conserve
taste? Taste must be painfully cultivated and requires an intellectual
subtlety that many people will never possess. That which is painfully
acquired does not sell well, and that which may never be widely acquired
can only look to "niche marketing" for its salvation. Taste must
be written off in this race for big, fast bucks as a net loss. How does a
neo-conservative conserve such attributes of character as honesty,
endurance, and self-sacrifice? These, too, are painfully acquired and
perhaps even more thinly distributed than taste, inasmuch as their root is
spiritual as well as (probably much more than) intellectual. Will the open
marketplace assure their rise to the top? No marketplace could be much
more open than the Internet. The newsletters I regularly receive through
e-mail telling me how to rope in customers and have them pulling out their
plastic before they can think are enough to give me some very blue moments
of misanthropy.
Of course, the recipe of neo-conservatism calls for a
generous leavening of religion (any religion will do, as long as it exerts
those old-time restraints against anti-social behavior: Original Religion
Lite). Shadia Drury has recently penned an interesting book about the
thought of neo-conservatism’s grandsire, Leo Strauss. I am wholly
unversed in Strauss’s philosophical bequest, but I tend to take Drury at
her word about it, first because she is a sound scholar, and second
because what she says tallies with what I have seen. I believe she is
entirely correct, therefore, that religion for the neo-conservative is a
strong desideratum not because all the world’s vanities must fall
prostrate before its higher summons, but because it is, rather, the glue
which holds this great capitalist generator of secular bliss together. It
channels ruinous concupiscence into market-making greed and gluttony,
sterile envy into what we call "motivation": it keeps the family
together and makes the neighborhood pick trash off its lawns (or pay to
have someone pick it off). It also allows a hard-working, prosperous
citizenry to view material success as the fulfillment of a holy covenant
rather than as an obstacle to spiritual maturity. It makes people behave
themselves out of a sense of communal expectation without tormenting them
over the tawdriness of motive behind their behavior.
I have paraphrased Drury for the sake of brevity and
emphasis. I wish to quote her directly at a particular point, however,
which seems to undermine a crucial insight into neo-conservatism. Here is
her assessment of the conservative orientation’s liabilities:
Conservatism is suspicious not only of innovation,
risk, and adventure, but of reason. It prefers incomprehensible
traditions to reasonable innovations. Conservatives tend to deprecate
the rationalist spirit, and are particularly distrustful of philosophy.
They reject reason in favor of "the wisdom of the ages," which
is how they designate traditions whose rationale is all but totally
lost, or customs that they cannot explain. It is no wonder that John
Stuart Mill dubbed conservatism as "the stupid party."
Now, Drury does not advance this capsulized criticism
to distinguish between neo- and proto-conservatism. Though the Mills dig
at Tories obviously belongs to an earlier time (a time, in fact, when one
could be a Millist progressive without having to apologize for our
nightmarish modern experiments in social engineering), her intent seems to
be that neo-conservatives have preserved this much of their ancestral
plumage. As a description of abiding conservative traits, the passage
strikes me as needlessly argumentative. That the conservative hangs on to
values "whose rationale is all but totally lost" hardly seems a
fair measure, for instance, of Jonathan Swift or of La Rochefoucauld,
whose suspicion of human nature was no less profound for being legendary.
John Locke, to be sure, believed the human mind to be a blank slate before
culture and environment scribble all over it; but as much can certainly
not be said of Plato, or even Aristotle—and in what sense could anyone
be dubbed a custodian of Western tradition who rejected both of those two
(and with them, almost every shred of patristic and scholastic
philosophy)? Immanuel Kant was clearly as immersed in this tradition as he
was critically supplemental to it. One might object—many nowadays will
immediately object, I am sure—that Kant is as vigorously disavowed by
contemporary conservatives as he is arrogantly ignored by contemporary
liberals. The former cannot forgive him for making sense of the classical
heritage (especially the ethical heritage, which he absolutely insists on
severing from such perceptible phenomena as voices from golden clouds) in
the very way which Drury finds lacking in their approach. The latter have
simply airbrushed him from history for being a despicable "universalist"
(which, by happy coincidence, excuses them from the labor of actually
trying to read him).
I should not like to detain this discussion in arguing
that Kant’s critical idealism is the zenith of that analytical
conservatism which embraces classical liberalism. One "ism" too
many could easily halt my broader argument in a fatal doldrums. I am
content to observe here simply that raising rigid barriers around schools
of thought can be highly subjective and self-serving. Let me put it this
way, using Kant as the wedge behind which my greater point may enter. If
one actually reads the man’s work—not one of two passages, or even one
or two treatises, but a substantial part of his corpus—one cannot
seriously doubt that Kant a) believes that moral duty must always preempt
material tendency and aesthetic pleasure, b) considers such duty to
justify the supposition of a supernatural and supremely good power, and c)
regards all possible human progress as ultimately indexed to this duty and
this power. In other words, Kant maintains that people will become better
because they will strive after moral improvement, and that they will
strive after moral improvement because, as beings granted freedom by and
under an all-good power, they have no higher destiny.
What has this to do with Fichte and Hegel, let alone
Marx and other social engineers with whom some conservatives have joined
Kant? The views outlined above certainly do not amount to a license to
overhaul society from the ground up, or even to an admission that such
overhaul is possible. In its totality, Kant’s stance is a principled
prohibition against despair—than which, of course, nothing could be more
conventionally Christian. It is a solution—a version of the only
solution—to the great enigma of faith: i.e., how do you find the energy
to fight battles which will mostly be lost in a war which has already been
won? If Kant rejects despair at the secular level of this great struggle,
he rejects complacency at the metaphysical level. We must actively hope in
a goodness not of this world—which means that we must strive after it,
that it may become a little more of this world.
A conservative who cannot accommodate this solution has
conserved nothing worth having. His neo-conservatism might as well be
called pseudo-conservatism—a set of barrenly atavistic postures struck
for their effect upon others rather than for their expression of an
inwardly felt truth. And such is just what Drury has described as
essential conservatism throughout the ages: review her angular portrait,
and you will find not a glimmer of inner conviction in the smug Dutch
merchant who sits for it. Why not? Because Drury has refused to paint fine
detail—because she herself is a professed liberal of the old school who
has neither abandoned rationality nor conceded it to the other side? I
think not. I think her pseudo-conservative portrayal of conservatism is
actually a fine likeness of neo-conservatism. The atavistic pose of
her subject has beguiled her: she has assumed that his grandsires really
did look the same. The rejection of Kantian rationalism by these young
upstarts is scarcely more typical of principled conservatism than
the rejection of all rationality whatever is of classical liberalism. John
Calvin tossed out Plato with one hand while slipping the other around
Cicero’s shoulder: his "repudiation" of inner enlightenment in
favor of phenomenal revelation was petulant, sporadic, and
self-contradictory. Enter the affected "returns" to the
fundamentals which cropped up throughout the twentieth century. Karl Barth
surpassed Calvin in the process of reviving him. Patron saint of the soi-disant
conservative movement after World War II called neo-orthodoxy, Barth
mounted an opposition to conscientious reflection and rational analysis
which was consistently belligerent (and would probably have left Erasmus’s
star pupil aghast). His new following—his neo-conservative sectarians
who have joined hands with the Jewish eudemonists of Irving Krystol’s
camp—continue to eat it all up.
Again I ask, why? Why is neo-conservatism so heavily
invested in mimicking the antediluvian religion of a patriarch who chats
daily with God even as its faithful build Websites, juggle cell phones in
their mini-vans, and divorce at rates exceeding those of the general
populace? Is the disparity itself the explanation—have these people
advanced so far into the postmodern limbo of constant harrowing change and
gaudy, raucous surface without substance that they have compensated by
creating a primitivism of mythic proportions? Where young liberals have
responded to chaos by letting down their hair and streaking through the
wilderness with cries of "Euhoe!", have conservatives answered
by raising a marble edifice in the city’s center and chiseling "Nomos"
across the architrave?
I wrote earlier that a religious veneer gives the
economic conservative the comfort of thinking his affluence ordained from
on high and the security of seeing his fellow congregants denied the more
spectacular forms of anti-social behavior. I was not being entirely
serious then, for I doubt that such cold calculation of self-interest
enters the neo-conservative’s head at a time when his neo-liberal
adversaries are running amuck. On both sides, rather, I suspect the
bedrock motives of being quite visceral. The hostility of both to
rationality clearly calls for that conclusion. If Messrs. Schwartz and
Singleton are right and the new generation of liberals despises its absent
or emasculated fathers, perhaps the new generation of conservatives longs
for a father who exercises arbitrary and absolute control. These zealots
do not want a God who sits at their bedside and soothes, "Why fear
the dark? You’ve seen all that surrounds you during the day. Whatever
else creeps out with the shadows is something you yourself have put there…."
No: this requires too much steady, concentrated effort, I suppose, of a
terrified child who cannot stop shaking. And so the Father, as a
non-negotiable element of the faith, must solemnly declare, "Of all
ghouls and goblins that haunt the night, I forbid a single one from
harming a single hair upon thy head!" There, now: evil spirits
exorcised, doubts eradicated, case closed. That the divine fiat is
wholly arbitrary, its power wholly incomprehensible, makes it all the more
reassuring. In a word, it is inhuman—and the human is precisely
what dismays us most. We want something utterly not us to make
being us as safe as when a magnificent figure leans over a toddler and
lifts the child into the sky with a laugh.
A poignant image… and, if we never knew such a father
on earth, perhaps a pathetic one. But it is also dangerous in its
disparagement of the human ability to understand—the moral obligation to
attempt understanding (part of which attempt is discovering just what we
cannot understand: Kantian critique, in other words). We must get over
this self-indulgent craving to be little children again, to be excused
seventy-times-seven of our tantrums and solecisms and fears of the bogey
man. The neo-liberals among us must stop thinking it important that they
"feel threatened" and, instead, assume some resilience and
dignity. The neo-conservatives among us must stop thinking it the
objective voice of God when they "feel called" to do something
against responsible counsel or in defiance of others’ claims upon their
loyalty. We must all grow up. To be sure, those who do not become as a
little child will never enter the kingdom of heaven; but since when did
any child want to remain a child? The distinctive quality of child-like
innocence is its self-oblivion, its headlong pursuit of an admired adult
state without being the least daunted by its incapacity to wear such big
shoes. My little boy wants very much not to cry when he hurts himself: he
wants to "be a man". I dread the day when he entertains the
insight that most of the adults around him are lustily broadcasting their
loves, hates, fears, and wants to all the world with the narcissism of a
spoiled brat.
In calling for reason from both sides—from the one
anti-rational phalanx that they form—I am not denouncing sentiment. As
was said somewhere in our last issue of Praesidium, a deliberate
emotion is actually a more sincere, profound, and humane emotion. What I
deplore in contemporary American culture is not the reign of feeling, but
the kind of feeling which reigns: impulsive, shallow, egocentric,
implacable, tasteless, and disastrous to both self and others. Thoughtful
people have finer emotions. The music of Vivaldi or Beethoven or (my
personal favorite, however decadent Richard Weaver finds him) Debussy is
not unemotional just because it doesn’t jerk out physiological response
at the rate of rap music. Otherwise, why not make a symphony out of
detonating bombs? The art of Titian or Vermeer or Friedrich is not
unemotional just because it doesn’t represent a familiar icon in media
that induce vomiting. We need to recover our reason so that we may reclaim
a finer quality of emotion. A rag-tag bunch of juvenile derelicts with
stupendous funding behind it which succeeds in murdering 5000 people seems
an unlikely delivery system for this message. In a way, though, it is
fully appropriate: its self-absorbed, exhibitionist thuggery is the
logical conclusion of campus anti-logic, and its self-righteous,
ostentatious bibliolatry is the logical extension of Big Tent illogic. Al
Qaeda is a glimpse at what our Left could become: small wonder that the PC
crowd sprang to its defense, for ideologues dream in cataclysm. The
Taliban is a glimpse at what our Right could become: small wonder that
American fundamentalists want every trace of it expunged from the earth,
for it could eventually be a rival gang fighting for the same Far Eastern
turf.
How do we recover reason? If diagnosing the sources of
our irrationality is as complex a task as I suggested earlier, then what
chance have we of a simple cure? I recur to Kant. Each of us, as an
individual, is responsible for his or her choices. Whatever degree of
conditioning may have been inflicted upon us by family or peers or
culture, we can always start out the new day by proclaiming, "I’ve
had enough of wearing this crowd’s livery: today I change." We must
all wear someone’s livery, to be sure: even Robin Hood’s men wore
Lincoln green. It is our duty, nevertheless, to insist that the greater
powers to which we pledge allegiance adhere to certain minimal principles.
Many would rather accept the colors than responsibility for the ideas and
actions nourished under them. In any given situation, many—perhaps most—human
beings are weak-willed. We must recognize that our groups do not usurp our
will, but merely express it. Everything they do with our approval
is something we are doing. We must gravely ask ourselves if we can
bear the consequences of that reflection.
In my opinion, the remaining classical liberals who
refuse to admit that their project is now essentially conservative, given
the virulence of the assault on rationality, need to consider the
consequences of their position. Shadia Drury is pleased to label the more
oppressive strains of the PC crusade as something vaguely right-wing.
There are one or two good reasons for that claim: but it is not broadcast
resonantly by her coterie, and almost never in those quarters where it
might do some good (that is, where it would create an uproar). Besides,
the fact remains that the avant-garde has only oppression of
inquiry in common with some of the Right. The core notion that all history
is a conspiracy and all discourse propaganda is as counter-conservative as
it is anti-rational. No doubt, Drury would like to elbow (or finesse with
the proverbial ten foot pole) her camp’s holy warriors off the ledge
where they perch precariously in the hope that some fourth dimension would
carry them back up on the Far Right. In campus curriculum wars, however,
her crew puts up the weakest of fights and immediately rolls over at the
first shout of "Racist!" or "Sexist!" In politics, it
tags along on a leash as candidates make extravagant appeals to helter-skelterites.
On the social front, it smuggles its offspring off to private school in a
more fuel-efficient line of vans and provides condoms for Courtney’s
coed sleep-over just in case a profane pair or two may take in vain those
giggly reassurances that everyone is "just friends". With
friends like this—with friends like themselves—why do moderate
liberals imagine that they need conservatives for enemies?
Neo-conservatism, which at least talks publicly about
repealing the rule of hysteria, wants to ensure major change by preempting
mass vacillation with an unquestionable and irrevocable command. Since the
command’s authority, however, may neither be examined nor doubted, this
strategy only extends the rule of hysteria. How can you not doubt what you
have not examined? On the contrary, only by examining something can you
locate its assumptions—its working axioms—and decide if these deserve
to be doubted because of their great number or because of their tendency
to impair rather than elicit good conduct. In my opinion (frankly, it is a
conviction with me), Christianity requires very few assumptions to make
sense of life’s mysteries; and it also pulls our contradictory human
motives—our fear and lust and envy, our guilt and self-loathing and very
occasional eagerness to trade our death for another’s life—into a
coherent and productive forward surge. I cannot understand why any
conscientious, practicing Christian would applaud, or even tolerate, manic
displays in the pulpit when the case for faith can be made with such
harmony and such profundity—with such intelligent emotion. The
present trend toward irrationally ungrounded and unlimited trust in a
higher power to arrange one’s physical safety, comfort, and prosperity
is simply an alternative kind of PC cultism. The campus radical demands
perfect sexual experiences, perfect jobs with perfect pay and hours,
perfect civility on all occasions: the pious eudemonist has unshakable
confidence that all his diseases will be cured, all aspects of his
marriage and family life blessed, and all his financial pressures
resolved. There isn’t enough space between the two to insert a fuse.
For neo-conservatism’s flight from "reckless
individualism" always comes full circle: self-preoccupation always
draws a large following, and crowd-followers are always courting a selfish
desire to escape themselves. Sparing a tender heart and an untrained mind
the "anguish" of private reflection doesn’t ensure a
well-integrated, communally directed person farther down the line: it
ensures, rather, a shallow community whose dominant concerns are no less
selfish for being general. A girl who has been saved from the challenges
of great books may want the same liposuction as her friends are having,
and may want it to make all the boys of her acquaintance happier. Is this,
then, self-sacrifice? By the same token, a poorly read young person who is
taught to approach God in prayer with all his wants and never doubt of
their fulfillment will end up composing a Christmas list wherein money and
popularity are sure to figure prominently. For true character and genuine
spirituality, the results of such a catechism are calamitous.
Descartes was able to peer inside himself in the Meditations
and find both God and his fellow man. Such discoveries, he claimed, are
based on common sense, which is "the best distributed thing in the
world." The neo-orthodox and neo-conservative equation of inward
study with self-absorption is a direct assault upon moral reason, which
requires a painfully acute analysis of personal motives in all
circumstances. With attacks like this from within Western society, who
needs terrorists?
On Left and Right both—but especially on the Right,
where tradition enjoys a good name even if it is little respected—we
must strive to recover the sense of a higher purpose, a moral duty whose
roots extend beyond the depths of our personal being to a metaphysical
author. We must seek (to use Kant’s contrast) "anthroponomy"
over anthropology. In today’s correct-speak, we must labor to see that
cultural diversity leads us toward, not away from, our common humanity: we
must devotedly study the fixed stars behind history’s variegated
fireworks—not the spectacular differences which can so easily blind us
to our shared mission. Many, I repeat, will resist the new emphasis (the
old emphasis renewed), or will be too blunt to see beyond the spectacle.
We must try, then, to court a larger few, and cease being consumed by the
movements of the many. The many are always followers, in any case. The
only real issue is whether the thoughtful will debase themselves in
concocting schemes which feign mass enlightenment, much to the delight of
fools and the consternation of the lost; or whether, instead, they will
tell the truth and leave the masses to grumble over an unwanted challenge.
I submit that it is our inescapable duty to pose the challenge and
withstand the grumbling.
Allow me to underscore with my closing words the
painful divisions and continued strife to be expected of such
truth-telling. I am not advocating peace at all costs, but ascent at all
costs. I am not proposing that we "reach out" to Muslims or
"sit down" with Hindus, but that we insist upon the service of
goodness in our own acts and welcome it gratefully when we find it in
others’ acts. The critical line of differentiation which I see running
through human affairs does not respect skin color or choice of holidays or
number of genuflections in the temple. It cuts right through the grain of
every major religious faith, rather, stirs complacent neighborhoods into
unrest, and pits members of families one against another. Good men who
mitigate a bellicose passage of the Koran will be denounced by the
weak-minded and the politically devious as betraying The Prophet. Good men
and women who dare to assert that the true God could never have intended
Abraham to sacrifice his son will be denounced by the same parties in
Christendom and Judaism—the many who are too dull and the few who are
altogether too shrewd—as blasphemers against holy writ. The position I
recommend is not middle-of-the-road, come-together appeasement. It is
intelligent, energetic, uncompromising service of moral right.
Conservatism and liberalism are not two polarities whose bisecting I urge
in high Aristotelian fashion. Both, rather, have put other things before
goodness, or perhaps have reverted to that paleolithic definition of
goodness as "feeling good". I argue for feeling bad, instead—lonely,
beleaguered, ignored, slandered, persecuted—whatever it takes, so long
as the right thing gets done. To be exact, we should learn how not
to feel bad when doing good rather than how to avoid feeling bad as we
find ourselves now.
We of the West are no longer tough enough: is that what
the Third World has been saying about us? If so, then its furious voices
are correct—but not, I suspect, in any sense that most of them
understand.
NOTES
1 See pp. 405-406 of Die
Metaphysik der Sitten in Kants Werke, vol. 6 (Berlin; Walter de
Gruyter, 1968), 203-494.
2 Cf. Noel Perrin, Giving
Up the Gun (Boston: Godine, 1979). I am indebted to Peter Singleton’s
Return to Chivalry (Tyler, TX: Arcturus P, 2001) for bringing this
splendid little book to my attention.
3 Richard M. Weaver, Ideas
Have Consequences (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1948), 181.
4 Simply because it is at
hand, I might cite from the introduction of David Walsh’s powerful book,
After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom
(Washington: Catholic U of America P, 1995), such phrases as "driving
passion for messianic self-salvation", "the expansion of
individual egotism", and "the destructive delusions of
self-perfection" (see 1-7). I would strongly recommend this brave,
original study to anyone who honors truth. My point is merely that it has
become a locus communis to attribute our postmodern self-absorption
to the individualist tradition of self-analysis, whereas I find ample
evidence that self-absorbed people do very little analysis of any kind.
5 See and Howard S.
Schwartz, The Revolt of the Primitive: An Inquiry into the Roots of
Political Correctness (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001); and Peter T.
Singleton, op. cit. (n. 1 above).
6 See Shadia B. Drury, Leo
Strauss and the American Right (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 159.
7 Ibid., 159. If I
may be permitted a marginal protest which is not at all irrelevant to the
main issues of this essay, I would like to object to Drury’s
characterizing of Strauss’s philosophy within a few pages of this
passage: "The phalocratic character of Leo Strauss’s philosophy is
undeniable" (167). The preposterous word "phalocratic" says
virtually nothing, says it with crude provocation, and reflects an
altogether typical habit of speech in liberal scholarship. If Drury means
to maintain that Strauss’s ideas were unconsciously but significantly
influenced by certain prejudices stemming from his masculinity, she should
spend enough words to do so. The term she has chosen, instead, does him
the abuse of alleging that he thought with his genitalia—a scurrility
which defies rational construction except as a patent insult. We need not
wonder how a feminist would respond to being labeled "cliterocratic"
or "uterocentric"; and her furious indignation at such a term,
in my opinion, would be fully justified. I realize that Drury did not
begin this jargonized mud-slinging and is, indeed, only using the common
parlance of her field. Nevertheless, to sloganeer the writings of an
intelligent human being with a phrase like "Phalus rules!"
partakes of the same vindictive hysteria as we see in the more volatile
campus uprisings.
8 The ascription of a
utopian faith to Kant has become almost universal among conservative
scholars, who conclude that his wresting the Jacob’s ladder of moral
knowledge from the rather low celestial vault of miraculous revelation in
history must leave it inclined upon humanist and scientific ends. I do not
entirely understand the stages of this deduction. I would guess that it is
affected by Kant’s treatise, Zum ewigen Friedan (Toward
Perpetual Peace), whose availability in translation suggests that it
has crossed the path of many political science professors. Yet this work
is directed at the conduct of nations and must be viewed, besides, against
the backdrop of Machiavellian statecraft and unscrupulous protection of
inherited privilege which colored the political landscape of Kant’s
time. In other works composed throughout his life, he is both reluctant to
extend an optimism about the possibility of individual moral progress to
any political system and outspokenly opposed to all types of civil
disorder. (See, for instance, the conclusion to Part One of Die
Metaphysik der Sitten, where Kant warns that "to rebel against it
[governmental authority] is nevertheless absolutely impermissible and
criminal." For more on the subject, visit the online journal Anthropoetics
for a 2002 special number [edited by Thomas Bertonneau] on Eric
Voegelin, wherein my own paper about Kant offers this defense at length.)
I must insist, then, that to speak of Kant in the same breath with
starry-eyed poets of revolution is grossly ill-informed and unfair.
9 Cf. the early treatise
(1759), Versuch einiger Betrachtungen über den Optimismus.
10 Cf. Kant, Die Metaphysik der Sitten:
"For by this method [i.e., adhering to the Golden Mean] moral quality
is not determined; on the contrary, all depends on whether or not conduct
is in proper accord with duty." (Op. cit., 404.)
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**************************************************
Academentia:
Making History
by
Mary Grabar
Mary Grabar is putting the finishing touches on her
dissertation at the University of Georgia, Athens, where she also repels
Vandals from the redoubt of freshman composition. We ask, by the way, that
admirers of former president Clinton observe how her criticisms of that
charismatic figure originate in and focus upon her concerns as a woman:
this is scarcely a political diatribe. Surely any fair person would admit
that, all things considered, Mr. Clinton’s conduct toward women was
reviewed with a benignly blind eye by current Gestapo standards.
Never debate a former 1960s protestor who was
"there" and helped bring the government "to its
knees". The aging radical will fall back on his old tactics.
The conversation began innocently enough last summer at
a pickin’ party/pig roast in an idyllic farm setting in rural Georgia.
It’s an annual event and I got invited because I belong to a group that
promotes old-time music and folk dances. At such gatherings, I find myself
sharing my love of traditional music and dance and some liberal concerns
such as land preservation and ecology with men wearing skirts and women
who think this Grateful Dead-inspired fashion is sexy. I avoid political
discussions, so I maintain friendships (though during one conversation my
aesthetic objection to flowery skirts flowing over hairy legs encased in
tube socks was insistently attributed to my narrow upbringing). We have a
good time dancing, and though I have my doubts about the effectiveness of
"dances for peace" that are sometimes held by the same
participants (except of course for the peace among the dancers
themselves), such a setting is the most conducive I know to having people
of all political persuasions "get along". Other than church, I
know of no place where I feel safer than at a dance weekend.
The day began with my usual Saturday morning visit to
the tiny local organic farmers’ market for fixings of the potluck.
The radical and I had met once before. The conversation
began with work. He teaches geology and environmental science at a local
college. The latter piqued my interest. I told him about a paper I had
presented the previous weekend on T.S. Eliot’s concept of
environmentalism, as he spelled it out in his "Idea of a Christian
Society". I also told him about my frustration in trying to find an
anthology for a special topics freshman composition class I had devised
that would include the environmental point of view of someone like Eliot;
the anthologies I had found had three sections: animal rights, deep
ecology, and ecofeminism. All three views start from an anti- Christian
premise and reject the idea of anthropomorphism, while purportedly
attempting to change the "consciousness" of readers. All wrongly
assume that environmentalism started in the 1960s.
I made the mistake of telling the radical this before
knowing his history. Though I claimed to be an environmentalist, I also
admitted to being conservative and Christian.
The latter two aspects negated the first for him.
Though the radical had never heard of, much less read,
the pre-1960s writers like Richard Weaver or John Ruskin that I mentioned,
he insisted that the environmental movement had started in the 1960s
because that’s when people’s "consciousness" began to
change. Innocently, I thought that this teacher of environmental science
might have been interested to hear what a Victorian had to say about the
environmental and social havoc wreaked by industrialism.
The conversation moved to a general lauding of the
sixties. He took partial credit for the civil rights movement and ending
the war in Vietnam.
Since I had been doing research for my dissertation
that involved the history of the 1960s for my chapter on Gravity’s
Rainbow, I told him that it was my impression that the civil rights
movement had started before the white sixties radicals got involved and
that some historians and political scientists believe that the sixties
protest movement actually prolonged the war in Vietnam.
"Who are these authors?" he demanded.
I gave him names of scholars.
He dismissed them as part of some right-wing conspiracy
and quoted Ho Chi Minh’s statement about the impossibility of the U.S.
winning the war.
Then began the charges typical of the sixties radicals
once you challenge their view of history. I was castigated as a right-wing
fundamentalist on the side of corporations and overall repression of
freedom. My references to specific writers and titles, either pre-sixties
or conservative, fell on deaf ears.
He accused me of believing in "God, work, and the
family". I replied, "What’s wrong with that?"
"You probably even like John Ashcroft!" I
asked him what problems he had with Ashcroft. He named an organization
that he alleged was racist. The charges against John Ashcroft range from
his associations with Southern Partisan to his sinister background
as a composer of hymns, as an exposé by The New York Times—with
entire verses as evidence—revealed.
The radical, with the years having added some girth to
the six-foot-plus frame, morphed from a placid banjo player to an enraged
boy. He began shouting. I had to walk away.
I removed myself and sat down with a retired professor,
his wife, and sister-in-law who was in a wheelchair. Not mentioning my
conversation, I said something about the state of academia, that history
is taught as if it began in the 1960s. The woman in the wheelchair smiled
and said, "They were just teenagers. They thought they invented
sex." The makers of the movie Pleasantville, promoting the
revisionist history of the radicals, would have us believe that everyone
in the 1950s was a repressed Puritan. (Then see the realistic 1970s
representation in The Virgin Suicides of a beautiful teenage girl
deflowered on prom night and left by Narcissus to wake up alone on the
football field.)
Clearly, something emotional was going on. I had struck
a nerve with this unmarried, childless man in his late forties. As a
woman, not only did I symbolize potential confinement and restriction of
his unlimited male freedom, but I was a bad woman—one who overtly
championed the idea of "God, work, and family". I was not even
like most of the women he had probably dated: women who would grant this
bad boy of the sixties all the privileges he had come to expect, up to
co-habitation and then abortion if necessary.
But his type are all around us.
Paul C. Vitz, in Psychology as Religion, exposed
the aggressiveness that the focus on the self bred among men (and women).
The cult of the self as evidenced in therapy and books that, in short,
advocated looking out for number one produced a generation of men who
never emerged from the egotistic and narcissistic stage of adolescence.
The hostility and rage that Vitz had diagnosed in 1977 have been
compounded by the passage of time.
Some of the radicals, though, express some regret for
protesting against their own country but attribute the phase to misguided
youthful ideals in the midst of overwhelming peer pressure. Last year, the
novelist Pat Conroy had published an essay expressing these sentiments in Reader’s
Digest; he claimed that instead of protesting against the Vietnam War,
he should have done what his buddy did and fight in the war. But
some still insistently cling to their own notions: any
"progress" not yet realized is due to the incompleteness of the
revolution. One suspects a defensiveness about a less than glorious past:
of converging barefoot and shouting against your government while your
parents are supporting you.
They are still in rebellion. Many of the men who
imbibed the predominant ethos of draft-dodging of the sixties or
disco-dancing of the seventies now find themselves single and childless.
They are angry and don’t know why the chicks who would "do it"
with men who refused to fight are no longer chicks. In their anger, the
women have turned to worshiping themselves in the form of goddesses or
have surpassed the rebels in terms of job titles, real estate, and 401(k)’s.
The latest psychobabble directed to women who love too
much or love the wrong man is that the need for someone to complement
their traits and protect them really indicates the need to nurture that
aspect in themselves. So the desire for a member of the species with more
muscle mass than you have indicates the need to develop your own muscles.
While the advice to exercise more is probably good in most situations,
women now are counseled to become emotional and physical hermaphrodites.
Nurture yourself, we are told. Don’t depend on anyone. Men like
"independent" women.
Former male rebels without a cause have told me that
allowing a man to buy me lunch is the equivalent of prostitution (the
category into which marriage has also been cast). That women
"use" men to have babies. That no one in his right mind would
get married without a pre-nuptial that would detail the fair distribution
of property, down to deciding who gets the couch and who gets the recliner
(with a clause in the event that there are two couches and a recliner, or
two recliners and a couch, etc.). Similarly, women insist on paying their
share of the restaurant tab and insist on an equal payment from the man in
terms of potatoes peeled for dinner. Babies are had at their convenience.
The mutual stand-off is described in the more nebulous terms as "fear
of commitment" and "problems with intimacy", problems which
have provided the material for many therapists, book contracts, and radio
advice talk shows.
Granted this is my experience with a selective pool. I,
after all, am referring to single, heterosexual, middle-aged men. But
whereas in times past such a man was a rarity, today many such men choose
this state. Marriage, because it involves duties to "God, work, and
family", might interfere with the principles they attempt to adhere
to: self, fun, and freedom. Or they will complain that they cannot find
the "right" woman: i.e., one to take on Mommy’s role: as
provider of creature comforts for when Johnny comes home from play. To be
fair, I know men who have tried to meet women’s demands that they become
more like women (i.e., "sensitive"); but such men are usually
ruined, either by capitulating and then whining about "feelings"
or becoming defensive and angry—or else (the worst combination) by
turning whiner and pseudo-he-man men’s rights advocate. Men in their
thirties have their own quirks, I am sure. But the free-wheeling sixties
and seventies—the decades of "make love, not war"—seem to
have produced a group of single men, who, despite their attempts at
Buddhist meditation, yoga, release therapy, and sitar lessons, are very
angry.
Pat Conroy’s statement of
if-I-could-change-things-I-would was one I had heard from a former ashram
member, hitchhiker, acid-dropper, daily pot-smoker, ex-social worker, now
"healer", "psychic", and men’s rights advocate.
Months before its publication in Reader’s Digest, he had sent me
a copy of Conroy’s essay which had been circulating through an e-mail
list-serve. During the presidential campaign, my friend had castigated
John McCain for his "traitorous" behavior while prisoner of war.
Even former domestic terrorist and Pentagon bomber, Bill Ayers, now
Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois and
Director of Center for Youth and Society, has the audacity to broach Bob
Kerrey’s behavior in Vietnam.
But the man before me did not even grant the Conroy-ian
pseudo-admission of youthful misjudgment. At forty-eight, he stood as firm
in his conviction as he had at eighteen years old. He was still the rebel
who had made history by that brilliant stroke of genius that had inspired
his peers: to change the world by gathering themselves into a mob to force
a democratic government to "its knees".
The position of the anti-hero is either in the middle
of the mob or on its fringes. In either case, his identity as a man with a
place in a social order is obviated. He can lose himself in some back
alley alone and experience the rush after the needle has found the vein,
or he can find himself in the midst of a throng and experience the rush of
power that comes from losing himself in its frenzy.
* * *
The 1960s produced its own twisted version of the hero:
the stoned-out drop-out who screamed he would not fight in a war, or study
for tests, or support a family. In retrospect, I realize my
protestor-interlocutor was assuming that I, like most women in his social
circle, would view his history as heroic. I did not, and he was deeply
insulted. His students, I am sure, look adoringly at him as he regales
them with stories about "changing history", though they are not
mature enough to question how being loud, obnoxious, and intimidating en
masse is really a courageous act.
Heroism itself has changed. The "reality"
shows that re-enact gladiatorial contests where men and women
"survive" by physical and emotional subterfuge present
mini-dramas of life in the workplace and sometimes home. Women break
through the glass ceiling through guerilla business tactics or gain tenure
through "scholarship" that engages in warfare with every critic
coming before them (now even with earlier "mothers" of feminist
criticism; nastiness somehow has a way of coiling back like a snake).
"Courage" has been changing indeed: eat fried rat on a staged
Galapagos Islands.
The recent re-definition of courage by Susan Sontag and
others to include the terrorists who fly airplanes through buildings is
really an extension of the sixties reversal. Heroism was a notion
ostensibly ridiculed by these anti-heroes and then changed in meaning to
suit their purposes. Any act of rebellion was therefore categorized as
courageous.
But the middle-aged, who no longer have parents to
rebel against, must put themselves into the role of heroes. Just as the
definition of "courage" is changed from meaning selfless acts to
protect the weaker to meaning crazed terrorism that kills the
weaker, the definition of heroism is changed as well.
One can, like Pat Conroy, chalk up his own past of
less-than-exemplary warrior heroism to being misled by peer pressure and
claim from the safe perspective of middle age that one would do things
differently now.
Or one can continue to insist that protesting was more
heroic than going off to Vietnam. One was fighting the enemy: the
"military-industrial complex". In a parallel move, communism has
to be recast as a nebulous, and probably more just, form of government.
What is important in terms of the new heroism is defying the
traditional order, questioning and then subverting traditional notions of
right and wrong. If one does not do this, does not agree with the
sixties radicals, then one is "following like sheep", which my
interlocutor indeed accused me of doing. The government was the
real enemy and these protestors were engaged in guerrilla warfare.
Those buzz phrases remain in my mind as they were
shouted at me that summer day: "following like sheep",
"changing history", "bringing the government to its
knees," "John Ashcroft", "God, work, and family".
I have known too many such men—often the most liberal and claiming
feminist credentials. There is something scary about a man shouting down a
woman, though I have never known one who was conservative to do it, as
much as he disagreed with me. But shouting was the predominant form of
protest in the sixties; it’s part of letting it all hang out. My debater
was continuing to practice what he probably had been doing with his
mother, sisters, and ex-girlfriends.
College students, I have found, do not question the
version of history promoted by those like my interlocutor: the vaguely
idealistic goals of "brotherhood" and "love", nor the
Marxist means proposed to achieve them, expressed in "The Port Huron
Statement", a position paper of the Students for a Democratic
Society, that presumed through its sweep to rewrite the New Testament. The
music of the Beatles and Bob Dylan is still popular with them. In
contrast, one cannot imagine a teenager of the sixties listening to
anything that old and dated—from his parents’ generation, yet!
(Another tribute to George Harrison on NPR as I write this; one of those
insipid commentaries by a mother of a small child who ends by pointing to
the "wisdom of youth" as her three-year-old comments that George
and John are dead together.) One of my better students approvingly quoted
in a paper the now sixty-year-old lyrics of Bob Dylan’s (né
Zimmerman before the image change): "Come mothers and fathers,
throughout the land, and don’t criticize what you can’t understand…
your sons and your daughters are beyond your command, your road is rapidly
aging. Please get out of a new one if you can’t understand, for the
times they are a-changin’."
These students have a vague belief that every right and
freedom they have is due to the efforts of the guitar-strumming saints of
the sixties. But with the elimination of standard courses on American and
European history (unless it is the multicultural fare of presenting these
cultures as oppressive), they have nothing against which to gage the
version of the sixties propagandists. Certainly, these students will not
get a different perspective if they are taking classes in environmental
science from my debater.
Their teachers, still caught up in their adolescent
narcissistic desires to be the center of the universe, insist that history
began with them, when they began making it. Don DeLillo captures
such self-infatuation of tenured radicals in his satirical novel, White
Noise, in such scenes as a lunch gathering of middle-aged adolescent
men who throw food at each other while they discuss the glory-studded
events of their youths—where they were when James Dean died, and where
they were when they brushed their teeth with their fingers: the
"seminal events… Woodstock, Altamont, Monterey."1
As recent college offerings on such banal and trite topics as Oprah
Winfrey and The Simpsons indicate, the curriculum is changed
to include any and all topics, topics akin to those DeLillo’s academics
work to implement in their own courses: the "ethos of the road"
and "the culture of public toilets."2 Students have
been taught that to be naked and stoned is the ultimate form of resistance
and heroism. But each generation of radicals must surpass the older one.
It is no wonder that the children of the original Woodstock generation
(those who could afford to travel and buy pot) destroyed the cash machines
and other property at their Woodstock II concert a couple years ago.
* * *
As our conversation had become heated, I had tried to
find some common ground. I had told my interlocutor that I had at one time
been in a landscape architecture program. I had told about my discoveries
in my research, that some of the same concerns that his generation was
voicing in violent and chaotic form had been voiced reasonably and with
knowledge by those like Richard Weaver. Though there was far from total
agreement, older conservatives (not the free-market, self-gratification
apologists one associates with conservatism today) voiced some of the same
concerns that the radicals did about rampant corporatism, materialism,
alienation, consumerism, environmental destruction, and mechanized
warfare. But I should have known better. "Woodstock nation", as
Abbie Hoffman proclaimed, would not engage in linear, rational, Western
thought and read philosophy and history. So my references to Ruskin,
Eliot, and Weaver were to no avail. In the sixties,
"poet-warriors" would declaim feelings on the streets and in
coffeehouses. Now the beats’ dictum of "first thought, best
thought" is heard in poetry slams, MLA panels, and classrooms across
the country. And I was encountering the self-righteous wrath of one of its
veterans personally.
As displayed by my interlocutor (as well as by refereed
journals and hiring committees at the most prestigious universities), the
claims to openness, free thought, non-judgmentalism, like all absolute
claims to relativism, are self-negating. While an adolescent may be
humored to a point in his attempts to think independently or not be
"brainwashed", as he might misguidedly put it, prolonging the
rebelliousness that rejects all standards except its own into middle age
implies the opposite of its intended effect.
Such claims become simple assertions of power, and like
all assertions of power, carry threats of violence. DeLillo satirically
presents his academics as "thug-like", with qualities akin to
Mafiosi and brown shirts.
On a practical level, the tenured radicals have control
of most of the universities and dictate what students will learn. But
unlike the presumably authoritarian strictures of a traditional
curriculum, which looks to a historical consensus on what is the best that
has been thought, these curriculum changes are made arbitrarily—by none
other than those who "were there". And their qualifications need
not be more than having been there (or now for younger academics to
just share their sympathies), notwithstanding a certain technical
proficiency that has come to substitute for wisdom. (I am sure my
interlocutor was an adequate geologist.)
While these new heroes of the self attempt to extricate
themselves from duties to God, family, and country, they elevate themselves
as that one to whom duty and honor should be shown. Self-help shelves sag
with tomes that are variations on "Women Who Love Too Much",
i.e., "at all", which emerged from the earlier genre of
"Look Out for #1". The message to women is to match men in
selfishness.
Now the former peaceniks, like my debater, I have
found, are not bleeding heart liberals (that’s where women’s misplaced
compassion goes), but libertarians. But libertarianism, though on the
surface falling into the conservative category, is really suited to the
demands of these Peter Pans. They use it to justify shirking financial as
well as moral responsibility. They did have to get jobs eventually, and
now, rather than clamoring for government programs (for which daddy is no
longer paying taxes), they want to keep the money for themselves. Their
protests against taxation are not based on a philosophical quarrel with
how the money is spent, but rather with the idea that they cannot keep all
the money for themselves. They also do not believe in contributing to
charities (unless maybe it’s the ACLU. or another organization that
would fight for their freedoms), or in tithing, or supporting children.
(They might chip in for the girlfriend’s abortion, relieved that the
amount is minuscule in comparison to eighteen years of child support
payments.) They claim the libertarian ethos of rugged individualism but
have had college educations paid for by parents and may have started their
own businesses in the homes of girlfriends long discarded after the
entrepreneur was able to pay his own rent.
The "spiritual paths" follow the self in a
similar way. Zen Buddhism is a favorite. So is anything New Age or
anything that mimics the "feel-good" seminars of the seventies.
Anything with repressive "thou shalt nots" is out. Commandments
might make them feel guilty about their behavior to women and country and,
presumably, carry the danger of making them "follow like sheep".
Indeed, they have no Good Shepherd to follow. As they
refuse to follow any authority, they place themselves into that role.
Hence, rules change according to their own whims: for marriage, fidelity,
support of children. But could anything less be claimed for those who
presumed the authority to change "consciousness" itself? No
wonder that the former "consciousness" changers have become
self-described psychics, shamans, astrologers, and healers. The pool of
available middle-aged men seems to be filled with those who will
predetermine that the relationship will not work out because of your sign,
your childhood, or aura. Not surprisingly, many of these men are
suspicious and accusatory on matters ranging from fidelity to ulterior
motives for marriage.
The old strictures of order, respect, and compassion
that emanated from a Judeo-Christian tradition have been replaced by
constant rebellion, suspicion, and manipulation. Underlying it all is the
perpetual adolescent’s egotistic desire for power.
* * *
Though I claim responsibility for making stupid
"choices" for whatever reasons, and for going along with the
dominant ethos at one time, I do not think that my experience is that
unusual. The sixties ethos has seeped into the culture at large. I have
seen my married peers go unthinkingly into the materialistic
acquisitiveness and conformity for which their fathers were criticized;
their changes are minor—"business casual" instead of the gray
flannel suit (including for women) and a joint instead of a martini on the
weekend. They are the "bobos", the bohemian bourgeois who buy
the trappings of peasant culture, while enjoying the gadgets and luxuries
technology has to offer. They’ll take a toke at a party while they worry
aloud about their teenage daughters doing dangerous drugs or having birth
control failures. They pass on the stories of their era to their children.
A teenage Boy Scout glowingly related to me his father’s story of
sixties heroism: about a graduating high school senior who stood on a
chair during commencement to protest the administration’s policy of
preventing those like himself, with long hair and beards and unkempt
appearance, from walking across the stage to pick up diplomas. But the
"social progress" evidenced by allowing someone who looks like
Taliban John to parade across a stage during a graduation ceremony is a
dubious one and is evidenced indeed today in a new policy of tolerance for
various sorts of appearances of increasing outrageousness. I don’t know
how much farther the children of these sixties heroes can go than the
tattooing, hair-dying, piercing, and branding they have been inflicting on
themselves.
Revolution is inherently violent, and sado-masochism,
self-mutilation, and terrorism are an extension of the violence that
undergirded the revolution of the sixties. Furthermore, violence was not
an unfortunate, unforeseen outcome when flower-bearing, peace-loving
children were forced up against the wall by the "establishment".
Rather, violence was justified and advocated by some of the most respected
intellectual leaders of the protest movements. The revered novelist Thomas
Pynchon actually celebrated the Watts riots in the 1966 New York Times
Magazine.3 Here, Pynchon, from the privileged perspective
of someone "hip" (an attitude often nurtured by trust funds and
Ivy League educations) presented the violence of Watts as justified and
authentic. Assuming the empathetic stance of one of the oppressed, Pynchon
wrote,
in a pocket of reality such as Watts, violence is
never far from you: because you are a man, because you have been put
down, because for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
One wonders how much time the Cornell-educated young
writer spent in Watts to present this authentic thumbnail sketch with the
confidential "you".
The authorial stance of one among the "cats"
veers into aesthetic appreciation:
as this summer warms them up, last August’s riot is
being remembered less as chaos and more as art. Some talk now of a
balletic quality to it, a coordinated and graceful drawing of cops away
from the center of the action.
One can imagine the readers of the Sunday New York
Times appreciating Pynchon’s glimpse of "reality" of Watts
and his assessment of the riot’s aesthetic qualities from their
doorman-guarded penthouses or summer cottages on the Vineyard. Rioting
since then, from the Rodney King riots to the lootings in Cincinnati, has
similarly been rationalized from the distances of ivy-covered enclaves or
security guard-manned editorial offices.
Those who have government supported round-the-clock
bodyguards make similar pronouncements on cases of violence. Former
President Bill Clinton’s rationalizations for the terrorist attacks of
September 11, or at least his inappropriate pointing to the political sins
of Western culture at a speech at Georgetown University last fall, drew
the wrath of the right-wing. Many of the Clintonesque statements made on
campuses that traced the terrorist attacks back to U.S. policies were
gathered into a report put out by the American Council of Trustees and
Alumni (ACTA). Liberal commentators like the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution’s Jay Bookman called the ACTA’s report
"hysterical", and implied that any criticism of the Left’s
supposedly open views was being quashed by the radical right wing. (On the
board of ACTA, Bookman suspiciously pointed out, sit Lynne Cheney, Sen.
Joe Lieberman, and William Bennett.) Newspapers like the New York Times
that covered the report quoted the more nebulous remarks repeated from
campuses, and by implication charged ACTA with hysteria also. Bookman
quotes a passage from the ACTA report that is presumably self-indicting:
"Rarely did professors mention heroism, rarely did they discuss the
difference between good and evil, the nature of Western political order or
the virtue of a free society…. Indeed, the message of much of academe
was clear: BLAME AMERICA FIRST." The key words quoted by Bookman to
support the charge of "hysteria" are "heroism",
"good and evil", "political order", and
"virtue", terms the Left loves to scoff at.
Liberals use a different form of rhetoric, as G.K.
Chesterton pointed out in Eugenics and Other Evils. This rhetoric
masks such terms as killing with euphemisms like "choice", or
"dignity". Chesterton was already onto their game in 1922.
(Surely even some hysteria should be allowed in the wake of 3,000 deaths.
To express no outrage at such a time is the pathological response.)
Bookman concludes after quoting the report,
I’m sorry. I don’t believe that campuses are
crawling with professors who blame the United States for Sept. 11. I’m
more worried about people who would use such ridiculous charges to
squelch the honest discussion that invigorates a democracy as well as a
campus.4
Bookman, obviously, has not spent much time on
campuses. The attitude of "honest discussion" goes so far only
to grant prestigious chairs to "philosophers" like Princeton’s
Peter Singer, who promotes infanticide and bestiality. Given the current
climate, future "honest discussions" on campuses might entertain
the equivalent of sending Grandma out on an ice float. But "honest
discussions" do not go so far as to entertain the notion that
euthanasia goes against divine law (the word most often stricken from
discussion on campuses is "God"). They do not go so far as to
include conservative views, including those who claim that some professors
do "blame the United States for Sept. 11".
Bookman does not mention the fact that real
"honest discussion" has already been squelched on campuses
across the country. There is no dissent likely to come from the
nineteen-year-old sitting in the environmental science class when his
professor tells him the environmental movement started in the sixties. Nor
is he likely to challenge the professor’s point that protestors like
himself changed the world into a more harmonious, peaceful place to live.
What does the nineteen-year-old have to compare it to? (Besides, he likes
the fact that his parents buy him $40,000 toys to drive around in and let
his girlfriend spend the weekends in his room.) The nineteen-year-old has
not heard otherwise. The professor, who is in a position of authority, is
likely to dismiss out–of-hand any suggestions to his own reading list
that do not jibe with his egocentric world view.
This is a world view that has come to dominate
education. Clinton’s speech, as an example of sophistic pandering, did
not overtly promote treason; instead, it just presented another tallying
up of the standard list of Western political sins (which could have been
lifted from any seventh grade social studies textbook). Similarly, the
"texts" disseminated in the classroom have the appearance
of open-mindedness and objectivity. But by the fact that the radicals in
power preclude the broaching of another view, the discussion is cut off—contrary
to Bookman’s claims of "honest discussion".
Another text that students are not likely to be exposed
to is Norman Mailer’s 1957 tract, "The White Negro", the
position paper on the new male ethic that was to emerge in the sixties.
Arguing for an existential authenticity, Mailer predicted that the
"psychopath may indeed become the perverted and dangerous
front-runner of a new kind of personality which could become the central
expression of human nature before the twentieth century is over." For
Mailer, the psychopath and part-psychopath attempt to overthrow western
"sublimation" and "create a new nervous system for
themselves." Aligning the psychopath’s impulses to the "Negro’s"
(or Mailer’s stereotyped presentation of the jazz-playing proto-hippie
sexual adventurer), who had been living between totalitarianism and
democracy, Mailer then predicts the rise of the "hipster". But
the hipster, because of his repressive society, must imbibe the values of
the psychopath (it was society that was diagnosed as crazy in the 1960s,
after all). The psychopath tries to live the "infantile fantasy"
and by "instinctive wisdom"—wherever this takes him.
The psychopath is ordinately ambitious…. So his
associational journey into the past is lived out in the theatre of the
present, and he exists for those charged situations where his senses are
so alive that he can be aware actively… of what his habits are…. The
strength of the psychopath is that he knows (where most of us can only
guess) what is good for him and what is bad for him at exactly those
instants when an old crippling habit has become so attacked by
experience that the potentiality exists to change it, to replace a
negative and empty fear with an outward action, even if . . . the fear
is of himself, and the action is to murder. The psychopath murders—if
he has the courage—out of the necessity to purge his violence, for if
he cannot empty his hatred then he cannot love, his being is frozen with
implacable self-hatred for his cowardice.
I can think of no clearer expression of the extreme
claim for "authenticity". After all, if your feelings lead you
to murder, then murder you must, implied Mailer. Indeed, the psychopath
murders "if he has the courage".
Mailer acknowledges the counter-argument, that to
murder a "weak fifty-year-old" candy store keeper who is likely
to be the target for the authentic psychopath could be considered an act
of cowardice. But then he offers the justification that one murders not
just the man but
an institution as well, one violates private
property, one enters into a new relation with the police and
introduces a dangerous element into one’s life. The hoodlum is
therefore daring the unknown, and so no matter how brutal the act, it is
not altogether cowardly. (emphases added)
Already, in 1957, courage is associated with the
courage to murder—for the American terrorist on American soil. The
small-scale act of terrorism against the hallmarks of Western order (an
"institution", "private property") that is
rationalized by Mailer in 1957 is extended in 2001 to skyscrapers and jet
planes. (A more outrageous example, cited in the ACTA report but not
mentioned in the newspapers, was an assessment by City University’s
George Lakoff of the "planes penetrating the towers with a plume of
heat. The Pentagon, a vaginal image from the air. . . .")
The fact that some people are killed or hurt in the
destruction of "institutions" and "private property"
is secondary to the hipster’s quest for—ironically—love:
At bottom, the drama of the psychopath is that he
seeks love. Not love as the search for a mate, but love as the search
for an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it. Orgasm is
his therapy—he knows… that good orgasm opens his possibilities and
bad orgasm imprisons him.
But such a search for the "Holy Grail" of the
"apocalyptic orgasm" is fraught with "ambushes of
violence" and "retaliations among the men and women among whom
he lives his life," and thus becomes unattainable. (Ask any woman who
has been with such a man.)
Society, therefore, must be changed. The hipster must
replace the "square": "the hipster may come to see that his
condition is no more than an exaggeration of the human condition, and if
he would be free, then everyone must be free." Such freedom requires
courage, though not the courage of old to live up to one’s duties to
protect the weaker. Modeling this new-man-as-hipster on what he perceives
to be the "Negro’s" position as outlaw and as violently and
sexually authentic, Mailer writes,
With this possible emergence of the Negro, Hip may
erupt as a psychically armed rebellion whose sexual impetus may rebound
against the anti-sexual foundation of every organized power in America,
and bring into the air such animosities, antipathies, and new conflicts
of interest that the mean empty hypocrisies of mass conformity will no
longer work. A time of violence, new hysteria, confusion and rebellion
will then be likely to replace the time of conformity. At that time, if
the liberal should prove realistic in his belief that there is peaceful
room for every tendency in American life, then Hip would end by being
absorbed as a colorful figure in the tapestry.
Hip has, indeed, been absorbed into American life. Sex
is now flaunted by twelve-year-old girls. Repression is the closest thing
we have to sin. Norman Mailer is an esteemed literary lion. Rap, which
promotes not only the orgasmic quest for "bitches" but the
destruction of private property (except the rappers’ own), is reviewed
as legitimate art in the pages of The New York Times. Today, hip
has been absorbed to the point that only fuddy-duddy enemies of the First
Amendment would object to the language of the rapsters’ expressions of
authentic rage. The sixties radicals made the world safe for rap and
pornography.
Sixties ideology and the version of history—that it
was "made" then—is disseminated not only in the humanities
through political and poststructural theories, but also in the sciences,
where a new catechism replaces prior attempts at objectivity: "Class
repeat after me: When did the environmental movement begin? ‘The
environmental movement began in the 1960s when people’s consciousness
began to change.’"
But a look around suggests that other than
environmental protection laws (which are often traded off in the
marketplace) and efforts to recycle the exponentially growing amount of
garbage produced, no profound change has been made, indeed, in terms of
"consciousness". As Eliot and others stated, no profound change
comes unless there is also a change in values or religious beliefs, hence
Eliot’s prescription of a "social-religious-artistic complex".
Lacking discipline that is rooted in a firm spiritual belief system, the
baby boomers live in bigger houses (often alone), throw away more garbage,
and have more energy-consuming gadgets than their parents did. And from my
experience on campus of being threatened daily with being run down by
cell-phone wielding student-commandeered SUVs, they have no qualms about
making sure their progeny have all the comforts technology and oil can
offer.
To be fair, the protest movements helped advertise
environmental concerns, which helped institute those laws (and which I
would support). But the environmental movement has alienated many
potential allies by its alignment with such fringe groups as animal rights
and ecofeminism, and such alliances themselves demonstrate its tangential
nature. Not much has been done on a personal level (where true change must
originate), despite all the rhetoric of "lifestyle" choices.
Many of the original alternative businesses, like Horizon Farms and Ben
& Jerry’s, have sold out to large corporations, inviting a cynic to
conclude that "organic" or "worker friendly" were used
as marketing techniques. These idealists apparently did not want to give
up material possessions to truly live their ideals. I have the same
criticism of professing "Christians" who use Christianity in
their business enterprises, from selling septic tanks to theme parks. They
too confuse the worship of Mammon with the worship of God. Neither group
has tried to diminish its reliance on electronic gadgets or the internal
combustion engine.
I recall that as I had navigated down the dirt road to
the party, I had encountered two young men driving environmentally
obscene, loud, three-wheel off-road vehicles. The orgasm-seeking described
by Mailer got played out in the marketplace, with electronic
spectacle-producing toys marketed to kids and "adult"
entertainment to their parents. There had been many SUV’s parked along
the dirt road to that party, as one also finds at a Dave and Buster’s or
"multicultural" alternative festivals like the Lake Eden Arts
Festival near Asheville, attended by an overwhelming majority of white
people who can afford to pay $30 for a session of laying on of hands and
who congratulate themselves for their cultural diversity as they watch
young white women perform African dance. (I laughed last year when the
security blared over a loudspeaker in the campsite, "You will need to
move the Land Rover. Please move the Land Rover.")
Admittedly, there have been attempts, such as the
organic farmers’ market I try to patronize. And certainly such
small-scale, "earth-friendly" endeavors are in keeping with
Christian ideas of stewardship and community. But changes cannot be
maintained unless the change in consciousness goes beyond the
self-glorification of the hipsters, unless it involves the idea of
self-sacrifice for the greater and ultimate good—indeed, what allegiance
to God, country, and family entails.
The chest-pounding of the graying veterans of the
revolution for the self would be merely amusing were it not for the fact
they now are in positions to change consciousness, namely in the
academy and in the media. The danger lies in the false history they
present to students. They present themselves as harbingers of peace and
love and cooperation, but do not present the violence that undergirds the
rhetoric and actions of their revolutions. Logic, like the other
institutions of Western culture, has been torn down by the poet-warriors
of the sixties. Without restoring the "open discussion" that
would entail traditional dialectic, the notion that the attempted
destruction of family (and its bonds of love) and country is antithetical
to peace cannot come out. Being presented with the idea that marriage is a
vestige of that old repressive system of subjugation and property exchange
(as is likely to happen in a class taught by a Marxist or feminist) and
not the Christian notion (automatically excluded from serious
consideration in a public university) is hardly an example of "open
discussion". But what is more loving than the husband and wife who
take their vows to each other sincerely? Certainly, the bed-hopping
promoted by the sexual revolutionists left many women feeling used and
abandoned, and many men feeling Nietzschean surges of power. The
alternative of family (not the pro forma type, but the truly loving
family) has its rightful place in building community and, dare I say,
bringing us the closest we can to world peace. The jealousies, envies, and
back-stabbings of sexually profligate pagans certainly do not lead to the
order and security that is necessary for a peaceful society. The personal
is political, after all. Let love begin at home.
But the adolescent, motivated by his surges of
sexuality and new-found independence, cannot see that far down the road,
and therefore is drawn to the adults’ pictures of their halycon days.
The former radicals, in their presentation of the history they
"made" as full of peace and love, fail to note the violence that
underlies it or else celebrate it as a necessary part of the quest for the
new world order. But Norman Mailer should be presented realistically: not
only was the "White Negro" a polemical statement to a generation
of men who wanted to escape marriage and work, but the values expressed in
it had reverberations in actions. Mailer stabbed one of his wives and was
instrumental in getting a convicted murderer out of jail, only to have him
murder again. This is not to say that all the sixties hold-overs are
violent. Indeed, I know some, who after turning to Buddhism or The
Celestine Prophecy, have settled down into peaceful lives as sculptors
or computer programmers. My point is that the fundamental position
of the sixties, the dispensing with the old, by its very indiscriminate
dismissal of what came before, is inherently violent. Revolution by
definition is violent. The justification for overthrowing Western
civilization extended into destroying what were perceived as edifices of
the culture, and no distinction was made between good and bad. All
institutions had to be destroyed. In the process, people got hurt.
My memories from the sixties as a child involved those
very acts of violence that Mailer was heralding as expressions of
authenticity in The White Negro. In my inner-city Rochester, New
York, working-class neighborhood, Otto’s candy store, where we would
converge to spend our nickels—where a patient 50-year-old Jewish shop
owner filled our bags with penny candy—was looted and forced out of
business. Otto himself was roughed up. I doubt that my former
protestor-environmental science professor "was there" in inner
city neighborhoods when rioting broke out. He, like most of the
protestors, lived in secluded suburbs, far from the
"institutions" they advocated tearing down.
Mailer’s followers did "violate private
property" and beat up the "weak 50-year-old man" who owned
it. I get angry as I think of this: Otto did the world no harm running his
little store to which I would be sent for an emergency quart of milk or
loaf of bread. In fact, in retrospect, I have come to admire the patience
of one who could spend long days behind the counter, facing red-cheeked
children, filling up paper bags with penny candy, to retire at night with
his wife to the apartment above the tiny store. What a small, limited
world compared to the globe-trotting of the executive today, I think. What
mundaneness in comparison to the computerized wheeling and dealing that
now goes on. In my memory, this adult stands out among others who trudged
to assembly lines or sewing machines and had no desire to inquire about
their children’s progress at school at the end of the day. The Friday
afternoon trips to Otto’s broke up the long walks home over frozen snow
banks and gray slush and the round of anxiety over money, sickness, and
drunkenness that were to fill my family’s home with increasing
intensity. My experiences were not unique; I had a friend who was too
embarrassed to invite me over after her parents and older siblings had had
a drunken gathering the previous night. I still remember the disarray on
the table I had inadvertently stumbled upon after the Friday night
debauchery. In high school, the poor girl confided to me about her
attempts at suicide. I point this out for the bad boys on tenure or with
big book contracts: because someone is white and lives in a house (amidst
other pieces of "private property") does not mean she is
privileged. (Something conservatives also need to remember in their often
over-romanticized portrayal of all families).
In context of the meanness of that world, the Mary
Janes and shoestring licorice were all the sweeter. But they were handed
out over the high counter by what Mailer would derogatorily call a
"weak" 50-year-old man who owned an "institution"—cramped
and as small as it was. After the rioters came through and beat Otto up,
he left. The windows were boarded. It re-opened some time later with new
owners who put bars on the windows and sold alcohol. I do not see the
likes of Norman Mailer walking through this neighborhood now.
Thanks in no small part to the rhetoric of the
radicals, the civil rights movement turned from a Christian-based one of
peaceful resistance to one with arms. The militant arms-bearing black
radicals were ironically photographed on campuses of Ivy League schools
that my Eastern European classmates could never hope to attend. Their
violence seeped into my junior-senior high school, where as a
seventh-grader I, along with my classmates, was locked into French class
as looters rushed down the hallways, broke windows, and beat up teachers.
For the dance lessons I had never been allowed to take, I tried to
substitute what was offered in my high school (which had started busing in
students): traditional African dance. Not quite up to the Shirley Temple
tap-dancing I had longed for! But when government programs are instituted,
the "underprivileged" are assumed to be non-white: imagine the
outrage were Eastern European folk dance be offered as the only option (at
taxpayers’ expense) to African-American high school students. In other
classes, I never learned about the World Wars, but was expected to read
newspaper articles about U.S. atrocities in Vietnam, dutifully copying
down undigested "facts" in a report for a lazy social studies
teacher who thought of himself as liberally enlightened. Another social
studies teacher held rap sessions about sex (he is now a high level
administrator in the school district). Planned Parenthood distributed
brochures, but the English teacher did not teach the poetry of Dante or
Donne. Students proudly displayed "Black Power" buttons, but
European history, including my own (then Yugoslavian, now Slovenian), was
ignored. I think my art teacher came in stoned every day.
The graduate school that I finally entered when near
middle age presented much of the same. I had to hunt out the few
professors who had not retired and who provided alternatives to the
meanness (in all senses of the term) of life I had seen. The clawing and
subterfuge of adults who jostled in sweatshops for the most profitable
"bundles" as my mother did (unions providing no help in dealing
with the envy the forelady had for the industrious) was perpetuated in the
Marxist and feminist drivel trotted out by the privileged children of the
suburbs (who needed to create their own ugliness and "worker
struggles"). My more ambitious classmates had landed jobs in the
darkrooms of Kodak or the assembly lines of General Motors. Where was the
truth and beauty I had sought? Certainly, any evidence of it in the poetry
of Shakespeare or Donne was soon quashed by the theories of nihilists who
attempted to spread ugliness out of their own boredom.
I have witnessed too many scholars taking early
retirement or simply quitting graduate school in disgust after the first
theory-driven seminar, as the feminists and poststructuralists take over
departments. The street protests are now carried on in the classroom.
Violence underlies the ideological wars in the academy today. Ad
hominem arguments have become the standard fare in the classroom and
academic journals. Similarly, in the personal arena, one need only draw
anonymous charges of racism and sexism to be dismissed. I have seen it
happen.
The radicals have made curriculum changes. But in
overthrowing history, these radicals place themselves in the position of
history-makers, or, in other words, God. In ages past, it was thought that
God determined history. Now the presumption is that the sixties radicals
determined history. They have taken on Mailer’s imperative: every act,
even murder, can be justified by the highest authority recognized.
Having replaced God with themselves, the old hippies
outside of academia have become shamans, healers, and psychics. These are
positions of power, however much the practitioners may protest that
they are tuning themselves in to "Nature" or "inner
powers". Perhaps an example of the extreme form of such violence and
arrogance is the case of the two therapists who smothered ten-year-old
Candace Newmaker to death as they presumed to lead her through a
humiliating and abusive re-birthing experience. They make good money
through these "alternative therapies" and often teach at our
most prestigious universities. So does former sixties terrorist Bill
Ayers. Musings on abortion as performance art are accepted on MLA panels,
as a Web site by a radical feminist and former phone-sex operator reveals.
These women laugh about their second trimester abortions, I have
found after reading one of their online journals.
The gospel of freedom, self-actualization, and
self-determination is a false gospel indeed. (I say this with
qualification: I was of neither the right economic nor racial group to
have ever been fully accepted by the liberals). These are code words for
the shirking of responsibilities and for assertions of power by the
privileged. Most of those who shout for freedom have had too much
freedom and recognize no limits in their ever-elusive quest for it. The
orgasm-seeking hipster becomes a metaphor. The angry hipsters in their
impotent rage seek outlets of violence.
So I saw in my debater not a hero who had fought the
protest trench warfare of the sixties, but a coward. But I do not mean a
coward simply in terms of refusing to fight in a war out of conviction of
conscience.5 As Mailer and others admitted, these protests were
not just for civil rights and an end to the war. They were part of the
larger effort to shed the constraints Western culture had imposed on men.
These constraints have included rational discourse; disciplined study of
history, philosophy, and literature; protection of children and their
mothers; manners; and respect and civility toward women.
These are mean people in all senses of the term. I have
witnessed their meanness on a personal level and through their rhetoric.
They have lost their manners and sense of compassion. The older
conservatives like G.K. Chesteron saw this and pointed out the obvious:
people who advocate the elimination of those they deem less than perfect
or inconvenient to their lifestyles are just cruel.
The radicals present themselves as nice, open-minded
people, until their opinions are challenged (or even when they are
presented with facts contrary to their views; I would have loaned some
books to my interlocutor). They are nice until they are expected to
perform duties. Limits will set them off into a rage—the rage of the
academic asked to demonstrate justification for a new type of
"studies" (Afro-American studies sometimes being instituted at
the point of a gun), of the graduate student expected to pass a test, of
the boyfriend asked to consult on schedules. All is sacrificed to their
self-gratification: God, family, and work. Anyone who threatens that
elusive goal of sensation-producing orgasmic thrills is vulnerable to
their wrath. But to look at them in their casual dress, easy demeanor, and
placid non-judgmentalism, one would never suspect this. Indeed, about
their own transgressions, a little fling, a little lie told, they are
quite placid and non-judgmental.
We come to the speech made by the heir of sixties
"consciousness" at Georgetown. Liberals see Clinton as the
pinnacle of reasonableness. Conservatives rightly detected something
insidious beneath the patina of non-judgmentalism. It was the political
version of the betrayer who says, "Honey, she meant nothing to me.
Why should a little dalliance affect our relationship? You know I love
you." (The rationalizations went on, going back, as they typically
do, to early childhood. Remember Hilary Clinton’s references to her
husband’s experiences as a three-year-old after the Lewinsky affair? But
any woman with experience knows that these issues never get resolved by
analysis.) And so it went with Clinton in his recent speech. What he said
essentially was, "America, you know I love you. But I have to think
of these other countries and will honestly point out your flaws to the
world." Clinton’s words were the words of a betrayer, and were all
the more evil because of the calm with which they were spoken. Certainly,
there was no "hysteria" evinced as Clinton made his speech. The
hysteria comes instead from those who feel betrayed by such a man’s
words: whether they are the citizens of his country or his wife. The
hallmark of the liberal is that he has no loyalty, neither personally nor
politically. The Rhodes Scholars, the Ivy League graduates, are clever
about their own violence. The name of the new violence is
passive-aggressiveness in the form of either neglecting to prosecute
foreign terrorists or rationalizing and supporting domestic terrorists.
The liberal then furthers the violence by accusing the wronged party of
"hysteria".
* * *
On that summer day, with the strains of fiddling in the
air, the former peacenik came over to my little group a little while later
and engaged us in a chat, as if nothing had happened. Like the hipster in The
White Negro, he had vented his rage and now presented himself as the
most peaceful man on earth. I pointed out that he had seemed pretty upset
a while ago. "Oh, we were just having a little discussion," he
said.
Those like him carry a sense of self-satisfaction,
having convinced themselves and others under their sway that they have
made Mother Earth more just and healthy. But their loud clamors for love
and peace did not prevent violence or suffering, as the millions murdered
in Cambodia revealed. Their calls to free love meant the end of real love
because "free" love eliminated what is essential to love: duty.
Their irresponsibility has led to suffering among those who in times past
would have looked to them for support: women, children, the weak, and the
old. (They have, as they will likely find out, also hurt themselves as
they find themselves aging alone.) For example, their abandonment of
pregnant girlfriends to abortionists in the name of freedom did not solve
anything. The killing of a human being at that early stage of existence
does not negate its existence; it just means that its existence was much
shorter. As in Crime and Punishment, the rationalizations and
justifications, however complex, cannot obviate what has been done. This
is a more distanced and socially accepted form of killing (our society
having in some sense accepted Raskolnikov’s theories). The attempted
rationalizations that come with the shirking of duty have been evinced in
myriad other ways. "Dropping out" is reflected in everything
from frustrating, non-committal relationships to outright abandonment.
Violence, now of the passive type, reveals itself by the refusal to
make any kind of commitment to others. In the process, the innocent become
victims of real acts of terror, as the violence is celebrated in the media
and the academy.
The violence that these radicals thought they could
eliminate by simply willing it ("think peace"; "make love,
not war") or refusing to fight has come out in another battlefield.
The war is now carried out with women. There has been a change in
consciousness. I realized this as the middle-aged man, frustrated by the
vicissitudes of time and imagining women’s infringements on his quest
for the holy grail of the orgasmic rush—whether sexual or egotistical—had
shouted the same accusations at me that he had shouted at parents, law
officers, and educators. About twenty minutes later, he was sitting next
to me in my little group with the calm, self-satisfied look of an
ex-president who had refused to fight for his own country but pinned the
blame for terrorism that threatened it on the Western world.
NOTES
1 From p. 67
of Don DeLillo, White Noise. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985.
2 Ibid., 68.
3 12 June 1966.
4 The
Atlanta Journal-Constitution. November 29, 2001. A18
5 Weaver in
his 1948 book Ideas Have Consequences makes the criticism that
modern warfare is mechanized so much and in the interests of big business
that it no longer tests courage.
Back
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***************************************************
Clowning with
Cloning:
Where Clouds of Witness End and Cloudy
Witlessness Begins
by
Peter T. Singleton
Peter Singleton’s Return to Chivalry: How
Contemporary Men Can Recover the Dignity of Living for a Higher Purpose,
was published late last year by Arcturus Press. Besides living off his
lavish royalties, he writes, edits, teaches, and does yard work cheap.
This may not be the time or the place, and I am almost
certainly not the person. Nevertheless, I have begged and been granted a
bit of space to ruminate over human cloning. I present myself exactly as I
am: not a geneticist or even a biologist, not a clergyman or a politician,
but a somewhat educated and reasonably well-informed private citizen who
is being submitted to a barrage of news coverage on this subject and who,
besides, has a special interest in popular culture. I do not much care for
the things that vast numbers of people do, say, drink, eat, read, watch,
and listen to, but those same things interest me. They are shaping my
world, whether I like it or not, and to understand the forces behind them
gives me the same satisfaction, I suppose, as a good engineer derives from
knowing why his flight has suddenly started plunging to the ground.
Praesidium has become a safe forum for crying,
"A plague on both your houses!" I give fair warning that this is
that kind of essay. Both extremes seem to me to be uttering mush, as
usual.
First we have yet another chorus of "Hands Off the
Mystery of Life" from the enemies of medical technology. I find that
I cannot sit still for this old favorite. Life is indeed mysterious,
because its value far exceeds the total of material pleasures—sex, food,
hot showers, wide-screen TV—that go into it. Some people will even
forego one or more of the sensual thrills just mentioned for a cause which
has no tangible presence at all. That’s quite a mystery. Personally, I
would name it The Power of Moral Principle, for one encounters it when
people are striving after a higher good.
But how is the mystery of life preserved by prohibiting
the creation of life in the laboratory? If we know that life might be so
created yet refuse the option, we may have many good motives for our
refusal—but preserving mystery cannot be one of them, for we know that
the option is viable. (In this case, of course, we do not know
conclusively, but the remaining obstacles are plainly not immovable.) Are
we supposed to pretend that legislating against
further advance in this direction is tantamount to
admitting that we could not have advanced farther? Is the biological
process mysterious if we forcibly keep it uninvestigated—isn’t that
like saying that Santa could be real as long as we don’t actually stay
up on Christmas Eve with the chimney in view? Is the "normal"
way of creating life, then, treated with such mystery-revering delicacy in
our society? When is the last time two of our number got married because
they wanted to produce a family rather than because they had a smashing
good time in each other’s company? If this estimable institution is
making a comeback, it nonetheless accounts less and less for each year’s
crop of new babies. Perhaps the whole thing really is a mystery to
a significant portion of the populace, since so many become pregnant in
circumstances where one would presume any sane person would prefer not to.
Naturally, there are remedies to dispel the unwelcome consequences of this
mystery. That they are resorted to by fewer expectant mothers these days
may reflect a new respect for life… but mystery? Wouldn’t a true
reverence for the mysterious demand that people attend the entire Mass
rather than consent not to pour out the consecrated wine when it shows up
somehow in their Coke can?
I have known enough childless couples, some of them
very closely, that I have little patience with such sentimental
exclusivity (I mean, the argument that only the old way "feels
right" and that these "feelings" are an objective measure
of moral worth—this from a crowd which usually rejects the authority of
feelings claiming to be the voice of conscience). The same shudders of
horror greeted the arrival of in vitro fertilization. That unholy
process showed disrespect for the mystery of life. God was somehow
actively involved when the village idiot was siring his tenth child on the
bag lady or when Billy and Sally parked the sedan and flopped into the
back seat; but two responsible, intelligent, mature adults were going
behind His back if they used medical technology to overcome a fertility
problem. Why, then, is heart surgery or cancer treatment not a similarly
sacrilegious end-run? "I’m sorry, Mrs. Smith, but your cancer will
almost certainly spread and kill you within a year. We would treat it if
we could, but successful intervention at this point would violate the
mystery of mortality."
It is a far greater mystery to me why some couples,
having reproduced in the time-honored manner, promptly surrender their
infant to a poorly paid stranger while they go amass enough money to
finance a new mega-van, or why they pressure their older children into
majors at the university which promise lucrative employment opportunities
but no food for the mind or solace for the heart.
It is a mystery to me how people can so misplace life’s
essential mystery.
On the other hand, it must be said that cloning is not
a very plausible strategy for healthy reproduction. No mystery there. Even
if all the health risks could be removed (and they are so many and severe
that, were the embryo considered human life, the parent would go up for
reckless endangerment), why incur all the expense and trouble? In vitro
is infinitely cheaper and easier. Even women who can absolutely not
produce viable ova may have recourse to relatives or friends for
"donations". The medical procedure involved, once painful and
costly, is little of either now. Under these circumstances, the conclusion
that cloning pioneers want not a little bundle of joy, but themselves all
over again, is very hard to avoid. The would-be parents I have seen
interviewed are of two types, and sometimes both at once: rocket
scientists who believe that the world cannot turn without their brain to
grease its sprockets, and New Age cadets who intend to run a relay race
with eternity. Just what we need: more egomaniacs and space angels.
To summarize: the problem here is not the menace posed
to mystery, but the needless risk imposed upon the yet-unborn. The
assistance of technology is no more Faustian in treating reproductive
disorders than it is in curing malaria or fighting multiple sclerosis.
People who want us to cover our eyes lest we get too smart should spend
some of their limited imagination picturing themselves in their
pre-scientific Eden. They should envision their child lying at the foot of
a tree with a broken arm and facing either a lifetime of one-armed
dependency or eventual death from gangrene. But then, I suppose the tooth
fairy would touch the arm and make it well.
As outrageously dangerous a method of reproduction as
cloning is, it promises other uses, we are told, which are unambiguous in
their humanitarian value. The notorious stem cell is always mentioned in
this context. Well, who wouldn’t want to see the lame rise up and walk,
the mute open their mouths and speak? These beatific visions are sullied
for some, however, by the reflection that the cloned creature which gives
its life (whatever life it has) to heal the sick is, after all—medical
liabilities and all—an embryo. A child in the earliest stages. And here,
in my opinion, the progressives tip their hand. They sigh deeply, roll
their eyes, and grow vexed. "Come now," they condescend,
"this lump of cells would probably never develop into a functional
human being." (If you didn’t wrest this admission from the
pro-cloning camp before, it’s because you were talking to the wrong side
of the corridor: New Moon Reincarnationists over there, AMA over here.)
"Just think of the human misery that could be alleviated by
exploiting this otherwise useless resource." And these exponents of
growing and harvesting life for research are quite right: their research
could well make life worth living for thousands of fully developed, highly
endowed human beings whose body has become a prison for one physiological
reason or another. Don’t these helpless victims of a cruel fortune
deserve a chance at life outside the casket—is it fair to keep them
sealed up over a quibble about the potential within a lump of cells?
My own conviction is that it is not only fair, but
morally obligatory. Invoking the mystery of life would be far more
appropriate here than in the matter of bringing a cloned embryo to full
term. The mystery resides not in a stubbornly guarded ignorance about how
life may be created, but in a tirelessly cultivated veneration for the
purpose of all human life. I once posed a freshman composition class the
question: Would you brutally torture a terrorist’s three-year-old before
his eyes if doing so would extract information about where he had planted
a nuclear time bomb? I am happy to report that every member of the class
responded in the negative (though some never forgave me the brutal torture
of their fun-loving minds and were moved to protest my unwholesomeness in
the term evaluation). If we were really as pragmatic as we make out, we
would tear the toddler limb from limb. After all, many of those innocents
who stand to be vaporized are also toddlers. But it isn’t even a close
call for us: better to die innocent than to torture innocence.
Plundering an embryo for its experimentally useful guts
and tossing the remnant out with the garbage is very like torturing the
child in a "good cause". Because the child cannot turn big brown
eyes upon us or scream shrilly while in embryonic form, we find it easier
to shrug off the atrocity. Perhaps the pro-research chaps would be a
little less unsavory if all of them were staunchly opposed to the
execution of infants halfway out the birth canal. Unfortunately,
experience teaches that they are often as coldly indifferent when the baby
is within mere seconds of screaming as within months of it.
And what, then, of those fully sentient victims who are
facing a life sentence of wheel-chair confinement or of devastating
seizures? I would say two things to them. The first will sound
platitudinous, but it remains true: a painful life may still be a valuable
life. I may as well confess that I am very near to believing this
platitude in an extreme and rough-hewn form: comfortable lives rarely seem
to have much meaning at all. Pain and debility separate individuals from
the crowd, and this separation makes them more meditative, more creative,
and more productive in the ways that matter. Hardship also makes them more
compassionate than the average happy, healthy clod. Mary Grabar recently
wrote a piece in Praesidium about the condescending folly of a
textbook which included Flannery O’Connor under the rubric of the
physically handicapped because of her mortal struggle with lupus. Who can
say that an O’Connor without lupus would have possessed the gravity, the
focus, the spirituality, and the quirky irony to author such splendid
stories? Would a wealthy Van Gogh have become a painter? Would a Leopardi
afflicted by neither physical nor psychological frailty have been a poet?
From the other direction, look at what we make of
happy, healthy people (this is my second point): surfeited consumers, all
too often, who do virtually nothing to justify the space they take up.
Most people do little more with their good eyes than watch TV, little more
with their strong legs than walk from parking lot to mall. In a recent U.S.
News cover story on human cloning, the young physician who donated his
cellular matter to the Worcester, Massachusetts, experiment, himself
wheelchair-ridden from an accident, defends his participation by saying
that he would like to walk his daughter down the aisle on the day of her
marriage. Well—and I would like a major league ball club to let me pitch
an inning someday before I am too old to stand up straight. If a certain
club’s owner would allow me to do just that in return for my donating an
embryo to his research project, where would be the harm? The embryo would
never know what hit it.
You will accuse me now of being facetious. You will
insist that walking or seeing or breathing under one’s own power is no
sunny afternoon’s diversion, but a major improvement in the quality of
life. In a way, though, my example remains very apt. Most of the
pro-cloning bunch, if pressed, would admit that they really do not
see any transgression in my swapping an embryo for a few pitches. Their
stressing of the research’s immense importance, therefore, is in bad
faith: the decisive factor in their judgment isn’t the research’s
great worth, but the embryo’s utter worthlessness. A stimulating workout
on a sunny afternoon is exactly what they want for their patients. Stephen
Hawking can already map the universe in a body that has to be carried
around like the shrunken Tithonus: "quality of life" for them
means having a good time, not fusing atoms or composing sonatas.
How important is Saturday on the links or (to allude to
countless commercials for pills) taking a grandchild to the zoo? All
right, it’s fun, and it nourishes family values: but having the
grandchild wait for the wheelchair also teachers a kind of value—a kind
so alien to our culture now that, behind all the miracle drugs and smiles,
we seem to be running from our little cherub’s whine, "This is
boring!" What about the cherub who never got as far as a grimace, or
even a wheelchair? Have we done him a favor by sparing him birth? Was our
day at the zoo worth his missing a chance at life? Don’t say that the
chance never existed—that he was germinated only to be dismantled. He
had the chance as soon as the first cell cleft.
For several years now, adults have been designating on
the driver’s license their consent to have their organs removed in case
of sudden death. The mortality rate among infants is, sadly, not
negligible: some do not survive birth. May I ask why we cannot harvest
stem cells from these unfortunates? Most parents would readily consent.
The contribution to humanitarian purposes would help them come to grips
with a devastating tragedy. Why do we human beings have to open a door
just because it is clearly marked, "Do not open"?
In one way, at least, I find all the sniper fire along
this Maginot Line to be quite diverting. The "mystery" people
seem to be convinced that if Mr. Jones clones himself, the Jones clones
will all drink his brand of tea, replicate his nervous habit of twisting
his mustache, and fall asleep before the same passage in Samuel Becket
which always puts him under. They will be Mr. Jones, precisely. This is
part of the great sacrilege against holy mystery, it would appear: God’s
distinct plan for every human soul will be short-circuited, because the
Ur-Joneses will all have the same plan.
Honestly, this is pretty shallow stuff! Of all the
people who believe in biological determinism, the "mysterians"
should have been the very last converts. Instead, they have put up no
fight at all. I myself will go out on their vacated limb, then, and say
that I don’t believe the cloned Mr. Jones would necessarily be anything
like his father/twin where it counts. One would tell the truth where the
other lied, one would stand fast where the other ran. In a word, they
would have different souls. I believe that, and I am shocked (and mightily
amused) by the people who do not believe it.
Barbara Walters and crew, of course, have regaled us
for years with stories about identical twins separated at birth who wear
the same tasteless clothes and listen to the same insipid music. Am I
supposed to hold my breath waiting for even one of these stories to ask
even a single question which will put the subjects’ moral acumen to the
test? I don’t need to. I need only look into my own heart for the
answer. I know perfectly well that I myself would be a slightly different
person if any of a dozen major events in my life had taken the other path
at the fork. If several together had taken the same kind of divergent
path, I should perhaps be very different. I am not substituting
environmental for biological determinism here—or only on the surface.
What I mean to say is that something which was permanently stifled in my
heart might have lived, and something which lived might have been
permanently stifled. My soul would have developed different muscles. It
would still be my soul—the response to outside stimuli would be my will—but
the nature of those stimuli might well have involved my will in different
kinds of resistance, unpredictably intricate yet still in toto a
response to my surroundings.
Naturally, all of the "eternarians" (read,
"new Age egomaniac MDs") are also counting on the restoration of
their pallid, clammy souls in their Klonekind. One can only wonder what
pleasure or profit they hope to derive from a second or seventh or
hundredth incarnation if biological determinism is so rigid that all of
these descendants are indeed them. What more or what different
would or can they do? Mr. Jones 17 can only repeat the circle through
which the lives of Jones 1-16 traveled; or if this is not so, then in what
sense is J17 a reprise of J16? What has it all been for—was it to keep
one’s precious self in the center of material existence, or to have a
crack at escaping oneself within that existence? God knows. And in the God
who knows, I suspect, the stunning ironies of all this dizzy futility have
to be stirring a divine smile.
Speaking of smiling, I have not launched the occasional
flippancy and facétie from my bow with any so orderly intention as
pinpointing the ills of the Western world in a Robin Hood flourish of
marksmanship. If I have succeeded in offending the reader (and whom could
I have entirely missed), I ask him or her to take it in good humor, for
amusement was closer to my purpose than autopsy. If I were to advance a
weak claim, however, to relevance in this special issue of Praesidium,
I would say that I enjoy living in a free society because I can write
articles like this without fearing for my safety. I value our tolerance of
extreme views, and I think it deserves to be said that we usually end up
striking a compromise in delicate matters which all sensible people can
live with. At the same time, I have rarely observed us to follow a course
simply because some nation or other would inevitably do so and outstrip us
in exploiting all of its "profit potential". In this case, the
Europeans will clearly clone human beings for all purposes, whatever we
decide, just as they quickly embraced euthanasia. Though our technology
tends to beat the rest of the world to every new existential precipice, we
are also the most likely of the "advanced nations" to pull up
short, take a long look into the abyss, and finally walk away. I like that
about us.
If I have any great reservation about us, it is that
these qualities are eroding around our edges. On certain college campuses,
a writer might indeed be in physical danger after publishing an essay like
this one in the student newspaper. On the national scale, compromise is
vanishing from politics. Those who see its demise as a triumph of honesty
or principle should wait until their party is out of power, and then see
how they enjoy feeding by ramrod. As for international expediency, that
has always been a thread in the fabric of diplomacy. Perhaps if we can put
our domestic crises in order, we can continue to exercise moderation and
judgment in what we export to the rest of humankind.
Back
to Top
**********************************************
The Anthropological
and Psychological Origins of
Political Correctness… with
Emphasis on Howard Schwartz’s
The Revolt of the Primitive
by
Thomas F. Bertonneau
I
All high-school biology students, I believe, know the
"boiling frog" thesis: place a frog in a vessel of water, then
warm the water slowly, no more than one degree every minute; the frog,
allegedly, will not notice the rise in temperature and will perish, quite
obliviously, when the water at last comes to a boil.
The "boiling frog" is an allegory of
political correctness, about which one is likely to read that it has in
recent years receded after peaking in the early 1990s. Those who say so
are like the frog in the ever-warming vessel. Either insufficiently
sensitive to begin with about changes in the civic climate or sufficiently
desensitized to their own plight by the inveterate claims of the
victim-mongers and by the barking preachments of tolerance, so-called,
they fail to appreciate not only that political correctness has absolutely
not gone away but that the ambiance of it has grown increasingly
caloric. Should we not yet have reached the moment of oblivious lethality,
we all the while hover—witlessly, as it were—a mere degree or two from
its onset. Thus, in the aftermath of the massacre at the World Trade
Center, college students who displayed the paraphernalia of their outraged
patriotism themselves came under attack from politically correct
administrators determined to quash any type of expression, particularly
any type of self-identification, that did not fit within the narrow
parameters of diversity, so-called. In addition, American politicians and
leaders from President Bush on down have treated their constituents to
condescending sermons on the peaceful nature of Islam, while urging them
(as if they were the aggressors or were likely to form lynching parties)
not to blame all Muslims for the 11 September attacks. When Muslim
students in the New York City public schools received license to pray
during class-time, the ACLU uttered not so much as a squeak.1
But when columnist Anne Coulter wrote that, while all Muslims aren’t
terrorists, nevertheless all the terrorists were Muslims, her press
syndicate, National Review, promptly sacked her. This was a
particularly telling indicator of the moral environment, since what
Coulter had written was empirically true; and even more so because National
Review enjoys the long-standing reputation of the conservative journal
of note. There stood before us, if we cared to see it, the spectacle of a
prominent conservative institution conspicuously dissociating itself from
a former contributor simply because she had remarked an empirical truth.
It was evidently not correct at National Review to observe that all
the attackers were, in fact, Muslims.
What grants political correctness its insidious mimetic
capacity, so that, after a while, even its opponents begin to internalize
its rigid ethos?
I have pondered the question myself, without ever
formulating a satisfactory answer. I have posed the question to leaders of
the academic resistance—once, indeed, to Steven Balch of the National
Association of Scholars at a meeting of the Philadelphia Society in
Chicago—without ever receiving a convincing reply. The manifestations of
political correctness have meanwhile continued to proliferate and
metastasize. In 1998, for example, I agreed to serve as executive director
of a scholarly association founded on the idea that it would act as the
vanguard of reform against the incursion of political correctness into the
humanities, only to confront, after a few weeks on the job, the
demoralizing fact that the board and the membership were so terrified of
offending the politically correct that they had become politically
correct. A woman stopped me in the lobby of the Marriott World Trade
Center, where the association’s annual conference was being held, to
complain that I had placed advertisements in Commentary. Her son,
she told me, also an academic, had objected that this might lead people to
think that the association was linked somehow to "those
people". Since I was present in my official role, I did not ask
whether, by the phrase "those people", she meant
conservatives or Jews. The statement was a bigoted one either way; nor had
the woman appreciated that I had also placed advertisements in New
Republic, about which precisely no one complained.2 When my
former dissertation advisor and friend Eric Gans spoke at one of the
conference sessions, the chairman of the panel treated him more wretchedly
than I have ever seen anyone treated in an academic setting—even at the
MLA.3 Gans had invoked René Girard’s notion of sacrifice as
the matrix of institutions and this struck the chairman (so one might
guess) as impermissible, or quite simply as incorrect and therefore
intolerable. Gans’ own analysis that the intolerance of "victimism"
stems from ressentiment carries weight for me; he had trespassed,
so to speak, on the chairman’s territory of classics. But there was more
to it than that. I had the impression that his deepest offense lay in
suggesting that the ideals of tragedy could be traced back to their ritual—that
is, to their actual—origins. The real had contaminated the
purely mental; a wraithlike image of cherished purity had been
defiled by an invocation of the adamant world.
Gans has written about political correctness and
victim-speak in a number of loci. In Signs of Paradox (1996),
he remarks that:
Postmodern victimary discourse interprets the social
order by the figure of the sparagmos, as though it were the only moment
of the originary event. The imposition of this radically dichotomous
model obliterates the historical nuances of social differentiation and
interaction, reducing all social roles to those of persecutor and
victim. It sacrifices to the power of its rhetoric the means to
understand the very movement toward social equality that it is
ostensibly promoting.… The reinforcement of the victimary self and the
consequent power of intimidation it exercises in the postmodern
political environment are first-order dividends that explain the immense
success of this discursive mode. (165-66)
The sparagmos is the moment in the Dionysiac
orgy when the encircling crowd contracts on the victim tethered or trapped
at its center and tears it to pieces. It is a pathetic all-against-one
arrangement, the classic articulation of which is Ovid’s description of
the poet Orpheus’ death in Metamorphoses XI. (I will
return to Ovid.) An aperçu in Gans’ Originary Thinking
(1993) on the esthetics of literary realism adds something to the passage
cited above:
In contrast to the classical social reality shared by
artist and audience alike, the "reality" of the realists is
one whose constraints are chosen by the artist and imposed on the
audience. The audience’s discomfort at this imposition is felt to be a
guarantee of the artist’s own faithfulness to the cause of truth.…
The realists, unlike either their romantic precursors or their modernist
successors (but not unlike Marxists), act in the name of neither a
universal nor a particular self, but in the name of objective reality.
(178)
Like the realists (Zola, Dreiser), the claimants to
group-mediated victim-status purport to depict reality (in the limited
terms of oppressors and the oppressed) only after they secure the license,
quickly expanded into a right, to choose the constraints on what will be
admitted into the picture of reality. The non-intervention of the
interlocutor, his "discomfort", is a sine qua non of the
procedure. The motto "j’accuse" perfectly
summarizes it.
Elsewhere in Signs of Paradox, Gans argues that
"victimary discourse" effectively piggybacks on the universal
revulsion felt by the civilized world over the Nazi holocaust against the
Jews. Of course, the Jews really were victims. The several millions of
them brutally extinguished in the death-camps relied on the depleted
survivors to tell their story. Its Christian decency moved the West,
particularly the United States and Great Britain, to extraordinary
solicitousness in their relations to those who now had tales of their own
persecution to tell. This hypothesis suggests why the United States, for
example, should have become so zealously determined in the two decades
after the war to solve its own minority problems: the civil rights
movement stemmed benevolently from the new ethical sensitivity. But there
is no virtue that cannot become a vice. Not everyone is genuinely a victim—except
perhaps of his own perversity or laziness—and a habit, generous in its
origin, which compulsively fails to distinguish between the actually and
the imaginarily oppressed swiftly makes for much mischief in the social
sphere. The politically correct assertion that I am a victim leans
for support on a browbeaten, semi-guilty willingness to countenance that
declaration; and the fact that victim-status comes to be assigned to the
individual merely because he can show the marks of his adherence to a group
said to be structurally oppressed depends especially on the neutralization
beforehand of any critical inquiry into individual claims. From a deeply
felt revulsion over Auschwitz, then, comes a form ripe for abuse
and exploitation; comes, indeed, a route to power for those who feel no
compunction in the indignity of using it.
And many people in all sorts of situations—some
calculated and some spontaneous—use it. Even the woman who whined to me
in the lobby of the Marriott World Trade Center was making use of it, for
what else was she doing but claiming that a remote and morally neutral act
(advertising an academic conference in Commentary) amounted to an
offense against her? Her implied dichotomy of malevolent
"conservatives" and right-thinking people, whom she
naturally represented, corresponds to what Gans calls the sparagmatic
model of social relations, in which all distinctions are absolute; and
under her own terms she clearly saw herself as the injured party.4
She was invoking the royal claim of lèse majesté, which has been
born anew in the egalitarian vocabulary of structural maltreatment. She
was also asking for something—to be the center of attention, the vox
primus inter pares, and the arbiter ad hoc in a re-alignment of
the organizational hierarchy. So must it have been, for she more than
hinted in tone and posture that her wishes ought to leapfrog the
organization’s duly constituted table of order and its legitimate
parliamentary agenda. She assumed her own special status.
Gans gives us an anthropological insight into political
correctness, without however making a special study of the phenomenon: the
plaintiffs reverse the asymmetry of the sparagmos in the full
knowledge that no one, in fact, intends them any harm; but by identifying
themselves as "victims," they activate an exploitable trait in
the very milieu that they indict as authorizing their persecution—its
penchant for mercy and generosity. Of course political correctness has a
psychological as well as an anthropological character. Howard Schwartz, a
philosopher by training who has long been interested in the psychology of
organizational structures, gives us a book-length psychoanalytical
discussion of the topic. Schwartz’s The Revolt of the Primitive: An
Inquiry into the Roots of Political Correctness, issued recently
(2001) by Praeger, traces political correctness to the resurgence of a
deeply seated archetype.
II
Like Gans, Schwartz is originally a New Yorker; both
are from the Bronx. Also like Gans, Schwartz can trace a biographical
trajectory from early, radical left-wing involvement through a type of
revulsion-cum-conversion to what might, for lack of a better term,
be described as a "conservative" point of view. Schwartz studied
in the 1960s, in California, with Herbert Marcuse, among others, and on
his own admission expended great quantities of his human energy in the
furtherance of various radical causes.5 The Revolt of the
Primitive begins with an anecdote. Schwartz recalls how "K",
a graduate student at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, pointed out a
story in the campus newspaper about a women’s group that had marched,
during the previous week, to "take back the night" (xiii); under
pressure, the group’s spokeswoman had uttered an apology for forcing a
"trans-gendered individual" to leave the march. The reason? The
organizers "perceived this individual to be a man" and "it
was stated that the march was for women" (xiii). "K"
contemplated writing a letter to the editor commenting on the weird
contradictions implicit in the account but, as Schwartz reports, gave up
the idea. "To be un-PC in academia is a career-killer,"
"K" said, "so I won’t" (xiv). For Schwartz, the
irreducible bizarreness of the event—feminists taking back the night
from predatory men who expel someone from their march whom they take for a
man, who then turns out to be a "trans-gendered" individual and
thus holier and higher up than they on the politically correct Ladder of
Being—affirmed anew the importance of certain ethical and
epistemological principles that he had long cherished.6 Says
Schwartz:
In the end you have to trust your own perception,
your own good sense. There has to be a criterion, a touchstone, by which
to discern the difference between what is sensible and what is crazy.
What makes our times so strange is that no such touchstone is permitted.
One is no longer allowed to take anything for granted. (xiv)
It appeared that the cultural condition was no longer
merely neurotic in a way that mild irony might disarm, but pathological.
Schwartz had previously concluded that a great deal of what comes under
the rubric of political correctness has its origins not so much in
politics as in "a sexual holy war" (xiv), but that this jihad
of women against men indicated, behind or beneath itself, something more
profound, "nothing less than a revolt of the primitive against the
mature, driven by the most powerful forces within the psyche" (xiv).
The "sexual holy war" pits the "toxic man" against the
"Madonna-and-Child" in a Manichean conflict where goodness is
the inalterable quality of the female and evil the ineradicable
characteristic of the male. In Chapter 1, Scenes from the Sexual Holy
War,7 Schwartz records how a raft of falsehoods deleterious
to the reputation of men has established itself as undoubtedly true
despite either a lack of evidence or the massive presence of contradictory
evidence. Among these are the story that recent decades have witnessed an
unprecedented epidemic of domestic violence by men against women, and the
assertion that the "deadbeat dad" (26) as the predominant type
among divorced men. One might add here the by now prevalent notion that
institutional medicine treats women as second-class clients and that such
cynicism results directly in higher morbidity and mortality rates for
women than for men. Sally Satel has tackled this logos pseudos in a
number of talks and articles. None of these stereotypes is true, as
Schwartz (or in the added instance, Satel) meticulously documents. In
fact, men have much higher morbidity and mortality rates than women, who,
on average, outlive them. In fact, wives and other female partners are as
likely to unleash violence on their husbands and boyfriends as vice
versa. In fact, women instigate divorce in more instances than do men,
who, by and large, succeed in maintaining their children as prescribed
under the law. "The myth of the ‘dead-beat dad’ is a variant on
the fantasy of ‘toxic man’," Schwartz writes; so are the others.
The myths seem to spring from a domain in the collective psyche that
exists at a remote remove from empirical reality, in a subterranean
stratum where the charisma of the image trumps the adamancy of facts,
where the subjective and personal simply do not acknowledge the objective
and the impersonal. Writes Schwartz: "The subjective views are not,
for those who promulgate them, ways of interpreting facts. Rather, the
subjective views come first, and then the facts are given weight in
accordance with whether they support these views" (28).
Beneath the contest of "toxic man" versus
"Madonna-and-child", then, there lurks a wider and altogether
more threatening struggle between subjectivity and objectivity, between an
irrational revulsion against the Reality Principle and a rational
acknowledgment of reality. "The picture of the sexual holy war is a
comprehensive image" (35) that focuses a multiplicity of unreal
complaints on the figure of the "toxic man." In Chapter 2, The
Sexual Holy War and the Meaning of Work, Schwartz identifies
"primitive feminism" or "feminist primitivism" (xv)
with the child’s "primary narcissism" (37), the stage of
psychological development in which the child is totally dependent on the
mother and automatically justified by her in his needs and dispositions.
The child, at this stage, sees the mother as an "omnipotent"
creature "whose love will make life perfect for us" (37). Freud,
whose assumptions about emotional development Schwartz largely follows,
understood that primary narcissism served both a social and biological
purpose. The child is vulnerable and helpless and requires the
close bond with the mother in order not to be harmed by an indifferent
reality that will slay him as swiftly as it will spare him. The nuclear
family appears to have arisen for the salient purpose of protecting
children. The mother’s role is to bear and raise the offspring; the
father’s job is to keep reality at bay. Normally, the child would leave
the exclusive orbit of the mother and begin his assimilation of the father’s
point of view. All mature individuals have come to terms with the
indifferent reality, "introjecting" (in Freud’s term) the
point of view of the father. Learning from the father is a matter of
survival, not an arbitrary endorsement of ideology.
Yet, as Freud claimed, while the infantile image of the
omnipotent mother must be suppressed, it is never destroyed, and always
lurks in the psychic depths as a temptation to seek refuge from reality.
Nor does the image of the omnipotent mother appeal exclusively to the
infant (or to the infantile urge in all of us); as an image it also
exerts a strong attraction on the woman-and-mother herself, who is
afflicted with the same tendency to greediness and self-love as the man.
The child validates the mother mightily, absolutely, and she, like every
other human ego, seeks the maximum of validation. In the traditional
arrangement, the husband’s validation of the wife-mother augments the
child’s and latterly compensates for the loss of maternal esteem
entailed by the maturing and departure of the children. But here is an
important question: what happens when the affluence and ease afforded
us by technical progress and by a burgeoning economy palliate what were
formerly pressing requirements? What happens, in other words, when
social conditions have become so perfected that they place too great a
margin between individuals and the indifferent reality?
Such a situation—and we now near the core of Schwartz’s
thesis—creates an opportunity for the image of the omnipotent mother to
assert itself nearly without limit against the Reality Principle.
"The problem is that if the work of the male is sufficiently
successful in distancing reality, the idea that reality is different from
fantasy can be lost" (57). We must keep in mind in considering
Schwartz’s argument that it is not women who assert themselves
opportunistically in this manner, but an infantile petulance and
self-absorption ("primary narcissism") to which all people, men
and women, are susceptible, and in which the ego of the child is fused
with the ego of the omnipotent mother. This explains how feminism
("feminist primitivism", as Schwartz says) can have been abetted
by a phalanx of both women and men, and how peripheral issues like
affirmative action for minorities can have become so easily adjoined to
the insurgency. The accusers of the Patriarchy are all children of the
omnipotent mother, who rise up to defend her against the pernicious
influence of the "toxic man", rather like the demons rising up
to defend the primordial mother Tiamat against the upstart male divinity
Marduk in the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish. And like the
totemic deity described by Emile Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of
Religious Life, the maternal principle is "immanent in the world,
diffused throughout a multitude of things" (Durkheim 141), and ergo
omnipresent, requiring constant deference from her worshippers. Everything
must be reconstructed (or deconstructed) to be compatible with her image.
One important manifestation of the feminist insurgency
(a campaign, as it were, to re-assimilate everything to the primordial
mother) is the drive to restructure work, formerly the dominion of men.
Ignoring the fact that male productivity, dependent on a certain hard
attitude toward life and other people, has made possible the conditions in
which she can assert herself, the omnipotent mother charges that the
values of the workplace unfairly discriminate against women (and against
those who align themselves with women, the ethnic and sexual minorities).
As Schwartz notes,
this puts male psychology into a terrible bind:
within this psychology the male’s standing with the female is always
tenuous, his role always subject to being rejected and repulsed. For the
male to lose his place with the female nothing more is required than
that she cease to buy into the fantasy that he has attempted to realize
[about her] or into his role in the creation of it. All she needs to do
is say, "I am not happy," or "I am not impressed,"
or "You’re a jerk." There is nothing he can do about that
because the whole drama is a fantasy; yet it is a fantasy in which her
place is essential, but his place is contingent […] He cannot say to
her "You’re a jerk, too," because then the basis of their
interaction would be undermined, and along with it the basis of his
sense of meaning. (45)
Feminists have made particularly harsh—and, as
Schwartz sees it, thoroughly uncritical—criticisms of male concepts of
work: they denounce work as compulsive, as exercising what Schwartz calls
"the displacement of affect" (47); as mandating an "imposition
of order" (47); as relying on "impersonal rules"
(47) that repress feeling; and as fostering a pathological form of "competition"
(48) that "gives men a way of measuring ‘progress’ by using
comparative means" (48). But such charges are rather like chastising
an orange for having a brightly colored rind, sweet fruit, and pips. The
task of keeping the indifferent reality at bay so that the woman as
wife-and-mother might bear and raise the children out of harm’s reach
necessitated just these traits, which amount, in fact, to one of the
colossal achievements of civilization.8 Yet displacement,
order, impersonality, and competition affront the image of the omnipotent
mother, because they violate her demand for a cozy egalitarianism
in which all of the children earn the same praise merely for being,
rather than for doing anything. The traits of the male-oriented
workplace are, moreover, rational; and rationality is necessarily not
subjective or personal but objective and impersonal. "It must be the
impersonality of male work that, more than anything else, has been
criticized by feminists" (49), Schwartz writes. Impersonality strikes
feminists as offensive because it expels feeling, warmth, and tenderness.
Consider, however, how closely impersonality is linked with rationality:
"Rationality must be contrasted, not with feeling directly, but with
irrationality, and feeling must be seen to encompass not only warmth and
love, but coldness and hatred. Envy, jealously, rage, and resentment,
after all, are also feelings" (49). Against reality, defined as
"the world that is outside of ourselves" and "indifferent
to us", feeling counts for little, if for anything at all; only
calculation and force—in a word, rationality—counts. Reality is the
realm where one can "make a mistake" (50) and where the
consequences can be lethal.
Schwartz deduces from the foregoing analysis that the
feminist and politically correct image of the "toxic man" or
Patriarchal Tyrant springs forth "not from the father as such"
but "from the fact that he represents whatever it is that interferes
with the fantasy that a life can be lived in perfect fusion with the
mother" (51). Schwartz says that the father’s real crime, in the
view of the omnipotent mother, is that "he introduces the fact that
the world does not exist to satisfy our desires", from which it
follows that "the repudiation of the father is rooted in the
repudiation of reality itself" (51 [emphasis added]). If the
repudiation were to succeed, as it apparently has, "there would be
nothing keeping the female identification with the primordial mother from
becoming total" (57).
This "identification with the primordial
mother" makes itself evident in unexpected ways that nevertheless
strike us as consistent with the case once Schwartz calls them to our
attention. The increasing emphasis on hedonism in Western society stems
from the primordial mother’s guarantee to her children that
"pleasure is all that is necessary and that to follow the desires
will lead only to more pleasure" (78). "Follow your bliss,"
as Joseph Campbell insipidly but influentially put it. The touted (fully
empirically verifiable) "dumbing-down" of the schools and
society would be a sign of this. Very little research will quickly show
that contemporary education theory attacks the rigors of the traditional
curriculum, with its hard reality-based standards and scientific
orientation, in favor of an egalitarian classroom that puts affect and
creativity, the latter so-called, at the center of the diminishing paideia.
Who needs algebra when we can all stick our fingers in the pot and paint?
Here I will perhaps be forgiven for making a personal
observation. In the fall of 2001, I taught four sections of freshman
composition divided between two colleges in New York State.9 I
expect students to be recalcitrant and lazy – that is simply their human
nature asserting itself. I know from research and experience how low the
intellectual preparation of high-school graduates currently is for their
confrontation with society, history, and life. Despite this, the
semi-literacy of the majority of my students, their hostility toward
learning and correction, and their fascination with what they call their
opinions never cease to shock and dismay me. They live almost entirely
under the reign of their own childish subjectivity; they feel and emote
promiscuously, but they rarely cogitate. Although my report is
impressionistic, I cannot forego remarking how immature the female
students seem to me, not only in their attitude, but also in their
morphology; there is a peculiar blandness about them, a kind of
neutralized or half-achieved sexuality. Nor can I avoid commenting (it is
again a mere impression) on the effeminateness of many of the male
students. When I began to teach in the early 1980s, the eager male student
who monopolized discussion was still a problem; nowadays the men (if that
is the word) are as nonchalant and detached as the women.10
Throughout The Revolt, Schwartz documents the alarming decline in
the numbers of men in the institutions of higher learning and attributes
the drop to a programmatic hostility to males fostered by the insurgent
feminist hierarchy in the academy. Maybe the masculine men are now shying
from college. It would not be an entirely unhealthy or unwarranted
decision. The prominence of homosexuals on the public scene is also due to
the sway of the primordial mother in her revanchista mood. Schwartz
believes that feminists have calculatedly created the charge of
"homophobia" to further disturb and humiliate men.
Schwartz "draw[s] a link between feminism, which
is arguably a fairly narrow intellectual current, and post-modernism, or
post-structuralism, which is considerably broader" (83). His Chapter
4, The Sin of the Father, is one of the more fascinating sections
of a riveting book. The self-denominating post-moderns, or post-structuralists,
"may be thought of as holding that there is no objective external
world" (83) to which individuals would need to assimilate themselves;
thus "what a society believes is a function of who rules within the
society" (83). Our own chapter of recent history in fact reruns the
antique combat between the philosophers and the sophists. Heraclitus, the
father of philosophers, argued that the Logos, which he defined as
an inherent property of an orderly and quite indifferent cosmos, "ruled
all." Protagoras, the father of sophists, contended that, "man
is the measure." To its credit, Antiquity voted fairly
consistently for the philosophers; on those occasions when, mistakenly, it
sided with the sophists, it tended to reap the lesson of its own sowing.
The Athenians’ sophistical ephebocracy, after the trial and
execution of Socrates, was little more than an invitation to Philip of
Macedon’s proto-praetorian dominion, which arrived in fairly short
order. Plato followed a robust instinct in vacating Athens for Syracuse,
despite his failure, while there, to influence Dionysus. The Romans
understood the Reality Principle perfectly well, and their Imperium
extended as far as 1453 A.D., if we were to include its Eastern half. The
modern Western elites have fawned over the sophistical assertion that
reality is a mental projection since the French (once thought of as the
heirs of the Romans) reintroduced it after their ignominious defeat in May
1940. Schwartz suggests that the current rule is, mother is the measure,
in which case the philosophers might as well cash in their pensions, for
"the denigration of men lies [in] the subordination of the objective
to the subjective" (83).
We can now see the two decades of post-modernism and
post-structuralism in their completed form. The movement began with two
male figures, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who, together and in
different ways, launched an attack on what came to be called (in Derrida’s
term) "phallogocentrism." The coinage refers to a deep-seated
strand in the Western world-view that derives abstract, even metaphysical,
values from the accidents of male morphology and enshrines them
dogmatically. The set of "phallogocentric" values would include
the rigor of linear thinking, as exemplified in Aristotle’s syllogisms;
the arrangement of social relations on the model of the pyramid, with the
ruling elite atop and the subalterns in their expanding layers beneath;
the preference for cold and hard analysis over warm and untrammeled
creativity. It is important to note, as Schwartz does, that what "phallogocentrism"
designates really exists—and that the characteristic achievements of the
West derive from it—but that the image connoted by the term is a partial
representation only of male psychology in a Western context. "Phallogocentrism"
was also constructed, as all cultural forms and procedures are. Yet
it was not constructed ex vacuo, as its deconstruction by radical
theory implies; it was constructed, rather, in response to reality.
Precisely as a partial representation, however, "phallogocentrism"
immediately became a useful concept for feminism, as did the whole
original post-modern and post-structural enterprise. In the academy and
elsewhere, feminism quickly absorbed its precursor-discourses with
blob-like efficiency and completeness. By the end of the 1990s, a phalanx
of female writers (with Toril Moy and Luce Irigaray in the vanguard) had
replaced the Foucault-Derrida constellation as, so to speak, those most
citable in scholarship.
In Schwartz’s detailed analysis, the triumph of
feminism and all those who participate in its ideology of the "toxic
man" and the "Madonna-and-child" represents what he calls the
power of the daughter. In the ease of modern life after World War Two,
some women became so cushioned against reality that they no longer grasped
the sacrifice of the male in keeping reality at bay. The disaffected
female interpreted the male character of the workplace, with its strict
hierarchy, devotion to merit, and aversion to affect, as a conspiracy to
keep her confined to the home. She divorced the husband, literally or
figuratively, gained custody of the children, and thereby stunted the
psychological development of the sons, who formed the alienated
generations of the postwar years. But, as Schwartz observes, "the
family not only had sons, but also daughters" (106). If the son,
dissociated from the father, nevertheless could not fully identify with
the primordial mother, the daughter faced no such limitation:
She did not have to admire the father in order to
gain strength. She could identify with the awesome power of the
primordial mother. She could adopt the mother’s denigration of the
father, not losing strength in the bargain, as the son did, but gaining
it because it would give her a way of understanding why her mother was
both so powerful and so miserable.
This finally gives us an answer to our question of
the origin of the Sin of the Father. The primordial mother, in addition
to being omnipotent, is also the fount of all goodness. She is,
essentially, goodness itself[.] If someone were to identify with her,
and yet find limitation and anxiety in her life, an explanation would be
required that would do justice to this in moral terms. The imputation of
badness would serve very nicely here, and it would be commensurate with
the magnitude of goodness it prevailed against. (106)
III
As Schwartz puts it, "the primordial mother is not
a problem because she is a mother but because she is primordial"
(111). The great figure of the primordial mother’s outrage against the
individuated male, as I have earlier mentioned, stands in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
XI. Orpheus, with his Apollonian lyre, has wandered into
Thrace, the ancient preserve of the "mad Ciconian women"
(Humphries’ translation, 259):
One of them, her tresses
Streaming in the light air, cried out: "Look
there!
There is our despiser!" and she flung a spear
Straight at the singing mouth, but the leafy wand
Made only a mark and did no harm. Another
Let fly a stone, which, even as it flew,
Was conquered by the sweet harmonious music,
Fell at his feet, as if to ask for pardon….
But there was other orchestration: flutes
Shrilling, and trumpets braying loud, and drums,
Beating of breasts, and howling, so the lyre
Was overcome, and then at last the stones
Reddened with blood, the blood of the singer,
Heard no more through all that outcry. (259)
In the Latin, the key phrase, shouted by the affronted
Maenad, is: "Hic est nostri contemptor!" Orpheus might
himself seem a somewhat effeminate figure, but he bears the marks of the
"phallogocentric" order. His music, with voice and lyre sounding
together, is "harmonious", in the sense of the term going back
to the Heraclitean usage of a force that holds opposites in static
tension; indeed, by means of his music Orpheus commands nature and, within
limits, neutralizes nature’s deadly aspect. (He possesses a limited
ballistic missile defense system.) Orpheus has also been married, famously
to Eurydice, whom he lost twice—once to a serpent’s sting and once to
his failure to control his own sentiment. He nevertheless (or rather therefore)
represents the individuated male who has taken the daughter from the
mother and who is acutely aware that, when one makes a mistake, one pays a
price. The Ciconian women, by contrast, comprise a classic
undifferentiated mob, cohesive only in its hostility to the trespasser.
Ovid appears to denominate them after a tribe of savages in Homer’s Odyssey.
A female sodality, their music is cacophonous and without form, but in
sheer volume it can overwhelm the poet’s singular, if potent, voice.
Orpheus’ contemptibility lies nowhere else than in his representing a
conspicuous instance of non-conformity to the rule of non-differentiation
and non-individuation. The myth has it that he was the first to initiate
men into the divine mysteries, breaching what had been the exclusively
female preserve of cult and religion. So "they struck him down, / And
through those lips to which the rocks had listened, / To which the hearts
of the savage beasts responded, / His spirit found its way to winds and
air" (260).
It should be noted that Ovid’s scenario has really
happened—in the raucous expulsion of the contemptible "dead white
male" authors from the curriculum on the grounds that their toxicity
("phallogocentrism") threatens the delicate feelings, hence the
very being, of female and selected minority group students. "Hic
est nostri contemptor!" Schwartz records an apposite personal
experience. In 1987, after a sabbatical leave, the campus minister at
Oakland University, where he teaches, invited him to give a talk at a
newly formed institute. The talk
required an overview of Freud’s concept of the
Oedipus complex: As I was going through this part of the argument, a
woman in the audience, who happened to be the chair of the psychology
department at the time, had what can only be called a fit. Without
addressing herself to anything I was saying in particular, and without
any attempt to control her rage, she said that Freud was a sexist and a
misogynist, and went on to condemn the entire psychoanalytic enterprise,
which she said was "shot through" with sexism and racism.…
Despite this woman’s evident lack of grounding in
her subject matter, her voice seemed to express a feeling of absolute
authority. I recall that at the time this struck me as very odd. But
what struck me as even more peculiar was that as she engaged in this
frenzied performance, the other members of the audience were not looking
at her as if she were acting strangely, but were looking at me as if I
had done something contemptible and despicable. (114).
Recently the philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers, author
of several moderate critiques of feminism, was treated to a similar bout
of aggressive hysteria at a federally sponsored symposium on drug-abuse
among girls; when Sommers questioned the probable efficacy of a heavily
ideological (feminist) anti-drug use program, audience hostility,
including that of the officials who had invited her in the first place,
forced her to relinquish the lectern. A male academic shouted at Sommers,
"Shut the fuck up, bitch." (A tape-recording captured the
insult, despite the miscreant’s denial of having said it.)
Significantly, Sommers had objected that empirical data did not support
the premises of the program in question. It is another case of reality
constituting an affront to some cherished image. Such incidents are
commonplace, however; they betoken a new and pervasive, a frenziedly Ciconian,
style on campus and elsewhere. "It has become acceptable," as
Schwartz says, "to meet alternative ideas with rage and disdain"
(115). Note how the Ciconian "rage and disdain" stand in hostile
relation to the procedural style of the supposedly male superego, which
tries to assess ideas on their merits. Schwartz argues that the superego,
along with the female "ego idea," is required to form successful
"bi-parental child-rearing" (117). Both are necessary. The
rebellion of the primordial mother and her coterie of daughters "is
not simply an attempt to overturn a paternal order, but an attempt to
unravel the connection between paternal and maternal" (117).
It is here that Schwartz’s psychoanalytic analysis of
political correctness converges with Gans’ anthropological analysis. The
politically correct university, under the domination of the primordial
mother, becomes affective and jealous in its basic structures; it replaces
the individual (because he is individuated, hence a priori
outside her realm and a threat to it) with the group. "If the person
can substitute a group identity for an individual one, social organization
becomes possible at the level of the group [and] an ideal of oneself as a
member of a group can serve as one’s ego ideal" (121). The
individual who rejects identification with a group now becomes the focus
of the group-consciousness, of the collective narcissism, and indeed, by
constituting such a cynosure, actually permits mediation among groups
which might otherwise experience destructive friction. Each group depends
on the primordial mother to keep at bay the individual renegade; at the
same time, they look to the primordial mother for the sustenance of their
collective ego-image. She answers the demand through "the idea of the
child who needs love the most, the one who has been least loved in the
past, the victim" (121 [emphasis added]). The
"marginalized" minority is diversity’s unwanted child in the
collective plural. Hence the incessant clamor by this or that demographic
segment of the university’s enrollment for favors and privileges—and
for punishments to be meted out to those who deviate from the one path:
Decision making in the PC university loses even the
intention of being rational. Argument about possible courses of action
no longer involves consideration of the actual effects policies will
have. The process turns instead to the competitive avowal of one’s
goodness and the imputation of badness to one’s opponents. But that is
only the beginning of the matter. The separation of decision making from
the consideration of results, together with the a priori establishment
of some views as morally good while others are morally bad, has other
consequences. It leads to a situation in which the intentions of the
actor, and, indeed, often only the purported intentions of the actor,
are the only matter of importance, removing the means from moral
consideration. (124)
The politically correct university is not only, as
Schwartz notes, a "psychological regression" (159) into
infantile narcissism, it is likewise a cultural atavism, a relapse into
archaic, indeed sacrificial, forms of communal organization that belong
more properly to the Stone or Bronze Age than to the twenty-first century
of the Christian Era. I return here to the work of Gans, who argues in Signs
of Paradox that the Holocaust represents a cultural turning point in
the Western moral imagination, by verifying in a massively empirical way
the essential Christian revelation that communal solidarity based on
persecution and victimization is evil. "Our ideal moral certainties
are re-grounded in the opposition between (Nazi) persecutor and (Jewish)
victim" (188). But it is really a good deal more complicated than
this, because:
The descent of the absolute into the empirical world
is the moment of its undoing. As soon as we posit an absolute difference
between victim and persecutor, the underlying symmetry of their relation
reasserts itself. When the SS torturer becomes the villain of the war
film, he is turned into a sacrificial figure, a scapegoat, [a]
structural equivalent of the Jud Süss in Nazi cinema. In the already
tiresome clarity of this asymmetry, culture has been abandoned to youth;
adults are too world-weary to participate wholeheartedly in the eternal
and now transparent structure of victimary resentment.… Group
resentment has replaced individual resentment —the point of essential
difference between the high and the popular—as the primary object of
cultural deferral. (188-189)
Gans remarks how
a long-lost Dionysian frenzy reappears in the
ecstatic forms of postwar popular culture, in its music and dance, the
audience of which more than that of any other popular form incarnates
"the people." These central dramas of the youth-culture are
not coincidentally the most subject to black and other minority
influences. The rhythms and chord progressions of popular music dissolve
individuality in a real or imaginary group movement that is the
historical heir to sacrificial ritual. They create, in an imaginary
context, the resentful unanimity of the sparagmos. (189).
Schwartz’s "Revolt of the Primitive" and
Gans’ atavism of a minoritized "youth culture" are, I believe,
aspects of the same epochal cultural transformation. The primordial mother
is the ringleader and youth (always in a rainbow coalition of sexually
ambiguous misfits) are her press gang. Schwartz interprets the phenomenon
more pessimistically than does Gans, who notes, but does not particularly
stress, the sacrificial character of the new, resentment-driven forms of
collective identification. Yet Gans does admit that "what is new in
our era is the promotion of non-integrative local theories…. as though
they were the only theories conceivable and it were no longer possible for
the human community to think of itself as a whole" (198). He also
notes how "feminism and other minority approaches, which maintain
their link with universal thought only through the unacknowledged
mediation of the Christian centralization of the victim, are fast driving
out other forms of cultural interpretation" (198). Gans’
"non-integrative local theories" are nevertheless deeply
troubling, not least because their most recent prototype appears to lie
exactly in the ferocious biological dualism of Hitlerian anti-Semitic
policy, as "non-integrative" as you can get. Paradoxically, of
course, the proliferating new Übermenschen find their superiority
to all others in their own alleged victimization, which then becomes the
pretext to victimize all who would deny the in-group’s special
(mother-authorized) victim-status. The lèse, as it were, proves
the majesté. Where the lèse does not exist, which means
just about everywhere, it is necessary to invent it. There is much burning
of the Reichstag. Schwartz catches the same paradox, noticing that the eidos
of women in the regime that they now obviously control is a contradictory
one, simultaneously a picture of "passive, hopeless victim" and
"exemplars of the primordial mother" (158).
At the level of civic policy, the irreconcilable
aspects of the weird coinage result in urgent demands for more and more
laws and institutions to protect women from men while at the same time
anguished complaints are issued about the unfairness of rules that ban
women from combat in the armed forces. (If women are so strong, why are
they so weak?) The "Tailhook" scandal of the mid-1990s, as
Schwartz writes, exemplifies the contradiction. Feminists insist on the
promotion of women into the high-testosterone world of fighter-jet
jockeys; they are then shocked to discover that a pilot’s recreational
activity runs to the randy and male. They demand, finally, that the
institution be remade to conform to the sensibility of a quilting club and
that men be punished for male behavior. The same duplicity also shows up,
extended beyond the realm of women, in the pernicious hate-crime laws,
so-called, that effectively place a higher value on certain individuals, because
they belong to an allegedly victimized group, than on other
individuals. In anthropological terms, such laws bestow a kind of sacred
status on those whom they prefer. The result can be a grotesque of
justice. Given two murderers and two victims, with circumstances in both
cases equivalent, a white on black murderer (statistically rare) would
likely receive a harsher punishment than a black on white murderer
(statistically not quite so rare) or a black on black murderer
(statistically commonplace)—provided only that the hate-crime laws are
invoked and a prejudicial motivation attributed to the perpetrator. Yet if
one perpetrator were more evil than another by virtue of the
accidental status of his victim, then the lives of some victims would
necessarily suffer a reduction in ascribed value. We cannot make A’s
death more calamitous than B’s without making B’s life less valuable
than A’s. Law ought to be integrative—before it, everyone ought to be
equal. God preserve any man accused nowadays on campus of the amorphous
trespass of sexual harassment. The "phallogocentric" protections
of due process no longer exist. The accused may even be deprived of basic
facts adhering to the charge, such as the identity of the accuser, and may
be denied counsel at his own hearing.
Feminists never slacken in their harsh condemnation of
the Patriarchy, as they put it, in which white males victimize all and
sundry. What about the Matriarchy? There is evidence that, thousands of
years ago, it existed. What was it like? The late Marija Gimbutas, a
source for much feminist speculation, offers many rich descriptions. In
religion, the Matriarchy was dominated by the imposing divinity of the Magna
Mater, attended by her divine children:
The pantheon reflects a society dominated by the
mother. The role of the woman was not subject to that of a man, and much
that was created between the inception of the Neolithic and the
blossoming of the Minoan civilization was a result of that structure in
which all resources of human nature, feminine and masculine, were
utilized to the full as a creative force. (The Goddesses and Gods of
Old Europe 238)
In Old Europe the world of myth was not polarized
into female and male as it was among the Indo-Europeans and many other
nomadic and pastoral peoples of the steppes. Both principles were
manifest side by side. The male divinity in the shape of a young man or
a male animal appears to affirm and strengthen the forces of the
creative and active female. Neither is subordinate to the other; by
complementing one another, their power is doubled. (237)
I have placed the two paragraphs in reverse order to
heighten the contradiction. "Dominated by the mother" and affirming
the creative and active female are qualities that do not, in fact, add
up to the male "complementing" the female. On the contrary, they
imply his subordination to a female principle that does not admit
male-female symmetry. Note how the "Indo-Europeans", those
Neolithic "dead white males", are conveniently on hand to
provide a polarizing contrast to the non-differentiating "Old
Europeans". I take the concept of polarization to be a
negative one in the context. Anyone who knows the mythic material,
however, also knows what the reign of the Magna Mater required. The
Chaldean shepherd Dumuzi, like his Syrian counterpart Adonis and his
Egyptian counterpart Osiris, suffered being ripped apart by demons to
appease her wrath and, as the story tells, to fecundate the fields as an
offering to her vegetation cult. The same story appears all over the
archaic world, as James G. Fraser showed in the multiple volumes of his Golden
Bough. Nor is it mere myth. Gimbutas extols the Minoan civilization of
Crete, as one of the final holdouts of the realm of the Earth Mother in
her many guises, before the Indo-European onset. In Aegean
Civilizations, Peter Warren cites an archeological find at Anemospelia,
on the slope of Mount Jukta, near Knossos. In "a remarkable
three-roomed shrine… there were four human skeletons, one of which, on a
low table, appeared to be a human sacrifice being enacted when destruction
[of the site] came, perhaps about 1600 B.C." (6). At Knossos itself,
"remains of several children in the basement of the building also
appear to be from sacrifices, made at the time of the great Minoan
destruction about 1450 B.C." (6). These phenomena date from before
the massive Greek (hence Indo-European) presence on the island. In the
Near East as well as in Crete, images of the Great Mother in all her
varieties are associated, in the iconography, with images of demons. She
is either the obese, globular divinity from whom all things are born or
the ecstatic virgin celebrating the Matriarchy; and they are the toothy,
frightening Nachtpolizei of the realm. In the Greek world
especially, a revulsion against human sacrifice appears only with the
ascendancy of the upstart Olympian cult of Hesiod and his fellow religious
reformers. Robert Graves gives a sense of what the return of the Magna
Mater would entail in his amusing but frightening Let the North
Wind Rise: the reduction of adulthood to perpetual adolescence; the
abandonment of the technical infrastructure; the reintroduction of archaic
religious forms. Far from being exclusively nurturing and protecting,
then, the Goddess is also savage and voracious. She devours the blood of
children. Tellingly, the word sacrifice does not occur in the index
of Gimbutas’ Gods and Goddesses, nor can I find any discussion of
it, however passing, in her text. No doubt it is kept at bay
because its presence would taint the pristine character of the eidolon.
Another fact about the Eon of the Goddess was that it
was tremendously long and, compared with later periods, depressingly
static; it lasted for ten thousand years. What Gimbutas claims about her
"Old Europeans" of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic eras—that
they fostered an ethical symmetry of the sexes—is really only true of
the much later Near Eastern and Hellenic and Hebrew cultures and their
offspring. It takes Gilgamesh’s spurning of Isis (be my son and lover,
she demands) to launch civilization on its (no doubt linear,
unsentimental, and "phallogocentric") trajectory and to begin
the long endeavor of creating social conditions that allow the maximum of
people, men and women, to become optimally individuated and happy. (I
suspect that it happened, somewhere in the Midwest, probably in Missouri,
around 1930 or 40.) Zeus establishes his renowned dike or
"justice" after vanquishing the Titans, a psychically
undifferentiated mob of giants and monsters born of Mother Earth. Zeus is
male and royal, it is true, but the Olympian Pantheon is refreshingly both
male and female, in a remarkably symmetrical way quite unthinkable
in the Utopian Matriarchy of Ms. Gaia. Zeus assumes the mantle of Imperium,
but often it is Hera or Aphrodite who moves and shakes. The gods and
goddesses marvelously balance one another, as in the dialectic of Athena
and Zeus in Homer’s Odyssey. Greek women might have had it rough
(who knows), but the images of the gods and goddesses on Olympus that the
Greeks bequeathed us comport remarkably with the behavior of the modern
middle classes, at least until very recently: their bond is of equals and
neither can one-sidedly bully the other. They conduct a kind of
ultra-civilized Southern Californian cocktail party ("More nectar,
Poseidon?"), complete with gossip and flirtation. Euripides
understood it quite well, as he demonstrates in The Bacchae: the
price of a cthonic, mother-oriented religious revival is nothing less than
civilization itself.
I am, as usual, hyperbolic. Readers might also think
that I have strayed far from the topic of political correctness and its
roots. It is not really so. It only appears so due to the fact that the
roots of political correctness run deep psychically, anthropologically,
and historically. The parallelism of the primitive, matriarchal societies
with modern intolerance and contemporary hysteria, remains. I take
Schwartz’s contention that the primordial mother plays the central role
in the latter as proven. I wish, indeed, to give Schwartz the last word.
In his discussion of "the daughter", Schwartz admits that he
finds her not only repulsively absorbed by her own "narcissism",
but "self-righteous" and "obnoxious" on top of it:
"She claims standing as a victim of oppression, but she is part of
the most privileged large group of human beings the world has ever known.…
She is a fantasy to herself and she connects only to her fantasy"
(111). Yet Schwartz finds himself plagued by the moral question of,
"how can I find sympathy for her?" Despite the fact that
"her grandiosity condemns all mortals and their works," she is
nevertheless, Schwartz says, "a human being who can be engaged"
(111). One must imagine her devastating loneliness and her corrosive
unhappiness:
When I reflect on this, it seems to me that, of the
damaged creatures in the modern family, her wound is the most painful.
It is the most painful because she must have the most difficult time
healing it. To heal it, she will have to find common ground with mortal,
limited creatures capable of sin--creatures like me, for example. Yet
she bears from her relationship with her mother the premise of being
infinite and divine. If the son has a hard time separating from this
overwhelming mother, think how hard it has to be for her. (111)
NOTES
1 As usual, the logic of the
Left is bizarre. The ACLU assiduously polices America’s public schools
to keep them free from any trace of religion, particularly Christianity.
Within days of the attack, however, it became necessary, apparently, to
exempt Muslims from the zealous rule. The only thing about America’s
attackers that seemed to trouble the politically correct was that their
sponsors, Afghanistan’s Taliban, were notoriously misogynistic, keeping
women illiterate and in the burka. The feminists exhibited
particular confusion as they found themselves condoning the military
reprisal against the Taliban, a gesture that put them in the same crowd
with people, like President Bush, whom they normally abhor.
2 The site
of this encounter is now rubble, or less than rubble, a mere smoking hole
in the ground. In the memory of it, my complainant’s woes seem even
paltrier than they did at the time. Standing in the midst of the Twin
Towers, which had already been attacked once, in 1993, she worried about
the possibility that someone might identify her as a
"conservative"—because an organization to which she belonged
had advertised its conference in Commentary. The "son", I
am convinced, was a rhetorical construction, so that the woman did not
have to speak in the first person, which indicates some residual
embarrassment over the content of her discourse. The little scene, quite
emblematic, retains for me its significance as a token of our deep moral
confusion.
3 I use the
traditional locution ("chairman"), but the person in question
was female. She was (as she remains) the author of a useful book attacking
the "Afrocentrist" theory that the Greeks "stole"
their distinctive intellectual achievements from the Egyptians. On a
number of occasions, she herself had been treated badly by "Afrocentrists"
and their politically correct defenders. This made her treatment of an
invited guest of the association all the more ironic and painful to
witness.
4 The logic
of her complaint is quite peculiar and revealing: the plaintiff starts
with the given that she is a member, voluntarily, of the organization,
which exists prior to her joining it; she then complains that the
organization has made an appeal in a "conservative" journal and
that this implicates her in "conservatism" which, for her, is
unspeakable. Notice, however, that it is not conservatives whom she
fears, but her fellow right-thinkers, who, if they thought her a
"conservative", would presumably do her some type of harm. It is
a remarkably faithless faith.
5 "I
went to graduate school first at the University of Pittsburgh and then at
[the University of California at] San Diego, where, a few months after my
arrival, Herbert Marcuse showed up with a group of graduate students. That
became my milieu. During this time the war in Vietnam was heating
up and the movement against it was developing along with it. This formed
the focus of our political activities, but we always thought of the war as
being an element of class struggle, and that was the framework for
everything we did." (From a communication to the author.—T.F.B.)
6 In a talk
to a group of psychoanalytically oriented scholars, Schwartz once made the
self-deprecatory claim that "I’m not a researcher." "A
researcher," he said, "goes into the world and finds things out.
I don’t find things out. I make things up. I’m an artist." He
continued: "Having said that, and mindful of the fact that I ought to
say something now that my mouth is open, I would like to tell you how I do
what I do, whatever that is. Unfortunately, I cannot do even that, for
most of what I do is done while I am asleep. I go to bed with a problem,
and I wake up with a solution. Or, to put the matter perhaps more
precisely, I go to bed with a confusion, a chaos, and I wake up with a
clarity, a view. Ordinarily I do not realize that I have this clarity
until I am in the shower, when it comes to me that I am seeing things that
I did not see before. Then, by writing, I work this through, and go back
to sleep. So for any of you who want to do what I do, whatever that is, I
offer these bits of wisdom: First, get plenty of sleep. Second, spend a
lot of time in the shower." (From a communication to the author.—T.F.B.)
7 In the
present essay, I deal only with Chapters 1-4 of Schwartz’s book; his
remaining chapters, 5-7, which apply the theory developed 1-4, are equally
fascinating, however, and will be appreciated by all those who read The
Revolt. I might add that my summary elides many rich details of
Schwartz’s analysis in what is a remarkably fine book.
8 It is
perfectly certain that the father cannot bear the children; it is
profoundly uncertain that he has the talent, innate or otherwise, to raise
children in their infancy. Biology is never constructed. It is created and
therefore is a given from which we start.
9 At the
State University of New York College at Oswego, in the town were I now
live, and at Onondaga Community College in Syracuse, forty miles south of
Oswego.
10 As I am
fully inured against political correctness, I shall simply say what I
think: like most male teachers, I have been aware that the classroom can
be a stage for considerable erotic tension; this is inevitable when the
coeds are physically mature young women. It might be middle age, or
excessive loyalty to my marriage, but I can only report that I have felt
hardly a twinge of erotic pique in my most recent teaching assignments. My
primitive male response to most of the coeds is that of a father to his
daughters or of a skeptical uncle to his nieces, still chubby with their
baby fat, rather than the response of an erstwhile bachelor to a bevy of
nubile half-virgins. I doubt that I would have been attracted to such
girls when I myself was a freshman. (I hailed from the beach at Malibu and
had a fairly hardy notion of female beauty.) As to the men—the more macho
they try to appear, with their scrubby beads and backwards-turned baseball
caps, the less masculine they seem. They too run to pudgy and exhibit an
irritating little-girl petulance when faced with the rigors and demands of
so simple a thing as competent prose.
Paradoxically, when
feminists rule, as Schwartz alleges convincingly, the belief that there is
no objective, external reality becomes a shibboleth. But reality always
has the last word; it persists and ultimately kills us whether we
condescend to believe in it or not.
Etymologically, mother
is indeed the measure, as the Greek term for "mother," meter,
clearly shows.
I will refrain from
commenting at length on the link between feminism and the supposed
"right" of women to abortion-on-demand. For the record, I am
deeply disturbed by casual abortion, but opposed, in a qualified way, to
placing legal strictures in the way of the procedure. I will nevertheless
hazard that feminism has a foundational and sacrificial relation to the
destruction of the unborn. The myth of Callisto is perhaps relevant, as
she becomes abhorrent to the exclusively female sodality of Artemis only
when she becomes pregnant.
Gimbutas’ speculation is
thus utopian. Recall how, when Gans mentioned sacrifice in connection with
tragedy, as I have reported, he got into trouble with what I would
describe as the feminizing, but by no means feminist, chair of his
session at the scholarly conference. The similarity of the two cases is
close.
WORKS CITED
Emile Durkheim (translated by Carol Cosman). The
Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Oxford University Press: New York,
2001.
Eric Gans. Signs of Paradox: Irony, Resentment, and
other Mimetic Structures. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Marija Gimbutas. The Goddesses and God of Old
Europe: Myths and Cult Images. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1983.
Ovid (translated by Rolfe Humphries). Metamorphoses.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.
Howard Schwartz. The Revolt of the Primitive: An
Inquiry into the Roots of Political Correctness. Westport,
Connecticut: Praeger, 2001.
Peter Warren. The Aegean Civilizations. New
York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1989.
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*************************************************
Three by R.S. Carlson
Ralph Carlson has been a steady contributor to Praesidium
since… well, since the time when it was still Arcturus. His
poetry, as you can see from this sampling, has clear moral coordinates
without being remotely didactic. Indeed, the imperative mood often
crouches like a clever hunter in flourishes of irony that bring an
outright smile as we recognize the artifice in how we lead our affluent
lives—or how others around us lead such lives; surely we are not
among them!
Professor Carlson teaches writing of all varieties and
at many levels at Azusa Pacific University in California.
Survivor Games/Business
Let’s see,
the winner of a "Survivor" show
ferried to an Indonesian island
or the Australian desert gets a cool million
before
taxes.
Lord’n’TV execs only know
what other millions go for the 125 support crew
for the pseudo-tough staging,
the transport of everything from
catsup and counseling psychologist to back-up
cameras,
and from Perrier sparkling water to first-aid kits.
But let’s pretend the "Survivor" winner
gets generous with companion survivors
who escape almost all the rough footage
and maybe all the footage boiled down for US air
time,
folks, for example, such as
survivors of the Salvador quake circa 01/01
(Let alone the Mongolian blizzard folks, the old-news
Bangla-Desh-Orissa State, India Monsoon group,
the Gujarat quake crew, et cetera, et cetera).
Aid agencies estimate 10,000 homes destroyed this
time
(just two years after Hurricane Mitch
smashed even more of these towns and villages)
and note, hopefully, that only $56 US
buys the 8 sheets of corrugated iron
used for a typical village home rebuild.
Playing with a calculator,
any survivor of the First World’s routines
can show that to re-roof the rebuilds
in El Salvador’s whole quake zone
would take $560,000, and leave $440,000 for the
winner.
Or, if $300,000 had to go to the IRS,
there is still $140,000 left to play with—
and that’s not counting
what a half-mill-plus charitable deduction
could do for a lucky person’s tax bill,
even after paying the accountant.
O well,
the next Survivor game will saturate prime time
and all the news hours and talk shows
their PR office can wangle, and we might
see those disaster/famine-compassion-fatigue ads
with dying babies in skeletal arms
slotted for a Tuesday or Thursday AM
somewhere between 1:30 and 3:00—
if nothing else pays better
to fill the time.
Search and Research
Where is the grade book? Which brief case
has the first seminar’s tests and handouts?
Oh, let the phone ring. The voicemail
will take the message. The brown case has
notebooks for… Let’s see… Maybe
the file box in the office at the house
is where I put the… Hmm… Oh, hello.
Come in and have a seat. We can put
That stack of books over here beside
the file cabinets. OK. I’m glad you came.
So what’s the first question? Mmm. If
You turn to your right, on the third shelf above
your shoulder, the thick paperback with grey
and orange cover—that’s the one—should
have a sample paper we can use
to model the note style required. Check
pages three-eighteen to thirty-seven
for citations, bibliography…
The formal details can be a bother
the first few times a person does a paper
for a class like this. Yes, you may
borrow the book. Just put your name and phone
number on this card… and yes, your address…
(and leave a hundred bucks deposit, too!).
Church Kitchen Gossip About Matilda
The trouble, of course, is that Messiah complex,
blended with bitterness at growing up
(physically, at least) in an at-your-service home
open at all hours to the battered wife,
the panhandling wanderer, the strong-
willed church elder who always knew
what the council should have done, knew
what they and pastor by none-too-complex
theology better do next, to the strong
hints about being able to pick up
a paycheck the next month, or to find the wife
and kids a more-to-their-liking home…
…And behind the prayers and smiles, the home
table fruited powdered milk, and knew
the blessings of potatoes mashed because a wife
could whip in more air and B-complex
vitamin enriched flour to fluff them up
for serving under table graces strong
on the lips of pastoral image. So, from the strong
protocols of deferring common home
interests—food, time, or dime-for-a Seven-Up-
at-the-soda-fountain—for someone else who knew
the sob story and torn jeans worked complex
predictable magic, or for the churchman’s wife
short on potluck casseroles, or the wife
of the chairman denying her breast cancer with strong
eau de cologne—from all this, her complex.
The cordial lady makes a man feel at home,
warm, accepted, open more than he knew
to help, to service—only Godliness up
her sleeve—till love and trust ease up
the walls like ivy. Then Mrs. Hyde, fishwife,
cuts in. Every fault he ever knew
he had—and scores he didn’t have, strong
as dirt and sin—suddenly crash home:
Beast! To make Christian Love so complex
to suffer! Who could hold up through such strong
insults, such betrayals? What wife could make a
home
for such filth once she knew his vile complex?
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***********************************************
Counsellor Dan
and Biddy
Moriarty Have a Go at Each Other
We unearthed the following spirited exchange in
Ríonach Uí Ógáin’s collection of lore about Daniel O’Connell (with
very extensive critical commentary), An Rí gan Choróin (The
King without a Crown—Dublin: An Clóchomhar, 1984), 195-196. Most of
the tales, and all of the commentary, are in Gaelic; but this particular
source (a document called Leabharín Mangaire) records this particular
version of a most notable exchange in Irish English of the mid-nineteenth
century. Uí Ógáin (or, if you prefer, O’Hogan) has preserved the
original’s idiosyncratic spelling, and so have we. Be warned that a
"th" in this part of the world is not always a theta.
(One of our editors can recall hearing a young lad exclaim on a stormy day
near Cashel, "Listen: ta-hunder!")
Students of traditional literature will recognize the
ever-popular genre of the flyting, where verbal combatants defame
each other until one is at last struck speechless. This sort of thing was
going on, apparently, among Theocritus’s shepherds long before "Counsellor
Dan" was called to the bar.
O’Connell not long after he was called to the bar is
to contest virago Biddy Moriarty, who had a huxter’s stall around the
Four Courts, to outdo her in talk—she was formidable with her tongue: O’Connell
imposed silence on her by using sescuipedalia verba in Euclid.
O’Connell: "What is the price of this walking
stick, Mrs. What’s-your name?"
Biddy: "Moriarty, sir, is my name, and a good one
it is, and what have you to say agen it? And one-and-sixpence’s the
price of the stick. Throth, it’s chape as dirt—so it is."
O’Connell: "One-and-sixpence for a walking
stick, Whew! Why you are no better than an imposter, to ask eighteen pence
for what cost you twopence."
"Twopence your grandson," replied Mrs. Biddy,
"do you mane to say that it’s chating the people I am?—imposter,
indeed!"
"Aye, imposter; and it’s that I call you to your
teeth," rejoined O’Connell.
"Come cut your stick, you cantankerous
jackanapes."
"Keep a civil tongue in your head, you old diagonal,"
cried O’Connell calmly.
"Stop your jaw, you pug-nosed badger or by this
and that," cried Mrs. Moriarty, "I’ll make you go quicker nor
you came."
"Don’t be in a passion, my old radius—anger
will only wrinkle your beauty."
"By the hokey, if you say another word of
impudence, I’ll tan your dirty hide you hastely common scrub; and sorry
I’d be to soil my fists upon your carcase!"
"Whew! boys, what a passion old Biddy is in; I
protest as I’m a gentleman!—"
"Jintleman! jintleman, the likes of you a
jintleman! Wisha, by gor, that bangs Banagher. Why, you potato-faced
pippin-sneezer, when did a Madagascar monkey like you pick enough of
common Christian dacency to hide your Kerry brogue?"
"Easy now—easy now," cried O’Connell with
imperturbable good humour, "don’t choke yourself with fine
language, you old whiskey-drinking parellelogram."
"What’s that you call me, you murderin’
villain?" roared Mrs. Moriarty stung to fury.
"I call you," answered O’Connell, "a parellelogram
and a Dublin judge and jury will say that it’s no libel to call you
so."
"Oh, tare-an ouns! oh, holy Biddy! that an honest
woman like me should be called a parrybellygrums, you rascally
gallows-bird; you cowardly sneaking, plate-lickin’ bliggard!"
"Oh, not you indeed!" retorted O’Connell,
"why I suppose you’ll deny that you keep a hypotheneuse in
your house!"
"It’s a lie for you, you bloody robber, I never
had such a thing in my house, you swindling thief."
"Why, sure your neighbors all know very well that
you keep not only a hypotheneuse but that you have two diameters
locked up in your garret and that you go out to walk with them every
Sunday, you heartless old heptagon!"
"Oh, hear that ye saints in glory! Oh, there’s
bad language from a fellow that wants to pass for a jintleman. May the
divil fly away with you, you micher from Munster, and make celery-sauce of
your rotten limbs, you mealy-mouthed tub of guts."
"Ah, you can’t deny the charge, you miserable submultiple
of a duplicate ratio."
"Go rinse your mouth in the Liffey, you nasty
ticklepitcher; after all the bad words you speak, it ought to be filthier
than your face, you dirty chicken of Beelzebub!"
"Rinse your own mouth, you wicked-minded old polygon
to the deuce I pitch you, you blustering intersection of a stinking
superficies!"
"You saucy tinker’s apprentice, if you don’t
cease your jaw I’ll—" But here she gasped for breath unable to
hawk up any more words for the last volley of O’Connell’s had nearly
knocked the wind out of her.
"While I have a tongue I’ll abuse you. You most
inimitable periphery. Look at her boys! there she stands—a
convicted perpendicular in petticoats. There’s contamination in
her circumference and she trembles with guilt down to the
extremities of her corollories. Ah, you’re found out, you rectilineal
antecedent and equiangular old hag! ’Tis with you the devil
will fly away you porter-swiping similitude of the bisection
of a vortex."
Overwhelmed with this torrent of language, Mrs.
Moriarty was silenced. Catching up a saucepan, she was aiming at O’Connell’s
head when he very prudently made a timely retreat.
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*************************************************
Postscript to
Tacitus
by
Giles Maskell
Ms. Maskell originally appeared in these pages when we
published the first chapter of her novel, Seasonal Migrations (Arcturus
Press, 1999). She continues to harbor a love, as she puts it, for
"statistically improbable people in the midst of daily life’s
squalor." Vive l’eccentrique!
Halfway, now, between the locker room and the chapel.
The last five minutes had swept him through the same shoal waters as had
been spitting him back out to sea for five years, like Odysseus having a
nightmare of making the beach on Scheria. (He clung to the remote literary
image… but as soon as his mind chanced upon Nausicäa, he was back in
the cold midstream of his terror.) If he had been a little older and
gotten shipped off to Nam (his big brother had been culled right out of
college in the last year of the draft), he imagined that his first
experience of walking through a mine field would have been about like
this. He wasn’t supposed to make it across this no-man’s-land, this
Charybdis that swallowed sailors. Passage here was categorically
forbidden. Yet he was almost through to the other side. There she was now.
He could see her hair: even in the shadows where she sat, he could make
out its rich gold.
And then would come the execution. Crossing a mine
field to get executed… but that didn’t matter. As long as he delivered
the message, it didn’t matter how stupid his first words ever spoken to
her might sound. What mattered was her safety.
Had he not really been going to speak this time, he
would not have thought consciously, "I’m almost there." And
before that, he would not have veered from the parking lot toward the
chapel. His body was amassing evidence at an alarming rate that he was
really going to do it. It had far outstripped his thinking mind, for he
still had no idea what he was going to say. Now his thoughts were
beginning to catch up ("Listen, stupid body, I can see her hair
clasp! We’re getting too close!")—but his body refused to wilt.
How many times since seventh grade had the Judas within him turned his
hands cold and slimy, stifled his breathing until he could not have
croaked a simple "hello", and made his heart or stomach (he
couldn’t tell which one) twinge with the acute pain of an attack or
ulcer (he assumed those pains were like these)? Mr. Bentley had once read
their advanced Latin class a poem where the lover felt just the same way
as he sat near his lady at a banquet (obviously, she didn’t know
about him, either). And Mr. Bentley had said in his manicured
British accent, "Someday you, too, will know the sentiment." He
had looked up sheepishly at the old man, wanting to respond in protest, Someday?
Him speak to her? A sweat-smelling,
gibbering idiot like him? Even if he had been fit to speak to her on rare
occasions, as when he was awarded academic honors or wore his
letter-jacket to school, the awareness that he was actually in her
presence would have reduced him instantly to a contemptible heap of
ordure.
So he was proud of his body now—strangely proud, as
if the part of him which was neither body nor Judas, the very part which
most keenly sensed the moral urgency of his mission, were serenely
detached from it all, looking on from a tree limb and swinging its feet.
"Go, body! Go, man!" Not serene, but exhilarated. The inner
Judas was losing, was going to lose, for he could not not speak to
her now, knowing what he had just found out. Yet it wouldn’t do him any
good, would it, that he was bearing bad news. Didn’t bearers of bad
tidings usually get shot? Never mind. She needed to hear… and one long
look from her would kill him, anyway.
There she was now, perched atop the stone wall, her
legs tucked into a hidden bench built into the wall’s far side, waiting
for her sister to finish Glee Club. He knew all of her daily routine
backward: he knew probably more about her, he figured, than one person had
ever known about another he’d never even spoken to. By the end of first
period every morning, he usually knew which uniform of the three options
she was wearing, even though he saw her in none of his classes and was,
indeed a full year behind her. It was helpful at this instant to know that
she had worn a red jumper today, for her back was toward him, and the
arcade’s shadow prevented her golden hair from giving her away
absolutely. (What crapola! That was Judas’s voice whispering doubts—as
if he wouldn’t know her hair, even in a shadow, from every other hue of
gold in the school, in the universe.) So the jumper reassured him and
condemned him. It was the last nail in the coffin prepared for the
execution. (As if the shoulders beneath the sun-swept white blouse
protruding from the shadows hadn’t been enough, even back near the gym:
though slightly slumped toward the invisible bench, they preserved that
perfect T-shape whose agile grace was a thing not touched, not approached,
by any other girl he had ever seen.)
She was alone, too. Entirely alone. There was usually
someone waiting to give or receive a ride loitering under the covered
walkway at this hour of mid-afternoon (and usually some guy hanging around
her at any hour while the sun shone on the campus); but as he climbed from
the lawn onto the sidewalk, he noticed that no other figure loomed
anywhere from end to end of the interminable promenade. What a stroke of
luck, that best part (or some good part) of him cheered frailly… and
then whispered to itself, or heard some bad part within its goodness
whisper, "Oh, hell!" The inner Judas, who heard all, overheard;
and he began to slide his slimy hand once more about the body’s
shoulders, his wry lips curling in a kind of kiss: "You can’t really
talk to her. Don’t you know that yet? Too bad, old boy, old sport, old
pal. You’re not the only clammy invertebrate in the world. You’ll
learn to live with it."
But the body had stopped before the concrete bench
which had materialized, sure enough, from the stones where he held his
gaze. Sweaty armpits, no voice, and all, it stopped. Damn! He was really
impressed with this body today! Now what? Now what?
Tell her that they intend to rape her. You have no
choice, it’s your mortal obligation.
"I… I…."
He couldn’t lift his chin, so he forced his eyes to
rise, feeling his brow wrinkle with the effort. Her beautiful blue stare
had never been fixed upon him before—in five years, all his relentless
espionage had done nothing to prepare him for how blue it was. He already
lacked the breath to speak, his pulse pounding in his ears; now the sight
of those eyes, looking straight into his own (his black-as-night eyes,
forever brooding, as everyone always reminded him)—that sight alone
would have robbed him of any last gasp he might have managed to put behind
a word. He could only gape.
Her lips parted as if to relieve him of his agony by
offering the next word (her full but subtle lips that knew a hundred
smiles, as he had learned even from his safe distances). She did not
speak, after all, however. Perhaps the gesture was sympathetic, an effort
to prompt him or a falling into pace with him (for she was following his
lead, he realized: his mouth was already open). Finally she coaxed, "Yeeesss?"
Her upper lip quivered with amusement, and her golden hair rippled against
her gloriously right-angled shoulders in a kind of shrug.
God you’re beautiful I love you so much I’ve loved
you for years—
"I… I…."
She giggled without blinking an eye.
"You don’t know me—"
"Oh yes I do," she parried easily. "You’re
Yanto Gwynn—what a neat name! You write poetry for the literary
magazine, you won the Latin award last year, and you’re on the soccer
team."
"It’s Welsh," someone said—someone who
had borrowed his tongue and decided to rattle it around. "Everyone
always thinks ‘Yanto’ is Hispanic or Italian, but… it’s Welsh. My
grandfather… he came from Wales. The Welsh are mostly small dark people,
like me."
Why had he said that? Did she know that a girl in his
class had dubbed him "Santo Yanto" because he was too
stand-offish to attend dances?
"You’re not so dark. Your hair’s light enough
to be auburn, almost." Maybe she didn’t know. Was she ever
going to blink?
"Leah," May I call you Leah, Goddess? "I
have… something to… to tell you."
Yes, now she blinked, and her gentle smile faded. His
tongue was his own again, but he had little joy of his recovered powers.
To think that he should have been here at last, after all these years, and
living and talking after the first wave of swoons—and yet have nothing
to say of all those priceless secrets from all those years. To think that
such a moment could have become so burdensome….
"I was coming out of the locker room just
now," he babbled, "and when I walked through the restroom, I—"
(He shouldn’t have given her the layout in such detail, and his tongue
re-froze briefly: this was the girl who would "never let it down and
show it", as he had heard guys whisper for years.) "Well, I
guess they didn’t hear me. The door had been propped open after
practice. They never heard me. They just went on talking. They couldn’t
see me, and I never saw them. But I recognized their voices. I was about
to pass on, when one word they said stopped me dead in my tracks."
There was no trace of a smile on her slackened lips
now, and her elegantly squared shoulders were for once rounded. With mild
astonishment, he realized that he held her in the palm of his hand—that
he had a kind of power over her. The thought filled him with a compassion
which he would never have believed one so low could feel for one so
exalted. And it would get worse for her—right now.
"Leah, they said your name."
"My name?" she exhaled voicelessly: her blue
gaze pierced him through and through now, yet he could meet it. Perhaps
that was what alarmed her.
"Leah, they’re going to…."
And then he had to look away. Yet he drew half a step
closer to her bench as he did so, and sighed a long, steady sigh.
"Look, when you go out tonight, don’t drink anything that’s been
out of your sight for even an instant. Just don’t. Not even a glass of
water. Do you understand what I’m saying? They have these pills, some of
the guys, that dissolve and have no taste. They make you… they make
girls pass out, kind of, but not so they can’t be led away somewhere
private."
"He… you can’t be saying… you’re not
talking about—"
"It wasn’t Brian—I mean, it wasn’t just Brian,
okay?" he stumbled in, unable to listen further to the anguish at his
elbow (he could sense her head bowing, her voice drawing closer to him).
"He’s keeping some bad company these days. Brian himself might
never… well, I don’t exactly know him" (your class’s Man About
Campus—why would he buddy around with me?) "but I know the
other better than I want to, which is little enough. It’s not like…
like they’re both going to… Brian is getting the stuff as a favor, you
see. I gather that the other will get… something else later. Quid pro
quo."
The Latin came out very dryly, playing ironically in
the memory of her praise for his famous skill at weird languages. Hard to
believe that he could be standing here so poised, so bitterly sad and
bitterly cynical, within a finger’s reach of the girl who could have
killed him with a kiss. He turned back to her suddenly. Her head was
indeed bowed.
"Don’t go," he pleaded. "Just don’t
go."
When she looked up, he could have kissed her just by
leaning forward (if he had known how: but upon her lips he would have
needed no lessons). The sweet scent of her hair which bathed his mind
might have been her breath. "No. I have to go. This is just not like
him… and I don’t really know—no offense, but I don’t really know
you. I have to give him a fair chance."
Her zenith-deep eyes peered from beneath raised brows
(fine, dark brows that faintly contradicted her golden hair, that chased
thoughtful furrows into her forehead—rather as his own had arched, he
imagined, upon first peeking up at her, yet infinitely beautiful in their
puzzlement, not gloomy and threatening). She was waiting for him to
answer. And he… what could he do to pretend that he had followed her
words?
"I’m sorry," she pursued, taking his
rapture for something else. "It’s just… I mean, I appreciate your
warning me, and it’s not that I don’t believe you. But try to see it
through my eyes."
"Your eyes?’ he droned.
"Yes. I mean, how can I just say, ‘Brian, get
lost, and don’t come back’? Because I never want to see him again if
this is true, but… but I have to know that it’s true before I
say it." She looked deeply into his stare. "Don’t you see? Don’t
you?"
"I… yes, I see." Yes, I see. I’ll be
seeing this moment for the rest of my life.
"Are you sure you didn’t… I mean, maybe it was
just a voice that sounded like Brian’s."
He emerged partially from his trance. "Um… well,
how many other guys are you going out with this evening?" Oh, God,
what a way to phrase it! "There’s only one Leah, isn’t there? It’s
not like we’re a big campus. He said your name."
"Yes. That’s… that’s not good."
She pulled away then and (again unconsciously mimicking
his motions of a moment earlier) heaved an enormous sigh and turned her
torso to gaze down the sidewalk. The sudden distance between them brought
him fully back to the surface. He realized, even, that she was fixing on
the point where Brian would cross the walk to reach the parking lot. He
thrust his hands deep into his pockets and righted himself. The words came
slowly to him now, but only because he was weighing them very
deliberately.
"Listen, I… you really don’t know me,
you know. Just what they say about me, which tells you nothing—less than
nothing, a lot of slanderous…. Well, under the circumstances… you
really have to find out for yourself. As you say."
"I’m glad you see it," she murmured with
wonderful gentleness, not quite meeting his eyes but dipping her golden
head slightly into one elegant, sculpted shoulder.
"But you know," he continued, absolutely
amazed at yet another being within him—neither poet nor babbler nor
Judas, but something like a man, "I don’t see how… I can stay at
home tonight. I can’t just stay at home, hoping everything turns out
okay."
"Were you going to stay at home? On Friday
night?"
"Sure. Where else would I go?" he mumbled
with false simplicity: the man had made a brief retreat into the hurt
child needing sympathy. "But now… well, I guess I’ll just drive
around. I don’t know where you’re going… I don’t know where he’ll
take you… and it’s none of my business to be asking. But maybe I’ll
go somewhere to eat, and I’ll see you. Or maybe I’ll go to a movie,
and you’ll be there. At least there’s always a chance."
"We’ll be at Cindy Rollins’s party," she
betrayed to him generously, almost laughingly, as her frame slowly turned
upon him again. "You’re really not going? I thought everyone was
going!"
"I… I wasn’t invited—"
"Everybody’s invited!"
This was precisely what he had wanted, what he had
needed. Why was the man in him skulking away just at the critical moment?
But he couldn’t suppress a sheepish pout. "So… so do I just show
up and walk in? Will I look odd, being alone?"
"Nnnnooo," she said slowly, her smile growing
as the word trailed from her lips, "but you’ll look odd being alone
and staring at me all night."
Santo Yanto, he brooded. And then he almost said, far
more thoughtfully, I’ve been alone staring at you for five years and no
one has noticed. Yes, why not say it? But he didn’t. His mouth opened,
but his mind ran away into the eternity of undisclosed secrets.
"I’m sorry," she hastened in, again
misreading his mood. "I’m not making fun of you. Only just a
little. Look, what if I fix you up with a friend of mine?"
"A… a girl?"
"I actually like the thought of her being there,
just in case anything really does happen." She had nobly fought back
a giggle at his stupid interjection, though her gaze had to fly up to the
rafters of the walkway’s roof. "She’s extremely
down-to-earth."
"Not anyone from my class! You don’t know how
they all hate me—"
"No, no, she goes to public school. She’s got
twice the brains I do, but they couldn’t afford St. Francis."
As he shifted and sulked a little, he saw Brian’s
tall figure clambering up the lawn—and that jackal Tipton walking in his
shadow. His fists clenched in his pockets. Brian was a foot taller than he
(and one of the few seniors, besides, who had ever spoken to him civilly);
but he suddenly had the idea of talking it all out—and more, if it came
to that—right in front of her.
"I’ll call you after I’ve cleared it with her.
Give me about an hour. You’re in the directory, right? Oh my God, there
he is! And Leonard is with him. I should have known that’s who you meant—"
"Listen, Leah," he muttered resolutely, his
eyes riveted upon the two shapes now striding up the sidewalk, "let
me challenge him with it to your face. See if he has the nerve to deny
it!"
"You can’t be serious." The calmness in her
tone so shocked him that his furious absorption in Brian (forged as much
by Brian’s success with her, he grasped in sudden shame, as by tonight’s
evil scheme) was snapped. She had his full attention again. She continued:
"He won’t admit anything, especially with
Leonard here to back him up. And then I’ll always wonder… about both
of you."
How could she be so cool? How could she still go out
with the guy—want to go out with him—when there was even a
possibility that he was up to no good? How could she be so even-tempered,
so fair-minded, so…
"How can you be so brave?" He said that, and
with the look that he had not been able to bestow upon saying his
five-year secrets.
"Go on now." Her lids dropped, she blushed
like a fairy caught red-handed mending toys, and she gave him an
infinitesimal box with her fingertip—on whose electric charge he could
have flown home above the swallows. "I’ll call you in an
hour."
***
Yanto had been fully honest, if a shade pathetic, about
his lackluster Friday nights, and he might have added all other evenings
to the list. Fortunately, this friend Rae, as she was called, lived close
by. (Short for Rachel? He had asked Leah to spell it over the phone, and
had almost found the nerve to banter, "Are you sure this is a
girl?") Leah also inhabited his humble suburb. They were all three
alien to the country-club set, but Leah’s looks and personality had
opened the doors which always remained closed to him, and apparently to
her friend.
So he found the trusty Rae’s residence with minimal
wrong-turning. He then had the further good fortune of discovering that,
against all likelihood, she knew the Ridgecrest area inside-out. "I
do a lot of baby-sitting over there," she explained. "The
Rollinses live by the golf course."
"And where, pray, is the golf course?" he had
drawled sourly.
Since the days were growing longer, he was able to
observe this foreign and hostile land rather closely. The sight of such
extravagant wealth (he had mistaken one driveway for the main road,
despite his navigator’s expert directions) left him mute and sullen. Had
he not been receiving instructions, they would have made the entire
journey in silence. He spotted a mass of cars ahead, lining both the curbs
of the boulevard which meandered beside the golf course’s luxurious
veers and bends. "That must be it," he mumbled.
"No, no. Keep going."
"Hmph. Wrong party." He fidgeted, very nearly
stealing a glance at his equally taciturn partner. "Do you know them,
too?"
"No," she droned.
The Rollins mansion was no less populous with revelers
than the other castle, yet it appeared less infested because of a lot-like
expanse at the back of its drive. Rae was out before he could open the
door for her (and, frankly, he had briefly forgotten to make the attempt
as he gaped in awe). They followed three or four other couples in through
a side entrance—French double doors within whose gap he could have
parallel-parked his parents’ Chevy. The sheer enormity of the place, the
fashionable dimness of the lights, the champagne-fueled restlessness (as
he reckoned it, not without suspecting his own naiveté) of the throng,
and the even dispersion of tittering laughter covered their infiltration
like an ocean closing over a pebble.
Yanto immediately despaired of ever finding Leah. He
had a hunch that Rae could have sniffed her out in thirty seconds flat—but
he checked himself as he turned toward her. It occurred to him that she
might not be "filled in". Would a girl tell another girl that a
guy was going to try to drug her at a party and spirit her off to his back
seat? Would she tell her best friend? Would a "good girl" like
Leah view the confession as humiliating? He couldn’t make girls out at
all, good, bad, or indifferent. So he merely drew a heavy sigh and dug a
finger in behind his necktie (which, he suddenly realized, was about the
only one on the premises, caterers excluded).
"Have some of these," said Rae, "they’re
good."
"Oh shoot, Rae—I’m sorry," he blurted in
her ear (a nearby gaggle of debutantes had just burst out laughing, and
somehow doubled themselves over without molesting the circulating waiter).
"I should have taken you to supper. I thought…." What had he
thought? Of food, he had thought nothing, and of his "date" even
less.
"S’okay. This is more supper than I would have
eaten. Come on, have some."
And she managed to supply him with plate, fork, and
hors d’oeuvres without even setting down her own dish, while he stood by
like a house-trained Tarzan and gaped at her maneuvers. Feeling both
faintly humiliated and distinctly uncouth, he wondered at the morsel on
the end of his fork for a full minute. He had just about advanced it to
his mouth when worse came to worst, in the person of Kristin Hogarth.
"Oh, Yantie! I can’t believe you’re here! Oh,
wow! Robin—Robin! Guess who’s here? Oh, she can’t hear me, I’ve
got to go tell her! God, this is just so… funny!" Kristin’s
naturally squinty eyes disappeared amid an alarming, raucous exhalation
that forced her fat cheeks even higher. "Robin!" she roared into
the crowd, plunging through a furrow of shoulders where she alone,
finally, managed to topple over a waiter. There were screams and laughter,
a tingle of glass, and a richly bellowed, "My God!"
"Do you know that person?" queried Rae,
leaning close to him (her hair had a nice smell, too—not like Leah’s,
but… nice).
"She calls me Santo Yanto," he explained.
"She’s always hated my guts." The braying jackass.
"Well," concluded Rae, "that’s not
what she called you just then."
Without exchanging a word further, as if through some
telepathic agreement, they began to "mingle", cradling their
plates adroitly, in a direction and at a speed which soon carried them out
of the huge room. They could actually hear their shoes kissing cleanly
across the hardwood of the corridor they entered. He had hardly to speak
above a whisper when he asked her if she wanted any champagne.
"I’ve already nabbed some," she returned in
the same intimate tone. "I got you some, too. In your other
hand."
He shot a glance up the staircase which was dropping
down beside their progress to see if anyone might have overheard the
burlesque exchange (or perhaps just to avoid looking at her—at Rae.
Where as she, anyway, and where was the tall, elegant Brian Bodell?)
"Have you ever had champagne?" pursued Rae,
almost at his back. At least her voice was discreetly purged of any
mockery.
His first impulse was to lie, but instead he just
scowled. "No, I haven’t."
"Do you want me to find you something else?"
The question, though posed seriously (even
solicitously), continued to irritate him. He ground his jaws, mulling over
various responses from "no" to "double bourbon" to…
when suddenly they walked right into Cindy Rollins, the lady of the hour,
where their corridor intersected a larger hallway. He walked into
her, at any rate. The back of his hand literally slid up her bare forearm
to her shoulder, and he saw that a few drops of champagne had pooled on
his wrist at the base of his thumb.
"I’m sorry!" effused Cindy with entirely
convincing chagrin, touching his own forearm (the shirt that flared with
courtly dash from his best sweater-vest) as if to soothe a pain. Cindy was
a beauty—not quite Leah (no one was quite Leah), but a veritable marble
statue. Like a statue, or perhaps a goddess, all of her features seemed
slightly larger than life, the better to be worshipped from afar. Her eyes
were huge, their whites flashed broadly, her wide lips shined like a
polished mineral and opened upon perfect marble teeth… even her arm, so
smooth and white that it might indeed have been Parian stone, was rounded
as if for voluptuous embraces or for bouncing babies. In her late
adolescence, she already exuded a mature, almost quintessential
femininity, an aura of Woman; and in his own diffident and untried
adolescence, Yanto found her warm, soft, throbbing proximity tinged with a
power to terrify.
"Yanto!" Cindy beamed, like a sun upon an
outer planet. "Wow! You’ve never been here before, have you? Did
you come to our Christmas… no, I remember now, that was Trisha’s
cousin from Canada. He looks just like you! Can I get you anything?"
A voiceless "ah" escaped through her
tirelessly beatific smile as she saw Rae.
"Hi, I’m Cindy Rollins."
And she shook hands with Rae amid her aura of moist,
fertile beams and the sacred tinkle of her bracelet. As her torso bent in
the gesture like a magnificent cypress bowing beneath a breeze, her face
passed directly before his eyes, closer even than Leah’s had been for an
instant that afternoon. A scent of something otherworldly again befuddled
him; but he thought less of kissing the broadly sculpted cheek
passionately than of falling on his knees and shielding his eyes from
godhead. He marveled at the slightly greater-than-mortal size of the
profile, and at the patently non-mortal exactitude of all its proportions.
"I thought you said you baby-sat for the Rollinses,"
he mumbled, testing his unthawed tongue cautiously, as Cindy drifted off
surrounded by a number and species of lesser beings to whom he paid no
attention. The party, thronged and nearly chaotic though it was, seemed
truly to resolve itself into circles of faces looking up for warmth and
light as she advanced through their midst.
"I do."
"Hmm?"
"I baby-sit for the Rollinses. You asked me if I…
never mind."
He shook himself, as if a violent physical effort were
necessary to deflect his gaze from the goddess of the fertile earth.
"Sorry, yes. I just thought… I mean, it looked like she’d never
met you."
"She hasn’t."
"Oh." He hunched slightly and drank the pool
of champagne off his wrist in a flicker of grace—of true graceful genius—which
far surpassed any possessed by Brian Bodell (and which came and went
completely undetected by his own psychic sensors). The way he concealed
the hunch in a sidestep, the way his lips continued to the glass after
cleaning his wrist so cavalierly, the way he stole yet another glance at
Cindy as his head tilted into the champagne… it was all one motion, and
the whole was at least the equivalent of swishing a plumed hat to the
floor before Cardinal Richelieu’s august presence.
"She certainly seems to know you,"
said Rae quietly.
"Yes, that’s… that’s odd, isn’t it?,"
he sported, surprised at the merriment in his voice. It could hardly have
been the champagne—not already! "I’ve never said a word to her in
my life. Or she to me."
"She really likes you, in case you didn’t
notice."
He stiffened abruptly, the flash of risqué
elegance now utterly withdrawn from his frame. He studied Rae
speechlessly. His initial shock was followed by a flush of delight, of
humored vanity—which was just as quickly succeeded by shame. When he
finally did speak, he sounded almost indignant with his partner; but the
shame (as he sensed vaguely) was really aimed at his own instant of
thrill.
"You… you must be kidding. Why… why would you
say a thing like that?"
"It was obvious, that’s why." She had a
way, this Rae, of standing her ground immovably and staring straight
through you.
"She was… just being a hostess. Turning on the
charm."
"It wasn’t what she said. It was the way she
said it."
To sustain this fight on two fronts—Rae on one side,
his inner man on the other (which inner man this time?)—was impossible.
While his decorous persona wanted to continue scoffing, that ghost of D’Artagnan
which had pirouetted through his soul just beyond his conscious mind’s
notice was whistling a song in the shadows now. Its words went something
like, "If Cindy can fall for me, then why not Leah?" He couldn’t
shake the mad lyrics out of his ears, so he took the offensive against
Rae, instead.
"Okay, so say… say she likes me."
"Say she does."
"Well, what does that prove? She doesn’t like me
for my politics or my big plans or my poetic visions or… or my good
heart or… or anything to do with what’s inside me, because we’ve
never had a conversation. She doesn’t like me for being the campus
he-man, because I’m not. What does that leave? She doesn’t know
anything about me. Neither does anyone else at St. Francis, because I don’t
come from their world. And that’s exactly what she sees in me—the
mystery. It has to be. The Roman historian Tacitus said we always build
everything we don’t know into something wonderful."
"I’m disappointed," murmured Rae without so
much as blinking. "I thought you’d say it in Latin."
He sighed and made as if to sip more champagne; but
instead, he muttered into the glass, "Omne ignotum pro magnifico
est."
"There, you see?" she countered, now with a
trace of animation. "I knew you were a Latin whiz. I’d never even
seen you before tonight. But Leah told me all about you."
"Leah," he winced. D’Artagnan had traipsed
off back into his century. The sally of cold pessimism against Rae, oddly
enough, had silenced the inward voice of joy without winning the outward
contest. "Leah knows me even less than Cindy."
"But they know about you… your scholastic
stuff, the soccer team. St. Francis isn’t like my school, where you
never get to know the names even of the people in your own class. It’s a
small world, and they really value gifted people. Leah told me about
something you’d written in the literary magazine."
He stared deep into the crystal glass as sweat started
to bead his upper lip. Leah had read that? His poem about death at
dawn, filled with images of youth without hope… if only she had known
that she was the cause of its minutely depicted anguish!
"And even if somebody does like you because you’re
mysterious… well, they could hate you for the same thing, couldn’t
they? Look at what’s-her-name—Foghorn Hogarth… though I didn’t
read all that as antagonism, but say it was. If you’re going to wilt
because someone like that thinks you’re weird, why not accept the
admiration of others who value you for being different?"
"Because I’m not different," he
protested, setting his plate on the edge of the staircase and mopping his
face with the freed hand’s cuff. "That’s just it. They expect…
what? Some kind of moody rebel without a cause? Some boy genius? Some wild
biker with a loose screw? What they don’t know is that I’m just
ordinary. Horribly ordinary."
"If that’s what you believe, then maybe a few of
us know you better than you do. Even I can tell you’re not ordinary. How
many guys at this party do you think have quoted Tastus since staggering
in here? How many are having this conversation right now? Look around.
They’ve got exactly two things on their mind. Getting stoned and… the
other thing."
The other thing. He thought of Leah yet again, but far
more urgently now. He felt as though he had betrayed her. Here he was
having a forty-fathom discussion with an amateur psychoanalyst, feeling
out the tender places in his bruised and beaten ego, and Leah… surely
Bodell wouldn’t have made his move yet. Far too early… surely.
"There’s Leah," remarked Rae casually,
right on cue.
His head swiveled like a weathervane in a fresh wind.
Unable to find her, he spun back toward Rae and then followed her gaze. He
saw Bodell’s tall, lean torso first. A flame of golden hair blazed
steadily well below one of the hated shoulders. He noticed that the lank
arm was bending at the elbow, reaching toward where her body stood hidden
from him—groping for her waist, or perhaps for the bare flesh beneath a
sleeve.
"No trouble, okay?" murmured Rae very softly,
almost pleadingly, at his side.
Did she know, then? He glanced at her (she came
scarcely higher next to him than Leah did to Brian: she was no Cindy). The
intensity of her imploring gaze so surprised him that he looked down
again; and he realized from those steady gray eyes—as if they had been a
mirror—that his own face had tipped her off. Whatever she had or hadn’t
known before, she had just read his mind.
The next two hours took on a new character. Now that he
had located Leah, Yanto found himself idling a lot around objets d’art
and potted plants rather than drifting nervously from room to room. He
never allowed himself to be close enough or alone enough in an open space
for Leah’s eyes to happen upon him. Brian’s height was a further
advantage: she might as well have had a balloon tied around her neck. He
bitterly noticed, nonetheless, that she never even shot a stray glance
into the crowd. Not that Brian absorbed all her attention: she seemed
always to be pursued by at least one other guy—an ongoing succession of
other guys—who often pretended to play hail-fellow-well-met with Brian
but whose true objective (as he could well observe from his hunting
blinds) was to woo the fair lady with the ivory smile and fashion-model
shoulders. And he reflected more and more gloomily, as he followed these
countless overtures to the courtship dance, that if Brian were to be soon
unmasked as Jack the Ripper, it would advance his own cause with Leah not
one punch of her little finger.
Of course, he became miserable company for Rae. He was
fully aware of his sudden unsociability without being able to resist it.
To her credit, she didn’t press the issue. She didn’t ever try to
resume their philosophical dispute—not at any level. She idled beside
him and helped him blend into the woodwork for a while. Then, when one of
his soccer buddies stumbled upon him (quite literally) and broached some
rip-roaring recap of the week’s scores in slurred speech, she discreetly
faded away. When the friend flung himself shouting after his misplaced
date, Yanto cringed at first, fearing that the uproar might draw eyes his
way. But there were similar uproars everywhere, although the better lit
rooms (that is, the rooms with dimmed chandeliers) were quickly emptying.
He barely caught sight of Leah retreating through the wide-open French
doors to the back yard. (It was Leah, not Brian, whose motion he had
detected: merely the way she walked, the way she tossed back her head, had
flagged him long before Brian’s height. After all, he had dreamed of
nothing but that motion for five years.)
He followed feverishly, ignoring now the sedated groups
sprawled all over sofas and settees. Outside, he blundered over the body
of someone who had passed out, apparently, and he slid through the close
ranks of a conspiratorial bunch visible only from their orange cigarette
butts. (His sense of smell, chasing his intellect from a mile behind,
paused in the sweet wreaths of something not tobacco.) He was briefly near
to panic—what on earth could Leah be thinking of, marching off under her
own power into the night with that amphibious Bodell, leaving her world of
light for those shadows where his basic nature was more comfortable? He
was almost furious with her, briefly.
But then he heard the amplified throbs of emerging
chords and a performer’s prefatory gibberish. In the next instant, he
noticed strobe lights flickering through tree limbs and spurting across
the lawn like so many squad cars on alert. He even saw Leah’s silhouette
as he rounded a brick wall. He was within twenty feet of her—he had
almost chased the couple down. And he froze in his steps: in fact, he
withdrew a few steps until he felt the bricks press between his shoulders.
They were going where he could not follow. Leah loved to dance (he had
often heard guys say so in their tight-lipped way, as if they were
watching her undress while they spoke), and he… he had never danced a
step in his life.
Farther along the wall, by the light of some Japanese
lanterns, he found a goldfish pond. A couple was seated on a bench at its
far end, their heads so close together that he could not decide if they
were whispering or if the breeze was stirring through the leaves. He
plopped down on the corresponding bench at his end as though bowing his
head compliantly before an executioner. The creature he loved most in the
world was perhaps being seduced at this very instant; and not only could
he not grab the scoundrel by the lapels—he was too clumsy and inept even
to mingle with the crowd. He might as well have been a bird sleeping in
the tree overhead. Even Cindy would be out there (even Cindy? Was
she now, thanks to Rae’s suggestion, a second prize after Leah?). What
would Cindy think if she could see him now? Didn’t they all really want
to be seduced, after all—hadn’t they been before? Wasn’t that why
they had these parties? Wasn’t it to create a wonderland full of shadows—of
the unknown, the ignotum? And he couldn’t even hold up his easy,
airy end of the shadow-magic. That was what he’d been trying to tell
Rae. He wasn’t ordinary, no: he was extraordinarily resistant to
mystery.
All kinds of imperatives flashed through his mind like
the forsaken strobe lights, and just as quickly vanished. He should at
least lurk at the edge of the dancing… he should at least stake out the
parking lot… he should… he should… walk through the middle of the
crowd up to Brian and sock him in the nose, starting a horrendous brawl,
dealing punches left and right to all comers—that was his favorite
inspiration. But he did nothing. He merely stared past his dangling hands
onto the paving stones, which looked clean enough to eat off of in the
soft light. Everything was so polished, so idyllic: and all of it said,
"What are you doing here?" Santo Yanto.
His peripheral vision picked up movement just in front
of him before he detected a sound. He subconsciously expected to see a cat
(that most feminine of creatures whose motion was yet so unlike Leah’s
queenly gait). When he looked up, he found Rae.
"Rae…" he said flatly. His mind was
instantly flooded with self-reproach for his neglected duty to her. In his
trough, he gathered these recognitions of further failure upon his head as
if he would bury himself. He didn’t even try to stage a defense. He didn’t
even manufacture some charitable lie about looking all over for her—which,
of course, brought him even lower in his own esteem.
"I left you," he confessed bluntly, looking
straight at her. "I didn’t even think about you. I just walked out
on you… like a complete jerk."
But to his surprise, her steady gaze only glowed
brighter, moister, and deeper. It was a remarkable gaze which he had seen
several times tonight; and her features, which were not carved ivory or
chiseled marble but fine, soft, and unexaggerated, also glowed when she
focused herself this way. Even in the yellow shimmer of the lanterns, he
observed her cheeks to flush like two freckled apples. She was… yes, she
was kind of cute. Pretty, almost. He had not noticed before.
And then she did the most incredible thing. She reached
out and stroked his hair. Lightly. Just once.
"You’re really suffering, aren’t you?"
she said.
He was grateful—so grateful—for her touch, her
words, yet he could only sigh and stare at his feet again. "I… I
don’t know what to do."
"How long have you loved her?"
He was able to look up again now. For the first time,
someone else knew. Not the only person who really counted, of course—but
at least someone knew. At least, after all this time, he was no
longer all alone with his agony, wondering insanely if it might not be
happening—if the strongest, most enduring emotion in his heart might not
really exist—since it never made a dent on objective reality. It had
just made a dent.
"The first time I ever saw her, I was in seventh
grade and she was in eighth. I was just a kid then, I know. But I was
never the same again after that. It made me grow up real fast. I learned
things about loneliness that some people never learn in a lifetime."
"But it’s also kept you young."
He looked deeply into her eyes, and saw the star of a
laugh. "Young? How?"
And then she did laugh (a brief, breathless laugh),
spinning away from him and extending an arm. "Just look around! How
many of them can feel what you feel? Probably every girl here has broken
at least three or four hearts out of all the guys here, and had hers
broken as many times, and now it’s gotten to be a way of life. They
break, and they mend, and their words carry a little less weight each
time, and they ask for a little less each time. But you—that’s why you’re
a mystery to them. You take things so hard!"
"And that makes me young?"
"Well, yeah. Haven’t you seen how hard little
kids take things? We baby-sitters know all about it!"
"Is Leah, Rae—is she young like that?"
Just then they heard a groan from the shrubs. It came
from the direction of the couple on the other bench, who had evaporated
into thin air at some point. Its hoarse complaint had a female tone about
it and was repeated now at regular intervals. He immediately shifted to
his "damsel in distress" state of readiness, rising slowly to
his feet.
"Someone’s hurt—"
"No, don’t go over there. Come away,"
insisted Rae. Her shortness contrasted so sharply with all he had ever
seen of her manner that he raised only a mild protest.
"How can you be sure?"
"I’m sure."
And she grabbed him by the hand and led him out of the
garden, up along the brick wall, and into darkness. Her small fingers
gripped him tightly. They had a feverish warmth.
No sooner had the two of them reentered the carnival
lunacy of the strobe lights than they heard Leah’s voice and, almost as
quickly, located her swinging figure unstably etched against the electric
fireworks. Even in the wild fidgets of illumination, he could sense
something hasty in that fashion-runway swing—or else her raised voice
had tipped him off; for though he missed the words, he detected a razor
edge in them.
"Rae, is that you? Thank God!"
The hot little hand slipped away from him. Amid all the
other confusion, he managed to perceive somewhere in his heart a pang of
regret that it was gone.
"Listen, baby, you’re blowing this all out of
proportion." Brian’s sapling-like silhouette came rolling along
behind.
"Am I? Out of proportion? Then you admit it’s
spiked—you just think I’m taking it too seriously—is that it? Rae,
will you guys take me home?"
He would never have guessed that Leah’s voice was
capable of such swift, clipped speech, or that its rich tones had so broad
a register. One can learn only so much from a distance, even in five
years.
"No, look, it’s… it’s not spiked!
Jesus, how do you spike booze?"
"Drugged, then! Whatever that was in your
palm!"
"It’s not! Drugged with what? What in
hell—"
"Oh, no? Then you drink it!"
Leah’s magnificent figure drew up right before him
now and spun around perfectly on a heel to face the flickering lights. He
noticed Brian halting as if before a snake, noticed the champagne glass
which she held up to his slack face, its crystal turning the festive
shafts into prismatic rainbows; but most of all he noticed the smooth,
cool sparkle over her drawn lips, so enticing even in their grimace, so
resplendent even in the Armageddon of frenzied explosion and skewed
starlight.
"What? Me? What do you…." Brian’s head of
lightning-beaten curls lolled back in a silly, semi-intoxicated, fully
embarrassed giggle.
"I said… drink it!"
And the champagne showered merrily through the color
storm, bathing its liquid beads in shades of paradise, before sizzling
over the handsome, bacchicly writhing face.
***
Starting the next week, Leah began to greet him
cheerfully in the halls, calling out to him by name if she happened to see
him first. Yanto expected (with a giddy mixture of terror and delight)
that his classmate-detractors would surely notice the treatment, fall
agape, and turn to stone. He expected, too, that all the campus rakes
would start to elbow one another when he came around, as if working up the
courage to ask him for his secret formula. To his relief (and his
disappointment), no such side-effects were detectable. They may have been
occurring, nevertheless; but he was so busy lowering his eyes and
smothering his beatitude after she had passed on her way that he couldn’t
have heard or seen an approaching locomotive.
There were longer conversations, too: a couple that
first week, and then one about every other day (or daily? no, not daily)
when she figured out that they had the same free period after lunch and
that he passed it in the same place. They seldom talked for the whole
hour. Maybe half of it. She wasn’t taking Latin or trig, so he saw no
chance of exploiting the possibility of studying together. (What little
she revealed about her courses, in fact, struck him as scandalously
light-weight: so seniors really did get to goof off!) But the sincere
interest and special intimacy—especially the intimacy—in her tone when
she chirped, "Watcha doing?" were manna from heaven. After five
years of famine, he felt that he might die of joy any second.
Except that the joy—even this supreme, unimaginable
joy—had a somber lining. He was indeed bitterly disillusioned at certain
rare moments (always at home, usually over weekends) when he reflected
that even so glorious a victory as this should fall so far short of true,
sustained happiness. And he descended to ponder (at his very lowest ebb)
whether he were not worse off than before, since now he would be hurled
from heaven forever after having enjoyed a taste of its nectar. She was a
senior: after another month, he might never see her again. She was still
extremely popular: it was unlikely that she was spending Friday and
Saturday night at home like him just because Brian had let his tongue hang
out too far. He remembered that steady stream of debonair backslappers
around Brian at the party, all of them stealing pickpocket glances at his
date. And Yanto remembered how he had realized then that nudging Brian
aside would do little to advance his own cause.
But there was Rae to be considered. Rae was Leah’s
best friend—and Rae was his friend, too (at least, she had seemed
to like him), and she knew how he felt about Leah. Would one girl say that
kind of thing to another who was her best friend? Would Rae tell Leah,
"He loves you so very much—you’re so lucky!" the way she had
told him, "She likes you," about Cindy?
The days passed, and he began to grow anxious. If Rae
had told her, what would she do? Would she come to him with beaming eyes
and a blush—would that be his cue? But what if the news had not been
well received? Well, she wasn’t showing any coolness toward him… but
would she? After all, Leah was an angel. She had given Brian a last
opportunity to redeem himself, much to her own peril: would she simply
snub the guy who had warned her, had saved her, just because he loved her
more than his soul? No, she would… be nice to him. Exactly what she was
doing now. So which was it? Was she saying yes, or saying no, or saying
nothing at all?
Then one Wednesday afternoon, the climax reared up in
the middle of a rambling conversation about colleges. It was destiny at
last: the big question had come to seek him out in his oubliette of
self-doubt. Time to be freed or be hanged.
With no transition whatever, Leah asked whimsically,
"What did you think of Rae?"
Rae had told her—he knew she would! What a friend!
And now she was sidling awkwardly into the matter by asking him what he
thought of Rae. The next question was going to be, "Do you know what
Rae told me?" She wouldn’t be about to ask that question if her
answer to him wasn’t going to be "yes"!
All my life… all my life in this moment.
"Rae?" he said.
She fidgeted, brushing her full-bodied hair off her
forehead in a manner which had haunted his dreams since seventh grade.
"Rae’s my best friend, Yanto. I’ve know her
for… forever. She’s a really, really neat person."
Then she bent toward him and tapped him with her
finger, just as she had done on that fateful afternoon last month. Her
lashes, her teeth, her lips had never been so close to him as they were
now. His mind flew away. He became an empty vessel, a stone basking in
golden sunlight.
"I know you haven’t asked her out since the
party, because I’ve asked her. I… gosh, it’s not that… look, I… you
should ask her, Yanto! She’s so perfect for you! And you’re
perfect for her, too. Gosh, you’re the two most… most
perfect-for-each-other people I’ve ever met! Do you know how hard that
is to happen? I’ve dated a lot, and I can tell you, it just doesn’t
happen. Once in a blue moon. She’s… you won’t tell her this, I know.
She’d kill me. But she really, really likes you. I’ve never heard her
talk about anybody like she does you!"
The stone gyrated madly in a kind of spontaneous
combustion, a kind of post-supernova collapse which leaves a piece of slag
heavier than a solar system. Yet the sun goddess continued to caress it
with her halo, safely beyond the reach of its invisible heat and
suffocating gravity alike, pausing on her diurnal journey not even an
instant, carrying light to other quarters of the universe. He stared at
her as if he had awakened from a five-year dream. The last five years had
never happened. His deepest, most immovable emotion—the one which best
identified his uniqueness, his being, his soul—had been a game of
make-believe. Her golden light had annihilated him like a thunderbolt, had
popped his swollen heart like a silent balloon.
"I wish you’d say something. Just to show me you’re
not upset."
Upset, he thought to himself, fixing her blue, blue
eyes now as if seeking the signs of blindness—some dense film, some
coating of scales. She couldn’t tell that he was upset? You can’t tell
that I’m upset? You just drove a stake through my heart, and you can’t
tell that I’m upset? Why should I be upset—it was just a little stake!
A little stake for a little heart—a tiny, shriveled-up heart that maybe
doesn’t even exist, that never existed. Why should you see me—I’m
nothing! Why should you see nothing? Only Rae would have seen, in your
place. She would have seen way back in seventh grade. And I’m going to
tell you so, too. I’m damn well going to say something this time. I can
feel it coming.
"How can I call her when I don’t know her
number?" he said.
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************************************************
Dr. Palaver
De omnibus pauca, de nullo omnia.
Dear Doctor,
I don’t recall the exact year when the word
"chauvinist" first bullied its way into common parlance, but I’m
pretty sure it was in the seventies. (The phrase "male chauvinist
pig" was the blunt wedge which introduced this single word into our
living rooms.) I know that there was some French ruffian of the late
nineteenth century named Chauvin (or Calvin—I shall abstain from
denominational jokes) at the root of our popular usage, but history is not
the focus of my question, or observation. For I really wish only to observe
that this word means nothing. What is a chauvinist? Someone whose
disagreement with you is loud and intransigent? Has being uncouth, then,
become an –ism? I was surprised how suddenly and thoroughly the
use of this idiotically vapid word destroyed an otherwise scholarly book
that I was reading. Why do bright academics allow their prose to be
sabotaged by such stale histrionics?
Non Calvinus
Dear Hirsute Purist,
I view words like "chauvinism" as a kind of
verbal color-coding—rather what mood is to verbs. As you say, the word
means almost nothing in itself: it conveys that a writer incapable of
objectifying his animosity yet unwilling to let his subject pass untarred
considers said subject incapable of objectifying his animosity yet
unwilling to let his subjects pass untarred. It codes the subject as
someone whom we can detest without wasting time on justification (for the
vicious crime of unjustified detestation)). Hypocrisy aside, the moral
problem with a "modal noun", of course, is that it dispenses
with verbs. The desired operation on the thing has already been done when
the thing is named: no scope remains for intelligent action. A hortatory
verb alerts us that it is pleading a case, not coldly stating a fact. A
hortatory noun, on the contrary, tries to switch off our awareness and
feed us pre-processed matter as raw data. Most of these hortatives are
"hated-coded": "chauvinist", certainly, is a
"hate word". If I call you a chauvinist, I alert my audience
(which I presume to consist of the "thinking class", where a
push is on to spare everyone needless thinking) that you may be hated
without a tedious review of the evidence. Small wonder that these same
people have given us the "hate crime", which, pondered from the
roots up, is not a matter of simply hating but rather of hating the wrong
people. One must "hate haters"; and one is so eagerly to accept
the validity of such modal signifiers that one considers a mere thought as
an act already done, judged, and condemned. These short-cuts to the noose
are much prized among revolutionaries concerned about staying on schedule.
Indeed, herein—and only here—do they differ from the poor chauvinist,
who is merely close-minded. They have big plans which call for a
full-scale lobotomy: he has only turned the key on a couple of
doors.
***
Dear Doctor,
I strongly recommend Mark Bauerlein’s Literary
Criticism: An Autopsy to your readers. Professor Bauerlein discusses
every slick academic euphemism from "interdisciplinary" to the
use of the gerund form (-ing) in titles. Readers of this column,
especially, will be delighted to see the verbose pomposity and insipid
jargon of PC stripped away to reveal the same airy weave—and the same
servile objectives—that went into the proverbial emperor’s new
clothes.
Not Selling Anything
Dear Altruist,
We do, in fact, sell this book (and a great many
others) on the Arcturus Press Website under our recommended reading. To be
exact, Amazon sells it and we collect a referral fee. Perhaps you may wish
to dedicate an essay to it: for while Praesidium has no review
section as a regular feature, it certainly looks favorably on papers which
take a particular work either as a jumping-off or a landing point.
About Bauerlein’s fine book, I will say in criticism
only that its astuteness left me wishing for more directness (a complaint
which I frequently have of even the best academic writing). I know that
one must tread warily, though he be shod in snowshoes of tenure, upon PC’s
sensitive skin. This isn’t the first age in which intellectuals have
resorted to rare diction and complex hypotaxis so as to smuggle heresies
past the censor. (I am assured that the intimidating character of both
Vico’s and Kant’s writing has such a source.) Without denying urbane
irony its due, however, I find that I should have liked one—just one—straightforward
statement of condemnation from Mr. Bauerlein about what he sees going on.
We must content ourselves, instead, with being told that current academic
discourse is "a lexical roadmap of anti-methodological
pragmatics" (xv). If there is a spade hidden somewhere under this
proliferation of Greek adjectival suffixes, I should like to see it called
a spade. What is (are) pragmatics? The science, perhaps, of how to do
things which achieve specific, immediate, objective, and materially
self-serving ends? Sounds like old-fashioned bloody-mindedness to me.
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