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P R A E
S I D I U M
A Journal of Literate and Literary Analysis
3.3 (Summer 2003)
A
quarterly publication of The Center for Literate Values
Board of
Directors:
John R. Harris, Ph.D.
(President)
Thomas F. Bertonneau,
Ph.D. (Secretary)
Helen R. Andretta,
Ph.D.; York College-CUNY
Ralph S. Carlson,
Ph.D.; Azusa Pacific University
Kelly Ann Hampton
Michael H. Lythgoe,
Lt. Col. USAF (Retd.)
The
previous issue of Praesidium ( Spring
2003)
may be viewed by
clicking here.
© All contents of this
journal (including poems, articles, fictional works, and short pieces by
staff) are copyrighted by The Center for © All contents of this
journal (including poems, articles, fictional works, and short pieces by
staff) are copyrighted by The Center for Literate
Values of Tyler, Texas (2003),
and may not be cited at length or reproduced without The Center's express
permission.
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Pensée
de la Saison
"The same old
world looks entirely different when you’re brave; and, when the world
suddenly looks as it has never looked before, it looks entirely the same,
when you’re brave."
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CONTENTS
A Few Words from the Editor
Seeing clouds on the horizon can be a form of
optimism unless you like being caught out in the rain.
Judges of the Past
Jonathan Chaves
Professor Chaves laments the damage which
ideological rigidity does to scholarship and protests the pose that
heightened awareness is somehow served by such brutal shortcuts.
Look Homeward, Angela
Staff
As we proceed through the twenty-first century, those
liberal arts departments which still survive are doing their very best to
dissolve in fatuity.
Daggerpoints and Loggerheads:
The Twentieth Century’s Fatal Division
into Ideological Camps
John R. Harris
The disingenuous courtship of newly enfranchised
masses by unscrupulous demagogues gave us two ruinous world wars, and now
harrows civilization around the globe.
Transgressive Technologies: Does
a Posthuman Dystopia Await Us?
Mark Wegierski
Contemporary education and modern economics invest
heavily in the notion that hi-tech is the only way to go... yet every path
in this direction must skirt the abyss.
"Diagnosis" (poem)
R.S. Carlson
Professor Carlson’s free-verse quartet finds sad
poetry in the least likely of settings.
Four Poems by Michael H. Lythgoe
As always, Michael Lythgoe’s poems burst with
colors, scents, tastes, and a keen alertness to the past.
Hommage à Baudelaire: Three
Prose Poems
John R. Harris
Electric fans, streetlights, and house-hunting are
three unlikely subjects for lyricism, but the splenetic prose poet may
find entire hemispheres within them.
"White Cover" (short story)
J.S. Moseby
This short story nostalgically gropes after the
late forties and the style of Everyman—yet its horrified vision of human
nature offers little optimism.
Dr. Palaver
More about the plight of contemporary Spanish, and
a wince at academic writing’s "pseudo-abstractivity".
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A Few Words from the Editor
First of all, it is my pleasure to announce that our
non-profit educational organization is now legally and officially The
Center for Literate Values. I continue to believe as firmly as ever that
the rather vapid phrase "literate values" must include a
tendency to seek privacy for meditation, an ability to employ meditative
moments in intense self-scrutiny, a certain healthy suspicion of others’
motives and one’s own, and—in two words—a cultivation of that
dutiful, confessional state of mind which might well be called moral
reason. I shall probably remain a little bewildered to my dying day by
the icy response which the "m" word and the "r" word
draw from ostensibly educated people, and especially educators at the
higher level. Nevertheless, some battles are better lost if winning them
would require a tenacity sufficient to prevail, under other circumstances,
in the whole war. I had reached the point where I was simply exhausted
with having to explain so innocuous a pair of words to so malicious and
retrograde a phalanx of intellects. Hence… farewell, moral reason:
welcome aboard, literate values.
The Web site where many of you are no doubt reading
these words has been overhauled from top to bottom (or whatever the
operative image is for a mass of hyperlinks). I sincerely urge everyone
who has access to the Net and is comfortable sitting glued to a screen for
hours to meander through The Center’s new site at a leisurely pace.
Please remember the magical "org" at the end of www.literatevalues.org.
Secondly, I must apologize for the appearance of
self-promotion in this issue. I had anticipated that my own essay would be
long. Its subject, frankly, deserves a book-length treatment: the
surprising yet intimate collaboration of communism and fascism in
rendering the twentieth-century West’s intellectual life suicidally
simplistic. I recall being rather relieved, in fact, at the prospect of
having little space left over to fill. I had forgotten that summer is an
especially slow season for submissions. Naturally, I was delighted to have
another piece from Professor Chaves, and journalist Mark Wegierski did me
the great favor of contributing a review of the twenty-first century’s
possible points of fatal collision with our "miracles" of
technology. Neither of these excellent essays, however, required much
space. I was therefore able to devote about half the issue to creative
work; and I found myself compelled, in addition, to inflict upon the
reader a few more of my prose poems (a stock of which I keep around for
just such emergencies).
This even balance of the analytic and the aesthetic may
have turned out to be a good thing. My essay, after all, scarcely plots a
vector toward optimism (and the final essay of this series, which I plan
to insert into the Fall 2003 issue, is indeed not looking rosy on the
drawing board). Mr. Wegierski’s overview of our lunges into various
technological abysses, furthermore, is downright frightening if one
ponders the frivolity of the electorate in recent years. Under the
circumstances, a heavy dose of artistic creativity is surely indicated.
Yet this quarter’s artists are themselves hardly
ravished by the realities of modern life. My own rambles are probably the
most airy, and in a sense the most irresponsible. Mr. Moseby’s short
story, while it has much of the nostalgic and a little of the fantastic,
remains on the whole pretty gloomy about human nature. Ralph Carlson’s
verse chronicle of a young woman’s being hustled by an impersonal
medical establishment from the first highly invasive treatments of her
cancer to an anguishing death safely beyond the sterilized corridors moves
us with the very absence of humanity it conveys. Michael Lythgoe’s work
pulses with a sense of far greater reality—of comic relief, in the
highest possible register—looming gloriously over our somber daily
realities; yet even here, hope lies in following rivers and clouds and
fragrances anagogically into metaphor and a love which passeth
understanding. The best hope this world has to offer, one might say, is
that which fractures the strict conditions of this world by finding in
worldly matter the stuff of otherworldly images. Of course, such hope is
not really in this world at all.
But when was it otherwise, I ask? If we lived in one of
those golden eras when people believed implicitly that heaven was coming
to earth, or if we who still think about things collectively decided to
burn our books and join the fête servile of those who can content
their heart with a day at the mall, how would we be better off? Both of
those states—the cultural golden age and the consumerist artificial
paradise—are merely alternative forms of delusion. Our hope can really
not rest on anything we see, not even if we should invent an antidote to
mortality. (For when has our joy with this life ever been so great that
its sole vitiation was the ticking of our body’s clock?) I would go so
far as to say that taking mortal existence’s full, sad measure— which
is getting easier to do all the time as our technological wonders
successively show their seams—makes us more capable of the one true
happiness we may know as we are. We expect less, we demand less, we
survive with less, and… and we begin to rediscover, for instance, the
pleasures of a Carolina wren’s warble because we are strolling along a
grass-besieged sidewalk rather than bulleting along a superhighway. We may
yet slow down: we may yet choose to slow down (as opposed to being
chased into the hills like Boccaccio’s crew by some terrorist-hatched
plague). Thinking makes you want to slow down, and reading makes you want
to think.
So read, and live!
~J.H.
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Judges of the Past
by
Jonathan Chaves
Jonathan Chaves is Professor of Chinese
Literature and Chairman of the Department of East Asian Languages and
Literatures at The George Washington University. He is co-author with J.
Thomas Rimer of Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing: The Wakan Rôei
Shû (Columbia University Press, 1997).
Recently, the MLA has sent a survey form to
chairmen of language and literature departments. When I received my copy,
I simply threw it away. Sometime later, I received a second copy, with a
cover letter in which the writer stated that he was "distressed"
that I had not participated, and asking again that I do so. I responded to
him that "distressed" would be an understatement to describe my
feelings every time I open the program of an MLA meeting, and read once
again the Modern Litany of Asininity. Should the MLA ever return to
sanity, I said, I would be glad to cooperate with any survey they chose to
conduct. But for now the study of literature—and therefore the MLA—along
with all the humanities, has become the playground of those who profess a
destructive approach to civilization known for the moment (a new term
could be coined at any time) by the oxymoronic name of
"Postmodernism."
At its base, this chameleon, this congeries of
seemingly disparate "theories" of literature, is really a deadly
combination of Utopianism and Nihilism, which, as Lee Congdon has pointed
out, "both derive… from the same source—undying hatred of the
world as it is." And not only the world as it is, but the
world as it was. C.S. Lewis has written that "we are not so
much the judges of the past, as we are judged by it." But a judgement
upon the past, upon all traditional religion and philosophy—let alone
the literature and art in which they are embodied—is precisely what our
"postmodern" colleagues consider themselves competent to
proclaim. They have done so by applying first "Deconstructionism",
which seems to ignore all historical context, and then "New
Historicism", which seems to reinstate historical context. But these
are two sides of the same coin. In both cases, the subjective ego of the
"scholar" is supreme.
In a recent piece in the Newsletter of the Association
of Literary Scholars and Critics, E. Christian Kopff has called upon us
"to teach our students to think like Dante and Homer," which is
the correct approach, already called for by C.S. Lewis in his great book
of 1961, An Experiment in Criticism.
But the "postmodernists", whether overtly and
proudly subjectivist, as in their deconstructive mode, or seemingly
historical, as in their "New Historicist" mode, are reading
Dante and Homer while thinking like Marx, Nietzsche, and Lévi-Strauss.
"Increasingly we meet only ourselves," writes Lewis, and indeed,
for a modern to read these critics is like looking into a mirror, rather
than through a window. Given the prominence of "New
Historicism", calling for a "return to the sources" (as
Kopff correctly does) will not be enough, so long as those sources are
returned to by scholars with an agenda of superimposing trendy ideologies
upon them.
This sad truth recently drove itself home as I plowed
my way through a book which is in many respects emblematic (pun intended)
of the problem. It is a study of the emblem books which played such an
important role in sixteenth and seventeenth century Holland and England
(and elsewhere in Europe), and which combined engraved pictures with poems
or prose texts conveying moral messages of various kinds.* The
author is described as being the Chairman of the Society for Emblem
Studies, and is clearly extremely learned on the subject. The problem with
this book is not an absence of scholarship—the bibliography of all
emblem books published in England is thorough and dependable, and whenever
the author limits himself to describing the books in a straightforward
manner, he demonstrates his comprehensive knowledge of their imagery and
rhetoric.
The problem lies, rather—as it so often does today—in
the author’s ultimate concern, which is really not to study these books
on their own terms, but rather to use them as fodder for the all-devouring
"theory" to which he subscribes, which is New Historicism
grounded in (Post-) Structuralism. This is the author’s (pseudo-)
religion. And it blinds him precisely to the real religion, Christianity,
which underpins the emblem books, such as Partheneia Sacra (1633)
by Henry Hawkins, S.J. This presentation of various images, most notably
the "Enclosed Garden" (hortus conclusus), as metaphors
for the Virgin Mary, is clearly inspired by something the author just
cannot sympathize with, namely real devotion. "We are required,"
he writes, as if it were a dreary obligation, "to visualise the
Blessed Virgin as, variously, a garden, a rose, a lily, a violet, a
sunflower, the dew, a bee, the heavens," etc. Our author knows that
all of these "are sanctioned by established traditions of Christian
iconography"—ignorance is not his problem. But this "does not
diminish the sense one has… of a tension… which affects almost every
level of its organization." In other words, for him, a Structuralist
tension between equal but opposite polarities or among unassimilated
fragments—a kind of absolutized relativism—subverts the (merely
conventional) religious devotionalism of the book. Structuralism trumps
Christianity. And in case we miss the message, the author repeats several
times—indeed, rams down our throats—the caution that the benighted
writers of the emblem books thought that the metaphors and images
they used were "natural"—or possessed "facticity"
(i.e., were true), while we today, in our greater wisdom, realize that
they were all culturally conditioned, and therefore lack substance as
truth claims. The writers of the seventeenth century believed what they
believed, and our author believes what he believes (the ultimate in
tautology!), and feels a kind of urgency to undermine the fallacies of the
very writers he is studying. He has placed himself in the position not of
scholar, but judge, of those writers, probably because he somehow
feels that the errors of the past are obstacles on the path to Utopia, and
must therefore be exploded.
Precisely because this is an ambitious book by a
well-established "authority," written in dense prose heavy with
jargon, and published by an important publisher, it is likely to establish
itself as the "cutting edge" of emblem book studies. It is full
of accurate detail pressed into the service of a subversive agenda. The
book is all wrong, in tone and attitude.
Is this a unique problem of this particular book? Of
course not; this is now the norm in the "leading" studies of
virtually any topic in the humanities. Only Lewis’s call—and Kopff’s—for
a return to "thinking like Dante and Homer" will save literary
studies from this descent into decadence.
REFERENCES
Lee Congdon. "The Aesthetics of Hate." Chronicles
of Culture, Vol. 9, No. 4 (April 1985), pp. 14-15.
C.S. Lewis. An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge
University Press, 1961.
Michael Bath. Speaking Pictures: English Emblem
Books and Renaissance Culture. Longman, 1994.
NOTES
* As
the reader will soon understand, Professor Chaves is pursuing a generic
point about contemporary scholarly writing, not tendering a book review.
He has therefore suppressed this particular book’s title and author lest
he appear to single out a certain scholar merely for uttering the
gibberish exacted of the whole cult.~Ed.
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Look Homeward, Angela
The following circular was marked, "Please
distribute and post," when it arrived in our e-mail this past
spring. Since our objective is not to deride any single individual or
group, we have suppressed most of the names which appear in the
announcement. We may confide without being accused of mean-spiritedness,
perhaps, that the proposal originates in a certain Canadian institution’s
Centre for Feminist Research.
Call for Papers, deadline extended
Diaspora, Memory and Silence:
Who Calls Canada Home?
We anchor the debate of changing diasporic
(transnational) identities to Canada, but, meanwhile, we question space,
place, and location as geopolitical manifestations, historical events
and metaphorical imagined communities. The boundaries of homes are often
remembered as sites of historicized struggles; in addition nuanced
identities present new possibilities for articulating anti-racist,
post-colonial identities or for critiquing the limits of modernity.
In this interdisciplinary conference we seek to focus
on interpretations of "home" and "homeland" within
the Diaspora, in the widest possible sense. When individuals leave
"home" they may experience a poignant loss of culture,
history, language-indeed a way of life. Our focus is on "loss"
and its remembrance.
While some may find solace in memories, others may
feel that memories are constant reminders of sorrow and suffering
endured in the "home" and "homeland." While silence
is a possible response to "loss" of "home" or
"homeland" (as well as one’s known and familiar identity),
it also generates possibilities of "new identities" and a
state of "double consciousness."
In this conference we seek to explore the hybridity
encoded in "memory" and remembering, and its expression and
representation in literature, film, music, personal narratives and life
writing. We invite papers that seek to move the concept of Diasporas
further, with particular reference to gender and class. Some of the
questions we want to ask are: is the Diasporic transnational individual
necessarily an intellectual or does the term apply equally to all? Do
women experience life in the Diaspora differently from men? Is the
essential self-expressed in a hybrid identity rooted in ethnicity? Is
hybridity a binary opposite of "indigenousness?" Is there a
relationship between hybridity and anti-racism, and hybridity, and
nationality? What is it? For the transnational migrant on the borders of
a nation or an experience, where and what is considered
"home"? How is the "homeland" configured in
narrations of the past?
Targets for the indignant grammarian sail past like
clay pigeons from some skeet-shooting machine run amuck. One would have
expected a Canadian, at least, to be able to quote a single word without
enclosing a comma or period within the marks: this Canadian cannot
even keep the question mark out of quotes consistently. Then there’s the
merciless transformation of rare words like "diaspora" into
plurals and adjectives. (Can "diasporize" be far away? "Narratize"
reared its ugly head long ago, though it is not as reverend as this writer’s
rather blasé "historicize".) And, by all means, let us not
write anything so quaint and proper as "indigeny" when we might
peel off some indigestible hunk of a word like "indigenousness".
The quotation marks will get it past muster. What the heck, just quote
everything: "home", "homeland"… and how about "centre"?
Isn’t there gross presumption in suggesting that a particular place is
somehow "home" to feminist studies? Better make that
"studies".
What are the odds that the question, "Do women
experience life in the Diaspora differently from men?" will be found
to have an affirmative answer?
All gibes and quibbles aside, however, the document
strikes us as a pathetic piece of self-indictment—pathetic on two
counts. First, there is pathos in the assumption that the loss of home—of
childhood, of innocence, of high hopes, of protective love—which we all
experience as we grow up is somehow a geopolitical (and almost certainly
patriarchal) plot. One must always wince when one sees adults in such
denial. It’s like watching a forty-something woman weep because the
teddy bear her grandma made her has been lost. Naturally, the display
makes one feel sad. One thinks of one’s own past, of how much is now
gone forever. Ní feicfaimid a leithéid arís, as many an old
Irishman has said (some probably in Canada): "We won’t see their
like again." But a grand gathering, not to commemorate the
snows of yesteryear, but to indict the culprit responsible for melting
them… aw, come on!
Secondly, there’s the self-contradiction so common in
contemporary literary studies as to be typical (perhaps requisite?) of
them. Follow along. IF national boundaries are a manipulative
construct of dominant cultures—propaganda, in effect—THEN we
should indeed make little of them. This is often precisely what an
educated person is called to do: it is why Socrates labeled himself a cosmopolites.
But our conferees are not-so-subtly invited to conclude that alienation
from home makes recent immigrants especially sensitive to the common
humanity of others not privileged to be part of the "Mayflower"
set. (Heaven forbid, of course, that the phrase "common
humanity" should appear even within quotation marks.) Now, such
sensitivity is surely a good thing. THEREFORE, an enlightened
project of liberating people far and wide from their silly regional
allegiances would seem to undermine the creation of sensitive souls. EITHER
the concept of home is a fraud whose victims are needlessly suffering, OR
it has a certain moral usefulness in rendering the exiled more aware of
what really counts. But the female protagonist of this script is at once a
victim for having been gulled into loving one mountain more than another
and a hero for lending her sympathetic ear to weeping slaves and refugees
out on the steppe where she has been shanghaied. Wasn’t Meryl Streep in
that one?
The honest, direct approach to this conference’s
topic would be to observe that the colorful dialect in which our
grandparents corrected us, the intricate way in which we grew up
celebrating the new year’s arrival, and the songs and games laced
through our childhood memories are all part of what makes us unique. To
deplore such uniqueness and seek to give us all the same past—or seek to
erase everyone’s past—is probably almost as idiotic in conception as
it would be despotically overweening in execution. At the same time, the
kaleidoscopic variety of our past years cannot conceal a common baggage of
naive expectations and resurgent hopes—of faces and places lost forever
in this world combined with intimations of immortality fed by the pain of
such losses. We are human beings, one and all. The academy continues to
turn the basic truths of our nature inside-out. As we approach the
half-century mark since the first ravages of "relevance" upon
the humanities curriculum, the professorial élite shows few signs of
awakening to the most essential limits of life: childhood, adulthood,
senility, death… male and female, this skin and not that one, this
tongue and not that one, this height, that weight, those eyes and hair.
What can never be made over must be made over, or at least incessantly
lamented, while what is eternal and transcending must be denied to the
last barricade.
Meanwhile, the human condition grows a little more
opaque to self-anointed literary scholars, sympathy in this world of
bulldozed homes and broken families becomes rarer than ever, and the
Western academy draws closer to fatal overdose as it pops one
anti-depressant after another.
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Daggerpoints and Loggerheads, Part Two:
The Twentieth Century’s Fatal Division
into Ideological Camps
by
John R. Harris
Argumentum pessimi turba est~
"The crowd’s will embodies the worst
conclusion."
Seneca, De Vita Beata 2.2
In the previous issue of Praesidium, I alleged
that much of the twentieth century’s misery stemmed from its persistent
submission of complex issues to yes-or-no litmus tests and, with
complementary perversity, its obfuscation of very basic moral choices as
insoluble conundrums. I further alleged that such topsy-turviness
reflected the largely successful attempts of egotistical, unprincipled
intellectuals to manipulate newly "empowered" throngs of
constituents whose rudimentary education, quite frankly, left them pawns
in any real power struggle. In the present essay, I wish to proceed from
abstract argument to a limited review of certain historical facts of the
past century--facts I have come to know best through novelists and
essayists. Where all such primary sources have been cited, by the way, the
translations are my own.~J.H.
My son has reached the stage where all that pertains to
soldiers and soldiering fascinates him. He had crossed this threshold,
probably, even before Operation Iraqi Freedom resuscitated patriotism and
plastered images of troops and tanks all about us. My generation, of
course, has a tendency to reticence in such matters—and I like to think
that my own aversion to gung-ho enthusiasm isn’t so much the long shadow
of the Vietnam War as it is a reasoned, perfectly manly distaste for
modern warfare. A bullet in the brain from nowhere…shrapnel through the
rib cage before you can get your face in the dirt… this doesn’t sound
to me like the stuff of valor and moral will. As well to display your
valor by flying a kite in a thunderstorm. What does survival prove,
besides your good luck? What does victory in a firefight prove, besides
the steadiness of your fingers and the dryness of your powder? What speed
does the righteous wrath of a good cause add to your missile, or what
punch the toughened sinew of Spartan training to your land mines? These
are not scenes from a Homeric confrontation: they are turns in a game of
craps. No wonder small-bodied women, having lived through boot camp, can
do as good a job as a veritable Ajax. It’s all in the eyes and fingers:
align the cross-hairs and then press the button.
Yet I allow my son his bloody combat missions through
den and bedroom, and I even participate. I am happy to see that he desires
to be brave. He will learn soon enough that bravery in the contemporary
world must be measured less by resigning oneself to an invisible, lethal
hail than by actively reasserting control over a culture of push-button
annihilation. I keep thinking of all those African and Arabic adolescents
one sees on TV wheeling their jeeps through harrowed villages and firing
rounds into mid-air. How often is there someone sensible enough, and man
enough, to say to them, "Stop wasting your ammo before one of you
takes it in the back"?
War is complex, and modern war is immensely complex. It
has become a commonplace to begin any explanation of the West in Rubble
(also known as postmodernism) by gesturing toward two devastating world
wars. I might as well go through the polite motions myself. The West’s
preeminent powers—the nations which gave us the Enlightenment and
scientific method and the glories of cathedrals and symphonies—could not
have more willfully slaughtered their youth in the Great War, and with
less regard for anything like fair play or humanity (let alone chivalry),
if they had lined all their young men up along the Tarpeian Rock and dealt
a push to every other one. The means of slaughter were ignoble, even
cowardly, and spared the brave no more than the faint-hearted, the
generous no more than the vile, the wise no more than the foolish. A
millennium of classical heritage leavened with Celtic/Germanic fantasy and
Arabic techniques of calculation had at last risen to produce… what? A
fearsomely vainglorious and repugnant adventure in nation-building which
exacted vast sacrifices of able men to meat-grinding machines.
The Second World War, of course, is somewhat more
tolerable in retrospect. If its machines were more deadly, they were set
into motion precisely to save innumerable droves of non-combatants from
the slaughterhouse; and the fighting, besides, was highly mobile, so that
no Maginot Line evolved wherein butchery could be concentrated with
inconceivably hellish intensity. (The Pacific Theater, be it noted, was
not so "clean" in this regard.) The cost of such mobility upon
Europe’s artistic and architectural treasures, however, was
proportionately greater. Cities far from the front were bombed into powder—great
cities with structures which had stood, in some cases, for two thousand
years. Civilians, naturally, were also implicated in "collateral
damage" much more than they had been before. In fact, there was
nothing collateral about Hitler’s bomb- and rocket-attacks on London.
For the first time, women and children were tactical targets. An ancient
or medieval city under siege would sometimes send its non-combatants under
escort into the mountains. The city itself was the target, whether for its
strategic position or its symbolic representation of authority. Now, the
objective was to dishearten the other side by shredding sweethearts and
infants. If the British had bundled off their families to one narrow,
aerially identifiable site in the Cotswolds, Hitler would have pointed his
V2’s there.
Is our nightmare, then, just a matter of technology?
Could we still rest easy as long as combatants were hacking away each
other’s limbs with blades or rather ineffectually depeditating horses
with careering cannonballs? Was the Thirty Years War, with all its
carnage, looting, and rapine, insufficient to "postdate" the
seventeenth century’s modernism just because it produced no mushroom
clouds? I can hardly imagine those who style themselves the conscience of
our time being comfortable in a distant past when temples and cathedrals
were not ransacked; for such salutary taboos were undergirded by rigorous
belief systems (often implicated in the causes of war), by a social order
which involved steep class hierarchy, and by a political order which held
authority to be divinely predestined and sanctioned. Turn the clock back
beyond the cataclysmic abilities of Western technology, and you inevitably
land in a Shangri-La where poor farmers are turned out to starve in a
ditch while His Lordship carries off their pubescent daughters.
Certainly the scope of our technology should alarm us.
I have already expressed my own opinion (which was around long before
Orlando tossed Cimosco’s blunderbuss into the Zuyder Zee) that gunpowder
is more akin chemically to cowardice than bravery. Is it such a bad thing,
though, that our technological culture is forcing us all toward a
spiritual definition of courage? How few of us would have discovered that
definition, otherwise! By all means, indict Western modernity for turning
us into cowards, into uniform drones, into servants of the machines that
were to serve us—but do not be so obtuse as to suggest that we were
forced where our own perverse inclinations did not already lean. Our
technology has merely clarified the cloudy image in the mirror. Now that
we see it to be a rather ugly image, some of us want to blame the filter.
The most brilliant, most appalling achievement of the West’s twentieth
century is that it photographed our human soul with x-ray precision: not
our culture, not itself—the West—in the camera’s springs and
shutters, but the diseased soul of the human being supplied with all the
toys and wings and thunderbolts he ever dreamed of.
To cringe from this portrait rather than facing it
"like a man" is the posture which contemporary Europe has
adopted. It is the "postmodern" posture: blame the springs and
shutters for working as they were made to work, not the face for having
warts. If my accusation is true, then the two world wars are really less
causative of Europe’s befuddlement than symptomatic of it. Europe, that
is, was already falling under an evil spell before Franz Ferdinand was
assassinated. The dark florition (if I may attempt a very fine
distinction) of this evil seed was not a Flanders stream awash in human
blood or a Pacific skyline pushing up mushrooms: it was not the
destruction per se. In fact, much of the destruction, at least in
World War Two, was incurred to resist the evil’s relatively orderly,
undisruptive proliferation—the tidy discretion of mass graves and death
camps. The evil was not what the technologically sophisticated trigger
unleashed. The evil was in the finger which itself itched with a wrath and
an ex nihilo creativity purloined from that old god of Western
Christendom, that god pronounced dead. It was ideology. It was classical
hybris liberated from classical condemnation—and armed, this time, with
the Analytical Age’s bottled earthquakes, yet as divested of that age’s
early moral philosophers now as mad Orlando of his clothes.
To assist me in diagnosing this dreadful disease, I
shall turn throughout the rest of my essay, not to historians (for I’m
afraid I haven’t much trust in recent history-writing, which itself too
often drudges for ideology), but to an array of personal accounts by
Europeans who lived through—or sometimes perished in—the last century’s
miseries. 1
I hasten to emphasize that I offer this brief review only
tentatively. I don’t pretend to have uncovered definitive,
incontrovertible answers, but only to have discovered that the true
answers must be far more intricate than those I was taught as a youth or
continue to hear as an adult. No doubt, my self-deprecation and my
gathering clouds of witness bestow upon me a passing resemblance to those
very postmodern analysts (or anti-analysts) I so disdain. The difference
is that I produce my dissenting witnesses, not to fray the edges of
orthodox explanations and uphold a kind of agnosticism, but to puncture
holes in ideological explanations (which, yes, are sometimes also
orthodox) as a way of letting the truth’s light sift through. I believe
these questions have true answers. The truth does not dissolve beneath
contrary points of view, it seems to me, but cries out, rather, for a
remove which explains the close-up appearance of contrariness in all the
testimony. I have often had occasion to recite to myself Saint-Exupéry’s
most elegant, almost mystical formula: "From surmounted contradiction
to surmounted contradiction, I make my way toward the silence of questions
and hence to beatitude."2
What I came to appreciate only recently was
how much this very man, who finally gave his life to free Europe from
fascist terror, was reviled as he lived and vilified after he died by both
communists and Gaullists for "fence-sitting"—i.e., for singing
neither stale refrain. Postmodernism, too, for inflexible and programmatic
ends, does not want us to achieve an enlightening remove from petty
obstacles. Beneath its insinuation that ideologues cannot be rejected
through right reason lurks a much-coveted license to hatch yet more
ideology.
My son has been reading a book about D-Day called We
Were There at the Normandy Invasion. 3
Published in 1956, the story
represents what I immediately recognized as the "party line" in
my own education, and what continues to be far and away the most widely
circulated assessment of France at that historical moment. Almost to a man
(goes this view), the French detested the Nazi occupation forces. Pampered
aristocrat and penurious farmer, worldly Parisian and naïve provincial,
Catholic priest and communist factory worker—all applauded the arrival
of Allied troops, all deplored the Vichy government and its collaborators,
all passed a note or hid a fugitive occasionally for the French
Underground (or maquis). Such is the image I imbibed as a child
from TV shows like Combat and movies like The Longest Day
and Is Paris Burning?; and such is the image, I remarked in
watching a recent PBS documentary, that American journalists still purvey.
The French hated their Nazi invaders, and they loved their Yankee
liberators. For that fleeting moment, at least, in the middle of the
century, the sons of Lafayette and the sons of Washington could toast
their common love of mankind in a bottle of rich amber Sauterne.
Now, there’s no question that the French have never
forgiven the Germans for the Franco-Prussian War—or certainly hadn’t,
anyway, in 1938. Frenchmen would have detested a billeted force which
spoke German even if it arrived with an olive branch and a promise to
defer to local government (circumstances which roughly obtained in the
euphemistic zone libre). That the French almost universally
rejected Nazism’s social objectives, on the other hand, is simply not
true. The Parti Populaire Français (or PPF) was little more than a
Nazi Party without German baggage: the same national socialist agenda, the
same loathing of American capitalism, the same suspicion of Jews and
Freemasons. The PPF amassed quite a following throughout France. It taxed
the Vichy government not only with sycophancy toward the Germans but also
with an inadequately aggressive intervention into social and economic
issues. Due to such sentiments among many of the rank and file, French
authorities zealously rounded up tens of thousands of Jews for Nazi
boxcars and gas chambers (as detailed in another kind of film, Mr.
Klein). France was by most accounts more forthright in handing over
her Jewish citizens than the Reich’s comrades in arms, Italy and
Denmark. Our own troops were scarcely greeted in Paris with open arms: GI’s
were not safe in the city immediately after the Liberation. My
father-in-law once told me that he and his buddies were ordered never to
stroll about the streets of Paris alone—that they could expect to be
treated by certain inhabitants as enemies. After half a century, he
retained a reticence about France which bordered on mistrust. Clearly,
something besides wine was being spilled on those Parisian furloughs.
Among other shady types, members of the Milice (Vichy’s secret police—a
kind of French Gestapo) continued to lurk about.
If I appear now to be stoking the anti-Gallic sentiment
so widespread among Americans these days, then my readers have falsely
anticipated my purpose. I say only that France was far from universally
rejecting the politics of Hitler and Mussolini—that the tribal
antagonism between Gaul and Teuton did not readily overflow into the realm
of ideas. But if France nourished substantial sympathy for fascism, is
that not the most valid of reasons to denounce her? Well, then… denounce
the Vatican, too, and Roman Catholicism. Denounce families with a de
before their name whose land (often shrunken to just enough acreage for a
dilapidated château) had been passed along for generations. Denounce
"sons of the earth" who had risen from their humble state to
become owners of tiny but prosperous local concerns—bottlers of mineral
water or packagers of fertilizer. Denounce Protestants who led decent
little lives around their small, proper families. Denounce bureaucrats and
petty functionaries—gendarmes and railways conductors—who kept the
status quo running smoothly. Denounce everyone who was not a card-carrying
communist: for this array of "everyone else" constitutes the
list of those whom Stalin’s emissaries had slated for execution when the
time was right. The proscribed well knew that they were marked men. 4
They
had felt the tremors from Russia, they had read brochures, and they had
listened to bearded firebrands spouting flames on street corners. However
repellent they found the upstart Austrian Corporal, he had not publicly
vowed to pillage their homes and stand their sons and daughters up against
the wall.5
The exporting of Soviet communism, in short, gave
fascism an appeal which it would otherwise never have enjoyed. Communism
had trenchantly, obtusely, and—in a word—ideologically simplified a
host of complex issues in what I have called elsewhere a "nullifying
opposition". 6
Either the passer-by was to embrace every tenet of the
faith without equivocation, or he was to receive a bullet between the
eyes. No modification was permissible: no compromises, no prisoners. The
example of pilot-author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry splendidly illustrates
the trials of a responsible Frenchman wanting no part of either extreme.
During his self-imposed exile in the United States (a period which saw him
dash off The Little Prince therapeutically), Saint-Exupéry voiced
precisely the sentiments common to most Americans and largely responsible
for their embracing of the war effort. France, wrote Saint-Ex in Pilote
de Guerre, was part of Western culture, and the West was all about
making sense of individual sacrifice in a metaphysical context. The
collectivism of both Hitler and Stalin, by contrast, outraged Western
tradition.
This moral system [of serving the collective] will
clearly explain why the individual should sacrifice himself for the
Community. It will no longer explain, without linguistic artifice, why
the Community should sacrifice itself for a single man—why it is
equitable that a thousand should die to deliver just one man from unjust
imprisonment. We still remember why, but we are forgetting little by
little. And yet it is in this principle, above all, which clearly
distinguishes us from an anthill, that our greatness resides. 7
For his pains in reconciling America to the war’s
costs, Saint-Exupéry was ostracized by de Gaulle’s circle (for which
the annihilation of all collaborators was as important as the repelling of
Nazism). The General himself, who constantly chafed at Eisenhauer’s
prudent direction, would never hear of honoring his nation’s beloved
aviator-poet during his long post-war term as France’s president. The
Nazis, at whose barbarity Pilote was specifically aimed, were
mild-mannered by comparison, at least to begin with. Since Saint-Ex’s
pages never actually mentioned Hitler’s name, the work circulated widely
in occupied France for months before fascist censors were able to read
between the lines!
Under such circumstances, one can hardly marvel that
well-meaning people (if less thoughtful than Saint-Exupéry) felt
virtually coerced at gunpoint into loathsome alliances. There were some,
inevitably, who played both ends against the middle with consummate
cynicism. Jean Dutourd’s satirical novel, Au Bon Beurre,
describes how a family of bourgeois shopkeepers manages to profiteer from
the Occupation so successfully that it pulls off marriage into the
aristocracy while also acquiring Gaullist sympathies at just the right
time. Yet even quite principled people could find themselves on the wrong
side of a jagged moral divide. Titled landowners who sincerely worried
over the sharecropper’s plight but were not prepared to see their homes
burned down… village priests who had devoted their lives to the poor but
were not prepared to see their faith exterminated… such were many of
fascism’s uneasy, deeply regretful allies. 8
Unfortunately, the fascist
agenda was often advanced as inflexibly as the communist. The troubled
consciences of fascist "acquiescents" must have led more than
one to pass secrets to the maquis—an organization run mostly by
the Communist International’s FTP (Franc-Tireurs et Partisans) in
central and southern France.
Nevertheless, the votaries of Bolshevism rather
consistently managed to surpass those of fascism in hideous and wholesale
brutality. Hitler gassed his millions—and Stalin machine-gunned and
starved his dozen millions. In places like Spain, the lessons of the
nightmarish comparison were clear to moderate minds like the fictitious
speaker’s through whom Emilio Romero wrote his testimony (in terms, be
it stressed, which often echo Saint-Exupéry’s):
The tactic of violence imposed upon the modern
political world by communism and fascism, with its terrorist razzias,
its civil militia formations, its dogmatic fanaticism, its radical
dialectic, its doctrine of attaining power through revolution, mass
uprising, and assault—and, above all, its corruption of the state into
an "apparatus" for integrating the community, as systematic
and inexorable as celestial mechanics—all of this had produced an
incredible devaluation of the individual and an icy superiority toward
personal sentiments.
Communist doctrine particularly shines in this
regard. The community is adored, that inanimate abstraction, to the
point of forging ferocious and grotesque gods like those of antiquity;
and among the sacrifices that are exacted figure the following: removing
the sexual member of male victims; thrusting crucifixes through that of
assassinated females; hanging the breasts of women on the walls of
barns, storehouses, or silos; throwing men into deep pits with heavy
stones tied about their necks; burying them alive while allowing an arm,
mangled and blood-streaked from agonzing torture, to show above ground;
violating women in front of their bound-up husbands; tying bodies to the
tails of horses and galloping on these barbarically until the animals
are exhausted and the victims have disintegrated like rag dolls; or
maybe leaving the victims nude or blind or one-armed in a kind of
partial sacrifice, so that in them is published a torture greater than
death. 9
To be sure, Spain and Russia of the early twentieth
century seem to have been crucibles wherefrom the greatest horrors of war
crawled forth readily. This was no doubt because such horrors are both
multiplied and minimized (to those immediately involved, that is) in
countries where life in normal times is cheap and death commonplace. Yet
if one examines one of the countries where fascism quickly took the upper
hand, one seeks in vain for mass graves of Stalinesque proportions. The
slaughter of the Jews did not begin at once with Hitler’s rise to power,
was scarcely prosecuted at all on German soil, and was either disbelieved
or entirely unsuspected by the rank and file of the German nation as it
happened (and long after it happened, in some especially thick-headed
cases). As for citizens of a respectably Arrian stamp, many would allege
later that they were afraid to protest or resist orders, and executions of
"conscientious objectors" certainly took place. There was no
wholesale annihilation of dissidents, however—a fact which would
invalidate the said defense of fearing reprisal when it was advanced by
several Nazi officers and collaborators.
Or consider Italy. All of the novels I have ever read
about Italy under fascism were written by its enemies, yet even these do
not paint a ghastly picture. Ugo Pirro’s L’Isola in Terraferma
follows the travail of a destitute Sicilian family ostracized for the
father’s refusal to renounce communism and embrace Mussolini. The son
(who narrates the story) is expelled from school for not wearing fascist
colors, and the father’s iron-working business almost founders. It
survives a particularly lean stretch only because the village priest
places a timely order—a priest who well knows, as does everyone in town,
that Papà Santini is "a militant, mature, conscientious, renowned
atheist". 10
There are incidents of hazing and moments of lying low; but
of brutal assault or executions over a ditch or patrol cars rolling
through the streets with mounted machine guns, we find no trace. The clear
implication throughout the book, rather, is that several of the Santini’s
neighbors are far from infatuated with fascism and march to its drum only
to avoid the same social and economic persecution which makes this family
stand out. The father, for that matter (despite the author’s attempt to
present him as otherwise), is more than a little ludicrous in his
coffee-house harangues of fellow communists (there are a few), more than a
little pathetic in his window-sill dreams of the revolution, and more than
a little despicable in his forcibly detaining a wife and daughter from
attending Mass. With enemies of authoritarian dictatorship like this, who
needs Mussolini?
Carlo Bernari’s Le Radiose Gironate offers a
much more detailed picture of mainland, urban Italy under Il Duce,
and the novel’s tenor, if not exactly resonant with communism, is no
less dissonant with fascism. The narrator has actually completed his
required military service as the story opens (as did a great many young
men who had no special enthusiasm for anything that the military was up
to). Yet when his childhood friend Andrea comes skulking about in search
of a place to hide, he quickly lends a helping hand. Eventually his bad
company lands him in hot water with the notorious chief of police,
Quattropani, who calls him in (not at gunpoint, by the way) for
interrogation. When the young man replies that he has never heard of any
Andrea Sacco, he realizes that he has stepped in a snare.
"Too much certainty!" he told me. "You’ve
made a slip."
He moved from behind the desk, gulped the last
sugared drops of Carmelina’s coffee (I recognized the green cup), and
said, "It’s never prudent to answer with such conviction."
He turned toward me, lighting a cigarette, and drew the first puffs from
it with such relish that the desire for one seized me; but hardly had he
placed the pack in my hands when he bolted up shaking his big hand.
"Oh, no—you’re not getting out of here with
just a friendly little chat!"
He caused the cigarettes to slip out of my fingers.
They went rolling all across the carpet. In trying to gather the most
wayward, I found myself kneeling, as it were, at his feet. He loomed
enormous over me. Only then did I feel that he could crush me. He
profited from my confusion by keeping me humiliated on the ground at his
feet.
"So that name doesn’t mean anything to you?
And you’ve never seen the man? Well, then… let’s take it from the
top." 11
A hint of a physical assault clings to this scene—but
the thumbscrews never materialize. In fact, Quattopani allows his young
quarry a restroom break shortly hereafter, and upon his return declares
coolly, "Freshened up? Well, we’ll stop here for this evening and
resume our conversation tomorrow." 12
For worse malefactors, the third
degree under hot lights, hours without food or water, a slap or two,
detention in a cold cell for a couple of days… this kind of harassment
was by no means unknown in police stations around the United States at
about the same time. The "torturing" of the young man with a
fresh cigarette would indeed send anyone into fits of laughter who had
read of what Solzhenitsyn endured.13
Significantly, I think, the book’s
single instance of deliberate, deadly percussion occurs when the shadowy
Andrea appears to have torched a gasoline depot, almost certainly maiming
or killing a few guards. Yet Andrea is a man of ideas, and hence heroic.
He is allowed a few murdered flunkies here and there, apparently, along
the way to making over the world—or a few thousand.
I do not suggest that fascism is or ever was inherently
more humane than communism. What I would emphasize, rather, is the
accommodation of certain moderating influences under the dark fascist
cloak. The Santinis escape starvation because a priest, who is wholly
unsympathetic with the father’s politics and who himself would have been
gunned down summarily in Red Square, manufactures enough employment to
keep them alive. The villainous Master Inquisitor of Bernari’s book
turns out to be restrained by something like decorum, if not manners,
because he must know, surely, that several highly respected figures of the
civilized world are propping up his cause. The likes of Sartre were able
to write away molested in occupied Paris (especially when they praised the
likes of Heidegger), a situation whose mirror-image in Moscow would have
been inconceivable. In much of Western Europe beyond Germany, decent
people sought to cut a deal with fascism because the alternative overtly
demanded their complete extermination; and the result was that, outside of
Germany, religious leaders and prosperous bourgeois and gentlemen of taste
and breeding (like the marchese in Bernari’s story, or like the
Graf von Metternich in Goering-looted Paris) made the finger on the
trigger a little less heavy. No doubt, we view these people with loathing
today—and, no doubt, we should. They temporized with rogues and thugs:
they struck a bargain with the devil. But the other devil loose in Europe
gave them little opportunity to reconsider and would have granted them
little clemency if they had considered otherwise.
To be sure, the grass-roots support of communism and
its cut-them-at-the-roots polemics are hard to understand in the
continental European context. The rural poverty in places like Sicily and
Spain was brutalizing. I recall a scene in Elio Vittorini’s Conversazione
in Sicilia (another anti-fascist classic) which—quite unconsciously,
I’m sure—echoes one of Spanish journalist Antonio Azorín’s most
poignant essays. In both cases, the authors are accompanying a caregiver
(the mother of Vittorini’s narrator is represented as a nurse, and
Azorín is curiously following his doctor friend Don Luís) on long rounds
among the poor. 14
Words of comfort, even of good cheer, are offered in
abundance—but the observer soon realizes that he is witnessing a
procession through a kind of Death Row. Confides Don Luís finally,
"I don’t know… what solution will bring this problem to general
attention. What’s certain, what’s undeniable, is that to live in this
way is impossible. We’re not living: we’re dying." The doctor
thereupon offers some dumbfounding statistics about the mortality rate in
his rustic practice due to tuberculosis and other diseases attendant upon
malnutrition.
Ruthless war, as I have said, is far more probable and
sustainable in places where the peace is just as ruthless—where slow
starvation is a way of life, and where the ailing waste away to the sound
of powerful chariots bearing the rich from manor to city to neighboring
manor. We can all comprehend how vengefulness would seep into the blood of
someone who had watched his parents or children perish in this way. What
most of us grasp less securely is that the omnipresence of death can
simply create calluses of habit upon the human heart, and that the
intolerance of needless suffering must sometimes be taught in such
circumstances. The duty of teaching falls to bourgeois convention: it is
part of that civilized routine which once separated the city from the
country, the township from the wilderness, the human world from animal
ferocity. It is a plain fact that the footsoldiers of Marxism drew a great
many recruits in the twentieth century from the latter member of this
contrast. Western Europe’s most destitute rural populations, living
always on the edge, without a past or a future, were attracted to the
Manichaean "us/them" oppositions of communism, and they were
prepared to enforce those oppositions in the most Procrustean of manners.
Urban Marxism, by contrast, was often capable of
compromise—at least as practiced by the urban poor. (The intellectuals I
shall leave for the climax of this essay, and the lowest circle of hell.)
Urban poverty was no less unsightly than rural, but it could not be
indefinitely overlooked by a bourgeoisie concerned about safe streets and
open businesses. Cutting deals was a necessity for everyone at such close
quarters: the essential concepts of multicameral elective government were,
indeed, concocted in ancient Rome’s seething urban cauldron. England,
which had no dearth of Marxist hotspurs in its own pot, was never pushed
to the brink of a Bolshevik-style revolution. Its urban politics were too
successful at defusing tension for pressures to mount toward cataclysmic
levels. (Of course, many of England’s most outspoken socialist crusaders
arose from rural constituencies in Scotland and Ireland.) Only in those
parts of Europe where rural destitution was utterly cut off from the life
of the city—as Russia’s heartland was from St. Petersburg or Calabria
was from Rome or Andulasia was from Madrid—did ferocious,
take-no-prisoners communist insurgencies occur. The well-networked city—and,
more generally, civilization—was Lenin’s worst enemy in exporting
revolution. Far from growing naturally and inevitably from the
self-annihilating progress of bourgeois capitalism, as Marx had predicted,
communism never really had a chance to catch fire and burn all before it
except on those sterile plains which the sun had just as mercilessly
seared.
We have seen this same lesson repeated in southeast
Asia, with a vengeance, throughout the second half of the twentieth
century—but my essay aspires only to autopsy the West’s collapse in
the century’s first half. I venture to propose at this point that the
ruinous "us/them" split between fascism and communism which
forced so many people of good will to select such unsavory allies was made
possible, in the first place, by masses of destitute, uneducated poor.
These masses fell easy prey to lettered and tutored demagogues in search
of raw political power to reach their own vainglorious, often megalomaniac
ends. A variant of this explanation is indeed the standard prologue to
World War One: I mean, that unscrupulous, egotistical leadership lured
France and Germany both into a slaughterhouse. I shall revisit the
circumstances of that war shortly—for, of course, it holds the key to
the second war. If I may keep backing up, however, like a detective trying
to reconstruct a crime, I would observe here that the abusive rousing of
impoverished masses is not just central to Russian, Italian, and Spanish
communism, but to German fascism, as well. The fascism of France, Italy,
and Spain was largely a reaction to the communist threat; and in Germany
of the Weimar, without doubt, fears ran the higher in that the bulging
Bolshevik dam sat just up the valley. Yet the German bourgeoisie of this
moment was strangely like the northern Mediterranean’s abject peasantry
in its extreme impoverishment. There was no German haute
bourgeoisie, compared to the European nations which had successfully
weathered the Great War. Here was an odd situation, perhaps unique in
Europe at the time: a nation without a vast rural peasantry, jeweled with
villages and cities of a substantial history, where shopkeepers and
artisans were as destitute as day laborers.
To the civilized immersion in classic letters, besides,
Germany had a dubious claim even before World War One. Certainly she
produced some of the greatest scholars in the West: yet they were
generally scholars of other traditions (Wilamowitz in Greek, Heinze in
Latin, Kuno Meyer in Irish). There was no German equivalent of the
Académie Française, there was no Colosseum or San Pietro on German soil,
and Germans had nothing closer to Shakespeare than Goethe or to Chaucer
than Wolfram von Eschenbach. Germany’s classics were the most
"folk" of any Western European nation’s (which is why she
gleamed among the romantics), and hence the least tied to anything like
the abstract, eternal rights of man. I defy anyone to show that the level
of moral sophistication in the Nibelungenlied approaches that in
Vergil’s Aeneid. The latter echoes infinitely with conflicting
duties, forcing the reader constantly to weigh the hero’s public
responsibilities against his private ones; the former so stubbornly
reveres prowess in battle that it glorifies a pair of jealous, lying,
conniving murderers for their valiant exit while killing infidels. Wrote
one votary of the old school to a German newspaper in 1929 (a blueblood—the
Graf von Schlieffen, no less), "Beautiful and uplifting experiences
are entirely absent [from All Quiet on the Western Front]. Could
there really be so many soldiers who served on the front in whose minds
only the horrid and the fearful remain, and not at least as many memories
of heroic deeds and beautiful rapture?" 15
In my own half-century of
life, I can’t recall having seen this particular justification of war in
any text since the days of the broadsword: i.e., not that it is a
necessary evil, but that it is an aesthetic, even mystical experience of
which no young man should be cheated.16
Such was the "buffer" provided by a liberal
education to many Germans even before the twentieth century’s first
great war. One can only wonder just which books Paul Bäumer is casting
aside in one of All Quiet’s most symbolic scenes. The young man
has briefly returned home on furlough. In his room, he idly begins to
thumb through the works he read as a schoolboy. Imperceptibly, the search
begins to take on something of the frantic. One book after another after
another falls into the pile at his side: at a glance, he knows that each
holds absolutely nothing whatever which bears upon his living nightmare.
How senseless is everything that was ever written,
done, or thought, if such a present as this could happen! It all must be
lies, all trivia, if the culture of thousands of years could not even
hinder these streams of blood from running, these dungeons filled with
hundreds of thousands of groans from existing. The field hospital shows
best what war is.
I’m young, I’m twenty years old, but I know
nothing of life but doubt, death, agony, and the conjuncture of
senseless surfaces with a background of misery. I see that masses of
people are driven one after another, silent, uncomprehending, dull,
obedient, and guiltless, to die. I see that the wisest brains in the
world are seeking after weapons and words to make all this yet more
refined and long-lasting. And along with me, all the men of my age here
and elsewhere, throughout the whole world, see the same thing: with me—my
whole generation is living through this. What would our fathers do if,
all of a sudden, we stood up and stepped before them and demanded an
explanation? 17
Of course, these words could be emblazoned on the
banner of postmodernism if they were not penned altogether too early.
(Along with such worthies as John Ellis, Jonathan Chaves has recently
unmasked—in the pages of Praesidium—the absurdity of
postmodernism’s claim to historical validity.) As anguishing as Bäumer’s
naïve plaint is, however, it also undermines itself. At a mere twenty
years, and having spent the last two of those years in the army, Paul
Bäumer can hardly assert much familiarity with his literary heritage,
even if his exposure to it as an adolescent had been well supervised. The
Maginot Line a failure of thousands of years of cultural evolution? Say,
rather, a betrayal of a painfully evolved culture, mostly by the military
élites of France and Germany after they had achieved a power far beyond
their range of expertise through the skillful demagoguery of their
political handlers. More about this momentarily.
Let me reemphasize that in the economic collapse
following the Treaty of Versailles, the next generation of Germans had not
even the advantage of Paul Bäumer’s heap of literary and philosophical
"trivia". 18
The grandfathers of these younger Germans continued to
live in a world of Prussian glories bearing no resemblance to the present,
their fathers lay in unmarked graves all along the Western front (or were
keeping as silent as the living dead), and they themselves absorbed only
bits and pieces of civilization haphazardly. Some of them, not
surprisingly, absorbed no civilization at all. They constituted an
uneducated mass. They were as well primed for the gross rhetorical
excesses and rigid "us/them" oppositions of a rabble-rouser as
was any swarm of poor farmers in the plaza on market day.
Even a Spanish peasant, for that matter, had some sense
of the past and of culture, perhaps a sense far superior to the
impoverished German bourgeoisie’s. Next to the universal humanity
adumbrated in thriving townships, Marxism’s greatest enemy has always
been the folk culture which it so shamelessly purloins and distorts to
host its own doctrine; for in the traditionalist, pre-literate ritual are
the seeds of universal duty and common goodness, too. Romero’s narrator
has this to say about one such rural communist recruit:
This young type of the Spanish rural communist made
me sad. He would never have been a communist by inclination. There were
deep moral reserves in the people, in their age-old games, their
innocent marriages, their "blue heaven", their domestic
intimacy, their natural way of living. Yet all of this was [tenuous]
vital and spiritual nourishment amid incredible hardships involving
economic and social structure. This situation, evolving through a life
of adaptations and discoveries, grew more painful each day. There were
communities of people and communities of animals: forced inaction,
demeaning servitude, forced labor. Teodoro was a natural product of
inadaptability to all of this, and he placed his faith in a world of
social equality and fraternal camaraderie. He was like an ancient
Christian, except without Christ. 19
One has to wonder how much more sophisticated than
Teodoro and his cousins were the young Germans who believed implicitly in
the glorious myths spun for them by Hitler’s propaganda machine. To
hearken back to an ideal golden-haired hero looks rather like atavism,
especially if one has been spoon-fed from the cradle on stories about
Siegfried and Parzival. Frankly, such debased acculturation reminds me
very much of our children’s flirtations today with time-traveling
Highlanders and laser-armed paladins: hoary legends for orphans without a
yesterday. Teodoro had yesterdays out of mind, but they were patently
severed from today. The likes of Mao and Kim Il Sung are ever ready to
secure the flapping legendary signifiers. The generation of young Germans
after the war (like our children, for different reasons) had few stories,
the most dubious of legends, and no past. Joseph Goebbels possessed all
the sophistication and charm needed to step in and sing the forgotten
lullaby.
In the inflammation both of southern and eastern Europe’s
rural peasantry and of Germany’s disenfranchised bourgeoisie, the
villain of the piece is not mainstream Western tradition, but severance
from that tradition. To be sure, in both cases, Western technology was a
material cause of misery: directly so for the Germans, who were eventually
outgunned in the Great War, and indirectly so for the peasant throngs whom
the industrial revolution had left behind. 20
Yet the coin has another side.
Western ethics and religion gravitated heavily against the
atrocities which war had sprung upon horrified onlookers; the Geneva
Convention was an early manifestation of the collective outrage. As for
places like rural Spain and Sicily, technology merely needed more time to
address the problem, and was indeed inhibited from doing so sometimes by
local superstition. In another of his classic essays, Azorín writes of
how the Spanish peasant refuses to irrigate lest the water dissolve his
soil’s nutrients and refuses to plant anti-erosive trees lest
seed-eating birds come to nest in them!21
The real villain of the piece, of course, is not one
who poisons water, but who poisons minds. In both impoverished rural
Europe and Germany, a starving mass of people was not turned into a
murderous horde by machinery, but by an induced blindness to common
humanity. And in both cases, those who induced the blindness were
themselves capable of seeing quite clearly. They created myth and lore and
music and philosophy almost ex nihilo with consummate cynicism in
order to fashion a human wedge behind which they might thrust their own
images deep into the world’s heart.
Was this, then, the inevitable outcome of Western
culture, as postmodernism maintains? In a sense, the answer must be,
"Yes." Without the Christian valorization of every individual
soul as equally precious to God, and without the Hellenic tradition (with
which Christianity fused early on) of prizing every citizen as a
repository of talent and reason, there would have been no arduous ascent
toward alleviating the misery of ordinary people and recognizing their
right to self-governance. Western tradition cared for the underprivileged
as no other culture has done in history. Yet transitions were not always
smooth. Populations which had been relatively comfortable before changes
settled in were sometimes nudged to the bottom of the pyramid. A
preeminent example is the hearty yeoman farmer’s conversion into an
uprooted vagabond, courtesy of the industrial revolution. By pressing for
universal political enfranchisement even as it was creating restless
droves of urban poor and sad provinces of starving sharecroppers, Western
civilization produced one of the most dangerous weapons in human affairs:
a huge block of political power whose members were without the resources
necessary to practice political responsibility—without the sense of
history necessary to distinguish truth from fiction, without the
rhetorical ability necessary to challenge popular opinion openly, without
the logical acuity necessary to reject a foolish opinion even privately.
Such masses of people were not at all a finished product, of course, from
the Western perspective. They were to be universally educated so that they
might be universally responsible—not educated with indoctrination, but
taught to read and write, primarily, so that their access to ideas might
encounter no limits and that they ability to appropriate and modify ideas
might be refined.
But the last chapter of this vision has never been
written in the public forum and at the polls. Instead, ambitious men
seized the opportunity to mobilize the mass’s strength long before its
"mass" character wore off in a series of individual awakenings.
I suggest that ideology, as a term possessed of meaningful rigor, was born
in this historical moment of cynical, ruthless hijacking. An ideology is
an experimental (i.e., unnatural) social design of such profound
incoherence yet of such militant rigidity that it must resist honest,
intelligent scrutiny with evasion, defamation, intimidation, and—in
extreme cases—physical suppression. 22
Now, how in the world could such a
thing as this ever come to be: an untested, volatile mixture of ideas
which proposes to validate itself by exterminating everything not it?
At the very least, the conditions required for so monstrously arrogant an
undertaking to gain a serious audience include the following: 1) an
uncommonly gullible and manipulable mass of followers, 2) an uncommonly
charismatic and unprincipled leader or clique of leaders, and 3) a
widespread discontent with the status quo. Contrary to the wag’s wisdom,
gullible masses have not stood ready throughout Western history. The
peasantry of a medieval baron would have been little inclined to hear out
some barb-tongued Thersites. Common folk, then and long thereafter, were
convinced that God had intended them to be peasants, and almost as
convinced that they needed looking out for and that their lord was doing a
tolerable job of it. Indeed, discontent with the status quo is always
largely a matter of perception in human affairs. Until the Enlightenment’s
respect for the individual had percolated thoroughly through Europe, one
would have to say that discontent among the lower classes was
astonishingly rare. The poor had no reason to expect anything but poverty,
nor the weak anything but weakness. An enormous amount of religion around
the world—varieties of quietism hatched by Confucius, the Buddha, Zeno,
Epicurus, and even certain Christian mystics—was truly that opiate which
Marx deplored in it… and, for better or worse, the drug worked.
The twentieth century brought all three elements
together. Large masses of rural poor and (after World War One) urban petite
bourgeoisie were available for exploitation. Furthermore, these masses
had become convinced by the nineteenth century’s brilliantly successful
progressivism that their lot was genuinely miserable. Perhaps most
importantly, a new kind of rogue was on the loose who excelled at
exploiting just such wounded souls. But how could roguery have ever been
in short supply among human beings, any more than poverty? Why now, at the
turn of the century, were exponents of airy battlefield glories like Paul
Bäumer’s elders—and, for that matter, like the French propagandist
Maurice Barrès—acquiring such vast influence over the general populace,
and this even before the Great War and a global depression had reduced
elements of the European middle class to a vulnerable penury?
The example of Barrès is instructive. A littérateur
of mediocre talents, he came into his own thanks to the newspaper,
that mass-produced and consumed genre of the written word which was the
only reading a great many people ever did. In the darkest days of the war,
his saccharine, jingoistic exhortations diverted the French public from
the obvious fact that their sons were being slaughtered without visible
progress on the map. "Even before she has shed her rain of blood upon
our nation, war had made us feel her regenerative powers—only by her
approach!" Barrès effused upon the outbreak of hostilities. "It’s
a resurrection!" 23
His columns leaned heavily upon communications which
he claimed to receive from young men at the front—among whom his own son
was serving—and also upon letters which he surely received from parents
solaced by his exhortations. No doubt, Barrès was not the least deceived
of his readers: most fathers naturally wanted to believe that the living
hell into which they had cast their children had redemptive qualities. All
in all, the apologist for such endeavor, if he is also a parent, must be
considered a figure more pitiful than execrable.
Two crucial components in Barrès’s case, however,
account for why the crowd-harrying dog was now having his day. One is
journalism. No writer of Barrès’s meager talent would have achieved
celebrity a century earlier, when writing was still the province of a
highly educated élite and reading the scarcely larger domain of a small
social minority. Enormous audiences were occasionally reached in the early
nineteenth century through the direct address of such fiery orators as
Ireland’s Dan O’Connell; yet these stentorian vocalists were almost
invariably undergirded by pamphleteering. (A source who claimed to have
attended Dan’s grand event at Tara Hill, where a million people were
said to have gathered, confessed that not one in fifty men heard a word of
the speech.) 24
The journalist, thanks to inexpensive printing techniques and
mushrooming literacy rates, could reach millions upon millions. Even the
incorrigibly illiterate could find a friend with a newspaper who was
willing to read aloud to bystanders. The deficiencies of style in this
cheap copy when compared, say, to Addison and Steele’s essays only
enhanced the potency of the former, for the new reading public lacked the
literary background necessary to support a fine between-the-line analysis.
The better the editorialist used the idiom of the masses, the closer he
was attended. The blunter his distinctions, the more effective their
hammering. It was as a journalist that Mussolini began his self-promoting
career in earnest.25
I do not mean to equate journalism with roguery. It is
a sad fact, though, that good journalism, today as ever, must be
championed by conscientious publishers and curmudgeonly editors against
the raw economics of pleasing the masses. Most people do not have time for
a lengthy investigation into the issues, and perhaps many do not have the
learning or the keenness to understand the details of such an
investigation. The journalist, therefore, is forever being tugged by the
gravity of quick consumption and easy comprehension into short-cuts and
shallowness. If he himself is seldom the rogue who would ride the mass’s
swell to elective office or a lieutenancy of the revolution, he is
nevertheless indispensable to such characters. Whether they have him in
their pay or have enlisted his fervent allegiance to their movement, he is
the pawn who has made kings throughout the past century.
To the journalist’s presence must be added the
philosopher’s absence. Western culture before the nineteenth century
abounded in artists, statesmen, clergymen, landowners, and even soldiers
who could have spoken with tolerably current expertise about any subject
under the sun: ancient epic poetry, the cause of earthquakes, the latest
reports from India. With the growth of empirical science, however, came
the Age of the Specialist. Diderot’s Encyclopaedia was a last
valiant effort to encompass all human knowledge within a set of readable
volumes. Soon the learned simply had to concede that they were learned in
special areas only. One could not explore the intricacies of Greek lyric
poetry and also those of the human digestive system or of the peculiar
properties of mercury fulminate. The effect of such specialization upon
social and political leadership, I think, has been grossly undervalued: I
am not aware that it has even been widely acknowledged. For this effect
was often negative, in the sense of "indemonstrable". It could
only be calculated by considering imaginatively what was not on the
scene. To the West’s mortal loss, common-sense pronouncements upon taste
and propriety, delivered by astute, well-versed people, faded from the
twentieth century. No major figure in the sciences would have cared to
pass formal judgment on a Fauve or Cubist exhibit: he would merely say
that he was a scientist and didn’t waste his time on such things. A
priest or minister might very much want to express a formal judgment on
some new scientific theory—but he could only do so as a priest or
minister undisciplined by scientific rigor, and so his
"judgment" would slip into the category of idle opinion. By the
dawn of the twentieth century, human experience had so fragmented that
philosophy itself—the study of "what it all means"—was
disintegrating into psychology, neurology, biology, political theory, and
a slew of other fiefdoms over which no one ruler held sway.
This unfortunate condition placed more power than ever
into the lowly journalist’s hands, since to him fell the chore of
representing—briefly and simply—all the modern world’s mind-boggling
technological changes and political upheavals to the common man. The real
experts tended to draw farther and farther away from public life into
their safe cocoons. The novels of Georges Duhamel portray the consequences
of this centrifugal motion with a clarity and justice beyond any other
works that I know. Duhamel’s protagonists are typically men of science
whose goal in life is to capture some strand of an objective, eternal
truth in their antiseptic laboratories. Yet their selfless devotion
(which, of course, is often tinged with egotism) is inevitably foiled by
witless bureaucrats, sensation-seeking journalists, and ruthless
politicos. If the truth is touched at all, its feel cannot be communicated
to the masses by their cliché-heavy scribblers—and it can only be
touched at all if the researcher’s probes receive the blessing of some
suave Machiavellian who intends to twist the results to his advantage.
So the experts kept as low a profile as they could in
this new era. Responds Duhamel’s most winsome scientific daydreamer,
Laurent Pasquier, when warned of war’s imminence with the Kaiser,
"War? What war? Oh, yes, I believe… it seems to me that people are
talking about war. Why war?" 26
At least Pasquier is no Niels Bohr
plugging away in the crypts of a megalomaniac intent upon world dominion.
Yet it was the objections and reservations of such as he which might have
averted the first war.27
Instead, their élite circle retreated to truths
visible only under the microscope. Politics, geography, morality… all of
that was somebody else’s specialty. The certain outcome of the
specialist’s unheard voice was the rising chorus of the throng, stirred
by a motley crew which one traumatized survivor of the era describes thus:
"a small minority of big-shots, politicians, financiers, economists,
writers, and high priests of a nationalism which conferred all their lofty
authority on them and whose paces they thought themselves capable of
governing."28
Self-serving politicians and irrepressible exhibitionists
like Charles Péguy led the chant for revenge on the Prussians, for
glorious displays of French manhood on the battlefield.29
In the moment’s
frenzy, pacifist Jean Jaurès was assassinated (on July 31—the very day
when, thirty-one years later, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry would be shot out
of the sky, bookending France’s wartime glories in lost literary
genius). A man of learning with profound rural attachments, Jaurès
projected a socialist aura when doing so was not yet de rigueur
among intellectuals. The "taint" of cross-cultural solidarity in
his message contributed to the nationalists’ loathing of him even though
no Bolshevik menace was yet discernable. Jaurès’s fate, as one may well
imagine, bent the heads of other specialists closer to their microscopes
than ever.
Even as the war grew bogged down in a mire of bodies
and would clearly not be muscled to any conclusion within months, those
who raised a protest were few and much reviled. Guéhenno writes with dark
humor about trying to obtain a copy of Romain Rolland’s Au-dessus de
la Mêlée in the winter of 1915. Alarmed by his lieutenant’s
uniform, the bookstore’s employees seemed determined to spare him
exposure to such a demoralizing influence. "Someone had finally dared
to say ‘no’," reflects the lieutenant fifty years later—and
adds in judicious afterthought, "publicly." 30
For Rolland’s
literary protest was, it turned out, widely read, at least beyond France
and Germany (into which latter country’s tongue it was not allowed to be
translated for decades). Rolland was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1916.
Nevertheless, he passed the war years a virtual exile in Switzerland,
enduring bitter isolation from his countrymen. He had spoken too bluntly—or
without, perhaps, the simplistic bluntness of ideology, but with mere
simplicity. Though a man of the Left in his own airy fashion, Rolland was
less inclined to indict class villainy and invoke an epochal class
struggle than to beg, prod, and cajole his audience (in the most ingenuous
manner possible) to think again. He would probably have been spared
Jaurès’s bullet had he returned home; for if thousands were smuggling
about copies of his book, no one would have found therein the makings of a
manifesto.
These, then, I believe, are the essential causes of the
twentieth century’s disastrous reduction to thinking in facile
oppositions, the one wholly and immovably dedicated to the other’s
annihilation. Huge numbers of people were enfranchised to vote or
otherwise participate in the political process without having been
supplied with the literate skills needed to reach clear, independent
judgments. Media of communication evolved which were adapted to addressing
such vast audiences—and inevitably, these media were characterized by
the speed and trenchancy of their presentation rather than by detailed
accuracy. Shrewd, unscrupulous men seeking political advancement under
these circumstances exploited the power of the popular press to cast
issues in black and white and to insist that anything less than total
capitulation to "the people’s will" was a defeat. Finally, the
longer heads who might have cried foul publicly and commanded general
respect in so doing chose, instead, to flee into their narrow areas of
expertise. Even Erich Remarque (I might add by illustration) constantly
reiterated in interviews that All Quiet on the Western Front was a
modest chronicle devoid of moral or political message. While this was a
fair enough response to pacifists, communists, and others who tried to
annex the book to their propaganda, a more honest answer would have been
to address the day’s major issues rather than to evade all tags.
Remarque was so badgered by the fascists, in any case, that he at last
left the country… so wouldn’t it have been just as well to speak out
when a forum was offered?
Today, we are all very familiar with the intellectual’s
retreat into specialty. The physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project
apparently pursued their labor with an almost adolescent excitement, so
divorced were they from the looming consequences of The Bomb. 31
To his
credit, Robert Oppenheimer would later be very candid about his group’s
troubling insulation from moral reality. A sensitive and erudite man
rather than a stereotypical "mad scientist", Oppenheimer serves
as a cautionary tale to all of us who assume that no amount of
experimental crescendo would nudge our conscience into the position of a
casual onlooker. Of course, President Truman himself always maintained
that he was appalled at the atom bomb’s destructive power and had been
given no very clear idea of it in briefings. Among the victims of the
reticent specialist, besides the general populace left to sort through the
hyperbole of marketers and the reductive headlines of journalists, are
certainly the policy-makers who genuinely seek after the right choice and
are baffled by the puzzle’s many pieces.
When I mention marketing, I do not refer merely to the
"public relations" antics of office-seekers—not even primarily
to that, nowadays. The marketer is a rather disheartening blend of the
journalist ("keep it simple, stupid") and the specialist (Ronald
Reagan’s engineer of the better can-opener). He works so closely at
present with the whiz kids of "research and development" that,
in many respects, he defines their experiments. Another way of saying this
is that the specialist increasingly specializes in marketing—in problems
of satisfying very specific demands. As the unholy marriage between pure
science and industry has matured, we see more and more well-paid, very
bright technicians giving less and less thought to the broad moral
consequences of their innovations. Now automobiles are designed on the
computer with aerodynamic precision: it isn’t the designer’s job to
lift his attention from alternative curves and seams to ponder the
Greenhouse Effect or the safety of toddlers. The architect’s assignment
is to build comfortable, attractive structures—and also, perhaps,
fuel-efficient ones. Urban aesthetics or neighborhood traffic patterns,
however, lie beyond his scope. General Mills and Kelloggs want to box
cereals that provide most essential vitamins and "taste great",
too. At the same time, all the heart-friendly bran and anti-carcinogenic
fiber are neutralized by whopping doses of sugar… but staff
nutritionists have apparently not yet been presented with that variable,
and enough brown sugar glaze can sell shredded cardboard.
During my lifetime, the masses have been so titillated
with sex by the media which serve (and rule) them that almost every
toothpaste advertisement borders on pornography (that most spectacular
beneficiary of the Internet); they have been so inebriated with speed that
they accept casualty rates on their highways equivalent to those of a
major war; and they have been so bereft of will power by sugary sweetness
that obesity has reached epidemic levels. No skepticism, no moderation, no
suspicion of bright images and oratory… the same kind of
"handling" which brought the West to make a bloody trough of
Flanders has bestialized its citizens, within a century, until they do
indeed resemble animals bound for slaughter. Where are the voices of
higher inspiration and better information which ought to have restrained
us? Why is the only alternative to having our children witness strip-tease
beer commercials between innings of the All-Star Game an iron-fisted
boycott or crackdown? Why are we now warring over Sport Utility Vehicles
when, forty years ago, we could have been zoning cities and planning
railways so as to use internal combustion modestly? Why are our official
handlers now contemplating a heavy tax on burgers and fries?
This essay’s final emphasis falls not on frivolity, I
would plead, but on ignominy. From the Great War to the Fat War: in a
significant sense, I believe the West’s decline to be very justly
capsulated in the contrast. As our media of mass communication have grown,
our societies—on both sides of the Atlantic—have become more and more
wedded to trends, fads, and other lunges to the extreme. Critical reason
has not kept pace with political freedom: the more rights we have
acquired, the less sobriety and restraint we have learned. Now the actual
literacy rates of societies throughout the Western world are plunging—willfully
plunging, as people choose to be served up the pre-cooked, highly
seasoned fare of the mass media rather than to feed their own intellectual
hunger. The mob has long ago descended from whatever dubious nobility
might be found in the clash of sabers. Today it is finessed, instead, by
promises to liberate its "sex life" of all inhibition and
pathological side-effect, to liberate its "road life" of all
fuel shortage and physical risk, and to liberate its "food life"
of all blandness and ill health. These promises are patently
contradictory; but the unreflective mass which we have become cannot even
perceive the contradictions—or cannot, perhaps, muster the will power,
the intellectual honesty, to register the perception.
Yet experts and specialists (some will object) are
hardly in short supply on soap box and bull horn as we swing from extreme
to extreme like a loose boom. Ban all motor vehicles, say the
"green" crusaders, many of whom have their doctorate. Ban all
genetically altered crops, say the nutrition fanatics with an equal
appearance of authority. In fact, the specialist brimming with advice has
never been completely absent from the past century’s scene of decline.
Particularly since World War Two, the Sartrean model of engagé
intellectual has attracted heavy investment, with its stock spiking in the
late sixties. Such "guidance", however, is by no means what I
would designate as informed, mitigating judgment. On the contrary, it has
inevitably been characterized by its provoking of the general public
toward extreme conclusions—its instigation, sometimes, of riots and
revolutions. Far from wise, responsible leadership, it represents the
quintessence of incendiarism. If its mouthpieces are not the populist
kings who ride to power on the mass’s assembled shoulders, neither are
they such pawns as mud-slinging or spear-shaking journalists. I place them
in a separate category, and I must discuss them in a separate essay.
For now, I say only that they are uniquely responsible
for what is most virulent and irrational—most ideological—about our
loggerhead culture in the "western West", the West of the Allies
and of NATO. After all, I have admitted above that nations like the United
States, Great Britain, and France were at far less risk of a cataclysmic
Bolshevik-style uprising than European nations with a destitute peasantry.
Yet our technology for manipulating mass opinion must surely have been the
envy of the Soviet Union, the austere voice of the philosopher warning
"Not so fast!" has been almost as inaudible here as in any
totalitarian regime, and the intellectual palliation of ideology (as
opposed to the brutal implementation of it) has never been attempted
anywhere so persistently as in the United States, Great Britain, and
France over the past fifty years. The academic romance with communism,
especially, is a highly peculiar phenomenon of the "Free World"
which really has nothing to do with the nineteenth century’s classical
liberalism and, furthermore, shows no convincing signs of abatement.
In my next essay, I intend to suggest that the ideology
of the West’s "academic specialists", or intellectuals, is a
thoroughly ad hominem affair. That is, it has little patience with
abstract ideas and little interest in objective reason (hence its open
contempt for both) when one places in the balance’s other scale the
sheer egotism of its exponents. It is an easy means for bright, learned
people whose craving for admiration surpasses their devotion to principle
to stoke their heart’s dark fire. I shall further suggest why the ascent
of such an unwholesome influence is, once again, a distinctive feature of
the twentieth century; and, finally, I shall try to identify what few
doubtful antidotes to the West’s malaise have occurred to me.
NOTES
1 If I might drop but a
single name to defend my suspicion of history books, Claude Chambard’s Le
Maquis (1970) was translated into English by Elaine Halperin and
published as The Maquis (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976). Here we
find the classic representation of the French Underground as a fraternal
order of leftists and rightists all working to overthrow Nazism. Though
the war had ended twenty-five years earlier, this naively uplifting book
appeared in the year of General de Gaulle’s death and amid rising
impatience with the Cold War. A coincidence?
2 From Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s
Citadelle in Oeuvres, ed. Roger Caillois (Paris: Gallimard,
1959), 680.
3 Written and illustrated by
Clayton Knight (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1956). Major General Ralph
Royce, USAF (Rtd.), was Knight’s historical consultant—an impressive
credential which reflects the book’s aspirations to veracity.
4 Timing is indeed everything—and
ideology indeed bends principles at will. As long as Stalin believed
Hitler malleable, "Muscovite elements among the Communists [in
France] were the first and most wholehearted collaborators" (David
Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich [New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1981], 64). Of course, this honeymoon proved to be a one-night
stand.
5 One may well counter with
justified wryness, "Yes, Hitler had vowed to murder only the Jews—a
fine case, this, of watching out for your own hide!" Yet the average
French bourgeois often identified Judaism (like Freemasonry) with
insurrection, if not with Marxism. The most eloquent and intellectual
exponents of revolution were often Jewish, even though these had little or
nothing to do with the masses of people whom the Nazis herded to
slaughter. I do not defend the identification: I say only that it found
traction among uninquisitive minds, whose surrender of the Jews could be
explained thereby as crudely defensive rather than purely pusillanimous.
Decades earlier, the Dreyfus Affair had involved the same identification:
a military insider had sold state secrets, Captain Dreyfus was a Jew,
therefore he was the traitor. Such thinking had much to do with the murder
of Georges Mandel and Jean Zay as Allied forces approached Paris. By
contrast, the anti-Semitism which seethed in Nazi Germany fed heavily off
the high visibility of Jewish bankers at a time when the Gentile
bourgeoisie was foundering.
6 "Daggerpoints and
Loggerheads: A Sad Time’s Taste for Perverse Oppositions," Praesidium
3.2 (Spring 2003), 23-32.
7 Op. cit., 378. Pilote
was in fact written deliberately to enlist American support for the war,
and, to that end, was translated so quickly that the English version—Flight
Over Arras—appeared before the French original!
8 France also possessed a
substantial body of ex-military and "anti-decadent" types who
foresaw a disgraceful drôle de guerre and would later embrace the
Occupation with self-flagellating glee: cf. Lucien Rebatet’s Les
Décombres. Here, indeed, was French fascism’s rank and file.
9 La Paz Empieza Nunca (Barcelona:
Planeta, 1957), 139.
10 L’Isola in Terraferma
(Venice and Padua: Marsilio, 1974), 32. Pirro wrote the original ms. in
1960 and revised it in 1973, when—or soon thereafter—my copy must have
been published. Since the author was born in 1920, his little novel has
every appearance of being autobiographical.
11 Le Radiose Giornate (Milan:
Mondadori 1969), 216-17.
12 Ibid., 217.
13 I cannot resist noting that
such uneven recording of "atrocities" by Marxist zealots seems
typical in all situations, and may be taken, indeed, as a benchmark of
ideology (i.e., the corruption of one’s own stated principles in the
interest of defaming the other side). I have seen lists of General
Pinochet’s crimes against humanity posted on the Web which include
frightening children by sending in police to suppress a riot. Pinochet’s
police, beyond question, executed some dozens or hundreds of people
without due process, and one finds the names of these unfortunates posted,
too. The throngs of Castro’s victims, however, could scarcely be read in
a day… and for that reason among others, perhaps, they are considered
unworthy of citation on the subject of atrocity.
14 See especially 233-48 of
Elio Vittorini, Conversazione in Sicilia (Milan: Rizzoli, 1993);
first published in 1953. Azorín’s essay, "Los Sostenes de la
Patria", is fourth in a series titled "La Andulacía Trágica".
See, for instance, Los Pueblos (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1987),
254-58.
15 See Im Westen Nicht
Neues (Köln: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2001), letter from Graf von
Schlieffen to the Deutches Adelsblatt, p. 220 of the book’s
generous post-novel Materialen.
16 I concede that this remark
indicts my own lack of erudition on the subject more than the Graf’s
Wagnerian Wut. For instance, Maurice Barrès (about whom more
shortly) wrote ecstatically in the last days of World War One, "What
letters our children are sending us from the front! It’s one long burst
of laughter!" (See Chroniques de la Grande Guerre, v. 1
[Paris: Plon, 1924 ], 255.)
17 Erich Maria Remarque, ibid.,
177-78. The original title of the novel, by the way, carries an irony
which the English translation could not reproduce. The watch cry,
"All quiet!" is equivalent to, "Nothing new!" in
German: hence Im Westen Nicht Neues. Yet this absence of novelty on
the German front line betokens anything but quiet—just the opposite! The
slaughter continues: the troops continue to be decimated. "Everyone’s
still dying… nothing new!" It is this indifference of the German
commanders to their soldiers’ massacre and, indeed, of German fathers to
their sons’ murder which composes one of the work’s most acid
undercurrents.
18 Remarque’s own book, for
instance, despite selling a quarter of a million copies in the first year,
was banned from one German school after another (lest it undermine the
courage of Germany’s budding manhood) until, to all intents, no German
adolescent would have had access to a copy. The American film based on the
book was also banned from Germany by Goebbels in 1931.
19 Emilio Romero, op. cit., 296-97.
20 The fascist Parti
Populaire Français attracted much rural support precisely because
French agriculture, too, was economically crippled by its failure to
modernize.
21 "Los Árboles y el Agua," op.
cit., 210-215.
22 Some will balk at my
insistence that ideology is a social design. We hear respectable
scholars saying that art, history, and even mathematics and science are
ideologically tinged. The crux of this assertion, however, is precisely
that all forms of human knowledge and endeavor reduce to power plays—not
the power of a divine tug on the heartstrings, but that of a
mass-manipulation for the benefit of the privileged (or, in pseudo-benign,
"after the revolution" manner, for the benefit of the Party
Chair’s Five Year Plan). Make no mistake: the word "ideology"
has no meaning beyond the presumption that people are being and must be
herded about.
23 Chroniques, v. 1 (op. cit.),
98.
24 See Ríonach Uí Ógáin, An
Rí gan Choróin (Baile Átha Cliath [Dublin]: An Clóchomhar 1984),
36.
25 It might be added that
all of the fascist governments displayed an interest in filmmaking which
bordered on sincere affection. Mussolini was the founder of
Cinecittà, the Italian H | |