CONTENTS

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.

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!

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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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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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Argumentum pessimi turba est~

"The crowd’s will embodies the worst conclusion."

Seneca, De Vita Beata 2.2

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.

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.

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!

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):

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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