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P R A E S I D I U M

A Journal of Literate and Literary Analysis

4.2 (Spring 2004)

A quarterly publication of The Center for Literate Values

 

Board of Directors:

John R. Harris, Ph.D. (Executive Director)

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 (Fall 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 Literate Values of Tyler, Texas (2004), and may not be cited at length or reproduced without The Center's express permission.

* 

Pensée de la Saison:

Wir sollten aus unserer Geschichte wissen, daß der Gegensatz Verbrecher-Idealist keiner ist.   "We ought to know from our own history that the criminal-idealist contrast is void." ~ Heinrich Böll

 

CONTENTS

 

A Few Words from the Editor

This issue is especially rich in "second takes" upon books and ideas which have enjoyed rather too much fanfare.

The Aesthetic Crisis of Post-Literacy: How Lack of Finesse Feeds Moral Collapse

John R. Harris

A recurrent theme of Praesidium is that post-literacy has visited an unbearable lightness of being upon Western culture. Could the fine arts offer us a means of recovering depth?

The Judgment of Paris

Gary Inbinder

The ancient Greek myth involving the foolish Paris’s award of the golden apple to Aphrodite—a rash act which precipitated an entire culture’s extermination—can readily be viewed as a cautionary tale for our own troubled time.

A Young Person’s Guide to Postmodernism

four polemical book reviews by Paul Sonnino

A half-dozen works of critical theory were invariably taught with quasi-religious devotion to graduate students in the relativistic seventies and eighties. Professor Sonnino’s none-too nostalgic retrospective shows the emperor’s once-new clothes for what they were.

Goldsmith, Blue and Green

review-essay by Mark Wegierski

The late Sir James Goldsmith sought to adumbrate a kind of cultural conservatism in The Trap which would reject much of what passes for the conservative in the United States. Canadian Mark Wegierski considers his effort a mixed and very faintly theatrical success.

Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language, by Don Watson.

reviewed by Margaret Turnbull

A distinguished Australian’s recent survey—wincing but sharp-sighted—of contemporary English usage is reassuring only inasmuch as Americans need not feel solely culpable in the murder of the King’s English.

Words in Spring’s Hour Glass: Three Poems

Ralph S. Carlson

Our title, Dr. Carlson’s poems: these works are not dedicated to springtime, yet they project a sense of words grappling with change which seems fully appropriate to the season.

Terminal Promotion (short story)

Ivor Davies

Four ambitious administrators think that they have died and gone to heaven, having underestimated their various talents for making everyone around them miserable.

Dr. Palaver, Word Therapist

Do two people hug one another or each other? Are lines toed or towed?

 

*****

A Few Words from the Editor

 

Appearances notwithstanding, Praesidium is not altering its format to become primarily a journal of book reviews. The lengthy and spirited assessment of postmodern critical theory which Professor Sonnino most graciously sent to me over the winter is, of course, a reappraisal of works once held collectively as the Graduate School Bible (at least if one were unfortunate enough to enter grad school as an English or Comparative Literature major in the late seventies or eighties). I know that a great many of us have shared Dr. Sonnino’s discomfort with Derrida, Foucault, and company for quite some while. When I was still immersed in the academy myself and would attend my region’s annual meeting of the Conference on Christianity and Literature, I clearly recall the odd mix of bright young things reading their papers about "discourse" and "signifiers" while the Old Guard milled about the coffee pot and muttered estimates of how long the trend in impenetrable jargon would last. It was altogether too easy to have a paper accepted for reading in those days if you only sprinkled the right formulas through it, and altogether too hard to understand what the paper could be saying beyond the transparently obvious. There was something de mauvaise foi about it all. To my mind, Dr. Sonnino has driven a stake straight through the dark heart of critical theory’s ambulant corpse. Though making such common-sensical remarks as his out in the open remains somewhat risky in many quarters, the thaw has definitely begun. May the days continue to grow warmer!

Likewise, the reviews which Mark Wegierski and Margaret Turnbull generously submitted to me are not just a couple of perfunctory salutes to new books by large presses. (Have you ever noticed, by the way, how carefully the hack reviewer confines his sharpest barbs for products of the least influential publishing houses?) Both of these scholarly commentators have written about works which happen to treat subjects of significant interest to them as educated observers of a troubled planet. Both also hail from points of the Anglophone world beyond the borders of the United States (Mark from Canada and Margaret from Australia). Since I have every reason to suspect that, even on the Internet, Praesidium’s readership remains mostly American, these perspectives achieved from slightly unfamiliar pinnacles will prove especially revealing, I trust. The experience of reading Blackwood’s Magazine as an adolescent permanently cured me of what is now (with a supercilious fatuity) called ethnocentrism. Mr. Wegierski’s review of Sir James Goldsmith’s book, in particular, recalls my youthful encounter to me, and is bound to surprise the younger or less traveled members of our audience with the vista it offers of a cultural conservatism quite unlike any known to us in the land of Wal-Mart and McDonald’s (where, frankly, we have little culture left to conserve). That Goldsmith’s approach to conserving delicate plants on the human landscape seems less than fully viable is very plausibly (and very charitably) presented in the essay—yet the problems implicit in holding on to the past’s riches are not removed simply by letting the dead bury the dead, as the essay also stresses. We may, indeed, die as a culture (as well as in some more individual, biological, and catastrophic sense) if we do not learn how to cling to vital elements of our human heritage. Dr. Turnbull’s case for the preservation of the English language from promotional double-talk is the perfect companion piece to such concerns. I doubt that I am alone in suspecting that civil society is breaking down—quite overtly dissolving into frustrated, alienated, isolated exiles convinced that they are constantly misled and lied to—because of our linguistic collapse.

My own essay volunteers a partial or preliminary cure to the disease which I have pondered for years: a revival of fine music and the visual arts. If literacy cannot resuscitate itself from frivolity and déraison (it may, in fact, have infected itself through such agencies as Dr. Sonnino’s gallery of rogues—but that’s another story), then might the other arts prove more potent? Would rap music really stand up against a steady onslaught of Bach and Vivaldi? If posters of movie and sports stars had to compete with reproductions of Titian and Turner, would not the adolescent bedroom be transformed? If the mind is currently too cluttered to be approached through images which it must itself manufacture from the printed word, what about a direct assault of good taste upon the eye and ear? The voluptuous Helen is always more appealing to the debased intelligence, as Mr. Inbinder thoughtfully shows; but Athena would certainly win the rest of the beauty pageant, if only we could get beyond the swimsuit segment.

The beauty of the written word, naturally, is in nowise meant to be disparaged by my remarks. Ralph Carlson’s poetry suffices to remind us that words, too, can paint a canvas. For that matter, they can be a lot more fun than hipping and hopping to a multi-decibel drumbeat (which is apparently great fun to some). In evidence of this proposition, I adduce Mr. Davies’ short story.

~J.H.

back to Contents

************************************

 

The Aesthetic Crisis of Post-Literacy: How Lack of Finesse Feeds Moral Collapse

by

John R. Harris

 

μονωδία γαρ εν άπασιν εστι πλήσμιον και πρόσαντες, η δε ποικιλία τερπνόν

"For monotony is cloying and tedious in all things, while variety is delightful."

Plutarch, Περι παίδων αγωγης

 

In my essay for last quarter’s issue of Praesidium, I argued that moral goodness is at once forever beyond satisfaction in this life and constantly exigent of particular actions in this life. We cannot fulfill the demands of goodness as we can the demands of a grocery list, yet the pursuit of goodness generates lists without end. Stop lying! Think of the children! Listen to the anger in your words! Fierce cherubs pop up on our shoulder at every turn, their brow knitted and their finger shaking, to remonstrate against our conduct in acutely specific terms. It isn’t that we can transform ourselves into the lordly All Good One who sends these messengers by acceding to each of their demands—but by refusing even one such demand, we become most painfully convicted in our own eyes of unworthiness to stand in that beatific presence.

In this essay’s context, I would like to emphasize about the earlier discussion what one might call its aesthetic. The "game" of morality—of classing a certain situation’s imperative option under a universal law, then recognizing in another situation that this law must yield right-of-way, then admitting to oneself that goodness’s essence can sometimes evade the finest legalese—is a tennis match between qualitative and quantitative thought. Every right action, as Immanuel Kant observed in terms much misunderstood, must be conceived of as law.1 That is, the subject must present it to his mind as a quantity, a clear reality with distinct limits: for nothing short of such a concept would be binding on other subjects—it would be a mere subjective whim without the compulsory quality of an objective duty. Yet quantitative objectivity does indeed characterize the moral imperative as a quality; for, as moral endeavor itself keeps teaching us in a most humbling pedagogy, no law ever foresees all of its proper exceptions or suspensions.

For this reason, by the way, civilized people do not legislate morality in the formal sense of punishing infractions by mulct or imprisonment: i.e., because moral law is subjectively objective—it is objectively compelling, but not incontestably so beyond the details of an immediate situation and a specific agent. To expand its reign in any given case would inevitably be to violate its decrees in other cases. Lying is always wrong, but we make it illegal only when it imminently impedes the practical functioning of society (as in tax fraud or commercial swindle). The person who lies about knowing a celebrity is not arrested or ticketed. If he were, then we should have to punish identically the person who tells his five-year-old that mommy’s cancer operation is just a routine procedure at the doctor’s office.2

I never cease to be astonished at the number of people whose eyes cannot follow the rational tennis ball in this match—or who refuse to sit and watch, perhaps, because the very suggestion of a game over such lofty matter strikes them as seditious. They insist that the boundary lines of moral law are immovable, do not overlap, and rest impervious to all late-coming legal claims. If one appeals to the imperfect, ever-approximating, asymptotic nature of human reason, as I have done, they lean over and give the rug a brisk heave. They protest, that is, that moral law is from God and not from man. They point to holy writ, delivered by some means to which all the strictures of human perception and reflection are irrelevant (yet what could such a revelation be to any human creature, other than a tree falling unheard in a Siberian thicket?), and they insist that no placement of commas or parsing of verb tenses could possibly be a source of controversy in the sacred text. The alternative, as they see it, is to slip and slide in relativism. In fact, they are always (in my experience) quite forthright about this motive for their kind of belief. Their "not one altered comma" intransigence about the holy document’s perfect authority is not a reverence for the document itself, such as one might expect of an unlettered medieval swineherd allowed a glimpse of an illuminated gospel’s first page… no; their high regard for the book’s authority, rather is an afterthought which steadies their dizzy brains as the society around them dances over a moral abyss. At all costs, relativism must be repudiated.

But not at all costs, surely. Not at the cost of goodness itself, in whose holy name moral relativism is less odious than nonsensical. I must not ramble too far from my stated thesis of the aesthetic, especially so early in the essay. Yet all of the misguided objections to moral reason which I have just summarized are indeed, at their foundation, the product of deficient aesthetic acuity. Moral laws are not relative: if they were, they should not be laws. They are incomplete, however—be their mundane entirety ever so grandly ponderous—and they do sometimes make conflicting claims. It is because they make conflicting claims that the human spirit is led up toward a metaphysical dimension where (and there alone) final harmony may be joyfully anticipated. Here on earth, our choice to do good for one party constantly renders us incapable of doing good for another party. Sometimes we must even harm one of the parties through neglect. A prosaic example would be helping Jill with her homework instead of Jack because Jack is fourteen years old and Jill is twelve, or because Jill has a test tomorrow. To insist that the laws sanctioned by God (and, after all, what other laws could be moral?) do not allow of these territorial disputes is to straitjacket oneself within one of two preposterous and, frankly, irreverent propositions. Either sacred duty includes so paltry a number of behaviors that no collision between duties can ever arise, or else the behavior which is "clearly spelled out" in holy writ takes precedence and the option less mentioned or less clearly supported is cut adrift without a qualm. The latter sort of determination is often conducted with a repugnant self-righteousness—that is, with a mistaken righteousness whose origins are egotistical rather than impartial. Jack ends up getting helped at his homework because this sacred passage elevates the household son and heir, or else Jill gets the help because that passage blesses little children.

Such falsely pious buffoonery lacks finesse. It is finesse—sensitivity to qualitative detail, to tone and nuance—which generates moral imperatives for innumerable circumstances. It is finesse which pulls twelve tables or ten commandments or seven cardinal virtues off a cold marble slab or a brittle yellow page and animates them to walk into our daily lives. True worship of the law requires a mind which ferrets out the quality of lawfulness in things. The law’s quantitative rigidity, far from being canceled out by sensitivity to qualification, is ennobled as its stiff line is bent infinitesimally into a heaven-bound hyperbola. Form is brought to life by shade, just as shade is rendered dramatic by the quest for form. The Pyrrhonist splits hairs for the egotistical joy of tearing forms apart. (Yes, the sensitive types—the esprits fins—have their egotistical monsters, too: academe is rotten with them.)3 The truly devout believer in goodness, however, relaxes the boundaries of excessively crude forms that he may find new forms within them. In a healthy, reverent, and tasteful mind, the cultivation of subtlety is nothing other than the invigorated cultivation of intricate structure.

I underscored the element of taste above, for it is here that I wish my essay’s emphasis to rest. I have argued often in other quarters that the moral squalor of Western culture today—Western post-culture, I am tempted to write—is in some significant measure due to our aesthetic crudity. Kant believed that contemplation of moral law was a "propaedeutic" (a "paving the way" type of instruction) for artistic appreciation. He seems to have had in mind that un-beautiful species of beauty known as the sublime which haunted the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: scenes of panoramic majesty which inspire the heart to divine God’s presence.4 Whatever the merits of that theory, I think it at least as likely that the study of artistic objects "playing" at the pursuit of new forms through finer shades prepares the mind to weigh moral questions maturely.

An example: there is much debate at this hour about whether American troops should or should not have entered Iraq a year ago. I do not propose to saunter into that particular mine field of exchange. Just about everyone will now agree, however, that our tactics greatly complicated a well-intentioned incursion by grossly miscalculating local sentiment in areas of fierce fighting. We did not exercise much subtlety in failing to recognize, for instance, that the last American "liberation" in that part of the world had left hundreds of thousands of Kurds exposed to subsequent slaughter, or that the religious factions most oppressed by Saddam were also closely linked by their beliefs to Iran. I hasten to add that I am not by any means condemning the invasion: I am suggesting that its conception would have profited from a certain qualitative maturity. Yet where was such finesse to be found in a culture which has disparaged and underfunded foreign language instruction for at least thirty years now (i.e., every since the Sputnik scare waned), and which suffers from a shocking deficiency of scholars who read even Arabic, let alone the dozens of other relevant languages in the Near East? Having devoted our resources to the satellite and the microchip (an obsession reflected on college campuses by the healthy budgets of engineering and computer science programs), how could we expect to understand people who lived closer to Homer than to Newton? Having determined long ago that the arts had no "use", what window did we expect to find upon the souls of people who listened to heroic poetry rather than "reality" shows?

Those who vocally opposed the invasion, furthermore, might helpfully have stressed our ignorance of popular sentiment among the tribes and sects we foresaw embracing the dubious prospect of shopping malls and superhighways. (The peddling of this same troubled dream has won us mixed reviews in the quondam Soviet Union, where doctors moonlight as call girls and free enterprise has transferred the throttle from the State’s hand to the Mob’s.) Instead, the loyal opposition sniped and crabbed fecklessly about absurd conspiracies hatched by oil companies and political dynasties with "OK Corral" vintage vendettas. The subtlety lacking on one side was rendered somewhat respectable by the formulaic villifying which proliferated on the other.

On both sides of the aisle, these arguments were more than rhetorical postures. They were moral decisions—or morally valent decisions. They affected the lives of millions, and have collectively precipitated the deaths of some thousands. (My "they" includes the invasion’s critics—for an opponent who cannot abstain from paranoid histrionics becomes complicit in the half-digested judgments he habilitates through his bungling of the resistance. This, too, must be deemed a decision, for all its show of insanity.) Information-gathering is a crucial part of moral conduct. One cannot be absolved of culpability for leaving a loaded gun on a table if one makes no effort first to discover who might be apt to wander through the house.

Yet our foreign policy is also a web of decisions, I reiterate, which might have been favorably influenced by an aesthetic regard for detail. I am inclined to believe that it is primarily this, insofar as it has proved a policy in error. Its stages were agreed upon by experts whose special competence far exceeds anything to which a literary scholar like me could ever lay claim. If such gifted people can nevertheless blunder badly in their reckoning of human motivation, maybe, in some way, they are too expert. Maybe they have forgotten how ordinary mortals live, or maybe they have never known what extraordinary misery does to normal sentiments.

Literature is actually a great corrective to absent-mindedness and under-education of these varieties (quite apart from the study of literature in its original language, with all the specific cultural insights thereby available). Take the classics, that body of texts which was once assumed to paint basic human nature and to express the highest human ambitions. Titus Livy shows us how implacable ethnic hatreds can be. Herodotus and Xenophon show us how bewilderingly soon local upheavals may be absorbed into the status quo within societies long bred to servility. Arrian at least implies (unwillingly, and perhaps unwittingly) that the definitive overthrow of such a tyrant in such a society can create an anarchy where the worst elements rise to the top. Every major oral tradition somewhat refined into recorded res gestae, from the Chanson de Roland to the Nibelungenlied to the Irish Táin Bó Cúalgne (not to mention the Iliad), shows us how ready—and often zealous—to die are young men for reasons little better than that most of their peers fear death.

The reading list for the invasion’s critics, of course, would look somewhat different, but it would run just as long. Tacitus on the self-desctructive lunacy of despots and the savage brutality of their henchmen… Thucydides on the libido dominandi—that lust for political power which can incinerate its votaries by the thousand in a determined self-immolation for a miserable cause… Ariosto on the uproarious bombast of egotism masquerading as idealism… Silvio Pellico and Dostoevsky on life in a narrow cell as punishment for thinking out loud… and, naturally, Solzhenitsyn. But why not, too, some of the very authors who owe many of their laurels to the academy’s reverence for Third World literature? How could someone read Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, I wonder, or García-Marquez’s El Coronel No Tiene Quien le Escriba and still remain comfortably indifferent to the plight of a destitute and bullied populace? Why does vigorous opposition to such outrages require the tawdry motive of plump oil profits to be supposed credible in the world’s wealthiest nation?

I am aware that pleading my case through a strictly literary aesthetic vexes the issue. Literature is the most "engaged" of all the arts, since its constituent elements are human beings and sequences of human events: hence it is also the most plainly, irresistibly moral of all the arts (an attribute which Chinua Achebe famously but obtusely misidentified as propagandistic). Assigning a bunch of policy-makers a list of novels can look very much like serving them with a summons to attend the next rally of one’s favored party. I should more properly say, therefore, that both sides should read both lists. More properly still, I should perhaps exclude all chronicles and memoirs, admitting to the list only creative fiction. In doing so, I would be shifting my emphasis from the literary work’s quantitative dimension—its programmatic convergence on insight, its plot, its "propaganda"—to its qualitative dimension. In literary narrative, that dimension may be called very simply human inner life, or psychology. Psychological depth provides most of the subtlety to be found in any story. Even a naïve fable peopled by stock characters manages to send tingles down the spine with its dark woods and darker caves only because these elements of the setting are really projections of human anxiety (cf. Hawthorne). Events are the story’s architecture: psychology is its play of shadows under the eaves and down the columns.

For our quibbling politicos of all stripes, the very blunt—yet apparently very needful—message of story-reading would be Heraclitus’s aphorism, ψυχή βαθυν λόγον έχει: "The soul’s order is abysmally obscure." Both major parties, it seems to me (and all minor ones, as far as I can tell), need to be reminded that people are not insects, and that their predicaments cannot be resolved by constructing a new kind of ant farm. In many cases, communities should be left to work out their own destiny. Yet for the same reason, one man should not be allowed to treat an entire community as his fish bowl: no destiny is fulfilled by hoping that an inveterate thug will "come round" to enlightened ways because they seem so perfectly obvious in New Haven or Worcester. The reader of stories will surely know that there’s no patented happily-ever-after ending for entire societies, since the very existence of stories—of crises churned from the daily grind of systems—argues otherwise; and he will also know that the suppression of crises by some author-turned-autocrat who writes with secret police instead of a keyboard is no boon to mankind, as if one system might commandeer happiness by capitally punishing all attempts at new chapters. Crisis is as essential as closure to human health and growth. The soul, in its eternal strain to think more deeply, to feel more deeply, is forever revealing the excessive rigidity of human structure. And that is as it should be.

But we of the West are no longer, on the whole, a culture of readers (and if not we, then who?). I shall abstain from taking aim at an easy target. I challenge anyone, rather, to advance the name of a single prominent political figure today who routinely reads creative works of more than… let us not say one hundred years old, but twenty. Bush the Younger was much derided as a candidate when, upon being asked his favorite book, he offered up the Bible. I do not recall, however, that any of the candidates responded to the same question with Anna Karenina or Leaves of Grass (a work much loved by Lincoln). Autobiographies of public servants, historical portraits of World War Two heroes, best-sellers in the mystery or perhaps sci-fi genre (but wander not too far down this curious path: fantasy can render a personage highly suspect to the electorate)… our leaders would probably like to read more excursively, more leisurely—but they haven’t the time. Their day is dedicated to the absorption of "facts", for their lives are dedicated to being "useful". Their stock in trade is to identify problems and urgently recommend solutions. They deal in quantities: any tremor of discontent is, to them, a possible theme of their agenda’s next symphonic movement.

Frankly, one can speak in no very different vein about the more "intellectual" progressives on the aisle’s left side whose seats are so far to the edge that they occupy the ivory tower rather than the senate house. Most contemporary academics in the Humanities do not read—not for aesthetic pleasure. Perhaps they once did so: perhaps a love of Coleridge or Goethe or Pushkin originally spurred them on to enroll in graduate studies. They, too, however, have become devotees of "the facts". They probably read a great many more literary journals (when they read at all) than other poems, plays, and novels of their special author’s period, for they are necessarily always on the prowl for a "publishable" topic and supporting citations. The most ingenious of them do indeed sniff out a useful commentary in the primary material sometimes, though that area of harvest has now been gleaned with many a fine-toothed rake; but even such genuine scholars seldom have the hours or the energy left to read from an epoch or tradition which can have nothing whatever to do with their specialization. Just look at that staple of undergraduate education, the literary anthology. Specialists have inserted authors whose work minutely reflects each era’s trends or—at strategic points—bristles with an era’s birth or decline. "Facts" arise from the brew and crystallize. The march of history acquires the look of destiny: so-and-so wrote such-and-such because he could not not have written it.5 In the meantime, some of the most beautiful works in literary history fall by the wayside. Lamotte-Fouqué’s Undine, Alain-Fourrier’s Grand Meaulnes, and Azorín’s Doña Inez are no more volumnious than Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice—but they will never find their way into Norton’s "must reads" for sophomores. They are too atmospheric, too open-ended: too severely warped toward a "universalist" quest for meaning.

I could not help but be amused recently when observing that Jorge Ruffinelli, editor of Augusto Monterroso’s Lo Demás es Silencio for Catedra, had determined this mainstay of "Latin American progressivist and revolutionary movements" to be "two different, yet perfectly compatible, Monterrosos."6 The quandary arises because Monterroso the activist ideologue conceals Monterroso the postmodern metafictionalist. The same man who could denounce Yankee imperialism without a pause to inhale could also write un-stories where nothing that seems to happen is unequivocally happening. The Rest Is Silence purports to be a biography of one Eduardo Torres, and obscure provincial literato in an obscure provincial town. Not only are Torres’s few scholarly opera littered with factual blunders, however, but he appends his own postscript to a work which includes the testimonial of his "widow". Of course, those of us who must move among such trends are familiar with the "Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes" phenomenon ad nauseam. One might as well call it the Tristram Shandy Phenomenon; for it is nothing new under the sun, despite its catalytic effect on the jargon industry, and it was rather funnier when it was only being done for the sixth or seventh time (Diderot, P.G. Wodehouse, Flann O’Brian…).

What I have found newly fascinating about Monterroso and his generation, rather than their not-so-rare humor, is precisely their fierce political activism. Naturally, I and many others have long noticed the paradox that an intelligentsia of voluminous agnosticism should be forever blaring non-negotiable political doctrine from campus soap boxes. For the paradox characterizes the species: Monterroso and Barthes are only two of the most eloquent specimens. How can such incurable perplexity be married to such irascible rigidity? Here we find no Swift or Thackeray shaking his head with a wry smile over mankind’s vanity while deducing therefrom a very circumscribed, chastened political hope… no: we find the most insistent utopianism in fine fettle. As I incubated this essay, I found myself no longer content to ascribe such glaring inconsistency to sheer folly, to careerist gamesmanship, to political opportunism, or to any of the other motives I have seen most thoughtfully alleged. 7 I believe that sane people must be coherent at some level, I do not believe the majority of our intelligentsia to be insane, and I do not even believe (not really—not on my better days) that most of them would sell their mother for a promotion. Señor Ruffinelli, at some level, must be right: the two Monterrosos must be compatible… but not for the reason he advances, which is no reason at all. "The preoccupation to maintain the literary work’s independence will not permit [Monterroso] to inflate its prestige through the author’s personal fame."8 Pen names are used to accomplish this end, not diametrically opposite styles.

I am beginning to suspect that the postmodern play of the reflexive (or "self-reflexive", if you’re on your third martini) metafictional self-deconstructing anti-narrative is itself a very surprising manifestation of finesse manquée. One would have thought just the opposite, at first glance. These burlesques without any stable reference seem like finesse run amuck—a mad debauch of finesse. They are too fine by half, like some highly urbane salamander at a soirée who turns everything into a pun or double-entendre. But one may as well say that they are not fine enough, for it amounts to the same thing. A truly discerning artist would know how to deploy the unraveling of finesse within the weave of structure so as to draw smiles at the most embarrassing or most suggestive moments. A "dead man’s" postscript to his own biography is quite amusing: his "widow’s" run-on sentences of three or four hundred words are infinitely less so, especially after the third or fourth ordeal. Their attempt to replicate bourgeois tedium is altogether too successful. The replica, indeed, has far excelled the original in its utter resistance of the faintest interest, and is now something like a defiance of the "rules" of good writing. Something like, but not like… because the send-up, if one may call it so, began in the mouth of a character with no literary pretensions whatever. Or, since all of Monterroso’s characters incline to the same excess, is writing itself the author of such interminable babble? But why, then, is the babble presented as a series of verbal interviews? Or is the literary pretense of the verbal interview being sent up?

The reader—this reader, anyway (who is neither Monterroso’s editor nor a tenure-questing academic)—is not left marveling at the vacuity of signifiers in literary texts, but at the ostentatious, somewhat arrogant pointlessness of these pages in this text. Would anyone read the same lines if they were not known, and very well known, to have been penned by Monterroso or one of his comrades in arms: i.e., by an intellectual deliberately writing folderol? If there is some "self-reflexive" joke engaging here in auto-arousal, might it not really be that the intellectual community has grown so analytically anemic that it titters just because one of its own has written something spectacularly illegible?

Ruffinelli (whose introduction belongs to that banner year of scholarly hermeticism, 1982) cannot resist passing an epic catalogue of critical warriors in review—all bowing, of course, to Monterroso:

Bakhtin studied this phenomenon in a hermeneutic of the text and its reception alike, establishing the possibility that dialogue works through a process of abandoning the "I"—a recognition of alterity and a recuperation of the "I" in the other—which, in his turn, Jauss has called the "state of aesthetic eccentricity", and which would surely be the fundamental premise of the dialogue between the text and the receiver. Yet here I am not so interested in observing the real (and historical) reception as the strategy of a text which in great measure presupposes the reader’s strategies. We could say, employing the time-honored distinction of Umberto Eco, that Monterroso’s [strategy?] has the structure of the opera aperta, conceding to the reader the function of completing it [the strategy? the text?] and complementing it productively (and not passively) in the privileged moment of reading—that moment in which the work acquires the state of existence. Or we could even draw into collaboration the notion….9

Yes, and ninety ships came from sandy Pylos. There is something quite deflating about reading dozen-word summaries of theoreticians from whose massive tomes one struggled vainly as a graduate student to strain a remotely comprehensible paraphrase. One entertains the "so that’s what they were saying!" moment succeeded by the "was that all they had to say?" moment. The god’s holy vault is not only empty, but in need of fresh air. On top of that, such masters of perpetual evasion may apparently be piled on the plate one after another in a kind of smorgasbord, or the browser may pick here and pass there according to criteria to be explained later (or not, as the spirit listeth). It seems, further, that the gross distortion which such theoretical perspectives force upon certain texts and the utter oblivion into which they elbow others is no mark in their disfavor; for it seems that the texts must justify themselves before the throne of theory, and not the other way around.

I used to think that this upside-down hall-of-mirrors pageantry betrayed a generation of literary scholars who had misplaced the forest in its trees, just as I came to view the quickly tedious humor of metafiction as over-analysis of structure. And I suppose that those assessments remain valid, in a certain light. The treachery of such a diagnosis is that over-exposure equals under-exposure. Like certain strange diseases where having too much of a nutrient produces the effects of deficiency, too much finesse leaves a mind too blunt. That this should be so is further proof on behalf of my argument that form and nuance (quantity and quality), far from being adversarial, depend upon each other for their very existence. Without subtle degrees of shading, a mass of clouds would be one cloud: without an irrepressible drive to impose boundaries and isolate units, the great cloud itself would merely blur into the sky, which would blur into the horizon… and the human ability to operate upon the environment would vanish. Fine minds are not inimical to laws—they thirst after intricate laws. Law-abiding minds are not inimical to distinction—they thirst after objectively valid distinction.

The decline of aesthetic appreciation in the West has spread the disease of blunt-wittedness, we may say, to the very people whose calling is to produce or ponder aesthetic objects. The absence of purposeful structure within which the parodist’s explosive devices may stir a refined humor indicates that parodists are no longer very refined. The absence of any compulsion to describe the entire literary phenomenon—or at least to explain exceptions to the model—indicates that literary theorists are anything but theoretical in the word’s root sense of "finely observed". Our cultural wits have hardened like a fountain removed to a deep freeze. We do not read enough, and we do not know how to read deeply.

I cannot say what may have brought a man as wonderfully erudite as Monterroso to this state: perhaps his sporadic education or the class tensions which a far from pampered youth introduced to him. Considering the great long list of offenders, however, I suspect the presence of a vast cause. If even those who have immersed themselves in fine art can emerge from the pool as dry as a bone, then we must surely be seeing a dominant cultural influence at work: the influence of "post-culture". Assuming that you could read Shakespeare—that indeed you had read Shakespeare, and could recite hundreds of his lines—why should you defend his works to a class of apes? Assuming that you had to win your bread by feeding the appetites of these Yahoos, in what respect would you continue to find Shakespeare relevant to life? In the rubble of post-culture, how would twenty-five hundred years of Western tradition strike you as anything more than a sham, a hall of mirrors signifying nothing? It could strike you, of course, as more real than the dehumanized nightmare of petrified, petrifying "facts"—bills, taxes, wages, prices, deadlines, speed limits, life expectancies, mortality rates—through which we must all sleepwalk daily. To hold on to a greater reality, however, while a lesser one—a chaos of incoherent sensations—assaults our minds with the help of statistical lubricant requires a kind of faith; and faith is not only a gift, but quite possibly (and unfortunately) a very rare gift.

Personal observation leads me to believe that a "sympathy with the unsympathetic" is indeed astir in the stronghold of the arts, and that we cannot sensibly hope for university professors and novelists to lead us farther from aesthetic nullity rather than closer to it. I am no longer a very young man (the sure sign of which is that I light up when an old man calls me young). Already in my own undergraduate days, it was entirely unheard-of for someone in the dormitory to possess Wagner or Rimsky-Korsakov (let alone Bach or Vivaldi) in his record collection. I can recall but a single lad who loved listening over and over again to the cleverly orchestrated over-and-over-again of Ravel’s Bolero—and this exception hailed from England. By the time I was working my way through graduate school, the hostility to classical taste was, if anything, magnified. The comparatists among whom I moved uneasily advertised an enthusiasm (perhaps genuine, perhaps feigned… who could tell?) for any odd collaboration of sounds imported from any clearly non-Western culture. The classicists among whom my anomalous orbit often carried me (for I was something of an intellectual isotope, always warily on the edge of these groups that lived on the edge) seemed, paradoxically, to have no inkling either of any tradition beyond the West or of any Western tradition not covered by their degree program. They partied fiercely, those who socialized at all (and many classicists do not socialize at all). They were the heaviest consumers of pop culture I had seen since the undergraduate dorm.

There must have been other types on campus. When I once attended a live performance by James Galway, the house was packed. Yet I recall seeing none of the many faces I knew from the English, Classics, and Comparative Literature programs at that grand occasion. To this day, if I chance to meander through the offices of a college English department, I find posters or memorabilia enshrining the Beatles or Elvis or Bonnie and Clyde or Apocalypse Now, but almost never anything acknowledging a prior claim to musically or visually artistic fame. Victor Borge’s bust of Mozart, if it depended upon Humanities offices for its circulation, would be the missing referent in a failed punch-line. Even architectural classics, photogenic though they surely are, have been virtually exiled from these hermetically sealed corridors. At most, a professor who did a bit of summer research in Kent or Salisbury has brought back a poster of some fortress or cathedral to commemorate a delightful trip.

I recollect some of Tom Bertonneau’s remarks about his own undergraduate days at Berkeley from a pair of poignant memoirs which we published in this journal.10 Tom’s taste in music is far more broadly cultivated than mine, and it has happily brought him into contact with people who have not turned their back upon that part of our tradition as my exclusively literary peers had done. Yet the exception proves the rule: Tom’s friends were not exclusively literary. My perception is that they were not even primarily so, in a professional way. By the same token, he has observed to me (and argued in another essay11) that the twentieth century’s greatest science-fiction authors were not formally educated to study or produce literary texts—were not, in most instances, ever enrolled in any School of the Humanities. English Ph.D.s are apt to write metafiction, purchase Blues and "classic rock" for their CD collection, and litter whatever wall space their bookcases leave unclaimed with something between Andy Warhol and Zulu headgear. The rare author who can compose a novel in the magnificent vein of Patrick O’Brian has probably led an active life building bridges or training Third World aviators, the tinkle of Chopin is far more likely to illuminate his study as he does a little Spring cleaning, and his cautious dust cloth stands a far better chance of passing over a Renoir print under glass.

Why is that? I believe it is because, besides being surrounded by the tastelessness of post-literate life like everyone else, those who are educated in literature sometimes feel a kind of vindictive contempt for a proficiency which has marginalized them. Granted, a large percentage of this not-negligible percentage wants to be marginalized since it already is so for less respectable reasons. People who stumble into graduate studies because normal social intercourse paralyzes them (e.g., the anti-social classicist) and people who suffer the stigma of, say, homosexuality seem to relish being hanged for a sheep rather than a lamb. They ransack literary history for the precious, the exotic, the bizarre, and the macabre: the robust durability of a mainstream classic offers no veil behind which to hide their personal strangeness. (Evelyn Waugh’s Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited leaps to mind.) Likewise, I exclude the younger generation of literary scholars which has effectively been denied access to the classics by ideologue professors. If these young people display no finesse in their choice of music and deem visual art to be some Webmaster’s original juggling of icons, it is because we older students of culture have failed them.

I say again that I suspect we owe this failure (for we are the ones who puzzle me) to our having grown so piqued at waking up to find ourselves utterly irrelevant in post-literacy’s vile new world. We despair; and in our despair, we turn angry. Sven Birkerts has written of an odd adventure in his youthful days of buying up used books. A former college professor called in the bookstore’s lads to cart away an immense haul—apparently his entire library. This morose figure had made a very sudden exit from the ivory tower, and in his disillusion he was clearing his basement of all print relics while making room for a career revolution via computer.12 I could almost have been that man myself. I recently attempted to sell most of my critical-theory library (nobody would buy it)… but I certainly would never have put all my Livres de Poche or my Oxford Classical Texts on the auction block. I was never that angry, or angry in that direction. I was and am angry with the profession, but not with the tradition. Yet I have seen those whose ambitions ran higher than mine wax furious with the very books they loved—furious with that love for costing them any chance of success in life, at least of a success comparable to their lawyer and doctor and accountant and programmer siblings and classmates. These same angry people, who have in many cases often achieved success’s pinnacle by academic standards, now seem to be grinding out books about hypertexts and other forms of pop culture.13 They would perhaps have desecrated their Complete Works of Shakespeare less if they had simply sold it for a buck… but that would have been mere passive aggression. They must go on record, it appears, as having washed their hands of everything yesteryear’s stereotypical poet in tweeds held dear.

To hell with finesse, they seem to say: bring on robotic efficiency, robotic immunity to despair. And their misfit, self-marginalized colleagues do not cry foul, and their undereducated seminar students have never been introduced to the fair-foul distinction. No, they will not close ranks around the cause of fine things, rest assured—they whose most unkindest dagger ends up in Shakespeare’s back.

So what hope remains? The hope of the alternative’s poverty, perhaps. Human beings are not robots, after all, and one sees signs that the generation presently entering college is not entirely willing to worship amusement and ease at the expense of depth. I recall at least three instances within the past decade of young students positively clamoring for a Latin class (and being denied it, in two out of three cases, by administrators who figured that Latin would not prove cost-effective). Eventually, the careerist fund-raisers and bean-counters will settle into the mausoleum’s dust, and rare beams of light will be allowed to reach rare green shoots. The current cycle of toxic ambition—the feminist ambition to have one’s own letterhead rather than be so-and-so’s wife or mother, the not-very-manly ambition to bring on the deluge because the last satraps has already been appointed—is bound to work its way out of our system. Tenure is dying, temporary employment burgeons, health care will eventually be nationalized, fame and "notoriety" have merged in fact as well as in common parlance before the clear triumph of publicity… good grief, what scope remains open to ambition now? Why need we buy into the politicians’ "dare to dream" cant when Hollywood and the Internet (not to mention the psychiatric/pharmaceutical complex and the illegal drug trade) are peddling dare-free dreams with unlimited refills?

Not ambition, but a craving for basics, will motivate the next generation or two of students, I suspect. Communities have become so flexible—and indeed, so tenuous and implausible—that one scarcely knows where to find the grandstands to which one might play. The vertigo of divorce and remarriage, of termination and relocation, of retraining and Internet degree programs, has made and will increasingly make us a nauseous culture, sea-sick on sea changes from which no coral ever emerges. We will again become, by default, a land of individuals; or, to be exact, as the less intelligent and the more easily exploited continue down the chutes toward some electronic slaughterhouse of the soul, independent thinking in the great plangent mass will become more anguishing, and so more fertile. The anguished few will seek a solid foothold against the drain’s suction, and they will surely find it—whether through Latin, or Shakespeare, or the Beatitudes—in an abstract humanity, a principle of sacrifice whose ultimate objective is not much in evidence at the Mall or on the Net.

If such a "hope" sounds oddly desperate as I describe it, my reservations stem from the tremendous labor of reinvention which oppresses it. Those who might reveal basic human reference points refuse to assume the duty. Naturally, many such points will remain unfound, unrecovered, at least in the specific form which has enriched Western tradition. Great literature will be dusted off, and Hamlet will live to brood over Yorick’s skull another day—sales of Jane Austen and Edgar Allan Poe have actually risen even as presses persist in grinding out extra-terrestrial adventures and Hollywood biographies. Yet how many young people, I wonder, will ever hear of Saltykov-Shchedrin or Jules Romains in this new century, let alone have any ever-so-slight opportunity of reading an offbeat marvel like Niall Ó Dónaill’s Seanchas na Féinne?14 Remember, these are the same young people whose exposure to music consists largely of Rap or Hip-Hop (whatever the difference is—don’t ask me) or lilting electronic syntheses accompanying—and helping to disguise—lyrics of maudlin sentimentality. Their awareness of visual art is concentrated upon the latest special effects at the movies: digitalization, Clay-mation, lavishly pricey crashes and explosions. While the keenest of this generation may not be content to feed at the trough, they may be reduced to cultivating keenness mostly on their own.

One is not born fine: finesse depends upon an immense inheritance of experiences which have been distilled—through culture—into a kind of ichor. This cultured heritage shows the young how to feel, and is infinitely more corruptible and perishable than the universal laws of logic which guide objective thought. It is aesthetic, to return to the essay’s opening terms. Virtually any human being can understand the objective moral logic which prohibits murder… but what about the wrongness of fracturing the neighborhood’s peace and quiet? What about the degradation of permanently tattooing one’s body with icons and shibboleths as if it were a car’s bumper in need of a sticker?

Many young people I meet are rigidly devoted to what they perceive as moral law. What they lack is precisely a finesse of application. Once again, they have not been taught the subtleties of moral teleology by those upon whom this obligation rested, and so they must assemble the puzzle with whatever few pieces are in sight. Their travail is most evident in their practice of religious faith. They seize upon certain obvious mainstays of moral discipline securely fastened in most religions yet continually ignored by their peers: abstinence from intoxicants, renunciation of sexual promiscuity, hope in the eventual purposefulness of life. One might call these the "classic" virtues—yet several others of that rank, such as courage and honesty, receive far less attention. Already at the cardinal level, moral law requires a bit of finesse. If the Stoics were right, then all virtues must indeed be teased from a single quality, Virtue: goodness in small things implies goodness in great ones, and a simple peccadillo is an indictment of deep pollution. Christianity abandons the absurd rigor of this formula, but it resonates from beginning to end of the New Testament with the notion that goodness mystically surmounts legalism. Perfect in all things, deeds of mercy and not burnt offerings, the two commandments which contain all others, perfect love driving out all fear (try dangling 1 John 4.18 before the vast "fear the Lord" crowd)… clearly the believer is intended not merely to follow a behavioral code, but to dwell in the spirit of goodness.

I will not tire the reader with a catalogue of ways in which our churches, ever more aware of the young (if not ever younger), favor the moral laundry list while discouraging profound reflection. The qualitative dimension, of course, survives in the contemporary religious service. In my opinion, it has taken the service over. Hand-shaking, hand-clapping, hand-wringing, hand-waving… Sunday morning in the sanctuary has almost become an aerobic event. But recall that too much is too little. Just as the postmodern anti-narrative is so analytical that it leaves nothing to analyze and turns obtuse, so these swaying, sniveling, shouting "hours of power" decant too much fluid emotion for the mind to come away knowing why it has felt, or even exactly what. The cathedral’s vaults struggling upward into shadow have been replaced by theatrical tiers of seats and a central stage. The fugue which chased after an elusive angel has become, first a guitarist on a stool, now a couple of electric guitars and a drumset. The emotions thus uncorked are visceral: a response to the close press of bodies, a response to the singer’s amplified plaints, a response to the prayer’s almost sobbing tones (enhanced by an electric organ, reserved for these occasions rather than for hymns). The aesthetic experience of the service has been grossly debased.

Need we wonder that the young mind thus tutored in feeling out the subtleties of experience should not be particularly uncomfortable with lies "if they help rather than harm"? Is it a surprise that a person raised to confuse the trembling of long exposure to high decibels with the Holy Spirit’s visitation should not be able to parse tortuous moral issues? Murderous tyrants are wicked, but one people should not criticize another people’s way of doing things… a volatile regime should not be allowed to stockpile biochemical weapons, but our troops should not be put in a position where more than one or two must die… The faithful and the agnostic among us seem to slip on the same stones when forced to cross these rivers, especially if they are young. Even if they read Shakespeare as well as the Bible, they have grave difficulty sorting out their feelings. They may feel deeply, but they struggle in vain to feel coherently. For finesse, in a way, is the enemy of feeling—of a certain kind of feeling, of sloppy sentiment. Finesse demands convergence upon form even as it relaxes the boundaries of forms too harsh. A lot of feelings or a great surge of feeling cannot redeem the sentimental failure of a feeling which renounces purposeful struggle.

I have ranged unusually far and wide in this essay as I myself have struggled after the sense of our cultural senselessness. That we are collectively wading through a moral quagmire surely needs no demonstration, and that our best and brightest have actually led us into the quicksand more often than pointing a way to safety needs but little further observation to come clear. I will also not have surprised many readers of this journal in saying that a deeper species of literacy than we now practice would be very salutary to us, nor in expressing my pessimism about our soon embracing the task of renewal. As I have revisited a great many propositions and concerns vented in these pages before, however, I have sought this time to emphasize the role of our aesthetic debasement. It has occurred to me lately that literacy itself can perhaps be helped out of its cultural sinkhole by a revival of musical and artistic taste—or that the three, perhaps, can help each other out. What effect would a vertically thrusting cathedral have on an insipid religious service? What effect would Freshman Oil Painting have on Freshman Composition? What effect would fifteen minutes per day playing a musical instrument have on our national policy-makers?15 If a tenured professor of Literary Theory were somehow induced to attend the symphony every month, would he or she be quite so rabidly nihilistic?

I propose to examine such possibilities in forthcoming issues of Praesidium. I shall attempt to contribute something to the discussion myself, but I must warn that there are those much better prepared to do so. Perhaps this open invitation—rambling, polemical, and as full of indemonstrable propositions as it is lean on footnotes—will induce some of our musically and artistically accomplished audience to come forward. By way of impressing a certain urgency upon the invitation, I again advance the claim that aesthetic discernment enhances moral discernment: i.e., that we not only may be interested in the beautiful, but ought to be. None of my propositions has been less testable, yet none seems to me more vindicated by common sense. Surely a person practiced in noticing fine detail as he picks a guitar or fills a canvas will be more apt to notice and include in his calculations the "collateral damage" of innocent bystanders attendant upon some just crusade or noble rescue mission. The good person’s objective is not to cripple his active will with a haunting prescience of incidental tragedy: it is to do what he must do without being surprised by necessary costs. We have in many respects "over-determined" our environment to the point that tragedy and misery are simply clichés or stage props in whatever genre we happen to be "playing" at. The reality underlying the "video arcade" obstacle appears to shock us when it pierces the formula in widow’s wails or child’s screams. The salvation of the oppressed by "smart missiles" is not supposed to leave toddlers without arms and legs. The purgation of DDT from the planet is not supposed to leave babies dying of malaria.

In other respects, however, we grow so drunk on debauches of unrefined emotion that we cannot hear the clichés dripping from our own mouths. The risk of several dozen young lives is not necessarily unconscionable if thousands more will certainly be lost through inaction. And though such calculations should never be a mere contrast of projected body counts—for dehumanized life is worse than death—the quality of survival is precisely what we now have greatest difficulty reckoning. We want no one hurt, either way—a kind of pipe-dreaming which can turn fatal for all involved.

When refinement sickens, command of basic arithmetic also takes ill. A person whose vision grows blurry cannot count the number of limbs on a tree, let alone the number of sparrows on a limb; and a person whose taste is coarse cannot understand why a tank in the plaza will not necessarily secure peace. Unless we learn how to distinguish better among the essential things of our world, we shall very soon lose our awareness of which things truly exist, and which belong to our troubled fantasies.

NOTES:

1 Cf. the opening remark from Part One of the Critique of Practical Reason: "Laws must completely determine the will as will, even before I ask whether I am capable of achieving a desired effect or what should be done to realize it. They must thus be categorical; otherwise they would not be laws, for they would lack the necessity which, in order to be practical, must be completely independent of pathological conditions, i.e., conditions only contingently related to the will" (Beck’s translation from p. 18 [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956]). I hasten to add that my employment of such Kantian terms as "quantitative" and "qualitative" is borrowed from the Critique of Pure Reason’s analysis of theoretical (i.e., empirical) reason. Kant leaves largely implicit moral law’s somewhat porous character in specific applications. He prefers to emphasize that a moral act chosen in response to a specific crisis treads down specific, or "pathological", pressures in favor of immutable truth. The emphasis is surely understandable—surely even laudable; yet later commentators have often decided to view it as a licensing of egocentric conduct which elevates subjective whimsy over objective duty, an obvious reversal of Kant’s intent.

2 It is a measure of Kant’s rigid devotion to formal law—and hence of his aversion to legislating personal whim—that he penned a formidable little essay asserting the wrongness of telling falsehoods under any circumstances (to wit: Über ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen, or, "Concerning a Supposed Right of Humane Love to Tell Lies".) Few of Kant’s "principled" detractors would sustain this position.

3 Or to recur to a locus classicus, Pyrrho himself and his followers, who were very much the equivalent of the contemporary deconstructionist, made a veritable system out of unraveling systems. In an earlier essay, I noted the bad faith with which Sextus Empricus welcomes suspension of judgment as a means for achieving the end of ataraxia, or utter indifference (see P.H. 1.29). This devious deception—and it is quite possibly a self-deception in most cases—is even better exemplified in Diogenes Laertius’s long, clearly admiring summary of the "ten Pyrrhonist perplexities" (see his life of Pyrrho, chs. 79-88). These include such compromising qualities of human judgment as its susceptibility to physiological variables (e.g., disease and age), to environmental variables (e.g., distance and lighting), and to cultural variables (e.g., taste in foods or dress). The list reads much like a canny adolescent’s battery of arguments for manipulating Mom and Dad—or perhaps like the Russian rake’s book of love letters guaranteed to get women into bed in Stendhal’s Rouge et le Noir. In all such cases, what is demonstrated is not the ludicrous sham of all forms, but rather the ingenuity with which unprincipled minds may puncture or exploit recognized forms in favor of an end allowed to pass unquestioned.

4 The opening sections of Part One, Book Two of the Critique of Judgment, especially sections 28-29, contain an extraordinarily (for Kant) eloquent account of the sublime experience. I might add that in the same work, Kant insists that taste should be consulted before genius in artistic creation because judgment "will more readily endure an abatement of the freedom and wealth of the imagination, than that the understanding should be compromised" (James Creed Meredith’s translation [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978], 183). This is hardly the pronouncement of a person who would countenance licensing whimsy as moral imperative—whimsy is to be given little enough rein even in art!

5 My youthful mind was lastingly impressed by the grandiose sophos who honored my first-ever scholarly publication by labeling it (or libeling it) as characteristic of "recent treatments follow[ing] Gomme’s lead in taking the fragment [Sappho 105a] out of its social context." (See R. Drew Griffith, "In Praise of the Bride: Sappho Fr. 105(a) L-P, Voigt," Transactions of the American Philological Association 119 [1989], 55-61.) To this day, I know nothing of my self-effacing mentor, Monsieur Gomme; but I enjoyed a laugh shared probably by no one else on earth at the discovery that I had reached the same verdict about Sappho’s misunderstood imagery as Professor Griffith, and had done so precisely by imputing basic human responses to similar people in similar cultural settings (specifically, to Sappho and the seventeenth-century Gaelic poet Mary MacLeod). The degree to which classical studies have grown hostile to any hint of universal elements within human experience is stunning, and must surely reflect not just the materialist assumptions common throughout academe, but also a certain aspiration to keep the uninitiated out of the temple. I quite concur with Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath in Who Killed Homer? (New York: Free Press, 1998) that such snobbery has severely dampened general interest in the classics over the past several years. By denying the universal, a priori basis of human aesthetic encounters, it has played its part, as well, in brutalizing our entire culture. I recently found in the fourth chapter of Plutarch’s essay, "Concerning the Education of Children," an extended comparison of good and bad teaching to sowing seed in various soils. Had Plutarch, then, read an Aramaic gospel somehow—or had Seneca, before he wrote nam et sceleratis sol oritur ("for upon the wicked the sun also rises" [De Beneficiis 4.27.1])? Is the parallel evolution of elegant tropes and great ideas insufferably "unscholarly" in the dark light of the scholar’s preemptive need to suborn all human events to obscure historical causation?

6 See p. 9 of Ruffinelli’s introduction to Augusto Monterroso, Lo Demás es Silencio (Madrid: Catedra, 2003), 9-48. This and two subsequent citations (see notes 8 and 9) are my translations of the Spanish.

7 Cf. John Ellis’s accounting for radical chic nouveau as a reaction to the extreme disengagement of literary criticism: "Deconstruction’s initial focus on linguistic indeterminacy and the independence of language from reality had an aura of ivory-tower amusement for scholars which invited a sharp swing of the pendulum to the opposite end of the spectrum" (Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities [New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1997], 215). My discomfort with this assessment arises from the all-too-evident fact—in Monterroso’s case and others—that the same scholars often strike both postures at the same moment.

8 Op. cit., 9.

9 Ibid., 36.

10 To be precise, both essays hearken to the days before Arcturus had been resurrected as Praesidium. See Thomas F. Bertonneau, "A Blast-Proof Bunker: Memories of the Santa Monicas—Decade 80," Arcturus 2.3 (Summer 1999), 20-33; and "The Seer of Solstice Canyon: Herbert Stothart’s Mountain Vision," Arcturus 4.1 (Winter 2001), 9-31.

11 "Apocalypse Among the Ruins," Arcturus 3.1 (Winter 2000), 17-33.

12 Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Boston and London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 117-118.

13 My own research into just what a hypertext is in literary circles has often turned up the names of Jay David Bolter and George P. Landow. I would recommend a rather less rose-colored study, Espen J. Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997). Birkerts (op. cit.) considers the medium "stylistically uninspired" (151), a verdict which I personally find charitable.

14 My edition of this extraordinary work (Baile Átha Cliath: An Gúm, 1998) is completely in Irish, and the general reader, of course, would find it unavailable in translation. That is part of my point: i.e., that we no longer translate great books as zealously as we once did. The academy, in its infinite vanity, has decided to reward pseudo-scientific quibbling over historical influence and mock-theoretical algarades of jargon while accounting a good translation as of virtually no value whatever in the promotion-and-tenure struggle. It is also true, however, that Ó Dónaill’s very colorful adaptation (originally made in 1942) of medieval Irish verse into relatively modern prose is simply untranslatable. The Fenian tales have naturally been translated into English very often in some form or other—but adaptation requires a special kind of apprenticeship. A century ago, educated people had access to such rare encounters thanks to having been taught two or three foreign languages. Now, when they do have any foreign language instruction at all, its emphasis is upon the spoken word, and upon words as they are spoken in government offices or on car lots.

15 In fact, Condoleezza Rice is an accomplished pianist; and, at the risk of being argumentative (an academic friend exclaimed to me the other day, "She’s as bloodthirsty as all the rest!"), I think the record shows her "feel" for delicate issues to be rather finer than the average. Skeptics not wedded to their skepticism may want to review Dr. Rice’s canny pronouncements upon the Soviet Union some years ago (e.g., in Uncertain Alliance [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984]).

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The Judgment of Paris

by

Gary Inbinder

Gary Inbinder is attorney specializing in healthcare law. He holds a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and a J.D. from the University of La Verne (California). His essay, Jacob and Esau, has been published on-line by Quodlibet, and has also been accepted by Humanitas, the Journal of the National Humanities Institute. He resides in Woodland Hills, California.

I. The Judgment

The story of the Judgment of Paris is well known as a mythological explanation for the casus belli of the Trojan War. Rightly understood, I believe it is a profound cautionary tale of the disastrous consequences of human moral weakness. I believe the word "judgment" in the context of the myth is ironic, because if we think of judgment as well reasoned deliberation, then Paris’s choice is totally devoid of judgment according to our understanding.

To recapitulate briefly the events leading up to the "judgment", all the gods and goddesses—with the exception of Eris, goddess of discord—were invited to the wedding of King Peleus and the sea-goddess Thetis, the future parents of the Greek hero Achilles. Angry at the slight, Eris tossed a golden apple inscribed, "For the fairest one," among the guests. The goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite each claimed the prize. Hera argued that she, as queen of the gods, in all her majesty and power, was most worthy of the golden apple. Aphrodite asked who could be fairer than she, the goddess of love and beauty. Athena declared that wisdom and knowledge were more beautiful than superficial and mundane charms.

The dispute became more heated, and the angry goddesses called upon the wedding guests to award the prize to the most deserving; but the wedding guests, fearing to award the prize to one goddess and thereby incur the wrath of the other two, wisely declined to judge. The final decision was therefore referred to Paris, a son of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy. In his infancy, Paris had been exposed on a mountain top and left to die because of a prophecy that he would cause the death of his family and the downfall of his native city. Paris was saved and adopted by a shepherd, and it was in the guise of a lowly shepherd that he was called upon to make his fateful judgment. Thus were sown the seeds of discord leading to fulfillment of the prophecy of the downfall of Troy.

Let us next examine the human qualities represented by the three competing goddesses. Athena "is derived…from the Sanskrit Dahana or Ahana (meaning the ‘light of daybreak’) and we are thus enabled to understand why the Greeks described her as sprung from the forehead of Zeus (the heavens)."1 She was the personification of the "knowledge giving light of the sky; for in Sanskrit the same word also means ’to wake’ and ’to know’. The Romans connected her name of Minerva with mens, the same as the Greek menos and the English mind."2 Therefore, I will identify Athena, goddess of wisdom, with the divine light and word of creative intellect and speech which corresponds to the human capacity for imagination, logic, and reasoned discourse. She therefore, in a Platonic sense, personifies the fixed and immutable world of the intelligible forms or things as they are; the source of refined judgment, philosophy and ideal beauty.

"Hera… the heavenly light, and therefore the complement and consort of the sky, is supposed to be derived from the Sanskrit soar, (‘the bright sky’) and surya (‘the sun’)". The personification of atmospheric change, Hera gave "the impression of the jealous, capricious, vengeful person…."3 Hera, consort of Zeus and queen of heaven, is light personified as that of the atmospheric or sensible, phenomenal world which is as mutable and diverse as the intelligible is fixed and unified. By her light we do not see the perfect universal forms of the intelligible world, but rather their shadows in the particulars of the phenomenal world. She therefore appeals to the irascible human characteristics of ambition, self-assertion, indignation, and honor seeking the goods of this world and the judgment of common opinion (or doxa) concerning those particular goods.

Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, is born of the sea-foam, which gives her an evanescent quality. In the context of this myth, she gives more the illusion of love and beauty than its reality. She is part of the mutable, diverse, and finite phenomenal world of shadow and illusion and appeals to the sensual appetitive nature of humankind. Her elusive and deceptive beauty gives rise to desires that can be destructive if not adequately controlled. She is the basest and most untrustworthy of the three competing goddesses and appeals neither to judgment of the higher intellect nor to common opinion, but rather to the usurpation of judgment by the passions.

Understanding what the three goddesses represent within the context of the myth, we can see how they relate to the philosophy of Plato referenced in "The Simile of the Sun", "The Divided Line", and "The Cave" in The Republic. Athena is the form of the good, or beauty itself that is apprehended by the intellect, or as Aristotle would say noesis noeseos, "thought thinking itself". She is therefore the most beautiful of the three, but only for those who can see her light reflected in the eye of their intellect. She is the Philosopher’s ideal, the source of Eudaemonia, or the end of a rational pursuit of happiness. I will discuss her offer of wisdom and victory in war in the following section.

Hera is the light of the "visible sun" of the sensible world. Her beauty can be seen in the twilight world of change apprehended by the eye of the body, and she appeals to the person of ambition and self-regard. Her offer of temporal power in kingship is discussed in the following section.

Aphrodite is the illusion of beauty that dwells in the shadow world of the Cave. She is a false light creating a false impression that deceives people through the "physical eye" and appeals to the impulsive sensual appetite. Her offer of Helen is discussed in the following section.

II. The Inducements

Much has been made of the "bribes" offered by the goddesses, but I think they are best understood as inducements either toward or away from right reason followed by right conduct and correct judgment.

Further, in a natural hierarchy those inducements range from the base and mundane (Aphrodite) to the noble and transcendent (Athena). As such, we may consider the operation of those impressions perceived through the senses upon the imagination wherein are formed ideas which may be good or bad. Once the idea is formed in the particular individual, that individual’s consequent acts may be judged by objective standards of practical reason. Memory also plays an important role in this process of rational judgment since the particular errors of the past, embodied within poetic documents of myth and legend which chronicle the lived experience of individuals in various ages and cultures, are stored in the universal trans-cultural, trans-generational treasury of human experience. We can then relate the particular act of the present to the vast treasury of precedent or remembered experience.

Tapping into this great memory bank proceeds in a fashion which suggests the Platonic concept of Anamnesis, or the doctrine of knowledge as recollection of ideas known to the soul in a previous existence.

Further, we may consider the operation of Synderesis, the "divine inner spark", upon the individual conscience which the Scholastic philosophers and theologians, most notably St. Thomas Aquinas, considered a habitual impetus of the First Principle of Practical Reason, to do good and avoid evil. Implicit in the Christian concept of Synderesis is something of the divine that remains in fallen man—an impulse that moves the human conscience to act in a way conducive to a transcendent or divinely ordained moral good. If one is habituated toward the good, one’s will in immediate action will incline to do that which is good in any given situation. However, one must be aware that Original Sin acts like a cataract, obscuring the vision of our inner "moral eye".

The operation of Synderesis upon conscience when oriented toward both the material and spiritual good of the individual should result in intuitive right conduct, according to what Edmund Burke described as "just prejudice". "Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature."4

Further, an individual with a moral imagination will judge the value of those ideas he or she conceives prior to acting upon them in word and deed. The deeds or words of the particular individual that enter into the greater world external to the self have a dialectic life of their own when they come into conflict with the words and deeds of others, playing out upon the great stage of history in the generalized life dramas that are recorded in the cultural and trans-cultural memory of things past.

The recorded practical wisdom embodied in the Myth is as follows, if we may start with the base inducement and ascend to the noble. Aphrodite appeals to the sensual and licentious. In this Myth she is the instigator of crime, for by enticing Paris with Helen, the object of an illicit desire, she invites disaster upon all if Paris should choose to fulfill that desire.

Hera offers kingship, which appeals to ambition and self-regard. It is a better choice than Helen, provided it, too, is not obtained at the price of crime, i.e. the usurpation of a lawful sovereign.

Athena offers wisdom and victory in war, the only moral choice in the context of the Myth. While much has changed since the age of pre-Classical Greece, we still live in a world of struggle and inevitable conflict, both internal and external—on the scale both of the self and of the self’s relation to others: its role among groups, communities, cultures, regimes, and civilizations. Therefore, wisdom and victory in war is the best choice among the inducements offered to Paris.

If Paris were a Eudaemon, a man, in the words of Aristophanes, of judgment "accurate, refined, and chaste", he would have the will to refrain from inherently evil actions. Further, he would possess both the wisdom to act as a mediator, attempting to reconcile differences when those differences were reasonably reconcilable, and also the wisdom that values victory in war, when war is the only viable solution. What Athena offered was the sort of victory Winston Churchill sought when, in confronting the forces of Hitler, he urged Britain to achieve "victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival."5

III. Why Paris?

Paris, a son of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy, is chosen to decide which goddess gets the apple. There has been much speculation as to why Paris was chosen for a task requiring the most judicious discernment. I believe the best explanation is to presume that he represents the commonality of humankind. As a callow, mediocre "everyman" rather than a hero like his elder brother Hector, he best illustrates the extent to which bad consequences occur when the lower passions, in both the individual and the group, are not controlled and balanced by right reason allied with self-regard.

In the Myth, Zeus decided that Troy must fall and Greece prevail. Placing the fate of a culture and civilization in the hands of Paris ensured a Greek victory. Perhaps this was propaganda for the advancement of Greek culture and civilization, but it also had a didactic purpose.

In the context of the story, Paris brings ruin not only to himself but to his family and all Troy, for Paris’s lack of judgment leads to crime. Whether we think of his action as consensual adultery (which at present is barely frowned upon in the West) or rape (which remains a crime), the moral of the story is that a nation which will not adhere to rules of natural justice and which permits such actions to go unpunished is doomed to destruction. In the Nicomachaen Ethics, Aristotle referred to adultery as follows:

But not every action or feeling admits of a mean; because some have names that directly connote depravity, such as malice, shamelessness and envy, and among actions adultery, theft and murder. All these, and more like them, are so called as being evil in themselves; it is not the excess or deficiency of them that is evil. In their case, then, it is impossible to act rightly, one is always wrong. Nor does acting rightly or wrongly in such cases depend upon circumstances—whether a man commits adultery with the right woman or at the right time or in the right way, because to do anything of that kind is simply wrong.6

What we see in the above is the philosophical intellect of Aristotle observing and universalizing the particular experience of life as it was lived within a culture and as embodied within the poetical expression of myth and legend. What Aristotle observed was the natural law that was embedded within the poetry and drama of his culture.

In Aristotle’s view, Aphrodite’s inducement is malum in se and should be rejected out of hand; there is no "mean" for adultery, and justifications fabricated to "depend on the circumstances" would be dismissed as sophistry. Of course, that is an ethical perspective arising from a pre-modern worldview and one that would be rejected by both the modern and so called postmodern worldviews, a conflict in ethical visions which I will address more fully below.

I next want to look at the moral issues of the ancient Myth that arose from a particular age and culture, were poetically embodied as an artifact in the myths and legends of that culture, and reemerged in Shakespeare’s The History of Troilus and Cressida. During those intervening millennia, Western history records the rise, spread, and subsequent decline of Greek civilization, the rise and fall of Rome, the rise of Christianity, schism between the Western and Eastern Churches, the conflict with Islam, Renaissance Humanism and neo-paganism, the wars of the Reformation, Copernicus and Galileo, the Counter-Reformation, and the beginnings of modernism, empiricism and a new materialism and naturalism (which were observed and analyzed by Shakespeare’s contemporary Francis Bacon and carried forward in the political philosophy of Shakespeare’s late contemporary, Thomas Hobbes).

A broad historical overview of some 2,500 years of Western Civilization is beyond the scope of this essay. What remains within its scope is the fact that Shakespeare’s Paris is morally reprehensible, that an audience of Shakespeare’s time and place would generally agree with that determination, and further that Shakespeare makes this judgment upon the same traditional natural law basis as the ancient Greeks. Place good and evil on a stage and humans, regardless of time, place, race, gender, or culture will intuitively make the distinction. Whether they individually identify with the good or evil character is another matter. Shakespeare’s contemporaries Bacon and Hobbes were harbingers of the modern era that fostered anthropocentric naturalism, radical empiricism, and an unrealistic idealism that engendered Western civilization’s turn toward moral and cultural relativism. This great paradigm shift in Western man’s understanding of himself and his relationship to the world came about largely through a modern tendency to confuse newly discovered laws of nature relating to physics and biology with the moral law that relates only to humankind. The great early twentieth century American scholar, Paul Elmer More, traced this modern tendency to its roots in ancient materialist philosophies that were opposed to Socratic and Platonic spirituality:

To ascribe knowledge and certainty to physical science and to deny man’s inner freedom by imprisoning the spirit in a huge mechanism of fixed and calculable natural law is to invert the whole order of the Platonic philosophy. The result of such an inversion is shown strikingly in the different connotations of the word "necessity" in Plato and Marcus Aurelius. To the former necessity meant the resistance of the meaningless and incomprehensible flux of things, whether in nature or the human soul, to the government of order and happiness; it was the exact contrary of the spirit, which is shrined in liberty. To … [Marcus Aurelius] necessity was the binding force of the whole world, leaving to the spirit this poor relic of freedom alone, that it might form its own opinion as to the moral character of the universal flux of which it was itself also a part, and so might persist in praising that as good which it felt to be evil…. The modern stoicism of science is gray with the same disease…. There is no stable foundation of conduct in this physical necessity taken as a substitute for spiritual law. In the end men will clamor for release from such joyless servitude; if they cannot discover the way of freedom in the law of the spirit, they will throw open the gate of the soul to the throng of invading desires, and the stoical necessity of science, save for the few exceptional minds, will remain as a theory, while in practice the mass… will follow a rebellious and epicurean individualism.7

As a result of this confusion concerning the distinction between physical "necessity" and spiritual law, modernism adopted an anthropocentric autonomous natural law, as opposed to a pre-modern understanding of natural law grounded in man’s participation in the divine order through the use of his God-given reason.

In Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss referenced this radical change in worldview as follows: "According to the traditional view [of natural law] those [moral] sanctions are supplied by the judgment of the conscience, which is the judgment of God. Locke rejects this view. According to him, the judgment of the conscience ‘is nothing else but our own opinion or judgment of the moral rectitude or pravity of our own actions.’ Or to quote Hobbes, whom Locke tacitly follows: ‘private consciences…are but private opinions.’"8 Add David Hume’s portentous declaration that "reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions" to the witch’s brew, and we have a foundation for the "feel good, do your own thing" psychobabble of postmodern popular culture, and a prescription for the deconstruction, decline, and fall of Western culture and civilization. By making our "private opinions" the source of moral legislation and reason the slave of the passions, the early modern philodoxers rendered God irrelevant in the sphere of human morality, legislation, and judgment. It then required but a little adjustment in one’s thinking, and a sufficient loosening of political and social restraints, to openly declare God dead and to affirm the nihilist’s creed, "God is dead, therefore everything is permitted."

Radical empiricism and naturalism spawned the secular ethics of utilitarianism, which can justify any evil as long as that evil is arguably conducive to the immediately perceived greatest material good of the greatest number at a particular time and place. I quote an observation on the operation of the modern utilitarian ethic attributed to Bertrand Russell: "… if it could be shown that humanity would live happily ever after if the Jews were exterminated, there could be no good reason not to proceed with their extermination."9 Alternatively, a vulgar pragmatism will argue for that which is good is that which works for "us" in any particular situation. Unrealistic, or Romantic, idealism will justify any evil as a means to achieving the "visionary" end of a utopian possibility that a self-proclaimed "vanguard elite", with little or no justification beyond its own "private opinion", confidently proclaims is "good".

In the context of this Myth, the "eye of the intellect" that could perceive the beauty of Athena in the eternal intelligible world of "things as they are" was, in modernism, made subordinate to the "eye of the body" that perceives the transitory mundane" things as they appear to be", i.e. Hera and Aphrodite. By declaring those baser goddesses of the mutable material phenomenal world more "real" and "true", modernism also declared them the "fairest" and therefore most worthy of the prize of the golden apple.

In Troilus and Cressida, Hector is portrayed as the noblest of three brothers. I would understand the three, in descending order, to reflect the qualities attributed to the three goddesses. Hector is a man who, given the chance, would have chosen the wisdom and victory in war offered by Athena. In The Republic, Hector would no doubt be assigned a place among the golden in Plato’s metallurgical moral hierarchy. Troilus, while a defender of Paris and the seducer of Cressida, is not so bad a man as his morally deficient brother. He is more a man of self-regard and doxa, or common opinion, and therefore would arguably have been more inclined to choose Hera as the fairest. He is perhaps a mixture of bronze and silver. The following lines from the play illustrate how the self-serving arguments of Paris and his supporter, Troilus, are countered by their nobler brother Hector. The argument is after the fact; Paris has abducted Helen and the Trojans must decide whether to appease the Greeks by her return and thus avoid war, or keep her and face the consequences:

Troilus: It was thought meet

Paris should do some vengeance on the Greeks.

Your breath with full consent bellied his sails….

And for an old aunt whom the Greeks held captive

He brought a Grecian queen….

Why keep her? The Grecians keep our aunt.

Is she worth keeping? Why, she is a pearl,

Whose price has launched above a thousand ships….

                                          O theft most base,

That we have stol’n what we do fear to keep!

T&C II.ii.72-93

Troilus appeals to Trojan honor and self-regard. He argues that the Greeks have "an old aunt" as a captive, whereas Paris has brought honor to Troy by taking the most beautiful woman in the world from the Greeks. The honorable thing to do is to fight to keep her. It is clear from the Myth, however, that Paris was not thinking of Trojan honor when he made his fateful judgment. Further, even if Helen were taken as a matter of honor, is that sufficient reason to excuse a crime and engage in war in defense of that crime—the foreseeable consequences of which war are the fall of a culture and civilization?

Troilus is interrupted in his defense of Paris by his sister, the doomed prophetess of the downfall of Troy, Cassandra. The gods have already decided that Cassandra’s prophecy will not be believed, and Troy’s fate is sealed; yet Shakespeare assigns his noblest character, Hector, to voice the following moral rebuke:

             Now youthful Troilus, do not these

High strains of divination in our sister work

Some touches of remorse? Or is your blood

So madly hot that no discourse of reason,

Nor fear of bad success in a bad cause,

Can qualify the same?

T&C II.ii.113-118

Troilus and, more disingenuously, Paris continue to argue against the return of Helen to avert war on the basis of the defense of Trojan honor, thus giving evidence of an irascible nature defending its "natural right"—an abstract right without a corresponding duty which is asserted by our lower nature to justify what our higher nature knows to be wrong. By defending Paris, the self-regarding Troilus has allied himself with the base rather than the noble. Hector responds to his brothers’ sophistry as follows:

Paris and Troilus, you have both said well;

And on the cause and question now in hand

Have glozed, but superficially; not much

Unlike young men, whom Aristotle thought

Unfit to hear moral philosophy.

The reasons you allege do more conduce

To the hot passion of distemp’red blood

Than to make up a free determination

‘Twixt right and wrong, for pleasure and revenge

Have ears more deaf than adders to the voice

Of any true decision. Nature craves

All dues rend’red to their owners. Now,

What nearer debt in all humanity

Than wife is to the husband? If this law

Of nature be corrupted through affection,

And that great minds, of partial indulgence

To their benumbed wills, resist the same,

There is a law in each well-ordered nation

To curb those raging appetites

Most disobedient and refractory.

If Helen, then, be wife to Sparta’s king,

As it is known she is, these moral laws

Of nature and of nations speak aloud

To have her back returned. Thus to persist

In doing wrong extenuates not wrong,

But makes it much more heavy…

T&C II.ii.163-188

After pardoning Shakespeare for his anachronistic reference to Aristotle’s ethics, I think it is fair to say that the greatest thinkers of the Elizabethan era could no more justify the choice of Paris than could the ancient Greeks. What, after all, was "the face that launched a thousand ships" weighed against self-destruction, the downfall and death of one’s family, and the collapse of an entire culture and civilization? Given the circumstances, any defense of Paris’s actions would seem wrong-headed and downright absurd. Yet within two centuries after Shakespeare, the moderns would defend such actions, and much worse.

At the time of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke observed Romantic modernism’s tendency to abandon the collective wisdom of generations for a highly speculative vision of the future,

They have no respect for the wisdom of others; but they pay it off by a very full measure of confidence in their own. With them it is a sufficient motive to destroy an old scheme of things, because it is an old one. As to the new, they are in no sort of fear with regard to the duration of a building run up in haste; because duration is no object to those who think little or nothing has been done before their time, and who place all their hopes in discovery. 10

Two centuries after Burke, Pierre Manent made a similar observation about modernism’s moral predicament:

… modern man, as modern, both flees from and seeks out law. He flees the law that is given to him and seeks the law he gives himself. He flees the law given to him by nature, by God, or that he gave himself yesterday and that today weighs on him like the law of another. He seeks the law he gives himself and without which he would be but the plaything of nature, of God or his own past. The law he seeks ceaselessly and continually becomes the law he flees. In flight and in pursuit, with the difference of the two laws always before him, modern man proceeds in this way to the continual creation of what he calls History.11

Modern man cannot be "modern" and still say, with Aristotle and Shakespeare, that an act of betrayal like adultery is "simply wrong". Rather, modern man, in his flight from God, nature, and his past, abrogated his responsibility for temporal judgment, saying, "Who am I to judge?"

What else can one say if one believes, consistent with Hobbes and Locke, that "private consciences… are but private opinions," and with Hume that "reason is and ought… to be the slave of the passions"?

The post-moderns are just the continuum of the moderns who rejected "conventional morals" and "common sense", so who is to say whether any behavior is foolish, vicious, or irrational? Moral and cultural relativism have been de rigueur among the elites of Western culture for generations, and the popular culture has told us, "If it feels good, do it"… so for the moment it would seem that Paris has won his argument with Hector.

This brings us back to Athena’s offer of wisdom and victory, a wisdom that respects the wisdom of generations past, and that knows the value of achieving victories necessary for the survival of a culture and civilization. In The West and the Rest, the British philosopher Roger Scruton writes about the "culture of repudiation" that has developed among the postmodern generation:

In place of the old beliefs of a civilization based