|
*****
A
Few Words from the Editor
Since
I have returned to teaching as an adjunct professor at the local branch of
The University of Texas system, I have dispoed of a little more money and
far less time. Hence the
collapse of Praesidium’s Winter and Spring issues into one: I could not
possibly have prepared separate issues of the journal over the past few
hectic months. Whether this
fusion of issues to inaugurate the new year is to become habitual, I
cannot say at the moment. It
may likely occur for at least another year.
The good news is that my modestly improved financial circumstances
may allow me to seek 501(c)3 status for The Center for Literate Values
this summer. (The application
fee is several hundred dollars, and our budget has always been meager.)
Should the day ever dawn when I may court wealthy foundations for a
few thousand dollars to expand our operation (many of you know that it is
now run exclusively out of my makeshift office at home, and that I have no
secretary or assistant or “gopher”), the journal might not fall prey
to such petty vagaries as it has this spring.
We may also be able to pay contributors a small but encouraging fee
for their work—the rarity of which, from year to year, has surely
supplied me with large-caliber ammunition for making a breach in the IRS
bunker.
There was never any intended theme for this combined issue.
I find in retrospect, however, that we have once again clustered
our thoughts and inspiration around a particular concern.
Several essays—and one short story, as well—have felicitously
converged upon politics in the broadest sense: the science, that is, of
regulating human activity in a manner both orderly and humane.
Steve Kogan’s meditation stemming from the riveting testimony of
Lev Razgon about the Soviet gulags will remind us of how disastrous was
the Stalinist experiment in making things anew.
Those who wish to create a perfect human order ex nihilo inevitably end up shooting and starving thousands or
millions of human beings. The
past’s memory is too persistent to eradicate in any other way; and if
past habits also happened to follow from common sense or common decency,
the executions must continue even after the last old history book has been
burned and the final new one rewritten.
Incredibly, the generation now coming of age seems to be far more
aware of the Jewish holocaust engineered by fascism than of the vastly
greater slaughter presided over by the twentieth century’s Marxist
utopians. No doubt, the
academy remains unmoved by the latter because its intentions were ideologically pure (as if such carnage
could be pure in any sense short of the absurd).
We therefore owe a debt of gratitude to those like Professor Kogan
who insist that the lessons of such misery be learned.
My own essay about Kant, Machiavelli, and telling lies has led me
to reflect upon what similar beasts of prey we had in Hitler and Stalin.
In their distinct ways, both incarnated Machiavelli’s Cesare
Borgia. Hitler (with
Mussolini’s help) persuaded the Catholic Church, at least early on, that
he was a bulwark against Bolshevism, thus draping his cloak à
la Machiavel; and he most certainly seasoned his mad imperial visions
with the artificial glories of a mythical past, as did Machiavelli in his
so-called Roman dream. Yet
what was Stalin’s ruthless exploitation of bourgeois convention and
gullibility if not Machiavellian to the core?
The great theorist of unprincipled political manipulation, after
all, regards no promise as binding and no outrage as impermissible.
His version of “virtue” is indeed, nothing less than the
ability to consider any criminal act as a possible option in the pursuit
of power. That
neo-conservative scholars like Leo Strauss should adopt The
Prince as their Bible ought therefore to disturb us deeply.
Precisely what is conserved in Egotism’s rapacious, ultimately
insane scramble to rule the world?
Mark Wegierski has been reviewing and discussing neo-conservative
books for me long before I had lent a critical eye to the term.
I hasten to stress (in support of our tax-exempt claim) that
neither Mark nor I nor any of the journal’s contributors approaches
these questions in the context of any party affiliation.
Our discomfort both with the New Right and the New Lefdt (for
things there are also entirely new: what would Gladstone or Wilson have
thought of campus speech codes?) roots in the equal abandonment of Western
culture by either vanguard. If
it is now “political” to befriend the mind’s endeavors and the
spirit’s creations, then we live in a desperate time, indeed.
Tom Bertonneau and Gary Inbinder remind us of just how desperate.
The former’s delightful essay on the thought-patterns of
contemporary undergraduates (complete with monstrous illustrations!)
suggests that Freshman Composition has so far descended to the level of
Middle School English as taught thirty years ago.
The latter’s dissection of a self-proclaimed “authentic” film
on King Arthur’s life and times proves that our
intellectuals are as good at rewriting history as ever Stalin’s
hack propagandists were—and also, not surprisingly, that mass ignorance
is traveling along the same vector, consenting to its own bamboozlement as
long as the folderol entertains and confirms shallow prejudices.
Mr. Mosby’s short story, as a science-fictional look into a
dystopic future, is the perfect bookend to the contents of this edition.
~J.H.
back to Contents
***********************************
True
Stories,
by Lev Razgon: Literature and the Soviet Genocide
by
Steve Kogan
It
was the end of November, and a recent snowstorm had whipped up enormous
drifts around the building. The sky was clearing, with the beginning of a
severe frost, and the stars glittered as always in winter,
with
a gloomy power and a remote indifference to all that is alive.
Lev Razgon, True Stor
After the
revelations in The Gulag Archipelago,
after the memoirs, the novels, and the unsealing of the Central Party
archives, why read another book on the Soviet labor camps? There
are even many Russians who say that they have heard it all before, and
Razgon imagines that western readers “have already read so much about
mass executions, terror, wrecked lives and decimated families that it will
probably strike them as absurd to offer yet another book on the
subject.”
I understand his hesitation,
for, even before I read his remarkable account of life and death in the
Gulag, my own small library on the camps had already said enough.
The men were not shown the thermometer, but that wasn't necessary
since they had to work in any weather. Besides,
longtime residents of Kolyma could determine the weather precisely even
without a thermometer: if there was frosty fog, that meant the temperature
outside was forty degrees below zero; if you exhaled easily but in a
rasping fashion, it was fifty degrees below; if there was a rasping and it
was difficult to breath, it was sixty degrees below; after sixty degrees
below zero, spit froze in midair. Spit
had been freezing in midair for two weeks.
The very sound of the word Gulag
falls like a dead weight upon the ear, the two rigid syllables forming the
Russian acronym for the dreaded “Main Administration of Corrective Labor
Camps”. Razgon reminds us in
his preface that it had “no equal in history’ and “was
distinguished, above all,” by its extent both in time and space.
In One
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn follows the
unities of classical Greek tragedy and concentrates the entire horror in a
single day and place, leaving it to our imagination to fill in the
remaining years of Ivan's captivity. “There
were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like this in his
sentence, from reveille to lights out. The
three extra ones were because of the leap years....”
It is the conclusion to one of
many haunting books by former inmates of the Gulag, a prison system over
which “the stars glittered as always in winter, with a gloomy power and
a remote indifference to all that is alive.”
It takes a zek, a convict
of the Gulag, to see a reflection of Soviet rule in the icy brilliance of
the northern stars. Razgon
says that the terrors of the logging camps alone were such that “several
years after my release I still could not look without hatred at the beauty
and wonder that is a forest.
In Razgon’s traumatized imagination, even a
midnight
sky could trigger frightening associations and become a hateful sight, for
“almost like the universe, Stalin seemed to have no end and no
beginning.”
The whole oppressive weight of
Stalin’s rule is captured in this image, which does not represent his
power as a simple force of nature but as an almost infinite evil that
threatens to engulf the world.
Razgon’s association of Stalin with the skies across the Gulag is
indicative of the writing throughout the book, in which the physical
dimensions of the suffering are always expressed in terms of what it felt
like to undergo Stalin’s ruthlessness. Hence
the value of True Stories does
not lie in the documentary evidence alone, for if facts and figures were
the only measure of the camps, then Razgon would indeed have written
nothing more than just another book about ‘wrecked lives and decimated
families”, and the first two chapters would have been enough to saturate
and numb the mind. Although he
does not use the term, Razgon understands the nature of “victim
fatigue” all too well, in which a constant spectacle of horrors can
become not only unendurable but also meaningless, like the repetition of a
word until it becomes an empty sound. The
beginning of his preface is organized around this very question of
language and genocide, and he answers it by affirming his faith in the
power of literature to restore our capacity for sympathy and wonder. Like
Solzhenitsyn, who subtitles his study of the Gulag An
Experiment in Literary Investigation, Razgon has a visceral connection
to literature, and his very first sentence draws us in: “'What can my
name mean to you?' This line
from Pushkin comes to mind when I imagine my Western readers….”
Razgon cannot help but feel
separated from the west, yet in one quick stroke he creates a feeling of
intimacy through Pushkin's mournful words. His
opening is typical of Russian writers on the Gulag, whose voices seem to
emerge from the Russian classics and are capable of arousing the same
intense interest that a Dostoevsky or a Chekhov can generate. Razgon
provides the underlying reason for this effect. Citing
the opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenina, he remarks that, just as “each unhappy family is unhappy
in its own way,” so too “the interest and value” of each story of
the Gulag depends on the particularity of the suffering.
For Razgon, therefore, no book on the Gulag is “just another
book”, since no one is “just another victim”. Arrests
are made, families are torn apart, and the corpses pile up, yet we never
lose sight of individuals, who are portrayed not simply as ends in
themselves but as a world. If
the despot who ruled the Gulag “seemed to have no end and no
beginning,” so did his victims, but in an altogether different, inward
sense. Thus, Solzhenitsyn
states on the very first page of The Gulag Archipelago that “each of us is a center of the
Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: ‘You are under arrest.’”
Commenting on one of his
guards, Razgon similarly observes that “all he had to do was pull the
trigger and one small universe of thoughts, emotions, friends and
acquaintances that existed quite independent of his will, would
disappear.”
Small universes had been
disappearing by the millions from the very beginning of Soviet rule, and
bullets were the least of its terrors:
The outpost Korabelnikov had been sent to organize was, I
discovered, to be used for punishing disobedient prisoners…. To
be sent to Korabelnikov’s outpost meant certain death. Each
time someone was taken there, the departure was transformed into an
incredible and barbarous spectacle. Some
of the criminals, trying in any way to delay this transfer, used to resort
to an old tactic and strip themselves naked: they would not be transported
like that in winter, they thought. This
had no effect on Korabelnikov, however. Like
the angel of death, he himself came to collect the raw material for his
punishment cell. The naked man
was bound, carried from the barrack across the entire compound, taken out
through the guard house and thrown on a sledge. Then
he was slowly driven off. The
howl of the man as he gradually froze would fade away into the distance.
Time
and again, we read of men and women who were turned into tortured animals,
a fitting image for inmates of concentration camps that were hidden in the
forests of
Siberia
. At the beginning of the
1930s, writes Solzhenitsyn, when Stalin introduced collective farming by
terrorizing the countryside, peasants
were banished not to a center of population, a place made
habitable, but to the haunt of wild beasts, into the wilderness, to
man’s primitive condition. No,
worse: even in their primeval state our forebears at least chose places
near water for their settlements. For
as long as mankind has existed no one has ever made his home elsewhere. But
for the special settlements the Cheka… chose places on stony hillsides
(100 meters up above the river Pinega, where it was impossible to dig down
to water, and nothing would grow in the soil).
Those who survived often acquired the characteristics of Arctic
animals.” In the opening paragraph of "Carpenters”, Shalamov says
that prisoners in Kolyma gradually developed an animal instinct to find
their way through freezing fog, and, in his preface to The
Gulag, Solzhenitsyn recounts a Soviet news report in which the writer
unwittingly betrayed the sheer animalism of the camps:
In 1949 some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news item in Nature,
a magazine of the
Academy
of
Sciences
. It reported in tiny type
that in the course of excavations on the Kolyma River a subterranean ice
lens had been discovered which was actually a frozen stream—and in it
were found frozen specimens of prehistoric fauna some tens of thousands of
years old. Whether fish or
salamander, these were preserved in so fresh a state, the scientific
correspondent reported, that those present immediately broke open the ice
encasing the specimens and devoured them with
relish on the spot.
The magazine no doubt astonished its small audience with the news
of how successfully the flesh of fish could be kept fresh in a frozen
state. But few, indeed, among its readers were able to decipher the
genuine and heroic meaning of this incautious report.
As for us, however—we understood instantly. We
could picture the entire scene right down to the smallest details: how
those present broke up the ice in frenzied haste; how, flouting the higher
claims of ichthyology and elbowing each other to be first, they tore off
chunks of the prehistoric flesh and hauled them over to the bonfire to
thaw them out and bolt them down.
We understood because we ourselves were the same kind of people as
those present at that event. We,
too, were from that powerful tribe of zeks,
unique on the face of the earth, the only people who could devour
prehistoric salamander with relish.
And the
Kolyma
was the greatest and most famous island, the pole of ferocity of that
amazing country of Gulag, which,
though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the
psychological sense, fused into a continent—an almost invisible, almost
imperceptible country inhabited by the zek people.
Halfway through Razgon’s account, I began to wonder if I could
even understand what he was saying, for suffering on this scale is often
incomprehensible to survivors themselves. In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s
novel Enemies, A Love Story, which draws on his personal contacts with victims of
the Nazi genocide, one of his characters remarks, “What happened to me
can never be fully told. The
truth is, I don’t really know myself. So
much happened that I sometimes imagine nothing happened.”
Bewildered by a past she can
barely comprehend, Tamara Broder has become a walking ghost come straight
from hell. “I’m not dead,
I’m not dead. I’m not
alive and I’m not dead.”
I do not exaggerate in my
description of her lines. They
are the same words that Dante speaks in the last canto of the Inferno
when he and Virgil come upon the figure of Satan, who is locked in ice
“at the bottom of the universe”:
How
chilled and faint I turned then, do not ask, reader, for I do not write
it, since all words would fail. I did not die and I did not remain alive;
think now for thyself, if thou hast any wit, what I became, denied both
life and death.
The parallels between the Inferno
and True Stories are equally
precise. In Canto XXXII,
Dante’s first view of the frozen lake of Cocytus takes his mind eastward
to the “frigid sky” over Russia’s “far-off Don,”
while Razgon’s image of Stalin hovering over the Gulag, like the icy
stars that “glittered… with a gloomy power,” has unmistakable
associations with Dante’s “Emperor of the woeful kingdom”. Every
literary allusion of Razgon’s is a perception of reality; hence the
precision with which he condemns Stalin’s treatment of the children of
prisoners, which he frames in view of the entire Inferno:
The tiniest infants were handed over to special nurseries where
they died almost instantly; older children were sent to special
children’s homes where they were first brutalized and then died, one
after another. Those still
older, were simply arrested and forced to pass through all the circles of
hell.
The reference works both ways, for Dante envisions the nature of evil so
precisely that he himself could almost pass for a zek. In writing of the
last circle, he speaks of men howling like animals and even suffers the
same after-effects of a traumatized memory as Razgon: “I saw a thousand
faces made dog-like with the cold, so that shuddering comes over me, and
always will, at frozen pools.”
Robert Frost once remarked that the Russians are an epic people. It
is a quality that Razgon shares with other writers of the Gulag in his
extraordinary capacity to confront psychic pain. The
identification with Dante emerges once again. In
his epilogue, Razgon writes that, fifty-two years after his arrest in
1938, when he was finally allowed to read his files, he was escorted
through the Lubyanka Prison to an empty office of the KGB, having been
guided by “my Virgil who led me through this quiet, almost uninhabited
hell.”
It is early evening by the
time he leaves the building and makes his way through a light rain to the
Solovki Stone, a “modest monument” to the victims of the Gulag, where
“I take off my fur hat, and drops of rain or tears trickle down my face.
I am eighty-two and here I
stand, living through it all over again, by the grave of those
millions.”
He has in fact been “living
through it all over again” ever since he first began to record the
destruction of his friends and family:
I knew then that no one else would summon back to life or even
remember these numerous individuals who disappeared in the Gulag. And
if I left this life without recording things which only I remember then I
would have in some sense committed a sin.
In effect, the entire
book is a spiritual journey through the camps, and the same is true of
other Russian works on the Gulag, which share Razgon’s religious view of
memory. Solzhenitsyn has often said that Russia cannot hope to save itself
from further slides into darkness unless it repents for its crimes, and,
in Hope Abandoned (1972), Nadezhda
Mandelstam similarly writes that “a sense of guilt is man’s greatest
asset. Sin is always concrete,
and repentance commands unique and powerful words, an unequivocal language
of its own. It may be the
language of a specific moment of time, but it lasts forever.”
To
understand her faith in the language of repentance, one has to appreciate
that Mandelstam is writing from a lifetime’s experience of Marxist
rhetoric, in which the concept of the individual was suppressed through
“a hodgepodge of positivist fodder” about “material” reality.
The end result was a deadening of consciousness and a “loss of
the self”, a dangerous vacuum that was replaced with party slogans,
catch-phrases, and the whole range of communist thought-control. The
first chapter of Hope Abandoned,
like Orwell’s 1984, is devoted
to a careful analysis of this process, which Mandelstam frames in
characteristically Russian terms as a spiritual exercise:
One of the most brilliant men in the history of mankind once said
that as soon as thought dries up, it is replaced by words. A
word is too easily transformed from a meaningful sign into a mere signal,
and a group of words into an empty formula, bereft even of the sense such
things have in magic. We begin
to exchange set phrases, not noticing that all living meaning has gone
from them. Poor, trembling
creatures—we don’t know what meaning is; it has vanished from a world
in which there is no room any more for the Logos. It
will return only if and when people come to their senses and recall that
man must answer for everything, particularly for his own soul.
For Razgon, Solzhenitsyn, and Mandelstam, the lessons of literature are
written in the language of suffering and redemption: hence the recurring
identifications with Dante and the special place of Dostoevsky in their
thoughts. As the title itself
indicates, Solzhenitsyn’s novel The
First Circle was explicitly written with Dante in mind, and it was
during Stalin’s campaign of terror in the 1930s that Nadezhda
Mandelstam’s husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, wrote his extraordinary Conversation
About Dante, not long before he himself died in the camps.
It is Dostoevsky, however, who provides a direct religious
perspective on Marxism and the Soviet genocide, for his critique of
socialism, conceived in light of the Gospels, addresses the central
doctrines of communist belief. Solzhenitsyn’s
celebrated remark that the line between good and evil does not run through
the state but through the human heart is a Dostoevskian observation
through and through, and it is interesting to note that it is prefigured
at the very birth of the Soviet state in Oswald Spengler’s analysis of
Dostoevsky’s works. Speaking
of his socialist “demons” in The
Possessed, Spengler writes in The
Decline of the West (1918-26) that they
were
denounced by the Russian Intelligentsia as reactionaries. But
he himself was quite unconscious of such conflicts—“conservative”
and “revolutionary” were terms of the West that left him
indifferent…. What has the
agony of a soul to do with Communism? A
religion that has got as far as taking social problems in hand has ceased
to be a religion… and so we come back to the contrast of Tolstoi and
Dostoevski. Tolstoi, the
townsman and Westerner, saw in Jesus only a social reformer, and in his
metaphysical impotence—like the whole civilized West, which can only
think about distributing, never renouncing—elevated
primitive Christianity to the rank of a social revolution. Dostoevski,
who was poor, but in certain hours almost a saint, never thought about
social ameliorations—of what profit would it have been to a man’s soul
to abolish property
?
Commenting
on Dostoevsky’s prophecy that “without God, all is permitted,”
Nadezhda Mandelstam observes in Hope
Abandoned that the Gulag was the final destination of Marxist
ideology:
The
“license” explored by Dostoyevski not only destroys its adepts, but
also spreads corruption all around, scorches the very earth, and lays
everything waste. We all have
read Dostoyevski and know the anguish with which he shows up license for
what it is, trying to warn people of its consequences. We
who have lived through the great era of license are well aware that his
words fell on deaf ears. It is
a feature of those who choose the path of license that they are completely
deaf and hear nothing.
During his youth, Razgon was also deaf to the true nature of Marxism
until he too fell under the blows of “those gods whom (in full
accordance with our materialist world view) we had ourselves created.”
Petro Grigorenko similarly
writes that, even with the failures in agriculture and transportation in
1930-31, “people like me continued to be hypnotized by the old
ideals.”
As Nadezhda Mandelstam and
George Orwell have described at length, the rhetoric of Soviet ideology
was designed to deaden thought, and it is significant in this regard that
Grigorenko’s trance was shattered not only by his experiences but also
by the enlightenment that came to him through literature, having “seen
and lived in socialism as it is described in the novels of Fyodor
Dostoevsky, Yevgeny Zamyatin, and George Orwell,”
whose 1984 is partly modeled on
Zamyatin’s We.
Like Grigorenko, who remained “hypnotized” even though he had
already seen “many negative things”, Razgon had once been blind to
crimes that had taken place right before his eyes, and it was not until
many years later that he began to be haunted by what he had written for
the journal of the Young Communist League:
I was seventeen, and taking my first uncertain but determined steps
as a journalist. Komsomolskaya Pravda commissioned me to write a piece about the
Moscow
children’s prison and I spent several days behind the massive brick
walls of the former Danilov monastery. Then
I wrote a sketch that borrowed the title of the prison wall-newspaper:
“A Factory for Turning Out Well-trained Citizens”. Everything
in that sketch was true and, at the same time, it was a lie from beginning
to end. The children were
certainly not cold and hungry and they did have a wall-newspaper, clubs,
film shows and almost clean sheets on their metal cots. Yet
I wrote not a word of how they shuddered when the guards shouted, how the
older children mistreated the younger, and of the prison hierarchy in
which the smaller and weaker you were, the worse it was for you… I
didn’t mention that the little children became the hostages of their
semi-criminal elders since the prison authorities could only keep control
with the help of the latter. For
the rest of my life I avoided writing about many things, but to this day I
feel a particular responsibility for this piece of dishonesty. It
is the most unforgivable of the many falsehoods I have written and
uttered.
Razgon’s act of contrition stood outside the entire framework
of Soviet doctrine, for Marxist-Leninism had proclaimed that “material
conditions govern consciousness,” when it was the ideology itself that
blinded a generation of believers. There
was nothing “historically inevitable” about Razgon’s enlightenment. He
could have remained in prison for another twenty years and never seen the
truth, for it took a special kind of person to experience the shock of
disillusionment and understand its meaning. Solzhenitsyn
records the standard denials of reality among prisoners in the camps:
“Corrupt officials put me here,” “Stalin has been misled by his
advisers,” “If only Stalin knew.” Thus,
they projected their own blindness onto Stalin, forgetting that they also
believed in his omniscience.
Soviet rule was based on contradictions of this kind, for, in the
peculiar viciousness of the system, the faithful themselves were turned
into victims, from thousands of socialists in Lenin’s time to Stalin’s
purges in the 1930s, when he exterminated the Bolshevik leaders and their
followers practically down to the last man and woman. Not
even the French Reign of Terror, which Lenin admired,
could compare in sheer thirst for blood, not only in practice but also in
a theory that proclaimed a “war to the death” against the “survivals
of accursed capitalist society, these dregs of humanity, these hopelessly
decayed and atrophied limbs, this contagion, this plague, this ulcer that
socialism has inherited from capitalism.”
Every
Russian work on the Gulag that I have read testifies to the power of
Marxist ideology to blind its believers and corrupt consciousness. Hence
the opposing belief that bearing witness to the truth has a redemptive
power through the process of confession, for repentance teaches that the
seeds of rebirth lie in the dark, in the blindness itself. It
is the theme of Dostoevsky’s epigraph to his final work, The
Brothers Karamazov: ‘Verily,
verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and
die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit”
(John
12:24
). This principle of
redemption through suffering is also announced in the first pages of Hope Abandoned, in which Nadezhda Mandelstam writes that
pain acts like a leaven for both word and thought, quickening
your sense of reality and the true logic of this world. Without
pain you cannot distinguish the creative element that builds and sustains
life from its opposite—the forces of death and destruction which are
always for some reason very seductive…
It is an extraordinary observation on the death-wish in human
personality, which Mandelstam relates to the hysteria in which she herself
was caught up by the signs and slogans of the revolution:
I am not proud of my early youth. The
image that comes back to me is of a great herd of cattle stampeding over a
field of ripe corn and trampling it underfoot in vast swaths. In
those days I ran around as one of a small herd of painters. Some
of them later became well known. We
wielded rough house-painters’ brushes, dipping them in buckets of color
wash to daub crude shapes on fantastic canvases which we stretched across
the street for demonstrations to parade under.
If one listens to the words of The
Communist Manifesto with a clear and open mind, one has a glimpse into
“the forces of death and destruction” that were crying to be
unleashed: “abolition of private property”, “abolition of the
family”, “The bourgeois
claptrap about the family and education”, “the forcible overthrow of
all existing social conditions”. In
a remarkable passage in The Decline,
which parallels Dostoevsky’s portrait of Raskolnikov in Crime
and Punishment and Smerdyakov in The
Brothers Karamazov, Spengler remarks on the narcotic force of
totalitarian beliefs, whose visions of utopia are only a pretext for
unlimited destruction and surrender of the will. Both
Raskolnikov and Smerdyakov see themselves as instruments of higher powers
and, in the words of the police inspector in Crime
and Punishment, “murdered… for a theory,”
a theory whose very goal is death. As
Spengler observes, “It is wholly immaterial what slogans scream to the
wind while the gates and the skulls are being beaten in. Destruction
is the true and only impulse, and Caesarism the only issue.” As
for the Caesars themselves, their one genuine ambition is to “demolish
every remnant of order” and ‘to
see in the outer world the same chaos as reigns within their own
selves.”
Everything
about Soviet rule was senseless and unbelievable. Lenin
had promised “peace, bread, and land” and created civil war and
concentration camps, communists were branded as enemies of communism, and
Stalin’s glowing support meant almost certain death. In
Razgon’s chilling words,
If
he declared at the plenary session of the Central Committee, “We shall
not give you the blood of our beloved Bukharin, the darling of the Party
and one of its leaders,” then it was clear that Bukharin’s fate was
sealed…. Once, his voice
almost shaking with emotion, Stalin said that “children did not answer
for their fathers” and straightway issued instructions that not only the
children but all the relatives of executed Party and state officials
should be arrested without delay and dispatched to the camps or sent into
exile…
The very language of sentencing was irrational, to the point where the
word “sentence” itself, like the whole Soviet system of
“extra-judicial procedures”, became arbitrary and meaningless:
These “procedures” gave one or more individuals the right to
sentence people in their absence and without a trial to any length of
imprisonment (up to and including a 25-year term), to forced labor, exile
for life, or to be shot…. The
term “sentence” sounds barely appropriate.
It is hard for me to find a better word, yet what kind of
sentencing actually took place? Lists
were simply drawn up and people were shot. Or
people were shot, and then the lists were compiled. Or
people were shot and no record was made or kept.
And for seven decades, the entire apparatus of communist propaganda, both
east and west, glorified the
Soviet Union
as the great defender of “scientific socialism” and the model of a
“planned economy”.
In
fact, the only change that had taken place since Czarist times was the
almost complete destruction of what was best in the old order and the
intensification of what was worst. In
The Foundations of Leninism,
Stalin proclaimed that “the essence of Leninism in Party and state
work” was “revolutionary sweep” combined with “American
efficiency”,
although nothing could have been further from America’s great practical
sense than the ideology of the Soviet state, which mirrored the Czarist
monsters of its hatred and elevated the worst types of the old bureaucracy
to new heights of power. In
the second volume of The Decline,
Spengler remarks on this phenomenon and states that Bolshevism “is not
the contrary, but the final issue of Petrinism,”
the historical term for Peter the Great’s programme to westernize
Russia. Summing up its dangers
in prophetic words, Alexander Herzen described it as an act that “drove
civilisation into us with such a wedge that
Russia
could not stand it and split into two layers” that had “nothing in
common”.
His words could be applied
without change to the Soviet masters of the Gulag: “There is no instance
in history of a caste of the same race getting the upper hand so
thoroughly and becoming so completely alien as our class of upper
government servants.”
A careful reader of Russian
history and literature, Spengler observes that Bolshevism had deep roots
in “the lowest stratum of this Petrine society, alien and western like
the other strata… and consequently filled with the hate of the
downtrodden.”
Nineteenth-century Russian
fiction is filled with alienated figures of this kind. It
is a type that Herzen describes in My
Past and Thoughts down to
the last detail:
Tyufyayev
[a governor of a province in
Siberia
] was a true servant of the Tsar. He
was highly thought of, but not highly enough. Byzantine
servility was exceptionally well combined in him with official discipline.
Obliteration of self,
renunciation of will and thought before authority went inseparably with
harsh oppression of subordinates…. Tyufyayev had an intense, secret
hatred for everything aristocratic; he had kept this from his bitter
experiences. The hard labour
of Arakcheyev’s secretariat had been his first refuge, his first
deliverance. Till then his
superiors had never offered him a chair, but had employed him on menial
errands. When he served in the
commissariat, the officers had persecuted him, as is the custom in the
army, and one colonel had horsewhipped him in the street at Vilna…. All
this had entered into the copying clerk’s soul and rankled there; now he
was governor and it was his turn to oppress….
If Tyufyayev was typical of the Czar’s “civilian clergy”, as Herzen
says he was, then “the hate of the downtrodden” in Petrine society
might well have found a home among the Bolsheviks. Herzen
remarks that, if Tyufyayev had lived during the Reign of Terror, he
“would have been a ferocious Commissaire
of the Convention in 1794, a Carrier,”
referring to Jean-Baptiste Carrier, who, according to the translator,
Constance Garnett, “was responsible for the noyades
and massacre of hundreds of people at Nantes, while suppressing the
counter-revolutionary rising of La Vendée.”
The spirit of Tyufyayev was
alive in Lenin just before the revolution when he wrote that “the
example of the Jacobins is instructive,” although Tyufyayev could not
have matched Lenin for sheer mendacity when the Bolshevik leader added
that “the ‘Jacobins’ of the twentieth century would not guillotine
the capitalists” but merely arrest fifty to a hundred bankers “for a
few weeks to expose their frauds”.
Several weeks before the
revolution, he proclaimed that state power would in fact be enforced
through “the grain monopoly” and “bread rationing” (starvation):
“These means of control and of compelling
people to work will be more potent than the laws of the Convention and
its guillotine. The guillotine
only terrorised, only broke active
resistance. For us, this is not enough.”
This time, he did not lie. In
March 1918, he instructed the Commissariat for Justice to be vigilant in
“setting up a really revolutionary court that is rapid and mercilessly
severe in dealing with counter-revolutionaries, hooligans,” etc.
In defining “the essence of
Leninism”, Stalin would have been closer to the truth if he had said
that the new order was the old prison system plus firing squads and
Marxist propaganda, or Tyufyayev modernized.
The
continuities are remarkable. Substitute
the word “Bolshevik” for “Petrine” in the following passage by
Herzen and you might think you were reading a page out of Solzhenitsyn or
Razgon:
One of the most melancholy results of the Petrine revolution was
the development of the official class. An
artificial, hungry, and uncultivated class, capable of doing nothing but
‘serving,’ knowing nothing but official forms, it constitutes a kind
of civilian clergy, celebrating divine service in the courts and the
police forces, and sucking the blood of the people with thousands of
greedy, unclean mouths.
So
close is the parallel between Czarism and Soviet rule that Herzen’s
words could be applied without change to the whole machinery of the Gulag,
down to the vocabulary itself of the Czarist prison system.
“How stable our prison vocabulary and terminology has
remained!” exclaims Razgon:
Exactly the same words can be found in Dostoevsky [in The
House of the Dead], Doroshevich and Solzhenitsyn. Naturally,
cells, peepholes and slop buckets continue to perform the same functions. But
even the verbs used remain distinctive: you are not “escorted” to an
interrogation or on a new transport but “taken”, not “imprisoned”
in the punishment block but “chucked” there. And
so on. Almost nothing in this
language has changed, testimony to the hellish stability of the system
that gave it birth.
What made these continuities particularly grotesque is that the old evils
not only persisted but were deliberately intensified, all in the name of
Marxist “emancipation” from the past. Had
Melville been alive to read Lenin on “the example of the Jacobins”, he
would not have been surprised by this demonic contradiction, for, as he
observed in a manuscript passage in Billy
Budd, when the French erected their guillotines, “Straightway the
Revolution itself became a wrongdoer, one more oppressive than the
kings.”
Like other features of Soviet
rule, Stalin’s campaign to collectivize farming followed this same
principle and reintroduced serfdom on a scale that the old czars could
have never conceived (it had in fact been abolished by Alexander II in
1861). This turning of the
screws also applies to the Czarist prisons that Herzen and Dostoevsky
describe, which were only a bad dream in light of what was to come. Solzhenitsyn
even provides examples of humane treatment that Czarist prisoners
received, including Bolsheviks themselves, many of whom were permitted to
have books and writing supplies, whereas he would have been shot on the
spot if his Soviet guards had found so much as a scrap of paper in his
pocket.
Armed with an ideology that destroyed all the old restraints, the
masters of the Gulag differed from Herzen’s Czarist officials chiefly in
the intensity of their ruthlessness. Compared
to Herzen’s Tuyfyayev, Razgon’s jailers seem unearthly in their
cruelty, as if they were cut off not merely from “the people”, as
Herzen says of the Petrine bureaucracy, but from the human race itself.
Yellow-eyes
came to life and the strange expression disappeared from his face. Until
now I had not understood its meaning: it came from his sense of
superiority over all those in the barge. He
wore this expression almost all the time. Only
on those rare occasions when I saw Korabelnikov (that was his name)
talking to his superiors, any superiors, did it disappear. His
yellow eyes would light up with a canine intelligence—attentive,
respectful and understanding. Then
the light faded and, once again, he gazed on the rest of us indifferently
and calmly. There was even no
malice there. And this was
surprising, because of all the many villains whom I met in that strange
world it was Korabelnikov who made the most terrifying impression on me. After
I was released from the camps the first time, and then, after a second
term in prison and in the camps, Korabelnikov would continue to haunt my
dreams, and I would groan in my sleep and wake up in a cold sweat.
This is the same Korabelnikov who sent prisoners howling naked through
the frozen wastes. At the deepest
zone of Cocytus, Virgil points toward Satan and his kingdom, and, calling
out the Latin name for the Greek god of the underworld, he exclaims to
Dante, “Lo Dis, and the place where thou must arm thee with
fortitude.”
Here, in the circle of Dis, or
Pluto, they are are now at the furthest extreme from the light of God.
Razgon’s glimpses into Stalin’s Arctic camps recall these same
associations, which place the Gulag at the furthest reaches from humanity,
even from the Nazi factories of death, which, however hideous, are not
beyond our sight. Razgon
reminds us that the Soviet camps operated across “the hills of the
Far East
, in the Siberian forests, and in the glades of the
Tambov
woods or the Meshchera nature reserve. They
existed everywhere, yet nothing remains of them now.”
Lost in space, they are lost
in time as well, for they swallowed up millions of lives and then
disappeared themselves.
There are no terrible museums as there are today at
Auschwitz
, or at Mauthausen in
Austria
. There are no solemn and
funereal memorials like those that testify to the Nazi atrocities at
Khatyn, Salaspils or
Lidice
. Thousands of unnamed graves,
in which there lie mingled the bones of hundreds of thousands of victims,
have now been overgrown by bushes, thick luxuriant grass and young new
forest.
Archeologists continue to uncover sites, and land erosions sometimes
raise the dead, but it is difficult to rebuild even a single camp as a
memorial. In an article on
Perm 36 labor camp, which “a few local academics are trying to
reconstruct,” the New York Times
notes that “there are virtually no films or photographs of the Soviet
prison system,”
and that, “unlike Germany, where the main concentration camps have been
preserved as museums, Russia has few visible traces of its recent,
harrowing past.”
The one inaccuracy in
the line is word “recent”, for people were disappearing as early as
December, 1917, when Lenin ranted against “the lackeys of the
money-bags, the lickspittles of the exploiters”
and called for a “war to the death against the rich and their
hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals”.
Lenin’s cry for blood
was truly apocalyptic, for he promised “the working people” a release
from all social injustice through the triumph of “the proletarian
state” and “the independent creation of a new life”.
Thus, Lenin the atheist
manipulated the religious sentiments of millions of Russians,
whereby the Christian concept of rebirth, as in Dante’s La Vita Nuova, was transformed into an instrument of demagoguery and
mass murder, and
Russia
itself was led “through all the circles of hell”.
Even
when he is not speaking of arrests and executions, Razgon’s demonic
pictures are exact. In one
scene of a winter roll call at
6 a.m.
, he describes prisoners standing in -30 C. weather and wearing face
masks: “Made from random scraps of cloth—bright cottons, towels or
other rags—these masks had holes cut for the eyes, nose and mouth. The
crowd of zeks then looked like some grotesque and frightening carnival
scene by Hieronymous Bosch.”
Razgon’s associations
of the Gulag with Dante and Bosch not only capture moments of horror but
also convey the demonism that he sees at the heart of Soviet rule, a
system so perverse that it could revive the most terrifying Gothic
nightmares even as it proclaimed the coming of “the new Soviet man.”
Lenin’s
assault on the past was so massive that he even tore away at his own
precedents. Not even the Reign
of Terror was allowed to serve as a model. “For us, this is not enough.” Hence
Lenin’s viciousness toward the intellectual classes, whose entire
prestige was bound up with their preservation and advancement of the human
heritage. Solzhenitsyn cites a
letter by Lenin to Maxim Gorky, in which the Bolshevik leader declares
with singular venom that, “in actual fact, they
are not [the nation’s] brains, but shit.”
So complete was the onslaught
that the very memory of the past, as in 1984,
could be punished as a “thought crime” by the state. This
was the message of power behind Stalin’s purges of the Bolshevik
leaders, that the history of the
Communist Party itself could be rewritten. If
“our beloved Bukharin, the darling of the Party”, could be consigned
to oblivion, then no one was safe. The
consequences were senseless in the extreme, for if yesterday’s
“vanguard of the working class” could be today’s “enemy of the
people”, then the division of the world into “exploiters” and
“proletarian” leaders was essentially meaningless. It
is precisely this void that Nadezhda Mandelstam has in mind when she
writes that “the ‘license’ explored by Dostoyevski not only destroys
its adepts, but also spreads corruption all around, scorches the very
earth, and lays everything waste.”
The destruction
of the past, the very labelling of the past as the great symbol of
oppression, was the key to this unrestrained ferocity. Hence
the courage of Mandelstam in committing her husband’s verse to memory,
of Solzhenitsyn in writing The Gulag
under the constant threat of arrest, and of Razgon and countless others in
keeping the intellectual heritage of Russia and western Europe alive
within themselves. When
Grigorenko remarks that he has lived under socialism as it is portrayed in
Dostoevsky, Zamyatin, and Orwell, he speaks for a generation of writers
for whom the classics not only helped to illuminate their own condition
but also became a guide to their writing itself. It
is as though each one had a Virgil of his own, for there is a deep
equivalence between Shalamov’s Kolyma
Tales and Chekhov’s short stories, Mandelstam’s Hope
Abandoned and the works of Dostoevsky, and Razgon’s True
Stories and the infernal scenes in Dante and Bosch. As
for Solzhenitsyn, his entire career after One
Day has something in it of
the monk Pimen in Mussorgsky’s Boris
Gudonov, the chronicler of
Russia
’s “period of troubles”. A
perfect example of these ties to the past is Leonid Tsypkin’s Summer in Baden-Baden (1988), which not only takes us on a double
journey to
Leningrad
and Dostoevsky’s gambling days in
Germany
but almost reads like a newly discovered novel by the author of The
Gambler. Tsypkin’s
immersion in Dostoevsky’s middle years is so immediate and intense that
his subject seems to have a living presence, as though Dostoevsky’s
spirit were still moving through modern-day
Russia
, in the same way that Razgon reads the Inferno
almost as though it had been written in view of the Gulag.
In
coupling the name of Orwell with Dostoevsky and Zamyatin, Grigorenko
reminds us of Orwell’s faith in literature as a vehicle of
consciousness. This is true
not only of his political and literary essays but also 1984,
in which he describes Winston Smith’s diary and his memories of Chaucer,
Shakespeare, and Milton as a last hold on reality in an age of Newspeak
and the daily sessions of “Two Minutes Hate”. It
is difficult to think of another major western author who shares
Orwell’s affinity with his Russian contemporaries, for whom the reading
of literature became a discipline in bearing witness to the truth. In
its analysis of the Soviet propaganda machine, its critique of the Soviet
literary world, and its remembrance of her own husband and the poet Anna
Akhmatova, Mandelstam’s Hope Abandoned is the perfect embodiment of this principle. Almost
every page intertwines the lessons of literature with incisive pictures of
Soviet life, and one passage in particular sums up the perspective of the
entire book, in which Mandelstam writes that “to lose one’s
memory—provided it was an honest one—is to lose touch with reality,”
although
Not everybody has the strength to say, with Pushkin: “And
reading with abhorrence my life’s tale, / I quake and curse, /
Complaining bitterly and shedding bitter tears, / But the sad lines I’ll
not wash away.” For their
own peace of mind my contemporaries will certainly “wash away” or
embellish their “sad lines”—though they will most likely not even
realize just how sad they are.
Many western intellectuals have also been quick to “wash away” the
bitter truths about the Soviet regime and, as a result, are completely in
the dark about why their Russian counterparts have maintained their faith
in the intrinsic value of literature. During
a Soviet-American literary conference in 1988, just before the Soviet
system came crashing down, J. Hillis Miller was surprised to find Russian
academics still believing that literature has universal value and that
certain works embody spiritual absolutes “with timeless validity for all
humanity”.
It is the surprise of a
western academic who not only seems ignorant of the scope of Russian
literature but also does not appreciate the enormity of the Soviet attempt
to obliterate the past;
hence his false sense of superiority toward his Russian colleagues, who
have stubbornly held on to “a solid ground of religious and cultural
assumptions… just about as it was before the Revolution.”
On a deeper level, he has no intimate, or inner connection to
literature and therefore cannot conceive that it could live beyond its own
moment and have a present
meaning. “Each week,”
writes Razgon toward the end of his work,
the newspaper Vechernyaya
Moskva publishes rows of tiny photographs of people killed 50-60 years
ago, for no reason at all, yet I am not aware that any of the thousands
who serve in that vast building on the
Lubyanka Square
has gone insane, committed suicide, or publicly spoken out in tears of
repentance, horror and mortal anguish….
In Chekhov’s story “A Fit” a student who goes to a brothel
with his merry friends suddenly almost begins to lose his mind from the
awareness that these unfortunate women are also people. Tormented,
unfortunate people. Not one of
his educated, clever and, probably, kind fellow students can understand
what’s wrong with him.
There are no “religious and cultural assumptions” in the passage. There
is only a glimpse into the hard, cold facts of Soviet life and Razgon’s
silent identification with Chekhov’s story, for Razgon himself had once
been present at a scene of suffering in his youth and had also observed
“tormented, unfortunate people” without taking them to heart.
Contrition
is not a “religious assumption” but an experience, and those who have
lived to tell the story of the Gulag bear witness to the truth of
Mandelstam’s observation that “pain acts like a leaven for both word
and thought, quickening your sense of reality and the true logic of this
world.” This is the same
animating power that informs the entire literature of the Gulag, which
could almost take as its motto Chekhov’s single aim in writing, “just
to depict life as it is, without taking one step further.”
NOTES
Lev Razgon, “Preface”, True Stories (1989), trans. John Crowfoot (Dana Point: Ardis
Publishers, 1997), p. 7. The
story of Razgon’s arrest echoes across the decades to this day. In a
recent review of Anne Applebaum’s Gulag:
A History (The New Yorker,
April 14, 2003
), David Remnick describes an interview
he had with Dmitri Likhachev, a renowned scholar and former convict of
Solovki, an infamous island prison camp near the
Arctic Circle
. Likhachev told Remnick of the
celebrated visit in 1929 by the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, who
arrived on the ship Gleb Boky
and later wrote a glowing account of the camp. Remnick
refers to Gleb Boky as the camp chief, but Razgon tells us that he had
far broader powers as the former head of the Petrograd Cheka (the
first Soviet secret police), and that he later served in the OGPU and
NKVD. Boky was arrested and executed in 1937 during Stalin’s
destruction of the revolutionaries of 1917. Razgon was swept up in the
purge, having married Boky’s daughter in the early 1930s. Both were
arrested one year after Boky’s “liquidation”. Razgon’s
wife died in a transit camp. Other
family members were arrested as well. In
1990, Razgon was permitted to read his original case file and the file
of Gleb Boky’s arrest and interrogation. He
recounts this painful visit to the archives of the KGB in his
epilogue. A detailed
discussion of Solovki, with extensive photographs that include the
visit of Gorky and Boky, can be found in Tomasz Kizny, Goulag
(Balland/Acropole, 2003). Photographs
of Soviet camps are hard to come by. Kizny’s book is apparently the
first of its kind.
Varlam Shalamov, “Carpenters”,
Kolyma
Tales (1950s), trans. John
Glad (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1982), p. 46.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), trans. Max Hayward and
Ronald Hingley (New York: Bantam Books, 1970), p. 203.
Solzhenitsyn, ‘Preface”, The
Gulag Archipelago, 1, ix-x.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies,
A Love Story (1966), trans. Aliza Shevrin and Elizabeth Shub (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), p. 73.
Nadezhda Mandelstam, “29
Digression, 1 ‘Pernicious
Freedom’”, Hope Abandoned,
(1960s), trans. Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 1974), p. 266.
This work is the second of two volumes of memoirs, the first
originally titled “First Book” and in translation Hope
Against Hope, grim plays on the name Nadezhda, which means
“hope” in Russian.
Lenin, “How to Organise
Competition?” (
December
24-27, 1917
), Collected
Works, Vol. 26, Lenin Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2999.
Razgon, “Kostya Shulga”,
p. 159.
Herzen, “The Later Years”, p. 621..
Herzen, “Prison and
Exile”, p. 184.
Herman Melville, Billy
Budd (c. 1888), Billy Budd
and Other Tales (New York: Signet Classics, 1961), p. 7.
Melville’s reflections on “the Spirit of that Age” appear
in three leaves that he apparently superceded, although they were long
published as a preface to the work.
On its deletion from subsequent editions, see “Editors’
Introduction”, Billy Budd,
Sailor, ed. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 18-19.
Razgon, “Jailers”, pp. 202-03.
Dante, Inferno, Canto XXXIV,
421.
Razgon, “Niyazov”, p. 29.
Ibid. Razgon discusses a
“special operation” at just one camp, which was “of a standard
design, just like any transit camp”, and calculates that Bikin alone
executed between “15,000 to 18,000 people during its existence”
(p. 29).
Alessandra Stanley, “Lest Russians Forget, a Museum of the Gulag”,
New
York Times (October 29, 1997), p. A8.
back to Contents
***********************************
The False Conservatism of
the Cynic’s Utopia:
Kant, Machiavelli, and
Truthfulness
by
John R. Harris
The False Conservatism of
the Cynic’s Utopia:
Kant, Machiavelli, and
Truthfulness
by
John R. Harris
"Well,
then," I said, "no one willingly delivers himself to evil things
or to what he knows to be evil. It is not in the nature of men,
apparently, to desire what is known as evil over the good things."
Plato,
Protagoras 358c
I
My first exposure to Immanuel Kant’s essay, Über
ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen (lit.,
"Concerning a Supposed Right to Lie from Humane Compassion"),
was not especially instructive to me, due entirely to my dilettante level
of German at the time. (In my defense, Kant has ever been renowned for his
impenetrable style: Germans are said to read English translations of him
sometimes in pursuit of lucidity.) I dimly recall understanding the short
essay well enough, at any rate, that I could conclude it to be naïve with
all the smugness peculiar to youthful innocence. Why, who does not know
that you must lie to your dear old mother if she should inquire in her
final breath whether you have secured a job, or whether your brother Ralph
has been found alive after the plane crash? People lie all the time with
the noblest of motives and happiest of outcomes. We lie to our children
ritually about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. We lie to our spouses on
a wedding anniversary that the years have brought no regrets.1
And then there are the lies of policy which our elected leaders must tell
to keep us safe. What treaties would ever be signed if all parties were
fully candid about their intent to reinforce the terms with a little sub
rosa hoarding of forbidden weapons or a little discreet spying over
forbidden areas? What responsible mayor would alert the citizens in his
charge to the outbreak of some dreadful disease or the discovery of a time
bomb in a crowded building? Utter and immediate disclosure in such
circumstances might well produce more casualties in the ensuing panic than
the threat itself, if realized, would harvest.
So I smiled patronizingly at Kant’s admirable
gullibility, as my students do now when I present them with my translation
of the essay. (I offer the full text below in just a few paragraphs.) The
odd thing is that age has slowly but surely reversed my sense of the
naïve. I now find the "grim realism" of young people in their
curious willingness to water down principles (variously styled
"compromise", "tolerance", "eclecticism",
and a lot of other self-serving "principled" alternatives to
principle) astonishingly short-sighted. Take the case which Kant himself
advances. A lunatic pounds upon your door, looking for the fleeing
innocent whom he wishes to throttle. The would-be victim has indeed just
slipped down your hallway. Do you tell the lunatic as much? Kant, against
all semblance of common sense, answers in the affirmative. I shall shortly
allow him to offer his own reasons for this apparently inflexible
stubbornness. For the moment, I shift to the real-life enactment of this
hypothetical case which would have leapt to every mind a few decades ago:
concealing Jews from Nazis in Fascist Europe. Obviously, you would say
"no" to the unblinking S.S. officer at your door after secreting
the Jewish refugee in a hidden compartment behind the wall’s paneling.
My best student of the past semester wrote as much in her paper on the
subject. Corrie ten Boom, she informed me, saved dozens or hundreds of
Jews by lying to the Nazis. To have done "less" would have been
to connive at mass murder.
Hannah Arendt had a great many enlightening things to
say in rebuttal of such mitigated principle—all of them drawn from the
soberest of experiences. In Tobin Siebers’ excellent Morals and
Stories, one of her "ground zero" observations is handled so
as to develop Kant’s position sympathetically.2 (It
was Siebers, as I recall, who first moved me to rethink my own
assumptions.) Arendt recounts one harrowing occasion when jackbooted Nazis
thumped into a kitchen under whose well-draped table a Jewish neighbor
crouched trembling. The soldiers asked the inevitable question: "Any
Jews in your house?"—whereupon the family’s youngest daughter
piped up in what must have been a child’s blessed ignorance of the
situation, "Yes. There’s one under that table." The soldiers
laughed, rolled their eyes, and exited, victims of their own sordid
worldliness.
I permissively anticipate the counter-argument that most
adherents to strict honesty would not have seen their friends slip off the
hook so cleanly. Yet I would pose the question, in return: "How many
Jews were in fact saved solely by a negative answer to the ruthless
officer’s question?" It is absurdly naïve to believe that Corrie
ten Boom, or anyone else, saved fugitives merely by an opportune lie, and
not by having effective nooks and crannies on hand. Would the soldiers
have searched any more thoroughly than they did if the householder had
replied, "Of course I help Jews hide from you!" If one citizen
had spoken up thus forthrightly (without actually divulging the place of
hiding: Kant leaves open the option of silence), would not other citizens
have made bold to do the same? Would not more Jews have been saved by a
general resistance of the civil populace than by the rare subterfuge of a
kindly soul here and there?3
I shall offer further defense of Kant’s position—and
in the broader context of free societies and peaceful nations—after I
allow the reader to peruse his essay. What I wish to emphasize as I finish
these initial remarks is the practicality which may ultimately be
seen to undergird honesty. Not that Kant’s case ever rests on
pragmatism: but then, the right-in-principle is pragmatic if you
once concede that human beings generally register an inner attraction to
goodness. People are not happy, for the most part, being bad or living
among wicked practices. I hearken to Socrates’s often and diversely
expressed view that right action and pleasure are identical, since
wrong-doing must eventually lead to misery. If you endorse the notion of a
free society, then you may be presumed to believe that freedom does not
invariably damage or destroy people—that in fact, on the balance, they
profit from their freedom to opt for the right path. If, on the other
hand, you believe that people will more often abuse freedom than grow
through it toward goodness, then you would logically be compelled to
espouse some kind of totalitarian system designed to relieve citizens of
those decisions which corrode their quality of life. The latter point of
view, however, has no foothold in Western tradition. It flies in the face,
not just of classical wisdom, but of Christian orthodoxy and the literate
awakening of the individual conscience. It also, by the way, runs head-on
against the embarrassing question, "If humans in general do not know
the good, then how comest thou to know it?"
In short, the Kantian defense of rigorous truthfulness,
far from being naively liberal, as many have implied of it, strikes me as
the only position conservative of mainstream Western values. On the other
side of the great divide is Machiavelli. Thinkers and historians commonly
associated with the more conservative side of the spectrum, such as Leo
Strauss and Harvey Mansfield, seem to make allowances for his moral
nihilism as the grizzled maturity of Realpolitik. I beg leave to
say that is it nothing of the sort. On the contrary, Machiavelli’s
insistence that the political leader must sometimes lie—and his
exhortation to all "good" leaders to lie with cold, calculated
ease—belong among the products of those perverted minds who consider reality a great
blank slate, and wryly call "value" the writing of any hand
strong enough to hold the slate aloof from other fingers. Such cynical
relativism has always stood outside the mainstream of Western thought. In
the twentieth century, it has characterized imperious ideologues who did
not hesitate to award their champions a free pass for ghastly genocide
Later in my argument, I shall propose that Machiavelli’s famous (or
infamous) Roman Dream, far from being a trivial lapse into
sentimentality, is nothing less than the vision of absolute autocracy
which has stirred every blood-smeared tyrant of our time to play fast and
loose with the truth.
First, the world according to Kant
II
"Concerning a Supposed Right to Lie from Humane
Compassion"
by Immanuel Kant 4
In Benjamin Constant’s work, France in 1797
(Part 6, Chapter 1: "Political Counter-Movements", p. 123), one
finds the following remark:
The moral proposition, "To speak truth is
obligatory," would, if people took it literally and without
qualification, render their social existence impossible. We have proof
thereof in the immediate consequences which a German philosopher has
drawn from this proposition. This thinker goes so far as to assert that
even lying to a murderer who should happen to ask us if the man he was
chasing had fled into our house would have to be considered a crime.5
The French philosopher opposes this proposition (p.124)
in the following manner: "It is a duty to tell the truth. The concept
of duty is indivisible from the concept of right. A duty in regard to one
person corresponds to another person’s right. Where there is no right,
there is also no duty. To speak the truth is indeed a duty—but only to
those who have a right to the truth. No person, however, has a right to
the truth who is harming someone else."
The first error lies in this premise: "To speak
the truth is a duty, but only to those who have a right to the
truth."
In the first place, the expression, "have a right
to the truth", is without meaning. One might as well say that people
have a right to their own reality: that is, to a subjective truth which
each carries about in himself. For to have a right objectively to a truth
would be the same as saying that whether a certain assertion were true or
false could be decided in this person’s will like a question of
ownership. A very strange logic we would have then, indeed!
Now, the first question is whether a person in
circumstances which will not allow him to evade a "yes" or
"no" answer can have the authority (or right) to lie. The second
question is whether he may not be bound to speak untruthfully in a certain
statement extorted from him by wrongful force so that he may avert a
misdeed threatened against himself or another.
Truthfulness in all declarations which cannot be
qualified or postponed is a formal duty owed by every person to his
fellows, be the damage thereby brought upon himself or another ever so
great. Even if I did not do wrong by lying to someone who wrongfully
forced me into speaking, I would nevertheless through this falsehood—which
can fairly be called a lie, though not in a strictly legal sense—do an
injustice to an essential component of duty. That is, I would act as far
as was in my power to bring it about that what people say (declarative
statements) is met with disbelief; and thus I would also be helping all
rights grounded in contracted agreements to fall by the wayside and lose
their strength—a wrong which would be inflicted upon all mankind.
Thus the lie, defined as a deliberately untruthful
declaration before another person, does not require the additional
qualification that it harms someone: only the legal profession insists
upon this addition ("mendacity is false witness prejudicial to
another"). For lying does indeed harm someone every time—though he
or she may not be an identifiable individual—by harming humanity in
general, since it renders the basis of good conduct unworkable.
Yet even the well-intentioned lie can become criminal
according to the civil code through unfortunate mishap; and that which
graduates to criminality purely through bad luck can certainly be judged
as wrongdoing by another standard. For instance, if you prevent someone
presently going about with murder in his heart from doing the deed by
telling him a lie, you become responsible—and quite rightly so—for all
consequences which may arise therefrom. If, however, you adhere strictly
to the truth, public justice can find no fault with you, let the
unforeseen consequences be what they will. It is possible, besides, that,
once you had honestly answered "yes" to the murderer’s
question about whether the object of his enmity had fled into your house,
the fugitive might have slipped away: in other words, the victim would
never have crossed the murderer’s path and the murder would never have
happened! But you lied and said that he was not in the house, he had
actually slipped away (though unknown to you), and the murderer thereupon
encountered him after leaving your door and committed his crime: in this
way, you could justly be called the author of the man’s death. For if
you had told the truth insofar as you knew it, perhaps the murderer would
have been apprehended by neighbors who ran over to assist you as he was
ransacking the house for his enemy, and the murder would have been
prevented. Anyone who lies, no matter how well-meaning his sentiments may
have been thereby, must face the consequences and the cost of having done
so, even sometimes in civil court, let those consequences be ever so
unforeseeable. Truthfulness, on the other hand, is a moral duty which must
be viewed as the basis of all obligations grounded in contracted agreement—obligations
whose binding power, when one concedes but the slightest subtraction from
it, turns weak and useless.
This is, therefore, a holy, unconditionally binding
imperative of the rational mind which can be abridged by no exigency of
circumstances: that in all clarifications of fact, one must be truthful
(that is, honest).
Mr. Constant is both thoughtful and correct when he
remarks the futility of propositions plagued by narrowness and transparent
surrender to airy ideas.6 "Whenever a maxim proved to be true
appears invalid in application," he writes (p. 123), "it must be
the case that we have not acknowledged a mediating maxim which contains
the means of application." He adduces the doctrine of common humanity
(p. 121) as the first link in civil society’s chain. "In short, no
person can be bound to another except by such laws as he has helped to
construct. In a very tightly closed society, a rigid maxim may be applied
in an unreflective manner and may need not mediating maxim for someone
accustomed to local practices. But in a very extensive society, a new
maxim must be added to the one being advanced. This second maxim is as
follows: that individuals must accept the creation of laws either in
person or through representatives. Whoever wishes to execute a basic
proposal in an extensive society while ignoring this second step is
infallibly sending it down the road to ruin. Such an outcome would of
course bear witness far less against the proposal’s own merits than it
would against the lawgiver’s ignorance or clumsiness" (122). He
concludes on p. 125, "A maxim widely recognized as valid must never
be abandoned to this fate, however great the danger it may
encounter." And yet, the gentleman has himself abandoned the
unqualified maxim of truthfulness to the danger which he would inflict
upon society: for he has failed to unveil any mediating maxim which would
serve to ward off this danger, and indeed none can be introduced.
Perhaps I should conform to the style of withholding
people’s names (though most have already slipped out). Let me say, then,
that "the French philosopher" is inverting the process whereby
one person harms another, in that he labels "truth" (whose
authority he can in nowise sidestep) as that by which an assailant is
unjustly handled.7 It would be mere chance if the truthful
declaration of our house-dweller gave pain, and not the result of a free
choice (in a legal sense). From his "right" to demand of others
that he be permitted to tell them advantageous lies, on the other hand,
would follow a claim which contradicts all notions of lawfulness. Every
person has not only a right, but the strictest obligation to be truthful
in statements of fact. He cannot edge around this duty, even if it
threatens pain to himself or others. In acting thus, he inflicts no pain
upon the person who thereby suffers, though he may create an occasion for
this to happen. For no one has a moral option to choose in such matters:
truthfulness (when one absolutely must speak) is an unqualified duty.
The "German philosopher", therefore, refuses
to adopt the maxim, "To tell the truth is a duty, but only to those
who have a right to the truth" (p. 124). In the first place, the
maxim’s formation is hopelessly confused: truth is not a property
recognized by laws as belonging to one person while denied to another.
More importantly, however, the duty of truthfulness (which alone is at
issue here) makes no distinction among the persons concerning whom one
owes this duty or might be released from performing it. The duty is
unconditional. It applies in all circumstances.
Let us proceed from the metaphysics of right action (an
area abstracted from specific cases) to a political maxim (where abstract
concepts must be applied to real events) and, from here, to the resolution
of a practical problem through a universal moral principle. The
philosopher must do three things. 1) He must begin with an axiom—that
is, a certain self-evident proposition which springs immediately from the
definition of communal right (reflecting the integration of one person’s
freedom with his neighbors’ in a universal law). 2) He must form a
postulate (here, that external law governs the community, endorsed by the
united will of everyone according to the principle of common humanity,
without which no one would have any freedom). 3) He must consider the
question of how it may be conjectured that in so large a mass of people
unity may be achieved through the principles of freedom and common
humanity (in this case, by a system of representatives). The solution will
become a guiding political idea, or maxim, whose particular enactment and
organization will contain decrees (based upon the wisdom of human
experience) about how to enforce the law in an equitable manner. Such a
pedigree stresses that the right must never adapt itself to the political:
the political must adapt itself to the right.
"A maxim recognized as true," writes the
author (and I would add, recognized a priori, self-evidently),
"must never be abandoned, however great the danger it may
encounter." I suggest only that here one must understand danger not
circumstantially—i.e., as potential harm—but as the commission of
widespread injustice. The latter is just what would happen if I
transformed the duty of truthfulness, which is wholly unconditioned and
indeed imposes the principal moral condition upon our utterances, into a
conditional demand subordinated to other considerations. And although I
might in fact do no injustice to any certain person in telling a certain
lie, I would damage the principle of justice as it applies to all
unavoidable, necessary declarations in general (that is, my injustice
would be formal, if not material). This is truly worse than doing an
unjust act to a certain individual, because such a deed reflects that the
doer has not even located a moral principle in his internal deliberations.
When the question is submitted to someone, "Are
you determined to speak the truth in the declaration which you have agreed
to make now?" he should not only receive it with offense at the
explicit suggestion that he might be a liar; he should also observe that
anyone who would have us consider any other way of speaking as an option
is already (potentially) a liar. For this questioner would demonstrate
that he does not recognize truthfulness as a duty in itself, but rather
foresees exceptions to a rule which, by its nature, allows of no
exceptions—and herein he would outrightly contradict himself.
All maxims for moral conduct in living must contain
strict truth. What have, in this case, been called "mediating
maxims" may only invite closer scrutiny of specific circumstances
(according to politically established rules): they cannot introduce
exceptions to the original maxim. Such a procedure would nullify the
universality in whose name alone a law of conduct may claim binding moral
force.
III
I will not be so bold as to assert that I am fully
convinced of Kant’s proposition (let alone so bold as to boast that I
live by it). Surely, though, Kant reminds us most usefully that telling a
falsehood is always wrong. There may be times when it is the least of
those wrongs which constitute our only range of choices on this sad earth.
To agree with Constant, however, that lying may actually be a moral duty
sometimes is—as Kant says—to undermine the possibility of human
society. It is to claim that individuals may not only live by an
individually tailored notion of right, but that they may adjust that
notion to particular circumstances. At a bare minimum, we must cling to
the wrongness of falsehood, even—or, should I say, especially—when we
feel compelled to be false. A transgressor who knows his sin may repent of
it afterward, offering to his god all the mitigating evidence of an
unsavory situation. A transgressor who has convinced himself that his
sidestep was a sign of higher rectitude—of a straight line drawn through
an invisible geometry known only to himself—is blazing a trail, not just
to vice, but to lunacy.
Yet how many of our "white lies" are indeed
the best of several bad options? How many of those clichéed "good
lies" withstand scrutiny? The mother on her death bed may very well
need to know of a child’s catastrophe in some sense which makes us
uncomfortable. If a material disaster is part of reality’s fabric, and
if a human being is poised to exit temporal reality for the eternal
variety, he or she surely ought to cast a backward gaze over the terrain
traversed in life as accurately as possible. Keen flames cauterize deep
wounds. As for the "Santa Claus" species of lie, only a dull
intelligence would insist upon transgression here. Children perceive
reality in generalizing images far more than adults. A benign elf is a
not-half-bad way of instilling into young hearts a sense of moral security—a
conviction that goodness must ultimately triumph. (To be sure, our
contemporary versions of Santa have been suborned to serve other ends—evidence
of a profound lie in our culture having nothing to do with chimneys.)
Likewise, no one but a disingenuous sophist or a fool would seriously
approve of a leader’s lying to citizens about the imminent threat posed
by a bomb or disease. The competent leader may well release his alarming
information house-by-house or only after guards have been posted along
avenues of egress: he will not sweep the menace under the nearest
rug.
Which brings us to the broader context where I promised
to address most of my comments: the "grim realist" is most
convinced of deception’s necessity in the realm of public policy, and
yet I find his case nowhere more shaky. The condition which Kant discusses
largely by implication—that of a public trust deficient to lubricate
society’s daily affairs—has been fulfilled in our time. Doctors refuse
to do delicate surgeries lest they be sued over a less-than-perfect
outcome, pharmaceutical companies to market life-saving drugs lest
unfavorable side-effects in a small fraction of cases expose them to ruin.
Attorneys have trained us well in the rhetoric of betrayed trust—but
trial lawyers, of their very essence, excel at negating assumed or
cursorily negotiated commitments and contracts which were once regarded as
binding. I personally have known my share of agreements made in bad faith
or improperly realized. I was most certainly lied to, with foresight and
deliberation by the guilty parties, at every interview I ever attended
which resulted in my being employed full-time as a professor. In one case,
particularly, I collected a file of evidence with the intention of taking
a grossly mendacious department chair to court. I never did—I never
sought to bring any of these desperate characters before a judge. I did
not, and do not, see how the cause of honesty is served in such actions.
The perpetrators merely learn to lie a little better next time, or to
anticipate their lies by issuing a disclaimer form in small print (as
genuinely incompetent doctors do). The culture of lies is not diluted when
we press a suit against someone who foils our expectations: it roots more
deeply. It thrives upon the new expectation, always clinging to our rosier
ones, that we will be lied to wherever possible, between the lines and
within parentheses. Our excessive concern with nailing down every
ramification of the agreement shows that we are confident only of
deception’s ubiquity. As Kant says of the absurd bureaucratic
swearing-in, the mere question, "Do you intend to tell the
truth?" inescapably implies that falsehood is a common, even
reasonable option in responding to searches after facts. No such search is
performed nowadays until the respondent has been bound finger-and-toe to a
kind of legal inquisitor’s rack.
And foreign policy? Is not deception at least required
to keep our children safe from invasion or sabotage? On the contrary, I
have the greatest difficulty conceiving of a situation in which falsehood
in international relations does not exacerbate rather than neutralize
crises. If we intend to spy upon the signators of a ballistics treaty,
then we should tell them so—and we should be prepared to open our own
air space to satellites. If we stipulate that examiners must be allowed
within a hostile nation’s borders in order to confirm that it is not
building weapons of mass destruction, then the examiners should not
tolerate coyness in the interest of "conserving the peace"—for
what else could such coyness indicate if not an abrogation of the treaty?
Perhaps a student of history will observe that we could
not have ended World War Two, even after dropping two atomic bombs, if the
Japanese had been informed of our having no more to drop. This is a
compelling example… but I have never been very satisfied by how the
debate over Hiroshima and Nagasaki is prosecuted. Did we honestly
need Japan’s unconditional surrender? Did not the power vacuum created
by that surrender open the door wide to forty years of communist
authoritarianism which left tens of millions of slaughtered innocents
where the ruthless Japanese had left only tens of thousands? Would it not
have been possible to blockade the islands most effectively after we had
destroyed the Japanese fleet? Such alternatives, it seems to me (in my
little bit of knowledge, perhaps), were never thoroughly considered
because, for the most part, the American public wanted a definitive
conclusion in Asia as well as Europe, and because politicians judged their
survival to be linked to that conclusion. Europe, of course, turned out to
be a happy ending no more than Asia: Stalin’s massacres and gulags
reduced Hitler’s to a poor second in sanguinary achievement.
Were we not lying to ourselves when we concluded this
war—surely one of the most just ever fought—with such a flair for
Manichaean distinctions? Has not the history of the twentieth century, in
fact, been one horrendous chronicle of ideological lies—of
pro-industrialists, on the one side, convincing themselves that abundant
and rapid material alteration of the environment was human progress, and
of social revolutionaries, on the other side, telling themselves that
progress lay in annihilation of all opposing voices and inculcation of
inflexible doctrine? Indeed, was not the century’s biggest lie perhaps
that these two camps were ideological contraries rather than alternative
versions of the Gospel of Self-Created Human Progress?
Of course, a moral lie is scarcely of the same category
as a lie regarding observable fact. It is both better and worse.
Contemporary political rhetoric has rendered charges of lying a rather
tedious business. Every person who chooses to emphasize one shred of
evidence over another is distorting the truth (according to those who see
the de-emphasis of their own interests as ignoring evidence of equal
worth). Simply mentioning Peter before Paul—or either one of them before
Patricia—constitutes a "moral lie" in that it imposes a
"false" value system (i.e., one that does not advance one’s
personal agenda). When minorities do this sort of thing, it represents a
fully admissible, even commendable turning of the tables to secure equity
by brisk counter-stroke (in an exchange, apparently, where strokes and
counter-strokes are foreseen to average out). When the majority asserts
its priorities, on the other hand, we are witnessing imperialism.
All frivolity aside, we must recognize that two
essential moral facts hover over all political intercourse like Furies
poised to punish those who slight them. The first is that no group of
people ever has all the right answers or is immune to morally flawed
judgment. The second is that certain kinds of persistent moral
miscalculation on the part of political leadership—even an alien state’s
leadership—compel righteous action. Be not lordly in asserting thy
virtue, and be not complacent in asserting thy humility.
At first glance, these maxims have something
uncomfortably contradictory about them. Perhaps Kant would say that they
compose an antinomy—a pair of laws, each possessing prima facie
validity, of which one half subverts the other half. If we were not so
inseparably wedded to ideology (by which I mean a belief system incapable
of defending itself by appeal to universal principles), we might recognize
that this is a good thing. As our petty human understanding nears the
verge of ultimate truths which it is not designed to grasp completely,
axioms look as though they cannot be reconciled. A constant effort of
judgment is required to police the border—to keep any one axiom from
being shanghaied and carried into our puny human habitations to serve as
an idol. There is absolutely no practical reason why we should not remain
ever on high alert that our moral determinations may be skewed—and that,
likewise, our fellows may require assistance against some tyrant’s
maniacally skewed Weltanschauung. These opposing duties, I repeat,
activate moral facts. We must admit our mistakes, and we must prevent the
victims of another’s persistent mistakes from being eradicated en
masse.
As we review history, the perpetration of moral lies is
seldom difficult to spot. Readers who are waiting for me to mention
Afghanistan or Iraq will probably be disappointed (or relieved), because I
doubt that enough time has passed for partisan dust to settle and material
fact to be clearly visible. Certainly no moral person can be much upset
over the demise of a regime which systematically beheaded women for (in
effect) expressing an opinion, or over the ousting of a butcher who
poisoned several hundred thousand of his own citizens, man, woman, and
child. I will venture so far as to declare that it dismays me to hear such
intervention condemned as "cultural snobbery" or
"imperialism". Even if a state were freely, formally to opt for
the extermination of a tenth or a third of its citizenry, the vote would
be invalid. A state can no more choose suicide morally than can an
individual.8 Morality is predicated on the presence of free will:
annihilating that will is thus immoral in the most basic way. That an
entire "culture" might somehow have imbibed from the milk of
baby-hating mothers a taste for genocide is tantamount to supposing that
suicide might be routine—let us say, universally mandatory—among a
population of millions. People who can form such a view of alien cultures
are indeed themselves guilty of considering other human beings as curious
animals capable of embracing any absurdity or atrocity.
As for the specific strategies involved in liberating a
portion of humanity from these evil people, I am not prepared to pass any
summary judgment. Like most of us, I have no special knowledge of matters
military or logistical; and like all of us, I cannot compare what has
happened to what might have happened. I will content myself with saying
that Islam does not strike me as a faith congenial to democracy. To impose
a democratic form of government upon a culture which has always embraced
theocracy (or, as I would much prefer to say, hierocracy—"rule by
priests") seems high-handed. The attempt may well appear throughout
the Muslim world to assault an entire system of beliefs requiring of its
adherents that they surrender their personal will to the will of their
spiritual advisors. Inasmuch as this abrogation of freedom is not
necessarily terminal (like suicide) but rather renewable—and probably
renewed every day in some manner—the non-Muslim world cannot very well
intercede on the ground that millions are being morally suffocated. We
allow, and must allow, our fellow beings to choose various kinds of
shackles for their wrists and ankles: we step in only when they start
lopping off their hands and feet. The freedom to err is an integral part
of the freedom to seek after truth and goodness. For that matter, Western
freedom has no very impressive track record to wave beside Islamic society’s
general oppressiveness. Bawdy, gaudy, tasteless, and sometimes piratical,
our no-holds-barred marketplace offers all too many infernal tableaux to
the dispassionate onlooker.
Major political errors of moral judgment, in any case,
do not require centuries to become clear before all eyes. If the promises
of support made to the Kurds at the end of the Gulf War were not lies,
they were something disturbingly close; and our bad faith on that occasion
has motivated, in some measure, the difficulty which we have encountered
in bringing gleeful partisans to our banner on this occasion. The
proclamations of ignorance published far and wide by our State Department
after the genocide in Rwanda, furthermore, have been revealed to be
profoundly evasive.9 All who needed to know knew well enough what
was happening in the capital city of Kigali. By comparison, the number of
murders in Bosnia was trivial—not morally, but arithmetically. It was
sufficiently small, at any rate, that the number of innocents maimed or
killed by explosives (detonated on cue and also, too often, months later)
and of civilian patients left to expire during power outages was probably
of equal value. This was a morally dubious operation, particularly when we
recall the domestic political morass which it was engineered to pave over.
Moral facts, slippery though they surely are, do not
vanish or retreat to insignificance just because they lend themselves to
manipulation. For truthfulness, I may now point out, always
possesses a moral dimension. To lie about something as indifferent as the
weather raises the question, Why lie?—and the answer will invariably
expose the design of one party to profit unfairly from another party’s
ignorance. All lies are immoral. What I have called the "moral
lie"—or what I should have called, perhaps, a lie about morality—creates
a diseased atmosphere favorable to other, more material lies. A person who
finds no merit in restraining his every whimsy will end up lying about
where he put the keys or whom he was addressing on the phone. A person who
considers all acts of moral courage mere bursts of "imperialism"
will lie about hearing a call for help or knowing that children were in a
building as it burned. Moral lies fertilize the rotten soil of false
observation.
IV
We are now entering the domain of Niccolò Machiavelli
(spelled in English, for some reason I have never fathomed, with only one
"c"). I will stress in departing Kant’s crystalline rational
world for this noxiously sweltering terrain that civil honesty remains a
duty, not an expedient. Machiavelli must surely be correct sometimes:
deception must surely have resulted in the annihilation of many a
political adversary. In any event, Machiavelli recommends fraud only when
it can be masked. We would never know if a true apostle of Cesare
Borgia had actually lied or not, and so we would be unable to determine if
the stratagem had paid off. Kant is therefore justified in ending his
short treatise by emphasizing moral obligation. Truthfulness may or may
not advance our cause on this earth: its ultimate purpose rests in
eternity, where goodness rules triumphant. If one does not believe this,
then one’s honesty is of no value. It is merely the best policy,
enforced until such time as a better policy may come along. Indeed, to
defend honesty with the utilitarian argument that it produces the most
flattering material results is to be dishonest through "moral
lie" (or "lie about morality"); for it is to imply that
dishonesty would be permissible if it could be demonstrated to
yield yet more flattering results. The Kantian not only lives by
principle: he is prepared to die by principle. The Machiavellian, in
contrast, lives by hook or by crook for as long as he can: and, when he
dies in body, he dies in soul as well—or dies (as he would maintain) the
only possible death after the only possible life.
For make no mistake: Machiavelli’s renunciation of
the duty to speak truth is nothing less than a renunciation of the soul’s
reality. Leo Strauss, whose classic study is disturbingly comfortable with
the implications of this bland agnosticism, is acutely and eloquently
aware of its gravity. Writing about both Machiavelli’s Prince and
the Discourses on Livy, Strauss observes:
He does not in either book mention the distinction
between this world and the next, or between this life and the next;
while he frequently mentions heaven and once paradise, he never mentions
hell; above all, he never mentions the soul. He suggests by this silence
that these subjects are unimportant for politics.10
I shall return momentarily to Machiavelli’s handling
of the metaphysical—for, as Strauss remarks later, the subversion of
values here goes far beyond merely keeping quiet about eternity and the
soul’s vital purpose; it extends deviously to a warping of metaphysical
terms until they appear to undermine themselves in support of ruthless
expedience. Lest I take too great a leap at once, however, let me first
cite the passages of The Prince which generations have found
abhorrent, audacious, brilliant, or (in the height of irony) honest.11
Machiavelli’s political manual is a rogue’s Bible from start to
finish. Chapter Three advises the adventurer who wishes to usurp power in
a foreign state that citizens will remain unruly unless "the blood
line of their ancient prince be eliminated." This is an invitation to
infanticide, as anyone of the period would have realized. Chapter Five
warns would-be megalarchs that "whoever becomes patron of a city used
to living free and does not destroy it should expect to be destroyed by
it"—a death sentence whose proportions we pampered moderns can
appreciate, perhaps, if we ponder the aftermath of unhoused hurricane
victims in impoverished nations. Chapter Seven praises Duke Valentino (Cesare
Borgia) for sufficiently winning the confidence and affection of the
Orsini that he was able easily to assassinate them at the
"right" moment; and its admiration further highlights the Duke’s
neat trick of subduing an ungovernable populace first by appointing a
harsh minister to punish recreants far and wide, then by bringing the
minister himself to a sanguinary "justice" for overstepping his
authority!
All of the brutally cold-blooded expedients recommended
above, besides being murderously depraved, are duplicitous. Cesare Borgia’s
assassinations and executions clearly betray trust; but the slaughter of
entire ruling families and civilian populations for the sake of
convenience deceives just as arrogantly, if less baldly. Grim as such
carnage is in any circumstances, Machiavelli counsels it here, not because
any kind of contract has been violated, but because its stupefying effect
upon the common people will promote abject obedience. There is no
semblance of a public decree, however high-handed, announcing, "If
you resist, then these and those will be executed." The butchery is
performed first—a sort of terrorist Blitzkrieg—and the body
politic is left stunned and malleable in its red afterglow, precisely
because no option to obey and pass unharmed was ever offered. One would
have found considerably more equitable treatment at the hands of a Nazi.
The locus classicus for Machiavelli’s defense
of mendacity, nevertheless, must surely be Chapter Fifteen. Many
Renaissance scholars know the lines by heart: "For a man who wants to
make a profession of good in all regards must come to ruin among so many
who are not good… for if one considers everything well, one will find
that something appears to be virtue which if pursued would be one’s
ruin, and that something appears to be vice which if pursued would result
in one’s security and well-being." Much has been written, by the
way, about the Machiavellian employment (or defacement) of the word
virtù. In the previous quotation, it seems to carry the meaning which
we commonly ascribe to it: goodness, a quality which has been carefully
cultivated in the service of universal moral principles. Yet when we
reflect upon how Machiavelli uses the word elsewhere, employments such as
this must indubitably be tongue-in-cheek. Virtue, rather, is almost always
what we find it to be in Chapter One, which treats of those who acquire
principalities by fortune or by virtù. Now, denominating an
inherited title as "rule by fortune" is already quite revealing,
since many of Machiavelli’s contemporaries would still have maintained
that certain families are divinely ordained to command the state. The only
viable alternative to such ancestral privilege is, of course, violent
accession to power: conquest or rebellion.
Chapter Eight perhaps throws the equation of virtue
with aggressive initiative into some faint degree of doubt: it ponders
those who have attainted power "through crimes". This chapter is
ultimately no more than one of many exhibits, however, bearing witness to
Machiavelli’s devotion to fraud. For it turns out that those who commit
crimes differ from Cesare Borgia only in being too open: they lack virtue
through having clumsily acquired a villainous reputation which ever after
impedes their imperial ambitions. Concludes Machiavelli of Agathocles,
"His savage cruelty and inhumanity, together with his infinite
crimes, do not allow him to be celebrated among the most excellent
men." That the transparent, repellent hypocrisy of this remark is
mitigated by its blackguardly utility as a caution about dirty laundry
merely argues for how much more deeply corrupted Machiavelli’s vision is
than any pedestrian hooligan’s. Part of being a fox, after all, is
knowing how to appear more closely related to a lion than a wolf. It is
Chapter Eighteen which undertakes the famous animal metaphor, and which
also compares the successful prince with a half-human centaur. The prince,
while being bestially merciless at times, must understand how to cleanse
himself of bestiality’s unwanted stench.
Surely there is no better perfume than a show of piety.
By no accident, Machiavelli ends the "fox/lion" chapter by
recommending that the ruler appear "all mercy, all faith, all
honesty, all humanity, all religion. And nothing is more important to
appear to have than this last." Yet we would once again do
Machiavelli the "disservice" of thinking his villainy pedestrian
if we believed his book to be seeded with religious references only to
curry cheap favors. To be sure, his paronomasia in Chapter Eleven
about ecclesiastical principalities seems to tip the hat and bend the
knee: "I will omit speaking of them; for since they are exalted and
maintained by God, it would be the office of a presumptuous and foolhardy
man to discourse on them." Even here, though, we should not fail to
detect a sardonic note. If Machiavelli really believed that ecclesiastical
states were sustained by God, discoursing upon them would be the easiest
thing in the world, since the ground and destiny of their authority would
rest beyond question. He is obviously concerned, rather, about falling
afoul of a formidable political machine—and he wishes the astute to
note this concern. He does not seek favors: he seeks to alert his
readers that favors must be sought.
That Machiavelli, all coyness aside, entertains this
view of the Church—i.e., as a political megalith whose massive fixity in
affairs cannot possibly be loosed under present conditions—shows clearly
through several innuendos. The third chapter chides the French for having
allowed the Church’s political power to eclipse their own: so much for
divine will and destiny. Two other references link the tactics of rogues
with God’s plan in a false naiveté which borders on effrontery. Chapter
Five includes Moses, "who had so great a teacher," among a list
of aggressive, dynamic leaders intent upon founding empires. For good
measure, the Persian Cyrus is the only member of this list whose deeds
were not transparent myth—a strong implication that Moses belongs with
the tall-tale majority. Similarly, Chapter Eight concludes by extolling
the cruelties of Agathocles, which were perpetrated all at once to secure
his position rather than extended over his entire rule: such tyrants
"can have some remedy for their state with God and men." Recall
that Agathocles is cited as an example of a ruler whose crimes were too
public and too lurid to receive the white-wash of "virtue". Yet
the reign of such a one can make its peace with God—a pagan reign, at
that. Under the circumstances, what can God stand for other than the
principle of a minimally demanding decorum, its exigencies even less than
those of virtù?
Strauss notices a passage of this sort in the Discourses
on Livy, which he makes bold (very properly, in my opinion) to call
blasphemous. In the passage, Machiavelli has dubiously characterized King
David with Mary’s utterance about God, "He filled the hungry with
good things, and sent the rich away empty." What makes the
characterization suspicious is less its aptitude at a certain level than
Machiavelli’s overt denunciation of David for playing fast and loose
with private property just before the citation. David is a tyrant such as
Mary described when speaking of some other tyrant.
[This passage in the Discourses] compelled us
to start a chain of tentative reasoning which brought us suddenly face
to face with the only New Testament quotation that ever occurs in
Machiavelli’s two books and with an enormous blasphemy. It would be a
great disservice to truth if we were to use any other words, any weaker
words for characterizing what he is doing. For it would be a mistake to
believe that the blasphemy which we encountered is the only one or even
the worst one which he committed. That blasphemy is, so to speak, only
the spearhead of a large column.12
Strauss proceeds to explain that, by rendering the
equivalency of God’s will and overweening abuse of power superficially
reasonable, Machiavelli has eased open the door through which may now
escape a great many conventional inhibitions. I fully concur. Indeed, I
would urge that the insinuating passages about Moses and Agathocles are
doing precisely the same thing.
By expressing my accord with the legendary Professor
Strauss, I do not mean to imply that my level if familiarity with
Machiavelli or with political science is remotely akin to his. Yet I will
risk the opprobrium of arrant impudence by saying that Strauss—and
countless other scholars—surprise me when they expend such labor upon
unearthing Machiavelli’s irreverence. The greatest blasphemy in The
Prince, after all, stands gleaming in the visionary daylight of the
twenty-sixth chapter: the so-called Roman Dream. Here Machiavelli employs
with earnest candor all those words resonant with idealism which have
elsewhere in the book been the brunt of subtle irony or the victim of
sinister inversion. I have italicized the most disarming examples.
Thus, one should not let this opportunity pass for
Italy, after so much time, to see her redeemer. I cannot express
with what love he would be received in all those provinces that
have suffered from these floods from outside; with what thirst for
revenge, with what obstinate faith, with what piety, with
what tears. What doors would be closed to him? What peoples would
deny him obedience? What envy would oppose him? [Italicize the whole
rhetorical question for being rhetorical!] What Italians would deny him homage?
This barbarian domination stinks to everyone. Then may your illustrious
house take up this task with the spirit and hope with which just
enterprises are taken up, so that under its emblem this fatherland
may be ennobled…
I defy anyone to argue with conviction that Machiavelli
is his former smug, wry self in this passage. With no little strain, one
might contend that he plays the role of patriotic zealot to the hilt in
order to the seduce the very prince whom he has coached in seduction: and,
of course, such a case has been made. Even if Machiavelli were nowhere
more calculating than in his zeal, however, we would still be compelled to
account for the calculation: i.e., why the urgency of mobilizing Lorenzo
de’ Medici? Would not the pretended zeal necessarily mask a genuine
zeal?
For all his brilliance, Strauss does not account for
this curious urgency in his own rumination over Chapter Twenty-Six.
Somehow he fails to notice it as he reviews the possibilities, and so he
fails to notice its blasphemy.
… Would Machiavelli condemn the immoral policies
recommended in the bulk of the book if they did not serve a patriotic
purpose? Or are those immoral policies barely compatible with a
patriotic use? Is it not possible to understand the patriotic conclusion
of the Prince as a respectable coloring of the designs of a
self-seeking Italian prince? There can be no doubt regarding the answer;
the immoral policies recommended throughout the Prince are not
justified on grounds of the common good, but exclusively on grounds of
the self-interest of the prince, or his selfish concern with his own
well-being, security, and glory The final appeal to patriotism supplies
Machiavelli with an excuse for having recommended immoral courses of
action.13
So the Roman Dream is just another Machiavellian
subterfuge—a cosmetic exordium under whose wrapper are smuggled
contraband explosives. But why the explosives? Worldliness has its
own kind of naiveté. I suspect that Strauss finds Machiavelli’s
resplendent vision inconsistent with his bituminous counsel because he—Strauss,
that is (and other scholars, too)—cannot see the moral lie of it all, the
lie about morality. Machiavelli must evidently believe in a perfected
end insulated from his squalid means because only a utopian ever could
believe such ends insulated from such means. If the Dream were not in
earnest, Machiavelli would have known better than to litter the road
leading up to its gilded pinnacle with foully murdered bodies. Because the
Dream is in earnest, he cannot understand how its foundation upon a
mountain of bodies might be indefensible. No one but a secular idealist
can so rape one moral ideal after another.14
I wrote in the previous section that political morality
demands both that one act energetically when transparent villainy is afoot
and that one never admit personal or cultural inclination to the authority
behind such moral imperatives. The person who believes only in things of
this world—the person like Machiavelli, or Benjamin Constant, or Karl
Marx—always puts the wrong emphasis in the wrong place. We should tend
to let our moral energy carry us forward in specific circumstances rather
than stand back and yield the day to injustice. We should step forward and
declare before the slanderer what we have seen with our own eyes; we
should step forward and stop the hand of the bully as it descends upon his
victim. These are the acts of worthy intercession from which Machiavelli
abstains. He tells us that others abstain, too, and that by being one of
the few to come forward, we merely court our own destruction—for the
world is a very wicked place! Yet where is its wickedness when Machiavelli
contemplates a future created out of his counsels? Italians are now
harmoniously united behind their secular redeemer, their native human envy
miraculously put aside in a surge of patriotic fervor. If only the
redeemer might borrow from his tutor the energy (a Nietzschean, nihilistic
sort of energy, as it turns out) to violate silly bourgeois taboo! Yet it
is precisely in the broader context—in our outlook upon the future
rather than upon bustling corridors and sidewalks—that we should chasten
our moral energy with self-doubt. If individual human beings can be
redeemed, can entire human societies be spiritually transformed? When has
a single society in human history ever been so elevated? We can stay a
tyrant from slaughtering his people… but can we so tutor his people that
none will ever again play the tyrant? The very aspiration is itself a kind
of incipient tyranny, for souls can only be saved one by one—and none
for this world, which at its very best offers a postponed death in a
softer bed with sycophants singing one’s praises.
The grandson of a triumphant Prince Lorenzo would have
sired a generation of Cesare Borgias. An Italy whose rule extended as far
as Machiavelli’s (or Mussolini’s) fondest dreams would have produced a
generation of megalomaniac assassins. There is no end to the downward
spiral of betrayal and brutality created by Machiavelli’s secret weapons—nor
any beginning, because Machiavelli, after all, did not invent betrayal and
brutality. He was indeed, however, among the first who sought to make
wholesale moral surrender respectable in the name of a "better
world", a here-and-now shaped forcibly from the theorist-creator’s
imagination. He was, heaven help us, among the first modern men.
I find it extremely revealing that Leo Strauss, the
grandfather of what is now called neo-conservatism, should so have
misjudged Machiavelli’s secular idealism—should have failed to
recognize in him a prototype of the twentieth century’s ruthless social
engineers. Strauss appears to be as enamored of the notion that all human
beings always strive after their selfish interests as Machiavelli clearly
is of the notion that moral short-cuts may be taken with considerable
profit. If the latter’s murky landscape is dominated by a vision of res
Italianae finally arranged, then perhaps the former’s equally dusky
vista is presided over by an equally naïve summit. For some motive or
other, I believe, is required to make people surrender all morally sound
motives; we human beings are not so constructed as to accept unfettered
selfishness without a bit of a fight (even if our perverse construction
also drags us back toward selfishness at our best moments). Invariably,
the grizzled veteran of life’s brutal campaigns, having lowered his
expectations dramatically to embrace Realpolitik, will end up
transferring all of his grand illusions to the terminus of the loathsome
no-holds-barred struggle. So for Strauss. He chooses to massage
Machiavelli’s intent (as he concludes what proves to be a very lengthy
meditation) in the direction of the modern democratic republic à la
Strauss.
While everyone is by nature concerned only with his
own well-being—with his preservation, his security, his ease, his
pleasures, his reputation, his honor, his glory—he must be concerned
with the well-being of his society on which his own well-being appears
to depend. The society which is most conducive to the well-being of the
large majority of the people and of the great is the good republic.
Although the reasoning which leads to the demand that one ought to
dedicate oneself to the common good starts from the premise of
selfishness, that reasoning is less powerful than the passions. Men need
additional selfish incentives in order to comply with the result of that
reasoning. The task of the political art consists therefore in so
directing the passions and even the malignant humors that they cannot be
satisfied without their satisfaction contributing to the common good or
even serving it. There is no need for a change of heart or of the
intention.15
Mansfield is quite right to observe that Machiavelli is
no Hobbesian seeking after broad concepts.16 The Prince is
written more for a nihilist Superman than for a plodding bourgeois
huckster. Strauss has succeeded here in reducing an incipient Nietzsche to
a mollified Hobbes—in fashioning from the Fox a Chicken With Teeth. The
abstract nouns of desiderata at this passage’s beginning are
already more his than Machiavelli’s, inasmuch as they appear to be used
without any hint of irony. The fuming whited sepulcher which is honor and
glory in The Prince now comes forward in an open poverty of attire.
Esteem coaxed or beguiled from one’s fellows is as basic a need as food
or shelter. Thus are we strange birds feathered. The republic is our happy
hunting ground because it allows us all to be as foxy as we like—a
veritable race of Cesare Borgias—in our hypocritical quest to be thought
philanthropic or public-spirited or courageous. It may indeed be that
civil society would collapse if a subversive group of truly
self-sacrificing individuals emerged from some radical cult. How would we
all survive in Strauss’s ameliorist garden if every one of us did not
lust to advertise his donations, his contributions, his innovations, his
risks, his wounds, his Calvary? In a land of stentorian narcissists, he
who does not trumpet his personal merits menaces an economy built upon
bullhorns.
"Merit", of course, has no objective meaning
in such a context. Yet it is worth noting that Machiavelli’s scoundrels
conceal their lack of merit that they may be found meritorious,
whereas Strauss’s are meritorious in the only sense of the word he
recognizes through their active success at feigning merit. They believe
their own lies—perhaps more than anyone around them.. "It is
impossible to preserve the perfect combination of being loved and being
feared," Strauss continues of his ideal "real world"
republic, "but deviations from the ‘middle course’ are
unimportant if the governors are men of great virtue, i.e. of greatness
and nobility of mind, and therefore revered as good at protecting the good
and the friends, and at harming the bad and the enemies." I have
suppressed no quotations or italics in this citation. Strauss has fully
convinced himself that leaders who wield great power may be trusted if
they are men of character, by which we are to understand that they will
elevate their adherents and crush their adversaries. What a pretty trust
for the ultimate misanthrope! Without dropping names, I may surely conjure
before the reader precisely the sort of statesman sketched out in this
last great hope, for we have seen him haunting our television screens and
corridors of power several times over the half-century since Thoughts
on Machiavelli was first published—and have seen him once lately in
very fine detail. He craves the highest offices to satisfy an insatiable
egotism. He lends himself to any public spectacle which will be widely
broadcast, assuming any role or position therein which his pollsters
foresee as favorably influencing the masses. (The word
"dignity", we might note in passing, is absent from the
vocabulary both of Machiavelli and of Strauss.) Once in power, he punishes
those whom the public wishes him to punish while reprieving every Barabbas
whom the public whimsically cheers. When an indispensable need for
coherence demands that he risk unpopularity through some shockingly
decisive act, he stifles any appearance of callousness however he can—delegating
the dirty work to another, assassinating under cover of darkness,
confessing with mock-remorse a complete ignorance of operations behind his
back, and all the rest. Even when his lies and equivocations have grown so
legion that they come spilling through the seams of the public-relations
envelope, he has arrived at such a warm spot in the body politic’s heart—voters
are so confident that his supple spine will bend to serve their own guilty
passions in a crunch—that his knavery is forgiven as a blond playboy’s
winsome prank.
This is not a portrait of Cesare Borgia, nor
even of the Lorenzo de’ Medici envisioned by Machiavelli; but it does
suit one of our recent presidents to the least wrinkle. Would Professor
Strauss, I wonder, be happy with the incarnation of his American Dream?
I have taken pains to hold this essay aloof from
partisan politics, and I shall make another effort in that direction now.
The neo-conservative phalanx, some of whose mouthpieces boast of having
themselves mastered the art of "triangulation" (a genuinely
Machiavellian exercise), appear to desire the exportation of the strategy
as a solution to Iraq’s post-Saddam upheaval.17 Were we to give
Iraqis and other oppressed Muslim societies a taste of freedom, they
contend, the globe would need far fewer terrorist-police. History, as I
have already said, will pass the ultimate verdict on this enterprise. When
I reflect, however, that its architects are in many cases the disciples of
Leo Strauss, I am beset with doubt. If our objective is simply to allow a
cruelly oppressed multitude a chance to shape its liberation from daily
harrowing, then we deserve credit for a deed well done—i.e., a gesture
of humanity whose selfish costs have plainly rivaled its selfish gains.
Yet if the objective is to create in Iraq a Straussian republic where
self-seeking is untethered and unbridled, then we are doing nothing less
than subverting spirituality, as our worse detractors say of us. For make
no mistake: Strauss’s political model is every bit as much a secular
utopia as Machiavelli’s—to that extent, the scholar has faithfully
interpreted the tutor. Self-interest betrays the higher interest in whose
pursuit the religious mentality believes us created, and a state which
promotes self-interest is an institutionalized blasphemy.
Ireland is a republic, but its state schools are
operated substantially by the Catholic Church. Iraq may certainly become a
republic which also condemns and prohibits the showing of Hollywood films
or the importing of hip-hop music. Indeed, the exclusion of such
culturally conservative forces from our own pandering, profit-driven
capitalist culture frustrates millions of American voters, and may have
more significantly determined our recent presidential election than the
war in Iraq. Capitalism and religious faith are not irreconcilable, but a
mediocre intellect can readily understand that, where both function
actively, heated friction will result. Would a Straussian view as failure
or setback an Iraq where, by decree of a religious elite, citizens
may not exploit certain native human weaknesses? That is, are our
policy-makers wedded to the notion that unencumbered economic activity is
required to keep ambitious corsairs pleasing the crowd rather than
building squadrons of stormtroopers? Do we, or do we not, believe that
honoring metaphysical ends as the basis of reality is the only reliable
source of social stability? A man cannot serve two masters. If we do not
invest in denouncing self-interest, and in allowing other societies to so
invest, then we serve self-interest; and if we serve self-interest, we do
not believe that the self’s ultimate identity lies in repudiating its
worldly trappings, amusements, and obsessions.
Has not history illuminated this moral lie on our own
shores? Is not the very heart of our cultural self-contradiction that the
"Religious Right" persistently sides with the theoretical forces
which condone a titillating, licentious marketplace, while the politically
correct "Liberal Elite" no less inscrutably fraternizes with a
depraved entertainment industry?18 Our campaign cycles froth and
seethe with venom precisely because the two polarities are promoting rival
utopias, and hence are in fact competing for dominance of the same pole.
Since utopia is itself a moral lie, prima facie—since no human
society is ever significantly happier or healthier than another of
comparable logistics—we are trying, blasphemously, to build heaven of
materials which we can see, touch, and lift. Strauss’s vision is not
radically different from Karl Marx’s in this regard. How can unfettered
ambition advance the human cause any farther than ambition suppressed at
gunpoint? We all know that the people, the demos, would have voted
billions of dollars for tsunami flood victims if a popular referendum had
been offered the next day; and the politician who had proposed and pushed
the measure would have enjoyed immense popularity as a result of his
"charity", having been generous in that sense which The
Prince’s Chapter Sixteen heartily endorses (i.e., with other people’s
money). Yet we also know—or ought to know—that money on such occasions
is filtered through several hundred very sticky, very dirty fingers. Whose
nephew will be commissioned to deliver the canned food? Which dictator
will receive the check to mobilize relief efforts?19
The pandering of the ambitious to the masses inevitably
creates a nightmare for the masses’ children: the invoice for such
generosity is invariably sent to the next generation. It is purely utopian—or,
as I have called it derisively elsewhere, an "idealism" of the
secular world, where the underpinnings of true ideals cannot exist—to
suppose that rapacious, egocentric motives can advance human society to a
more stable condition. Wheels must turn slowly, constituents must badger,
committees must wrangle, muckrakers must attack and counter-attack—not
so that self-interest may rise up to the top, but precisely so that the
grease of self-interest (which drips like cold molasses) may have time to
evacuate the machine of state. Human affairs on a grand scale never work
spectacularly well when they work their best. This is because things work
best when seen in truth, because lies abound, and because sufficient time
is required for the lies to wilt. The fast clocks of this world are not
reliable in such cases, and this world’s fast-talkers are especially to
be shunned.
That Machiavelli deserves to assume a permanent place
among the Modern Rogue’s Gallery of ideological false counselors is
hardly a daring proposition. Eric Voegelin’s exquisite phrase for
Marxism—"intellectual swindle"—seems to me tailor-made for The
Prince, though the juxtaposition of Marx and Machiavelli will shock
the gallery’s superficial browsers. To enroll Leo Strauss in the same
corridors of infamy may be far bolder. Neo-conservatism prides itself on
facing the grim facts of human nature and building upon the same decades
of lowered expectations which unmasked the Soviet "experiment"
as a gory nightmare.
I conducted an unusual experiment to test the soundness
of this classification: I decided to see what a feminist has to say about
Machiavelli. Hanna Pipkin’s Fortune Is a Woman was the obvious
choice, a work generally admired in the scholarly community and published
in the heyday of rejected canons and awakened consciences. Feminism, I
have long observed, is the quintessence of secular idealism. Its most
vocal proponents begin by playing the universally circulated
"cultural relativism" card (every campus deck has several,
enough to ensure that each disciplinary hand will be empowered by the dark
trump). All cultures, the dogma goes, are founded upon arbitrary myths
introduced and reinforced by those in control. Culture is propaganda. The
very notion of objective moral truth is at best laughably gullible—and
at worst a gambit on the part of the beleaguered classes of privilege to
trick us into accepting their ascendancy a little longer.
Yet within a secular cynicism every bit as corrosive as
Machiavelli’s (or Strauss’s), the academic feminist is apt to launch
without warning—like The Prince’s final chapter—into a
stunning vision of a better life. Forsaking the obvious logical conclusion
that we are all forever condemned in this life to exhausting power
struggles uninformed by any genuine scruple, these luminaries unveil words
like "fairness" and "rights" and "freedom".
Their mid-air recovery of moral metaphysics is often quite as
breath-taking as Machiavelli’s parting salute to "nobility" or
Strauss’s to "honor". Never did such naïve idealism sprout so
suddenly from such malodorous compost!
If Pipkin’s case against The Prince pursued
similar lines, I reasoned, then the paradox of extremes warped around into
strange union would be complete. We should have before us the trompe l’oeil
arabesque of two bitterly adversarial political camps which both reject
selfless moral duty as anachronistic folly, both consider human beings as
scarcely more than well-clad apes, and both expect to knead of this soiled
dough a terrestrial City of God.
Pipkin surprised me, however. Her relative comfort with
Machiavelli’s assessment surprised me, and so did her recurrent sympathy
with Strauss. Surely, I had thought, a work entitled Fortune Is a Woman
must bristle at the phrase’s original author. The Prince advances
this metaphor in Chapter Twenty-Five. The feminized abstraction in itself
could offend only the most neurotic "victims" of sexism—but
the rest of the chapter extends it in terms whose loathsome, undisguised
criminality will not see its likeness again in Western literature until
the Marquis de Sade. "Fortune is a woman," concludes Machiavelli,
"and it is necessary, if one wants to hold her down, to beat her and
strike her down." Call it a trope, if you will. The offense—and it
is a moral offense beyond equivocation, inspiring one to sneer at all
those denunciations of the "barbarians" ruling Italy—lies
precisely in the image. Homer speaks of shepherds defending their flock
from a lion: Machiavelli speaks of holding a woman down and raping her. As
well as an Iago who incites murder, he is a perfect swine.
As far as I can discern, Pipkin is unmoved by
Machiavelli’s citing rape as an appropriate model for handling doubtful
situations. She is, indeed, so faithful to the cultural relativism which
she shares with her generation of scholars—so irreproachably logical—that
she almost avoids the "trap" of abandoning the secular miasma
and pointing to morality’s deus ex machina. She almost remains a
thorough relativist from beginning to end. As such, she approves both of
Machiavelli’s "exploit decorum" tactics and of Strauss’s
"God is dead" insights into Machiavelli. The two of them, she
concedes, have it about right.
Yet Pipkin is also awash in the post-structural hedging
and shifting of her time. (One may argue, indeed, that only a post-structuralist
can "feel" the utopian’s self-reversals—and may observe that
the post-structuralist scholar writes only about the utopian text—because,
whenever values are deprived of a metaphysical support, they are bound to
pull out the cornice while filling in around the foundation.) In
deconstructive thought, ultimate truth is an illusion. Truth claims take
turns pushing off against each other in a dance of the pendulum which has
no real focus. Meaning, rather, is the myth created by stating that the
other is not meaning—although otherness must remain enticing,
since its alternative will not withstand scrutiny. (Note the similarity
with the political "triangulations" of the nineties.)
Machiavelli’s Fox and Lion are such opposites, either of them both
supplementing and contradicting the other. This serpentine struggle to
advance in a world which, after all, has no objective sense finds Pipkin
looking on sympathetically, but also shaking her head over its inescapable
futility.
So the foxy unmasking of fraud cannot, by itself,
inspire corrupt men to virtù; and, indeed, a true or mere fox
would not even conceive that project. Machiavelli may have been foxy,
but he was not merely a fox. All three images of manhood are his. So now
one must ask once more: if a man were not merely a fox but somehow also
held a vision of manhood as Citizenship, so that he wanted to transform
society and men’s character toward real glory, could he do so? If
there are no Founders, what does it take to found, or to renovate?
Could a fox with such a vision perhaps inspire,
manipulate, and use a lion as a false Founder-figure? A lion could
certainly frighten men into obedience, but since he lacks true virtù,
how could he—or he and the fox together—inspire men? Or would the
false appearance be enough? In politics, after all, appearance is
everything; it is a realm where "men judge more with their eyes
than with their hands, since everybody… sees what you appear to be;
few perceive what you are" [from the Prince, ch. 18]. Could
it be after all that the great historical Founders were only lions being
used by foxes who had a larger, nonfoxy vision?20
One can glimpse in this fencing match which Pipkin
arranges between Machiavelli’s terms that self-betraying Sehnsucht—that
presumption of a better answer not yet found—which deconstructionists
cultivate so lovingly in their writing, since it convicts them, too, of
contradiction, and thereby bolsters their thesis that all is
contradiction. A vision of manhood as Citizenship? Would this not
be a vision of moral duty, that naïve folly of the pre-modern,
metaphysically benighted mind? Apparently not—or not to Pipkin. I remain
unsure of just what alternative she proposes to the Lion and his
Alternative… but it has something to do with femininity. Fortune is a
woman. Fortune is what Machiavelli chose to denominate whatever his prize
pupil, the new Cesare Borgia, would not quite be able to predict or
control on his best days of being bad. It is a she. Pipkin
seems to agree that rape is the wrong way to "enter" her—but
she otherwise fulfills none of the outrage I had anticipated. The
"rape" extension of the metaphor might almost be absent from
Chapter Twenty-Five. It is interesting merely as male frustration.
But what, then, is the meaning through which female
otherness would not just supplement, but terminally complete the Lion and
the Fox? Pipkin is dreaming of idealism, like Machiavelli and Strauss,
even though the terms of her meditation have relegated all ideals
irrevocably to pipedreams. Pitying Machiavelli’s entrapment in his
manhood, she concludes, "Machiavelli at his best summons us to
heroism rightly understood: to public action for higher goals that
nevertheless serve our natural and private needs, action that recognizes
both our vulnerability and our capacity as creators and judges."21
In her last paragraph, she has, after all, embarked upon the good
ship Hope to n’importe où hors du monde—to a pristine
utopia. Heroism rightly understood? What can that mean, if not the
old-fashioned, now annihilated variety of heroism which congenial readers
will allow her to pull like a rabbit out of a hat? Higher goals that
nevertheless serve our natural and private needs?
"Nevertheless" proves the least bit inadequate to lubricate the
insertion of "higher" when we have been left with nothing but
Straussian self-interest—but egocentric ambition (such as academic
feminism has long used to leverage women away from the family). Our
capacity as creators and judges? Would that be, perhaps, our capacity
to play God now that He is dead? To create our own truth on the spot, as
Kant says Benjamin Constant’s elite who enjoy the "right to
truth" must absurdly do?
My test, then, confirmed my suspicions more profoundly
than I would have thought possible. Where I had expected to find the irony
of a feminism more resonant with universal principle than
neo-conservatism, I found the dull, irony-free convergence of the beguiled
upon an impossible sanctuary for truth built of programmatic lying. Where
I had expected to see bitterly competing political cabals taking no
prisoners, I found the genuine moral outrage directed at women—the abuse
of their physical weakness and the undermining of those promises upon
which they, especially, must depend—brushed aside to assert the new
sisterhood’s "right to lie as a man lies". What secular
idealism—what a hell of a heaven!
V
I cannot do better now than to stress once again, as
Kant does in all his moral treatises, that the ultimate ends of goodness
must be metaphysical—that, in plain terms, good deeds are never good
because we profit materially from them. Yet if human nature is magnetized
to a truly higher goodness—to an ultimate end which no paycheck or
judicial verdict or medal ceremony could ever come close to fulfilling—then
we necessarily carry that magnetism into our daily adventures, and we must
necessarily feel bereft at some level when those adventures pull us away
from the attraction. In that sense, then—in a Socratic sense—good is
indeed profitable, and the life in opposition to its currents is one of
"insanity".
It would be a mistake, I think, to underestimate the real
validity of this view. If we live long enough, we invariably meet people
who have given their existence to one sort of lie or another—to hollow
glories, to shallow trappings, to carnal thrills—and we notice them to
be deeply disturbed As we have seen in this essay, even the most eloquent
exponents of cultural relativism (or of biological determinism, in Strauss’s
case—but relating value to genes and nerves still leaves it unrelated
to principle) cannot bring themselves to stare a mendacious, egotistical
society square in the face. There always has to be some redemptive
transformation which the persistent, well-placed lies of the ideologue (or
the self-chastened lies of Strauss’s Hobbesian herd) will concoct. An
indefinite future of unrelieved fraud, envy, and betrayal is too much for
anyone to ponder day after day with undamaged sanity.
Yet post-structuralists and various other post-moderns
are correct, for their part, that believing in truth—in its necessary
connection to reality and in our obligation to tell it—is something of a
game. There may be no truth at all: there may be no "real
reality", only what we construct of the "truths" upon which
we sell ourselves. This is the case in all matters of the spirit. Belief
that truth exists, and that speaking it is obligatory, requires faith.
Such faith is self-serving, the cynic will observe. Rather than describing
a noble act of self-surpassment, it coddles the believer by allowing him
to proceed with his silly game and have no second thoughts, no suspicions.
Yes… but we might as well say that it is self-serving to opt for sanity
rather than to drive ourselves insane.
In any case, there is no great risk that the broader
community (let alone an entire society) will join us in telling the truth
tenaciously, so we will have the "satisfaction" of finding the
game anything but a cakewalk. We may expect to be exploited to the hilt by
all of Machiavelli’s heirs, by all of Strauss’s "virtuous"
egotists, by all the power-hungry who cloak their ambition in the pieties
of racial or sexual equality. Occasionally, one of those who has destroyed
our own career or stolen our own nest egg or seduced our own children will
come crawling to us with a vision of the grave deep in his eyes, and seek
absolution. Then we may have the satisfaction (if we truly worship the
truth) of saying those calm words, those true words, which will turn this
king of the world—this prince of darkness—to a despiser of all the
gods he lied for.
It is a small satisfaction—or not so small, depending
on how you look at it.
NOTES:
1 I hope it will not seem uncharitable of
me to observe that Benjamin Constant, whose ridicule of Kant’s strict
adherence to truth-telling was the springboard for the latter’s short
essay, made his artistic reputation with Adophe. This novel is
devoted to a young man’s concealment from his mistress of the bitter
truth that he does not love her. Since the affair, besides, is adulterous,
one may surely ask if Constant was sentimentally qualified to be a
persuasive apologist for "love’s necessary lies": his list of
such, I mean, seems exorbitantly generous.
2 See especially the seventh chapter of
Tobin Siebers, Morals and Stories (New York: Columbia UP, 1992).
3 In Eichmann
in Jerusalem (New York: Viking, 1964), Hannah Arendt remarks that the
story of the Danes’ overt resistance to the SS’s overtures should be
“required reading in political science for all students who wish to
learn something about the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent
action…” (171). The German
effort to deport Jews from
Denmark
to death camps was an utter flop.
4 I have translated the text of Immanuel
Kant, Über ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen, as
printed in Kants Werke, vol. 8 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968),
423-430. The essay was originally published in 1797.
5 Kant adds a footnote to
this page in which he explains that he himself is said to be the
"German philosopher" rebuked by Constant , although he cannot
recall the occasion when he might have written the cited remark.
6 In this paragraph, Kant appears to wander
off the subject—but he is in fact building to a point clarified in his
third-to-last paragraph. Constant, he writes here, sensibly insists that
people must consent to the laws which govern them. In doing so, they are
usually forced to adopt a republican form of government, since modern
states are too massively populated for everyone to stand up and be heard.
The reader may well question what all this has to do with telling the
truth. Kant’s answer is not just that representative government cannot
function in an atmosphere of mistrust and dishonesty (though this
objection, too, is implied in his closing remarks). The third-to-last
paragraph will emphasize how government itself descends from abstract
moral imperatives—or must do so if it is to have any authority. On other
words, the basic principles from which human society grows cannot be
shredded somewhere down the line because they seem inconvenient in
specific cases.
7 Throughout this paragraph, Kant contrasts
schaden with leiden, offering in the present sentence a
parenthetic distinction between the Latin nocere and laedere.
I have consistently translated the former verb as "give pain"
and the latter as "suffer", since the contrast seems to be
between immediate physical harm and more lasting, more internalized harm.
Cf. the legal distinction between "pain" and
"suffering".
8 A more apt metaphor might involve the
individual who chooses to amputate one of his members, since the state is
not opting for complete self-annihilation. A refinement of the comparison’s
terms, however, does nothing to qualify the decision’s immorality. The
fanatic who castrates himself to avoid lechery or who cuts out his tongue
to preempt lapses into gossip and slander has removed the physical
possibility of accomplishing a perversely willed act, not purified that
will at its roots. On the contrary, by insulating himself within
impossibility, he has both despaired of ever reforming his will to
manageable levels and precluded himself from varieties of productive
living which a whole-bodied person might explore to great moral profit. So
for an entire society which exterminates a percentage of its more
eccentric members: it thereby not only proclaims its inability to function
as a society, but it also denies itself innumerable opportunities to
improve for the benefit of all. A culture in which women who wore pants or
went to market unveiled were summarily executed would be one in which
common decency extended no farther than the will of the hierarchs. Such
cultures, lacking an internalized sense of decorum, slide with astonishing
speed into debauchery once official strictures are relaxed.
9 PBS Frontline aired a documentary
in 1999, The Triumph of Evil: How the West Ignored Warnings of the 1994
Rwanda Genocide and Turned Its Back on the Victims, whose conclusions
in this regard were irresistible and damning. Excerpts and related
material are posted at www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/evil/.
10 Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli
(Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1978), 31; first published in 1958.
11 My citations throughout the rest of this essay
are drawn from Harvey C. Mansfield’s translation of The Prince
(Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1985). I have not included page
numbers from this text, however. Translations of the work are so numerous,
and Machiavelli’s chapters are so brief, that I judged it more useful to
mention the appropriate chapter by number.
12 Op. cit., 49.
13 Ibid., 79-80.
14 I do not intend the two words "secular
idealist" in an entirely serious philosophical sense. As I explain
later in the essay’s body, I find in the utopian a naïf who
strives after objectives not possible in this world by clinging to
"principles" which he has concocted without the benefit of
metaphysical ends. All idealism is indeed nonsensical in a completely
secular context.
15 Op. cit., 281.
16 See p. xi of Mansfield’s introduction to his
translation of The Prince (op. cit.), vii-xxiv: "Machiavelli
did not attempt (as did Hobbes) to formulate a new definition of justice
based on self-preservation."
17 For instance, David Brooks, Bobos in
Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 2001), speaks admiringly of President Clinton’s ability to
reconcile interests by striking compromises, and suggests that this is
indeed a distinguishing characteristic of the "bohemian
bourgeoisie", or the "bobos". Compromise, of course, can
reflect humility and self-sacrifice; but it also can—and, in these cases
frequently does—signal a lubricious relationship to principles and a
facility for having one’s cake and eating it, too, regardless of the
broader consequences.
18 I have never observed a functional
collaboration of filmmakers and academics. This odd union is more likely a
marriage of convenience, with entertainers eager to contribute (in return
for an approved "artist" status) at political rallies and to
type-cast homosexuals as sympathetic, bourgeois white-collar males as
despicable, etc. The leftist furor against the Sport-Utility Vehicle
strikes me as similarly rhetorical when I consider how many of my academic
friends hop jets to conferences in Barcelona—a means of conveyance whose
consumption of energy leaves the SUV looking as virtuous as a donkey cart.
The Right Wing collaboration with mega-business is less frivolous.
Whatever true consonance of motives exists between Christian morality and
capitalism must surely be confined to the small businessman trying to
serve his neighbors honestly and efficiently in return for a very modest
income. Such a spiritual connection is entirely effaced in cynical
marketing tactics and faceless automated service departments whose product
has often been assembled half a world away. The level at which this
inconsistency is perceived in suburban America seldom surpasses a kind of
nagging discomfort endured from day to day like aging and rising taxes.
19 I do not suggest that our national response to
the Indonesian tsunami was excessively prompt or generous; I evoke the
catastrophe, rather, as an example of what sorts of situation might be
exploited readily by an unprincipled aspirant to high office. I should say
of our specific response to this crisis that we showed laudable
promptitude in responding in situ with helping hands: aircraft
searching for survivors, ships landing medical teams and troops to clear
rubbish, etc. As I wrote earlier, such an immediate and physically active
response to a crisis is just what moral law demands. Our broader response,
chided in quarters for being too stinting and too tardy, was also perhaps
entirely appropriate. Observers at my remove cannot begin to address such
a matter authoritatively. I will only note that forces in the Indonesian
government are openly hostile to our anti-terrorist effort, as their
chilling reserve in the midst of rescue endeavors has indeed demonstrated,
and that a lavish donation running through the hands of such vocal
antagonists might conceivably finance—some few or many dollars of it—the
next terrorist assault on innocent civilians.
20 Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman:
Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli (Berkeley,
Los Angeles, and London: U California P, 1984), 102.
21 Ibid., 326-327.
back to Contents
***********************************
Three
Essays for Students:
On Topics Various and Sundry
and Illustrative of Problems Faced by Beginning Writers
by
Thomas F. Bertonneau
Thomas F. Bertonneau is a founding member of The Center for
Literate Values’ board and has contributed to Praesidium numerous essays on
subjects related to our vanishing literacy. He presently teaches English at the
State University of New York, Oswego.
I. Introduction. In
my role as a teacher of reading and writing to undergraduates, I have sometimes
found it useful to write essays for my students, to illustrate some point made,
perhaps a bit abstrusely, by a writer whom I have assigned them to read, or to
suggest how they might respond to instructions they have received about writing
a formal theme of their own. A pronounced difficulty of novice writers is their
egocentricity. I have written about this in Praesidium before: how,
because their linguistic context is predominantly oral rather than literate,
freshmen conceive of writing as a mere transcription of what one would say about
something; and how—quite as Walter J. Ong predicates in his analysis of
literacy in Orality and Literacy (1982)—they tend
to confuse the subject and objective. Or rather, they lack an orientation to
what adults recognize as the objective world, the realm of existence which
remains adamantly uninfluenced by private opinions and wishes and is what it is,
whether anyone prefers it that way or not. Student writing comes burdened, until
it is weaned from the tendency, with many iterations of the first person, both
singular and plural, as though the only thing that actually existed, or held any
interest for awareness, was the writer himself. Hence the first of the three
essays, where I have tried to illustrate the principle that it is entirely
possible to draw on personal experience without using the pronouns of the ego.
II. The Abyss that No One Can Leap: An essay
on education autobiographical yet objective. Walter J.
Ong points out in Orality and Literacy (1982) that people without letters
and bookishness think differently from those who have acquired them and that the
gap between the lettered and unlettered is vast and daunting; it is the case
moreover that by a peculiarity of their condition illiterates cannot imagine
what it is like to be literate, whereas literates, for their part, can by an
effort remember what it was like to be sans their ABCs. (Not that it is
easy.) Given the unimaginable character of literacy from the viewpoint of
illiteracy, the question arises, how do the unlettered—including all
alphabetic people when they were children before the age of four or five and so
did not yet possess their abecedary—become lettered? How does one leap an
unleapable abyss?
Ong notes the contrasting traits and
tendencies that distinguish literates from illiterates. Literates think
analytically, in terms of discrete and stable categories, under such notions as
cause-and-effect and part-and-whole, abstractly and at a distance from the ego;
illiterates, by contrast, rarely use categories (being confined to concrete
items in the immediate scene) and then only rudimentarily, show great discomfort
with analysis, and seem to work with but the vaguest notion of cause and effect.
Most dramatically, illiterates (Ong in fact uses the charitable description of people
living in primary oral cultures) separate little or nothing from the ego;
everything, in an oral society, is personal, and many things are not just
personal but conflictual. "Orality" (the term that Ong puts in tension
with "literacy" in his title) does not make logical arguments or
marshal evidence—it merely asserts. Called on to explain or justify their
judgments and preferences, the unlettered Uzbek collective farmers studied by
Alexander Luria in the USSR in the late-1920s could not do so. Indeed, when
confronted with judgments made by literates, they found them incomprehensible
and contemptuously rejected them.
The pupils in Miss Barbara Rollins’
composition course in the Santa Monica High School Summer Session of 1969 were
certainly literate in the sense that they had known their letters since
Kindergarten and had graduated through the usual English curriculum in their
grammar-school and junior-high-school years; they had read a little bit—a
smattering of poems and stories, a Shakespeare play or two, and a sequence of
dreary textbooks written in insipid "educationese" for classroom
purposes. They had not, however, "internalized" literacy, to borrow a
phrase from Ong. Reading and writing were techniques which they could
pragmatically exercise, but their awareness had not yet been
"restructured", as Ong says, by literacy. Their mental habits by and
large remained those of speakers, not of writers, of a language;
they were watchers of television rather than readers of books. As Miss Rollins
could not in that moment have read a treatise that would only appear a dozen
years later, she could not have understood these matters precisely as Ong would
formulate them; but understand them in her own clear way she did. The assignment
on the first day of class asked her pupils to respond in writing to a statement,
it might have been by Burke or Coleridge (who was it?), that people ought to be
humble about what they know; that the young especially needed to be modest in
their professions and seek tutelage in the authorities as designated by
tradition and consensus.
It was 1969, but one summer after the
"Summer of Love". The "youth rebellion" had broken into full
stride and only a few years earlier Abbie Hoffman influentially had warned
undergraduates at Sather Gate in Berkeley not to trust anyone over thirty. Miss
Rollins’ writing students swelled with indignation as they took pen in hand
and began scribbling on the lined pages of their spiral notebooks. Who was
this guy, the majority of respondents angrily demanded, to instruct us?
How did he know what we knew or did not know? Times are always changing, so what
could somebody a hundred years ago have to say about the kids of the present
day? We should make our own mistakes and decide what knowledge we need to know
on the basis of our own particular conditions. We need to be ourselves, to be
individuals. And so it went (although the typical sixteen-year-old put it
much less competently), a mighty torrent of rhetorically reactionary verbiage.
The second meeting began with Miss Rollins
shuffling an unruly sheaf of lined manuscript on the lectern. The difficulty was
that the edges of the pages were frayed. "It would be instructive,"
she said, "to go over in class some of the written responses from the day
before." While she did so, she would make verbal comments on our
formulations. At the announcement that what they had written twenty-four hours
previously would become a public matter during the next forty-five minutes, Miss
Rollins’ pupils ceased from restiveness and grew quiet. It was a glorious
California mid-morning outside, with its fierce sun and dry air, and with the
audible invitation of Santa Monica Beach—the combers backing on the sand
sounded to us a melancholy, long, withdrawing roar—a mere but impossible three
blocks away.
Miss Rollins began to read: "Who is this
guy," she quoted aloud from a page, "to instruct us?" She
histrionically underlined the "us". She added matter-of-factly
that he was Burke or Coleridge (memory has made it vague), either of whom in
youth had led a Bohemian life, challenged the institutions, derided the
inherited tradition; both of whom after decades of life and meditation had
altered the original untutored opinion. She suggested that the question, "who
is this guy," represented an unwise rhetorical choice, since it
betrayed an ignorance, on the writer’s part, of whose words he addressed.
"It doesn’t look good," she said; "it opens you up to an
immediate charge of uninformed hot-headedness." One could hardly disagree,
although one bristled at the chastisement. Who was she, three quarters of
the class was rhetorically posing to itself, to criticize us? They
bubbled over with rebuke—they foamed like those pushy combers on the hot sand.
But the rebuke, too, would obviously come under the same objection. Yet another
thing pricked at more than one of the now quiet pupils: Was that my
response that Miss Rollins had just read aloud? Am I under criticism? It
was hard to say, especially after she had read five or six, since they all
resembled one another with remarkable likeness. Then with a certain studied look
of confusion and self-correction showing on her face, Miss Rollins begged a
collective pardon. It seemed she had picked up a sheaf of papers from the
previous semester by mistake. The current class’s responses were in another
drawer of her desk. She retrieved them and began once more to read. "Who is
this guy," she quoted aloud from a page, "to instruct us?"
So much for the difference...
Of course, Miss Rollins had made no mistake at
all. She had finely calculated the performance and had probably been carrying it
off for years. "Writing," she told us a little later, before the
class-period ended, "requires thinking, and thinking requires a conscious
suppression of the ego." In order to become masters of prose over the
course of the semester, aspiring writers would need to do a number of things:
read a good deal more than they had; learn to use reference-sources so as to
know what they were addressing; gain control of their grammar (some of them had
not kept up with their lessons); and above all reign in their egocentric view of
things. A certain type of humility might protect them from making rash
statements and from exposing their own naiveté and lack of knowledge. Naiveté
itself and the lack of knowledge would take some time to cure, as the only cure
for them lay in education, on which we were only just embarked. But when her
students did these things, Miss Rollins promised, their writing would start to
be more individual and identifiable. "Untutored writers always seem
alike," she said; "the truly individual writer is not born, he’s
made—by grammar, vocabulary, and the accumulation of lore." And the point
itself had been made in a fairly incontestable way.
At a talk given in Michigan in the early
1980s, as someone’s colleague once reported, the redoubtable Professor Ong
spoke to the question, posed by a clever interrogator, of how one leaps the
yawning abyss between the mental habits of spoken language and those of literate
language. The questioner thought that he could dissolve differences and confound
him whose argument depended thereon. "It requires a death," Ong said,
and then made a poker face. The questioner, who had put his inquiry from a
motive that now suffered defeat (the desire, precisely, of the Young Turk to
"catch out" the esteemed doctor in some contradiction), arched an
eyebrow in puzzlement and dejection. Ong arched an eyebrow, too; he waited in
silence. (So the colleague described it.) Said hesitantly the examiner,
"Well, uh, what do you mean?" "Have you ever wondered," Ong
replied, "why students cry—why even football players cry—when we
criticize their prose?" "Hmm?" The Turk felt stumped. "But
they do, don’t they?" "Yes." (And it was true—anyone who had
taught English at the secondary or first-year college level could verify it.) A
pause intervened. Ong smiled. The smile told silently: I am grinning because
I know in advance that what I shall presently say will fall on skeptical, even
hostile, ears. No one wants to hear the truths about these things. Then the
good doctor said: "Those are tears of mourning—for the oral person who must
die in order that the literate person might be born. Of course, there’s a
resurrection. The oral person is reborn in a new guise, altered by the onset of
literacy." Ong was a Jesuit, a priest, the savvy among the audience
remembered. He was Walter J. Ong., Jr., S. J.—Society of Jesus. But the same
savvy portion of the audience also quickly saw that they could abstract from the
specific religious implications of the statement. It had objective plausibility.
For indeed, writing entails and generates
intellectual procedures that stand in diametrical opposition to those of people
who only speak their language and who therefore never visualize words as
something exterior to themselves that can be sorted and criticized and then
recast to correspond with greater closeness than before to some element of the
world. Oral people are story-tellers, for figures in action are one of the few
things that they can remember—that and simple formulas preserved among
literate people in the "old sayings" like "a stitch in time saves
nine" or "a penny saved is a penny earned" with their childlike
rhymes and short-term repetitive structures. Ask a first-grader, what did you
learn in school today, and he will not answer, "the states of the
Union" or "words that end in -ing," but, rather, that first
we did this and then we did that and so on. And… and… and… a
story. No piece of the story can be extracted from the narrative as a whole.
Break it into pieces and the pieces vanish from memory. College-level English
teachers constantly write in the margins of student papers the admonition,
"Avoid summary." Don’t retell the story, but analyze
it: show how the parts relate to the whole, which is an infinitely harder thing
to do than telling it over. All summaries of Coleridge’s Rime of the
Ancient Mariner are necessarily alike. Only the deep-diving analyses
differ. The literate person is an individuum in a way that his oral
counterpart never can be because the literate is so thoroughly infused by the
archive of written material. He is a compound of many other people besides
himself. He is, in a real sense, a bit of Plato, a bit of Dante, a bit of
Shakespeare, and a bit of Tolstoy. It was Miss Rollins’ unspoken theory
independent of Ong’s.
The oral person must die so that the
literate person might be born. The oral person senses this and recoils; he
redoubles his resistance. "That witch!" said one of Miss Rollins’
charges to another in the school bus, on Pacific Coast Highway, during the ride
home. "I hate her as much as you do," his interlocutor agreed. In
this, too, as in their identical response to—Burke, was it, or maybe Coleridge?—the
two lads resembled one another, were precisely not individuated or
distinguishable. To hear any judgment that implicated the ego in any way save a
pandering one stimulated both of them to a rage of personality-dissolving
rebuke. A great chasm yawned and from the other side of it a half-apprehended
voice could be heard beckoning: I dare you—I dare you—to leap! And
the two addressees of what they heard as a taunt felt their feet grow cold. To
make that leap required a training that neither could fully imagine even while
they were aware, in a resentful way, of not possessing it. And yet... To
feel one’s kidneys crawl, one’s stomach tighten, one’s ears redden, all
because one had rashly instead of thoughtfully put down the words.… That
itself constituted a chasm that threatened to swallow one into a darkling
unpleasantness—the repellent Tartarus of the mental tyro. Care
to dwell there forever?
One of the features of the old Greek and Roman
writers is their profound serenity. A Plutarch or a Seneca or an Emperor Marcus
might strike a modern reader, especially a non-classicist, as irritatingly
remote, as detached in an uncharitable way from the immediacy of experience.
(But writing does exercise a "distancing" effect, as Ong says, and
does so positively.) Modern writers, the twentieth-century writers most of all,
follow the penchant for primitiveness that began with Montaigne even before
Rousseau; they invoke the "stream of consciousness" and other devices
that imitate, without actually being, the oral person’s blustering negotiation
with the world. The ancients, perhaps because literacy was still new, felt no
desire to "free" themselves from it. Plutarch in his essay On How
to Listen reminds readers that an uncritical youthful pride is the worst
enemy of education; that calm receptivity and openness to correction are
absolutely essential to intellectual (not to mention ethical) improvement. One
should read the poets and philosophers, Plutarch says, and note their lessons
and listen attentively even to the dreariest speaker. Plutarch draws, in all his
essays, on a formidable learning, so that he is able to abstract significant
patterns from a vast range of sources to fashion his arguments and to arrange
evidence for his proofs. The same is true in Seneca and Marcus. The same is true
of Simone Weil, who loved the Greco-Roman writers. In her essay on The Right
Use of School Studies, she argues, as Plutarch does, that learning demands a
suppression of the ego, a submission to external facts and indubitable
logical structures. Such suppression resembles a death. The leap is in the
deliberate suppression.
But when and how does anyone make the decision
that springs loose the leap? To paraphrase Kierkegaard, we likely leap forward
and become aware of it backward, the event adding itself to consciousness only
as a memory, not as a direct apprehension. After a sufficiency of constructive
chastisement, after the right measure of disciplined reading and absorption of
real knowledge, one suddenly finds oneself standing on the other rim of the
frightening chasm, having already vaulted it. Now another weird phenomenon
manifests itself: it is the "resurrection" of which Ong speaks; but it
is also a curious doubling of the personality such as Edgar Allan Poe
writes about in his disturbing Doppelgänger stories. The newly born
literate suddenly perceives just how limited the callow self was in the long
recalcitrant time leading up to the leap. A thing so circumscribed by its own
hypersensitivity, a thing because of its hypersensitivity so shuttered to the
grand and wild world, had to be suppressed, "extinguished" even,
to permit the emergence of something so much happier, so much more robust, so
much sweeter with all the pungent flavors of mind, reality, and experience. Yet
"extinguished" is not quite accurate, for the callow self is still
there, but submerged and under a new control. The exercise of control is indeed
a key element of the new personality. Strangest of all, it now dawns that this
new self was the voice calling to the old self from across the abyss, the one
saying leap! leap!
According to the gazetteers of Santa Monica
High School, Barbara Rollins passed away sometime in the early 1990s after a
long career (more than thirty years—closer to forty) and a few seasonal rounds
of retirement, troubled by illness and loneliness and old age. Toward the end of
her tenure, she had fierce arguments with "reformers" of the
curriculum who wanted, in her judgment, to treat students with kid gloves by
stroking their egos under the imperative of "self esteem". Esteem,
Miss Rollins argued, accrued from accomplishment, accomplishment required
discipline, and discipline demanded careful intellectual correction, beginning
from Day One of a student’s matriculation. The "reformers" heaped
scorn on Miss Rollins’ "traditional" view. ("Tradition"
serves them for a word of reproach.) They prevailed, she retired, and not too
long thereafter she died. For a few scattered individuals, each of them long
since sent forth from his high school alma mater, a voice is still
sounding, mixed with his doubled own, from far away in a remote and daunting but
magically radiant distance across a deep gulf: Leap!
Leap! Leap!
III. Interlude. Unlike
most teachers of college-level composition, I cannot bring myself to separate
reading from writing; I assign a good deal of serious reading in my composition
courses, more than most of my colleagues. My syllabus differs in character from
that of others even when they resemble me in asking their writing students to
engage in considerable reading. The contemporary essays and bits of journalism
that typify the usual made-for-the-classroom anthology strike me as being,
generally speaking, poorly written, ideologically skewed, propagandistic,
tendentious, and, as is often the case, simply trivial. Contemporary effusions
are bad for writing students because they ensconce those students even more
deeply than they already are in the cliché of the present. In the past, when I
let students read contemporary writing or write about contemporary
"issues", the results were always the same: they did no thinking at
all, but fell into the hackneyed ruts of whatever side of the argument they
endorsed a priori. Their papers resembled the stump-speeches of
presidential or congressional candidates, for whom uttering a truly thoughtful
or non-party-platform consideration would send their campaign-managers into wild
fits and probably provoke the talking heads on television to declare that they
had forfeited the election for the sake of a wild remark. For many years, I have
asked students to read two authors of the period of the Roman Empire. Seneca,
who wrote in Latin, served Nero at court and eventually died on Nero’s
command; he was a stoic, but he was also philosophically eclectic, and his prose
has the virtues of the old Republican simplicity. Plutarch, born about the time
that Nero died, in 60 A.D., wrote in Greek, more ornately than Seneca did, and
with a Platonic orientation. Plutarch’s essay On Listening
is, in fact, a punctilious guide for perplexed college freshmen about how to
profit by training the attention. When I ask students to write about Plutarch, I
let them see my essay on Seneca, and vice versa. In the present semester, they
wrote about Plutarch.
College students are supposed to be
"computer savvy". I find, on the contrary, that they know almost
nothing about the word processing programs that come "bundled" with
all the other programs on their laptops and in their towers. One thing that I
wanted to teach them when I presented Liberal Studies to them was,
simply, how to use the footnote-function on the Microsoft Word program.
Thus the footnotes…
IV. Liberal Studies, Vocational Studies, and
Philosophy. Since the Classical Age of the Greeks in
the fifth century BC, two large ideas about education–more particularly about
higher education–have competed with one another. The first of these, and the
one with the greatest immediate appeal, is that higher education should prepare
the person to be effective in some professional way in the world: to be a
physician, a lawyer, an engineer, or whatever the special application might be.
The other idea is that the preparation for such endeavors is, precisely, special
training, and should therefore be distinguished from the truly higher
education without which the physician or lawyer or engineer is merely a
technically proficient dullard. Higher education, in this the true view, seeks
for the aspirant the wisdom and distance that together properly subordinate
proficiency to decency, appetite to taste, and capacity to reason. While true
this doctrine is, it is easy to lose sight of, as societies ancient and modern
have regularly done.
Seneca, an influential Latin writer and
thinker of the first century AD, provides an accessible discussion of the issue
and helps us to see the limits of modern "higher" education in a clear
light. There is some terminological confusion which ought to be sorted out
first. Seneca, in his Moral Letters, uses the term "liberal
studies". He means by it the additional curriculum that is supposed to
round out a person’s technical preparation. The aspiring physician thus
studies medicine, of course, but traditionally he also takes courses in a
smattering of other subjects–geography, literature, and mathematics.
Completing these courses, he presumes himself to be roundly–that is, liberally–educated.
But this, says Seneca, is to confuse a fortuitous collection of facts, gleaned
without a plan, with real knowledge or with wisdom. Facts are necessary for
wisdom, but they are not sufficient for it. What is sufficient for wisdom?
Wisdom, as the ancients saw it, is a
discipline. It concerns character. Wisdom requires the prolonged, serious
contemplation of life, helped out by the close, sustained study of the best of
the poets and philosophers. From these one learns "bravery… loyalty…
self-control" (Letters 157). One learns humanity, which
Seneca defines as "the quality which stops one being arrogant towards one’s
fellows, or being acrimonious" (157). Seneca, a Stoic, read Zeno all his
life, and Plato and Aristotle. He also knew Homer and Virgil. Now the term
"liberal studies" is still in use in contemporary higher education. A
student has his major area of study, but he must also fulfill the so-called
breadth requirements in letters, arts, and sciences. The idea is, as it was in
Seneca’s time, to create a well-rounded person. The scientist should have some
exposure to the liberal arts and the English major should be familiar with the
sciences.
The problem is that contemporary higher
education presents the breadth requirements as just that–a glancing exposure
to something outside the student’s stated interest in the hope of
"widening" his sense of the world. The student usually sees them as a
bother.1 This is because the existing academic culture has, in fact,
lost sight of exactly the argument that Seneca makes in his Moralia: a
miscellany of reputed facts has no meaning at all unless the pieces of it find
unity under a larger view—a philosophical view. The philosophical view,
moreover, is not something that can be picked up casually by a random tour of
this science and that, keeping a souvenir from here and there. Nor is it
something that can be acquired in close proximity to a purely technical training
the goal of which, as the trainee sees it, is to fetch him the largesse of a
salary once he graduates.
Colleges and universities in fact see it in
the same way, as one can tell by the ways in which they advertise themselves.
The brochures always boast about the hiring-rate for graduates. They rarely say
anything about instilling the discipline of lifelong devotion to a distanced
contemplation of life or about inculcating taste or decency. They boast, as does
SUNY Oswego’s website, about "student-centered education."2
Indeed, how many students would be attracted to an institution that promised,
say, that it would teach them, in four years, not to care about the number of
zeros in a salary, but rather to take the maximum of interest in the beauty of
manners and in the value of a cultivated taste in letters and arts? How many
would be attracted by the promise that education would teach them not to be
obsessed with a narrowly defined and selfish self? For that would be to
advertise a curriculum the opposite of "student-centered". Few, one
imagines, would be takers. Yet just these things, Seneca says, constitute
wisdom.
The same problem has another dimension. Even
where the stipulation of the breadth requirements–of the old "liberal
arts" curriculum–still exists, much of it has been deformed by a fervent
politicization. The old goal of the Shakespeare course was to foster in the
student a permanent love of the Bard’s achievement–in the elevated
language, in the psychological and moral insights, and in the tragic wisdom of Hamlet
and Julius Caesar. The new goal of the Shakespeare course all too often
is to convince the student that he is smarter than the Bard, whom he can
identify as a wicked man who held that foreigners and women were inferior to
patriots and to men. The real hero in the new version of the course is not the
artist, but the teacher-critic, who haughtily reveals, not why one ought to
love, but why one ought to despise, artistic achievement; the student, in
imitating the teacher, becomes himself a similar hero. The whole approach
is based on flattering ignorance by convincing it that it is superior to
knowledge. Why then should those exposed to this type of "liberal
studies" take any interest in the literary and philosophic tradition? If
the teacher said that twenty centuries of esthetic and philosophic labor amount
only to misogyny and xenophobia, one could hardly expect the student to pursue
his nascent curiosity, supposing it to exist, in the subject. One would expect
him to focus obsessively only on his "practical" courses. This is what
happens.
It turns out that Seneca’s analysis of
"liberal studies", once one has dealt with the terminological problem,
remains as valid today as it was twenty centuries ago. Society needs
well-trained, technically proficient specialists, to be sure. Society also needs
those specialists to know the essential facts about disciplines outside their
own applied ones. But these things are not, by themselves, enough to constitute
a genuinely educated elite. This is so because the specialist, who is by
definition a member of the elite, might well be uncouth. This in turn is so
because facts have no meaning until an overarching view arranges them into their
pattern.3 In this sense, Seneca rightly distinguishes even
"liberal studies" from philosophy. For Seneca–as it should be
for modern people, too, whether it is or not–philosophy constitutes the
discipline which, once one has laboriously acquired it, puts all the other,
lesser disciplines in their true light. In mentoring people in manners, taste,
and reasoned judgment, philosophy performs the task without which no
civilization can continue. Absent manners, taste, and reasoned judgment, there
is no civilization at all, but merely a rabble of morally coarse and
intellectually unformed experts swayed this way and that by animal appetite–swayed
again by the approbation or disapproval of the crowd. Neither a smattering of
facts nor special practical knowledge can rescue a person from the crowd. Only
philosophy makes a real individual.
Writing to his younger friend Lucilius, a
public official in Pompeii, Seneca says that an untrained hunger for mere facts
violates the higher principle of prudentia. People who see "liberal
studies" in this way, Seneca says—as mere cramming for some hypothetical
exam—would employ them to transform students "into pedantic, irritating,
tactless, self-satisfied bores, not learning what they need simply because they
spend their time learning things they will never need" (159). Everyone has
probably found himself, at least once in his life, frightfully annoyed by
someone crammed full of facts–about baseball statistics or the equivalent. The
"cramming" approach to the liberal arts would reduce essential
knowledge to lists and tables. What students really need, Seneca argues, is the
sagacity to tell, in the first place, what is worth knowing and what not. Such
sagacity is identical with reason, on the one hand, and with character
on the other. The word for it, once again, is philosophy.
V. Interlude. I
like to argue to students that the discipline apposite to making sense, for
example, of an essay by Plutarch or Seneca or to making ethical sense of
subjective recollections is equally apposite to making the case for anything
that a writer would like to recommend to someone else. To illustrate this
argument, I wrote the piece about monster movie, which follows. I wanted as well
to show students how they could use the Internet in their writing. All of the
photo-stills in my essay were downloaded from various websites having to do with
the dinosaur-genre of B-grade films.
VI. On Dinosaur Movies.
Mention dinosaurs together with the cinema and everyone thinks of Steven
Spielberg, whose multi-million dollar forays, beginning with Jurassic Park,
appear to have cornered the market for this particular genre. The success of
Spielberg’s films (however much deserved) has unfortunately obscured the
long-standing tradition of featuring dinosaurs in cinematic fantasies designed
to thrill audiences by the anachronism of placing extinct monstrosities in
modern settings. Beginning with Willis O’Brien’s silent version of Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1925), Brontosauri
and Tyrannosauri Rex have frightened and delighted movie-goers by
charging about on the silver screen and wreaking mayhem in miniature sets of
London, New York, and Tokyo.
Doyle’s scientific romance concerns the
adventures of Professor Challenger and his colleagues on a remote and isolated
plateau deep in the Venezuelan interior. Reports have filtered out of weird
zoology peculiar to the place. On the basis of these, Challenger mounts an
expedition. Once having ascended the plateau, the explorers discover that its
isolation from the rest of the world has removed it from the prevailing trends
of evolution. A sample of Cretaceous species remains preserved there, the
carnivorous varieties of which harass Challenger and his party until, after
suitable tension, they make their escape through a system of caves. It happens
just in time, since a volcanic eruption destroys the mountain. O’Brien saw the
possibilities in Doyle’s story, but added an element that never occurred to
Doyle and that "made" the film as far as audiences were concerned. O’Brien
has Challenger rescue a Brontosaurus egg and return it to London as proof
positive of his discoveries. The egg hatches; the creature grows. In the
epilogue, a few years later, it has waxed into a full-sized thunder lizard,
whereupon it slips confinement in the London Zoo and blunders its way both past
and through the main architectural adornments of the city. It enters the
Thames and is last seen swimming out to sea, its destination unknown. O’Brien
later included a prolonged dinosaur sequence, with a wide variety of species, in
his sound-film of King Kong (1933).
After World War Two, the notion of the dinosaurus
redivivus–smashing against the works of man–entered into combination
with the pervasive fear of atomic warfare and of the effects of lingering
radiation. A young former assistant to O’Brien, Ray Harryhausen, teamed up
with director Eugene Lourie to make the best dinosaur movie ever—The Beast
from 20,000 Fathoms (1952). Scientists explode a plutonium bomb inside the
Arctic Circle. Radiologist Tom Nesbitt, played by Paul Christian, goes into the
blast area with his assistant to monitor the results. Unknown to them, the
heat-flash has thawed a Rhedosaurus—frozen in suspended animation for
many millions of years—from the ice. The monster’s throes cause an avalanche
that kills Nesbitt’s partner and leaves Nesbitt himself semi-conscious in the
cold. After a transition, the radiologist finds himself in a hospital bed in New
York City, recuperating from his injuries. No one believes his story, of course;
on the contrary, his supervising physician suspects him of delusions. When
Nesbitt begins to be aware of news stories about "sea serpents" off
the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland, he insists even more vehemently on the
reality of what he has seen. By persistent effort he persuades an elderly
paleontologist (character actor Cecil Kellaway, in one of his last film
appearances) that there might be something in his tale. Meanwhile, odd
occurrences happen along a line stretching from the test-site down the Atlantic
coast toward New York; they have been the sources of the journal items that
convince Nesbitt of the empirical status of his own memory. In one of the truly
uncanny sequences in cinema, the Beast emerges from the sea to attack a lonely
lighthouse in Nova Scotia. The action takes place in silhouette and at night.
Thurgood Ellson, the paleontologist, now
persuades the Navy to let him use a diving bell to search for the creature,
which he believes he can find in a submarine canyon off Long Island. The film
uses a good deal of stock-footage at this point, of sea-going salvage-vessels,
deck-activity, the hoisting aloft of the mechanism, and so forth. As the bell
descends, Ellson makes his reports. He speaks calmly about the discomfort of
close quarters inside the bell and comments on the sights visible deep under
water. Suddenly, the Beast hauls into view. "There’s no doubt about
it," Ellson excitedly says; "it’s a genuine prehistoric
survival." Aboard ship, Nesbitt and Ellson’s female assistant Miss Hunter
(Paula Raymond) share the doctor’s excitement. "The dorsal ridge is
singular, not double, as we suspected," Thurgood notes; "and the
clavicle suspension appears to be cantilevric! But the most amazing thing
about it is—." Suddenly, as the maw of the Beast yawns (we see it from
Ellson’s viewpoint through the port of the diving bell), Lourie cuts to
shipboard. The line goes dead. The sailors try to draw up the bell, but all they
get is free cable. The Beast has claimed another victim, whose death has the
consequence of heightening the budding emotional tie between Nesbitt and Hunter.
The gentle Professor Ellson, having gone to meet his maker, now becomes the main
attraction. Lourie gives us scenes of an ordinary workday on the Gotham docks. I
can say that when the Beast emerges, it is near Henry Street, in Brooklyn,
because when I showed the still image to my Brooklyn friend Steve Kogan, he
recognized it as down the street from where he lived for forty years.
A saurian head now lifts out of the water
(with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background) and the Rhedosaurus lurches
ashore. For the next twenty minutes the evolutionary anomaly terrorizes
"The Big Apple" until cornered inside the roller coaster at Coney
Island and dispatched (by Lee van Cleef, no less) with a bazooka shell
containing radioactive salts. The conflagration inside the amusement park is
another brilliant touch. The creature’s death throes provoke real sympathy
from most onlookers. Brought to life by atomic energy, the creature also dies by
it. The message is clear: in nuclear weaponry humanity has unleashed a new kind
of beast and has become its own predator. As Jeff Rovin writes in A Pictorial
History of Science Fiction Films (1975), "The film moves quickly, and
the fact that there is a monster loose in New York is taken very
matter-of-factly by all" (62). This straight-faced approach serves the film
well.
After The Beast had made its success, a
Japanese director, Inoshiro Hondo, saw the potential for a good imitation. The
Japanese had made a number of military special effects films, for propaganda
purposes, during World War Two; they became particularly adept at miniatures.
The post-war release called I Bombed Pearl Harbor (1952) gives a sense of
their accomplishments. At Toho Studios in 1954, Hondo, drawing on his expertise
in miniature sets and their destruction, produced Godzilla, whose
four-hundred-foot tall fire-breathing lizard, like Lourie and Harryhausen’s Rhedosaurus,
owes its life to atomic testing. The film’s American release that same year
splices scenes with actor Raymond Burr as reporter "Steve Martin", who
provides a Yankee point-of-view character to make the story appeal to the export
audience. In Godzilla, the allegory is cruder, but also more powerful,
than in The Beast. Rather than employ Harryhausen’s stop-motion
animation with models, Hondo put an actor in a rubber suit, which is,
nevertheless, effective. The black-and-white photography, with the
monster-sequences taking place at night, gives the film a quasi-documentary
feeling. The monster rises out of Tokyo Bay, in nocturnal black-and-white, and
he systematically destroys the metropolis.
All of the landmarks must have been instantly
identifiable to a Japanese audience, and the annihilation of them is meticulous.
Hondo also stages horrific scenes of panicked crowds being incinerated by the
dragon’s fiery breath. In one, a mother clutches her infant before
disappearing in the hellish vapor. Doctor Serizawa uses his "oxygen
destroyer" to kill Godzilla while the creature sleeps in Tokyo Bay. Akira
Takarada, who starred in the movie, explained in an interview with Stewart
Galbraith how he "shed tears" at the Tokyo premiere:
Godzilla himself wasn’t evil and he didn’t
have to be destroyed. Why did they have to punish Godzilla? Why? He was a
warning to mankind. I was mad at mankind and felt sympathy for Godzilla, even
if he did destroy Tokyo. (Monsters are Attacking Tokyo 50)
Godzilla’s death did not prevent a host of
sequels, none of which has ever matched the documentary-like starkness of the
original.
The 1950s saw many minor dinosaur movies:
Lourie’s The Giant Behemoth (1955) and his Gorgo (1957),
both of which stage their destruction in London. There were productions from
American International such as The Land Unknown (1956), set in a
mysterious tropical valley at the South Pole, and King Dinosaur (1955),
set on an unknown planet to which an expedition from earth travels. Of these, The
Giant Behemoth is probably the best. It attempts, with qualified results, to
be a sequel to The Beast. The setting is London, where the monster does
to the Thames docks and Trafalgar Square what the Beast does to the Brooklyn
waterfront and Wall Street in the earlier film.
The genre died out in the 1960s, but enjoyed a
semi-revival with the advent of videotape. (No doubt the currency of The
Beast and Godzilla in the VHS format suggested to Spielberg that the
Cretaceous Era was still exploitable.) The giant-insect movies are an offshoot
of the dinosaur films. The Deadly Mantis (1957) stars The Beast’s
supporting lead, Kenneth Tobey, and runs with the same plot. The giant bug,
thawed out of the polar ice by atomic testing, heads south to feed on tiny,
scrambling people. The authorities trap it in the Holland Tunnel and gas it with
cyanide. Them! (1954), with James Arness and James Whitmore, features
oversized, aggressive, mutated ants from the New Mexico desert—near the
original nuclear testing grounds.
In Them! another British character
actor, Edmund Gwenn, plays the entomologist-counterpart of Kellaway’s
paleontologist. Like Kellaway, Gwenn was a veteran screen presence working at
the end of a long career. In the obligatory professorial lecture scene, Gwen
explains that these mutated ants pose an evolutionary threat to human dominance
of the planet and that the creatures must be exterminated before they can
spread. He delivers this speech with the utmost apocalyptic certitude. There is
much discussion of keeping things secret so as not to create a panic.
Authorities destroy the original New Mexico nest, again with cyanide: the
sequence where Arness, Whitmore, and Weldon enter the labyrinth in protective,
gas-proof suits is one of the eeriest in the film. They have done a thorough
job, but even so an escaping queen establishes a new brood in the storm drains
of Los Angeles. Arness and Whitmore lead troops into the underground maze and
dispatch the ants with flamethrowers. Gordon Douglas directs with careful
development, accelerated pacing, and claustrophobic aplomb (Whitmore to Arness:
"I get a strong brood smell") in the concluding storm drain
sequence.
As in The Beast, the characters treat
the situation matter-of-factly. The ants are large—about six feet long—but
not so large as to appear implausible. Nor are they immune to ordinary weaponry,
as bullets and grenades will kill them, even though napalm does a better job.
All of this contributes to the verisimilitude of the cinematic narrative.
Dinosaurs have exercised fascination on the
public since their discovery in the 1850s. Reptilian life strikes people as
primitive, implacable, and frightening. An alligator or komodo is a lurking,
pitiless jaw-cum-gullet. Nightmarishly big reptiles naturally generate a
double dose of fright. As Takarada told Galbraith apropos of Godzilla,
"ordinary audiences… wanted to see the film to be scared" (50). Yet
in all three Lourie films—The Beast, The Giant Behemoth, and Gorgo—the
director endows the creature with noble and sympathetic qualities. The Rhedosaurus
is a lonely male, the last of its species, looking for a mate; his death
inside the burning ruins of the roller coaster is full of pathos. The Behemoth
is dying from the very radiation that has reanimated him. Exhibitors capture the
baby Gorgo and keep him in London as a circus attraction until his mother, four
times his size, comes to rescue him. Even in Godzilla, the afflicted
survivors of Tokyo give evidence of sympathy for the creature, and wonder if it
could not be preserved "for study" rather than killed. Sentiment does
not prevail.
By comparison, Spielberg’s efforts seem
slick. Tedious subplots involving the romance between paleontologists (one of
them, a willowy blond, played by Laura Dern) weigh them heavily down. They tend
to give disproportionate screen time to the adventures of children. Preachy
lessons on ecology burden all three. Long live the Beast! Its clavicle
suspension appears to be cantilevric!
Works Cited
Liberal Studies, Vocational Studies, and Philosophy
Seneca (Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger).
Translated by R. Campbell. Letters from a Stoic. New York: Penguin, 1969.
On Dinosaur Movies
Stewart Galbraith IV. Monsters are
Attacking Tokyo: The Incredible World of Japanese Fantasy Films. Feral
House: Venice, California, 1998.
Jeff Rovin. A Pictorial History of Science
Fiction Films. Citadel press: Secaucus, NJ, 1975.
The lines from The Beast from Twenty
Thousand Fathoms are quo ted
(with care) from the DVD version of the film.
back to Contents
***********************************
by
The recently released “extended unrated director’s cut” DVD of the
film King Arthur has been touted by
the filmmakers as presenting an “authentic historical” look at the life and
exploits of the legendary King of the Britons.
When the powers that be in Hollywood take on the Canon of Western Culture
and Civilization in the name of “authenticity”, their product should be
taken with the proverbial “grain of salt”.
In bringing their “authentic” King Arthur to the screen, Producer
Jerry Bruckheimer, Director Antoine Fuqua, and writer David Franzoni may appear,
to skeptical eyes, like tricksters relying upon their audience’s ignorance of,
indifference to, or antipathy toward Western culture in order to successfully
pull off their postmodern legerdemain. Skepticism
is warranted, because the film plays fast and loose with the history of the
period, relevant theology, and a wealth of Arthurian literature to give us a
Pelagian Roman-Briton Arthur, Sarmatian Knights of the Round Table, and
Merlin’s marginalized “Woads”.1
The filmmakers also provide us with a Grrl Power Guinevere who can hack,
slash, and hurl spears and caustic epithets with the most bellicose of
barbarians. She is introduced as one who has been severely
“victimized”—i.e. imprisoned and tortured—by evil, sadistic, murderous
mad monks, which gives one a hint of what the filmmakers think of traditional
Christianity, not to mention the treatment of Guinevere in Arthurian legend.
This Hollywood mish-mash deconstruction of history and legend ought to
raise some questions, not to mention eyebrows or even hackles, among thoughtful
viewers. “Why is the only ‘good
Christian’ in the film a follower of Pelagius?” one might well ask, and,
“Who were the Sarmatians, and is Lancelot a Sarmatian name”?
The fact that Arthur, the only “good Christian” in the film, is
identified with an ancient heresy speaks volumes about the filmmakers’ agenda.
As for the Sarmatian knights, “authentic historical” Sarmatians came
from the Black Sea region of southwest Russia and had names like Farzoy and
Ininthimens, but the makers of this “authentic historical” film had no
problem calling them Lancelot and Gawain.
The following is one viewer’s response to a cinematic King Arthur that is a farrago of falsification and politically
correct postmodernism.
Arthur
in history: There is very little contemporary scholarly consensus about the
“real” King Arthur except that he was probably
a Roman-Briton who may have led a
British army against the Saxons at the Battle of Mount Badon.
The filmmakers take the first of many great liberties by placing their
story in the period 450-465; according to most historians, the Battle of Mount
Badon was fought ca. 500-520, and the location was probably in the vicinity of
Bath in Southwest England; therefore ending the film with a battle in 465 at
Hadrian’s Wall near the Scottish border is problematic.
Further, the film conflates the Arthur of history and legend with two
historical figures, Lucius Artorius Castus and Ambrosius Aurelianus, who were
separated in time by more than two centuries.
The latter of the above-mentioned commanders, the Roman-Briton Ambrosius
Aurelianus, might make sense as the “Arthur” of the film if the battle at
the end of the movie were not Mount Badon, but an earlier battle with the
Germanic tribes led by the Jute Hengist. The
movie, however, doesn’t mention Ambrosius’s 465 overthrow of his predecessor
Vortigern, also known as the “Proud Tyrant”, and doesn’t acknowledge that
it was Vortigern, rather than Ambrosius, who was probably a Pelagian.
Further, those associated with the film actually claim to have based
their character on Lucius Artorius Castus, though why they place Artorius at the
time of Ambrosius is puzzling, to say the least.
Lucius Artorius Castus was a Roman commander of Sarmatian auxiliary
cavalry. Sarmatian cavalry served
with the Roman Legions in ancient Britain, and there were Sarmatians who
remained in Britain after the Legions pulled out (ca. 410); but how one
conflates Slavic Sarmatians with Gallic Knights of the Round Table is another
postmodern Hollywood mystery that “passeth all understanding”.
Historians, supported by epigraphic evidence, date Artorius to ca. 200,
which is about 300 years prior to the Battle of Mount Badon, approximately 265
years before the suppression of the German alliance led by Hengist, over 200
years prior to the final withdrawal of the Roman Legions from Britain, and about
150 years before the birth of Pelagius, all of which precludes this Artorius
from having been the Pelagian King Arthur of the film.
Ambrosius Aurelianus was at least active at the time in which the film is
set, the mid-fifth century. Some
scholars, based on the earliest chronicle, the sixth-century monk Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniae, think that it may have been Ambrosius who
defeated the Saxons at Mount Badon. However,
if that were the case, Ambrosius would have been at least 70 years old at the
time of battle, which is well above the average life expectancy in sub-Roman
Britain. In addition, someone aged
70 or more is very old to have led an army in a Dark Ages battle: the King
Arthur of the film appears to be about 30 and in his prime.
The fact that many historians believe Ambrosius was too old to have led
the Britons at the Battle of Mount Badon has led them to posit that “King
Arthur” was actually a warlord or general in the service of Ambrosius and may
have ruled a territory as under-King; this is largely based on the
eighth-century Welsh historian Nennius’s reference to Arthur as the leader
during the battle (dux bellorum).
Other historians believe there were two Kings, Ambrosius the elder and
Ambrosius the younger, and that it was the second Ambrosius who overthrew
Vortigern and ultimately defeated the Saxons at Mount Badon.
However, many sources identify Uther, Arthur’s father, as Ambrosius’s
brother and it is consistent with Merlin’s prophecy that Arthur would succeed
his uncle and father and lead the Britons to victory over the Saxons.3
Considering the best literary, epigraphic, and archeological evidence, it
appears that among the candidates for the “authentic historical” Arthur, the
filmmakers’ Lucius Artorius Castus should be ruled out completely, having
lived at least two centuries too early to be the Arthur of history or the film,
and that Ambrosius, elder or younger, remains at best a dubious Arthur.
If there was an “authentic historical” Arthur, Ambrosius’s nephew
and Nennius’s dux bellorum “Arturus”,
who defeated the Saxons at the Battle of Mount Badon, seems a far better choice.
The film’s reference to Arthur as a “Pelagian” runs up against more
“inconvenient facts”. Pelagius
died in Palestine ca. 420, yet in the film in 465 he has only recently died,
having gone to Rome to argue for his doctrine.
In fact, Pelagius left Rome after it was sacked in 410.
At the instance of St. Augustine the doctrines of Pelagius were condemned
as heresy by the Council of Carthage in 416, and Pelagianism was banned by
Imperial edict in 418.
There are yet more relevant historical facts concerning Pelagianism in
Britain that the film conveniently chooses to ignore.
In the year 429 the French Bishop of Auxerre, Germanus, or St. Germain,
was sent to Britain by the Pope, at the request of the British bishops, to
combat the Pelagian heresy. A
famous disputation between Germanus and the Pelagians is said to have taken
place at St. Albans. After Germanus
won the debate, the Britons called upon him to lead them in battle against the
Saxons and the Picts. The Britons,
led by Bishop Germanus, won a great victory, and it is possible that Germanus
was chosen to lead the Britons in battle because their Overlord Vortigern was a
Pelagian, and therefore a heretic not suitable to lead a Christian army fighting
the pagan barbarians. Be that as it
may, it is virtually certain that after Germanus’s suppression of the British
Pelagians, and Ambrosius’s subsequent overthrow of the Pelagian Vortigern, a
Pelagian would not have led the Britons in battle at Mount Badon.4
As for the dispute between Bishop Germanus and the Pelagians, there is
plenty of reference in the movie to “freedom” and “free will” as
“Pelagian” teaching, but nothing about the opposing traditional Augustinian
teaching concerning original sin and prevenient grace.
In fact, the film has little or nothing to say about Pelagian teaching or
theological disputes, but rather argues for some postmodern political concept of
“freedom” as a “natural right” to fight for one’s victimized identity
group, or for an alliance of victimized identity groups, by any and all means
necessary. The alleged
“victimizers” may be Roman, Saxon, Jute, Christian, male, or any other
“power group” that can be demonized as the source of one’s socio-economic
and/or sexual oppression. This is a
doctrine more associated with new-left politics than with Pelagius.
Arthur
in legend: King Arthur is said to have held court at Caerleon on the Usk with his
Queen Guinevere, formed the Knights of the Round Table, and been mortally
wounded at the battle of Camlan ca. 537, after which he was transported to the
mythical island of Avalon to heal his wounds.
From here he was some day to return to rule in a golden age.5
This brings us to the Arthur of legend which the film so infelicitously,
if not brutally, deconstructs.
Most of our knowledge of Arthurian legend comes from Sir Thomas
Malory’s fifteenth-century compilation,
Le Morte D’Arthur, Tennyson’s Idylls
of a King, Mark Twain’s mildly
subversive A Connecticut Yankee at King
Arthur’s Court, and T.H. White’s The
Once and Future King, which were the sources of earlier Hollywood films such
as Knights of the Round Table, Excalibur,
the musical Camelot, the animated
feature The Sword in the Stone, Indiana
Jones and the Last Crusade, and even the wildly subversive spoof Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
All the above referenced books and movies have in turn relied on earlier
sources, most notably the works of the twelfth-century French trouvere
Chrétien de Troyes. Other
significant twelfth-century sources are the Norman poet Wace, who is generally
credited with the introduction of the Round Table, and the Welsh scholar Walter
Map, who linked the Arthur legend proper to the cycle of the Holy Grail, itself
derived from Chrétien de Troyes’ Percival
le Gallois.
The movie’s postmodern war of “liberation” against economic and
class oppression, racism, sexism, and “imperialist aggression” is
diametrically opposed to the fundamentally Christian message of the Arthurian
Romances. The filmmakers have done
something truly insidious: they falsify the substance of the religious debate
between the Church and the Pelagians, which does a disservice to both the
traditional and the Pelagian point of view.
They also twist history and legend like a corkscrew to come up with a
completely ahistorical, un-legendary Arthur whom they disingenuously tout—to a
largely unknowing, and perhaps uninterested audience—as being “historically
authentic”.
The Arthur of the film is a postmodern fabrication, resembling neither an
historical nor a legendary character. The
postmodern King Arthur has grunting,
grunge, gore, and Grrl Power, but lacks an awareness of sin, repentance,
forgiveness, and redemption. The
film sets up an ahistorical conflict between its alliance of comic book
“heroes” as “victims”. A
“King Arthur” who is a Christian heretic, a Grrl Power Guinevere, Knights of
the Round Table who are Sarmatian pagans, and Merlin and his “oppressed Woads”
oppose “victimizer” villains: a venal Church in league with a corrupt Roman
Empire, rapacious Roman nobles, and a menacing horde of comic book proto-Nazi
“Saxons”. The filmmakers do this
because it is easy and convenient for them to fabricate straw men and then knock
them down for their audience’s amusement.
They also apparently dislike the Western culture and civilization that
produced the Arthurian tales; and they use deconstruction as a means of
attacking the very traditional Christian—and thus “politically
incorrect”—theme that underlies all the Arthurian legends.
The theme is this: that human weakness and fallibility forever preclude
the world’s “perfection” by human effort alone, and that an instinctive
human need for redemption, represented by the search for the Grail, comes as a
gift from a loving God.
Is there anything to recommend in this film?
There is a fairly good battle on the ice, reminiscent (some would say
overly derivative) of Sergei Eisenstein’s film classic Alexander Nevsky, although the battle plan of “Arthur”, his
Sarmatian Knights of the Round Table, and “Wonder Woman” Guinevere relies
less upon tactical brilliance and individual prowess than upon the comic-book
stupidity of the “Saxon” foe. One’s
money would be better spent on renting Excalibur
and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,
which are far more entertaining, appeal to a wider contemporary audience, and
remain true to the meaning and spirit of Arthurian legend and the culture which
gave us the tales of Arthur, Merlin, Camelot, the Knights of the Round Table,
and the quest for the Holy Grail.
NOTES
1
Picts are referred to as “Woads”
in this film, presumably because they painted themselves blue with a dye made
from Woad. The early chronicles
and legends refer to Merlin as Welsh, and of noble birth; in other legends
he’s identified with a figure in Celtic mythology.
A discussion of the etymology of the name and changes in character is
beyond the scope of this article; however the film’s portrayal of him as the
leader of the Picts/Woads seems novel and bizarre.
According to the early chronicles the Picts were Arthur’s enemies.
Merlin first appears in early chronicles as the Welsh Emrys or the
latinized Ambrosius. Suffice it to say that calling the leader of the Picts/“Woads”
“Merlin” is like calling a Sarmatian knight “Lancelot”.
2
Artorius is a Roman family name, meaning “plowman”; Castus means
“chaste” or “virtuous”. Some
believe that the exploits of a second-century leader of Sarmatian cavalry are
a source of Arthurian legends. However,
the leader of the Britons at the Battle of Mount Badon (ca. 500-520) may have
been “Arturus”, as the 8th century chronicles of Nennius
indicate. The etymology of the
name is complex, involving Latin, Celtic, and Welsh morphology. If the
filmmakers wanted to claim the second-century Artorius as their “King
Arthur”, why did they set the film in the mid-fifth century—and why did
they make him a Pelagian; and why did they give his Sarmatian “knights”
the names of medieval Gallic Romance? Some modern writers believe this
Artorius to have been the source of some of the Arthur legends.
This may be a reasonable position to take, so long as you place him in
the second century where he belongs, don’t make him a Pelagian, and don’t
call your Sarmatians Lancelot.
3
In some legends Merlin (also known as Emrys and Ambrosius) prophesies that
Vortigern will be overthrown by Ambrosius Aurelianus, who would be succeeded
by Uther Pendragon, who would in turn be succeeded by a greater leader,
Uther’s son Arthur. It is Arthur who would unite the Britons and defeat the
Saxons. The fact that Merlin is
also sometimes referred to in early chronicles as Ambrosius (the latinization
of his Welsh name, Emrys) has caused some to confuse him with Ambrosius
Aurelianus. The primary sources (
sixth to twelfth
century) for histories of this
period are Gildas, De Excidio Britanniae,
Nennius, Historia Britonum,
Bede, Historia Ecclesistica Gentis
Anglorum, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia
Britoniorum.
4
The primary sources (contemporaneous 5th century) are Prosper of
Aquitaine, Epitoma Chronicon, and
Constantius of Lyon, de Vita Germani. Constantius
writes of a later visit by Germanus, ca. 447, in which he again won a
disputation with the Pelagians. Thus,
with the fall of Vortigern ca. 465 the Pelagians were suppressed in
Britain
, and the victor against the Saxons
at
Mount
Badon
ca. 500-520, whoever he was, was
almost certainly not a Pelagian.
5
Sir Thomas Malory’s Carlion, in
Wales
, and duty station of
Rome
’s Second Legion Augusta in earlier
times. Malory identified
Winchester
as the site of Camelot, and others
have referenced Camelford in
Cornwall
and
Cadbury
Castle
in
Somerset.
back to Contents
***********************************
Two
Brief Essays on Politics, the Economy, and Western Culture
by
Mark
Wegierski
Mark Wegierski is a Canadian journalist
based in Toronto who frequently contributes to Praesidium.
Unless otherwise indicated, the cost of the books he reviews following
these short essays is in Canadian dollars.
Some
Notes on East Asian Cosmology, Society, and Economy
One of the most interesting aspects of the history and philosophy of
science and technology is the study of the interrelationships between cosmology,
society, and economy. The idea of
looking at the links between Eastern religion, quantum theory, and the success
of Far Eastern economies is certainly a provocative one.
The beginning point for the serious study of the history and philosophy
of science today is probably Thomas Kuhn’s well-known work on the evolution of
knowledge paradigms, The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions. Thomas
Cleary’s book, The Japanese Art of War:
Understanding the Culture of Strategy (published by Shambhala), is a book
which could be recommended for those looking at the interrelationships between
East Asian cosmology, society, and economy.
There is also George Gilder’s Microcosm,
which takes a stab at interpreting the social and political effects of the
microelectronics revolution (relating it to the emergence of quantum theory).
The basic argument proposes the obsolescence of the state and of the
command-economy while exalting of the smallest possible units in the global
economic system: i.e., individual entrepreneurs.
(A good example of Gilder’s arguments is when he points out the way in
which microelectronics—as in the once-proposed SDI system—negated the
advantage of a technological “brontosaurus” like the Soviet SS-20 missile.)
Another of Gilder’s books on a similar theme is entitled Life
After Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life,
where he unpersuasively argues that the current media monopoly will be
undermined by the further advance of communications and computer technologies.
How much has truly changed at this historical juncture, notwithstanding
the Internet’s conquests?
One of Gilder’s other books is the ominous-sounding Telecosm.
This volume, like most of Gilder’s output, is a frank celebration of
technology and the entrepreneur, Gilder
being what is in many ways
an incredibly facile techno-optimist. (A
different side of Gilder, however, is seen in his socially conservative book on Men
and Marriage, an expanded edition of Sexual
Suicide.) There is in our time
an unbelievable intensity of global economic competition, in the context of
which unequivocally progressive trends are hard to find.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, America—in spite of Gilder’s
optimism—appeared to be falling behind.
Another book from this period was Lester Thurow’s Head
to Head: The Coming Economic Battle Among Japan, Europe, and America.
On what appeared in the 1980s and early 1990s to be the Japanese success
story, there was published, among many books on this topic, a work edited by
Steve Barnett, The Nissan Report: An
Inside Look at How a World-Class Japanese Company Makes Products That Make a
Difference. Shintaro
Ishihara’s famous statement, A Japan That Can Say No: Why Japan Will Be First Among Equals,
appeared in English translation. For
a very hostile analysis of Japan, one could consult the geostrategist Karl
Wolferen’s work, The Enigma of Japanese
Power. On the Far East in general, there was the Winter 1992 (1991-92)
edition of New Perspectives Quarterly,
put out by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, on the theme,
“Looking East: The Confucian Challenge to Western Liberalism”. However,
there occurred in the mid to late 1990s an economic collapse in Asia, especially
in Japan. This has to a certain
extent confounded those who were looking to the East as an alternative
power-center to America. It seems
that America, with its “rap, crack, and Big Mac”, its vulgar pop-culture and
moral decay, has after all triumphed economically.
Another interesting work, Bryan Appleyard’s Understanding
the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man, is a “humanistic”
critique of “the scientific enterprise”.
It points to the emergence of “chaos theory” and “indeterminacy”
as a kind of “crisis” of modern science.
Two other books in a related vein are John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, and
Neil Postman’s Technopoly: The Surrender
of Culture to Technology. A new,
popular work in “chaos theory” itself, is M. Mitchell Waldrop’s Complexity:
The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos.
John L. Casti’s Searching for
Certainty: What Scientists Can Know About the Future deals with similar
scientific issues.
It is fairly clear a link between a given society’s cosmology and its
social norms indeed exists—a relationship which, although fundamental, is
rarely given the attention it deserves. One
can, for example, establish a pretty clear correlation between the emergence of
the post-Copernican mechanistic and Newtonian view of the universe and the
subsequent rise of various types of capitalism and liberalism.
The modern notion of “the observer affecting the event” and related
concepts, of course, have applications far beyond physics—as for example, in
an epistemological theory which explicitly embraces the Heideggerian
“virtuous”—not “vicious”—cycle.
(To wit, the more we know about something, the more interested we become
in it; and the more interested we become in it, the more we know about it.
The “knower” and “the thing known” cannot
be strictly distinguished.)
In social terms, the adoption of this outlook could possibly lead to
assigning increased value to the pre-rational and predetermined aspects of our
identity, such as our familial and gender roles, as well as our place in local,
regional, ethnic, and national communities.
In more narrowly political terms, it could signify putting a greater
importance on voluntarism (the will) and its exercise in the political
arena—as opposed to ostensibly rational debate—and on affective,
as opposed to concrete, purely physical results.
For example, if we feel that we are part of a great historic collectivity
which makes our individual sacrifices meaningful to us, we can endure far more
economic and other hardship than if we conceive of ourselves as individuals
looking out only for ourselves. The
justification for marrying and raising a family is typically, for most people,
an affective and non-rational imperative. In
fact, it would be difficult for a person concerned only with him- or herself to
make any rational argument for the family from that perspective.
It might be argued further that the triumph of “chaos theory” and
indeterminacy would presumably lead to greater caution in our constant, ongoing
manipulation of the physical and social environments, since we simply cannot
truly know or calculate the impact of our various transgressions against Nature.
That the earlier economic success of the Far East may be derived from the
familial and social discipline of Far Eastern cultures is quite plausible.
(Such discipline generally originates in Confucianism—or in some
elements of Shinto in Japan). The
importance of social factors in the
Far Eastern economic miracle cannot be underestimated.
With the sense of belonging to a cohesive, homogenous civilization, and
with the willingness to make enormous sacrifices for the extended family group,
Far Eastern peoples have been able to work extremely hard for what are
relatively far smaller pecuniary rewards than American workers receive.
It should be also be noted that in South Korea and Japan, the great
corporations have themselves reinforced the sense of community by extending a
paternalistic care over their employees. In
mainland China, as well as in overseas Chinese communities, the small
independent enterprise is often coterminous with an extended family group.
Because of this solid base of social conservatism, it could be argued
that the downturn in Japan and much of Asia will only prove temporary.
At some point, all those economies will come roaring back.
It should also be noted that virtually at the height of the crisis,
Japanese unemployment was no more than 4%, whereas the equivalent rate in the
U.S. was seen as coterminous with a massive boom.
Everyone in Japan appears to be willing to make sacrifices to keep the
unemployment rate comparatively low.
As Samuel P. Huntington had argued in his famous article (“The Clash of
Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs
[Summer 1993]) and book (The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order [Simon & Schuster, 1996]),
the divergences in the world of the future are likely to be along cultural and
civilizational lines. East Asia
might well constitute a global focus of cohesion and social conservatism in
distinct contrast to disintegrative North American individualism and liberalism.
This excessive individualism and liberalism will almost certainly
negatively effect the North American economy at some point.
In this context, a case could be made that too much fervor and arrogance
are evident in the efforts of the
United States to push its rights-dogmatism onto East Asian countries where such
liberalism is clearly an alien cultural tradition, often seen by Asians as
simply “crazy”. Because of the “absolutism” of the U.S. stance on
rights, it becomes more difficult to properly distinguish between the real
cruelties of China, such as its treatment of Tibet and religious minorities, and
some trivial issues like the caning of a young U.S. vandal in Singapore.
Incredible though it may seem, the government of the United States under
Clinton, according to some economists’ estimates, actually controlled a
greater proportion of the domestic economy than is controlled in China under the
present regime. One suspects that
some of the biggest critics of China today were some of its biggest fans during
the truly bloody Mao period, when tens of millions of people were actually
slaughtered. These persons typically
hate contemporary, authoritarian China precisely because
it has abandoned the grand totalitarian, utopian dream of Mao.
The East Asians themselves often interpret the current American “human
rights” emphasis as nothing more than an attempt to weaken the self-discipline
and competitiveness of their societies, vis-à-vis America.
One might, if inclined to speculate on things Eastern, point out the
possibility of a rather more distant future, where the peoples of Europe and
heartland America could possibly be given some role to play in a socially and
technologically stable, unified, worldwide Oriental empire.
It is perhaps only in this way that a massive, enervating Western
decadence and decay can be overcome and transcended.
One is given a possible picture of such a world in David Wingrove’s
bestselling—though somewhat inept, internally inconsistent, and dystopic—popular
science-fiction series (which now numbers eight thick volumes)—Chung-kuo.
We are certainly living in interesting times—the form of bad luck
wished upon an enemy in an ancient Chinese curse.
Down
with the Therapeutic Left and the Managerial Right
The Next City was from the
middle to late-1990s a prominent Toronto-based Canadian magazine which is now no
longer published, although the website (nextcity.com) is still extant.
In his editorial commentary in the Spring 1997 issue, “Down with Left
and Right”, Lawrence (Larry) Solomon, the editor-in-chief of the magazine,
suggested that his title’s terms had definitively outworn their usefulness.
Among the responses published in The
Next City (Fall 1997), Michael Taube, then publisher of a small conservative
zine From The Right (which in the end
lasted only three issues) had argued that those terms continued to mean
something significant. Nick Ternette,
editor of The Left Fax (another small
zine), had claimed that “the left as defined by socialists, Marxists, and
greens does not believe in more government intervention, but less—it believes
as some of the new right does that people should do things for themselves
instead of relying on government, and it sees an alternative to free markets...
and... government interventionism, namely communalization.”
Mr. Solomon’s response (Fall 1997) can be summarized as a reiteration
of the call made in the initial piece for paying less attention to outward
ideology. The implicit hope
expressed was that there would
be more of the practical working-out of difficult modern-day problems and
dilemmas by persons of good will regardless of ideology.
Although this is certainly a fine sentiment, one finds that in practice
there will often be some kind of partisanship.
Nick Ternette’s statement is curious in that it can be read in a very
traditionalist way. Does he really
mean by it that the managerial-therapeutic welfare-state should be abolished,
and that persons should depend on their own resources (or those of their
immediate locality)? Does he really
advocate a devolution of power to smaller municipalities and rural areas, as
against the big cities? Does he
really believe that neither provinces nor the federal government in Canada
should set any general standards for health, education, welfare, human rights
laws, etc.; that only local taxes should be collected; that any resources
collected should stay within the locality; and that one should only be bound by
the rules, laws, and customs of one's locality?
If Mr. Turnette thinks his position has been massively misrepresented
above, he should have been more careful in his rhetoric.
One suspects he probably missed the point that most of the communities of
the country are NOT the various components of the urban-based “rainbow
coalition” continually trumpeted in the media, but rather smaller
municipalities and rural areas typically despised and marginalized by
Left-liberalism today.
A traditionalist take on Mr. Ternette’s writing may strongly suggest
the obsolescence of the Left-Right dichotomy.
According to many theorists, the prevalent current-day political reality
is the “managerial-therapeutic regime”.
That term is carefully chosen, for one could argue that there is a
“managerial Right” and a “therapeutic Left” which, although in apparent
conflict, in fact represent little more than a debate between “hard” and
“soft” managerial styles. The
“managerial Right” represents the consumerist, business, economic side of
the system, whereas the “therapeutic Left” represents redistribution of
resources along politically correct lines and ongoing “sensitization” for
recalcitrants.
The Left is also identified today with the pop-culture, which, in a
somewhat different way from the therapeutic, seeks to reduce to non-existence
all traditional social norms. While
ferociously struggling for its vision of social justice and equality, much of
the Left before the 1960s felt that many such norms were simply a natural,
pre-political part of social existence which it had no desire to abolish.
The profit motive of the corporations, and the rebelliousness of the
cultural Left and of late modern culture in general, feed off of each other, as
Daniel Bell has argued in The Cultural
Contradictions of Capitalism. North
American pop-culture (which most definitely includes very reckless and
irresponsible academic and art trends) and the consumer-culture, are tightly
intertwined. What is fundamentally
missing is the sense of an integrated self and society, where a more meaningful
kind of identity can be held by persons, and in which real public and political
discourse can take place.
It could be argued that the real division of late modernity is between
supporters and critics of the managerial-therapeutic regime.
The latter include genuine traditionalists, as well as various eclectic
Center and Left persons. It may be
noted, for example, that Christopher Lasch, one of the most profound critics of
late modernity, continued to identify himself as a social democrat.
This kind of coalition is prefigured in the words of John Ruskin, who, in
an age of a pre-totalitarian and pre-politically-correct Left, could say with
vigor, “I am a Tory of the sternest sort, a socialist, a communist.”
One of Canada’s leading social democratic thinkers, Gad Horowitz, in
his earlier years was a close friend of George Parkin Grant, Canada’s leading
traditionalist thinker, and there was some suggestion of a coalition of the
traditionalist remnants of Canada with social democrats and socialists against
“the American technological empire”. From
those early years, one can find enthusiastic declarations by Gad Horowitz in
defence of Canada’s British institutions and identity, based on the premise
that only if Canada remained British-oriented would there be any hope for
genuine social democracy’s continuing to exist in the country.
In his scholarly yet sharp-edged book, Beyond
the New Right (1993), Oxford professor John Gray sketched out “an agenda
for Green conservatism”. He was
not the first to notice that true ecology and true conservatism share many
things (as is already prefigured in language in the term “conservation”).
That
which many reflective persons object to is the subsuming of all political
realities in the “capitalism vs. socialism” (said to be equivalent to
“right vs. left”) debate. As far
as social conservatives are concerned, they only need to reach to The
Communist Manifesto for their understanding of capitalism:
The bourgeoisie
historically has played a most revolutionary part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to
all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.
It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to
his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man
and man than naked self-interest—than callous “cash-payment”.
It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of
chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of
egotistical calculation. It has
resolved personal worth into exchange value...
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto
honoured and looked up to with reverent awe...
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and
has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation...
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the
instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with
them the whole relations of society... All
fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of venerable prejudices and
opinions, are swept away... All that
is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.…
So
much for the idea that capitalism and conservatism are coterminous, or that
capitalism- and consumerism-boosting economic or fiscal issues must take
precedence over social issues in conservative thinking!
In conclusion, it may be stated that the tempering of the excesses of
late modernity by certain traditionalist and local aspects would be highly
salutary. Indeed, it might be the
only thing that would keep society from descending into various forms of
dystopia. Many reflective persons
are opposed to what George Grant (following Jacques Ellul) called “the
universal, homogenous world-state”. The
managerial-therapeutic regime has its own versions of Left and Right (generally
speaking, Left-liberals and neo-conservatives).
Serious social critics are eclectic in their own placement on the
spectrum. The debate between the
“official” Left and Right often has little meaning.
Honest, reflective critics of “the system” or “the regime” should
not flinch from each other because of too-quick preconceptions about what a
given political outlook represents.
back to Contents
***********************************
Reviews
of Recent Books Which Strive to Define Contemporary Culture
by
Mark
Wegierski
The
Financial Century: From Turmoils to Triumphs.
By Reuven Brenner. Toronto:
Stoddart, 2001. ISBN 0-7737-3281-0.
Pp. 214. $32.95.
Reuven Brenner is a distinguished professor of business and economics who
teaches at McGill University in Montreal. This
book, which sensibly rejects a socialist-style command-economy, also
simultaneously embraces wide-open immigration, and (what the reviewer has
called) hyper-capitalism. The
book’s outlook is economically conservative or neo-conservative, lacking many
social and cultural nuances.
In the Introduction, Brenner identifies his work as one of the type which
examines “why and how nations prosper or fall behind”—listing Adam
Smith’s Wealth of Nations as the
first. The influence of Adam Smith
is clear throughout Brenner’s book.
In Chapter 1, Brenner lays forth his main ideas, predicting “Another
American Century”. His book is
extremely Americano-centric, seeing America as closest to the free-market ideal
that all of the rest of humanity should try to approximate.
Brenner states: “Prosperity is the result of matching brains with
capital and holding both sides accountable.
In every society, there are only five sources of capital... inheritance,
savings... access to financial markets... government and crime” (p. 9).
Brenner’s outlook is that the success of society should be measured by
the
extent
to which it allows for widespread prosperity, which is said to flow mostly from
unimpeded access to financial markets. For
Brenner, anything associated with government is pejoritized: “Government is a
monopolistic financial intermediary that makes decisions about taxation,
borrowing, spending, ownership of resources, and granting monopolies.
Instead of financiers, politicians and bureaucrats decide how to match
money and people” (194).
In Chapter 2, “Capital Markets and Democracy”, Brenner argues that it
is the openness of capital markets, rather than the possession of the formal
trappings of democracy such as elections and “paper constitutions”, that
determines the true extent of freedom in most societies.
In Chapter 3, Brenner wholeheartedly embraces “Globalization”.
He calls this “The Long Road from Immobility to Mobility”.
He argues that one of the most important factors contributing to economic
prosperity is a country’s open-border immigration policies.
Although this is currently a fairly common opinion, it can certainly be
questioned. Some would argue that,
given the current-day welfare state, mass immigration mostly enhances the big
government agenda. It continually
increases the number of voters and clients for big government and its attendant
projects of redistribution.
In Chapter 4, “Direct Democracy and Financial Markets: What Do They
Have in Common?” Brenner suggests citizens’ initiatives and referenda as
among the best instruments for holding governments to account.
How would he react to citizens’ initiatives and referenda that aimed at
restricting immigration?
In Chapter 5, “Monetary Standards and the International Financial
System”, Brenner quixotically calls for a return to the gold standard.
Chapter 6 examines nationalism—which Brenner finds “absurd”.
While it may be admitted that nationalism has its negative side,
nationalism can also be a focus for the most exalted senses of human purpose and
meaning. Nationalism cannot be written off—in a fashion curiously reminiscent
of Marx—as merely a tool for government and closed elites to maintain their
power.
In Chapter 7, “Extracting Sunbeams Out of Cucumbers”, Brenner
criticizes imponderable academic and bureacratic jargon.
In Chapter 8, “The Future of Higher Education”, he attacks the overly
jargon-ridden, bureaucratized and government-funded universities.
But is having most education run by private business truly the panacea
for the crisis in education?
Chapter 9, “A Financial Twenty-first Century”, expresses the hope
that “investor capitalism” will finally mean the end of big government.
It could be argued that Brenner’s views are centered on a highly
reductive view of human nature and the purposes of human existence, making
widespread economic prosperity virtually the only worthy human aspiration.
He writes, “When capital markets are closed, people turn real issues
into moral and ideological ones.” Are
not moral and ideological matters often the central issues of human existence?
How can they not be considered “real”?
Many persons might also ask whether the freewheeling capitalism espoused
by Brenner is indeed the best vehicle for achieving widespread economic
prosperity, or if it would in fact encourage very steep
inequalities
in society. Brenner would probably
argue that the flourishing of plutocrats goes hand-in-hand with the achievement
of widespread economic prosperity.
Brenner’s common sense is his through-going rejection of the
socialist-style command-economy. However,
he goes to another extreme, hyper-capitalism.
Brenner would argue that the arrangements he advocates are better at
creating widespread economic prosperity, and perhaps even true equality, than is
the mixed economy which has been accepted today as a workable compromise in most
Western societies. Because of his
overly economic focus, Brenner misses, downplays, or mis-describes many of the
social, cultural, spiritual, religious, moral, aesthetic, and psychological
dimensions of the crisis of current-day society.
The
Politics of Ethics: Methods for Acting, Learning, and Sometimes Fighting with
Others in Addressing Ethics Problems in Organizational Life.
Richard P. Nielsen.
The Ruffin Series in Business Ethics. R. Edward Freeman, Editor. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996. ISBN
0-1950-9666-5. Pp. xiii + 255.
$45.00 (cloth), $29.95 (paper).
This work is said to be “opening up a dialogue between business
thinkers, literary figures and corporate managers trying to act ethically” (p.
ix). Richard P. Nielsen is one of
the leading scholars in the business ethics field. The
work includes References (pp. 235-251) and a short Index (pp. 253-255).
After the brief, clear Introduction (pp. 3-9), Chapter 2 looks at
“Obstacles to Ethical Organizational Behaviour” in terms of several mostly
negative
“archetypes” of conduct drawn from history or literature (Eichmann,
Richard III, Socrates’ Jailer, Phaedo, Faust, Dr. Suguro [the Japanese doctor
convicted of criminal experiments on American P.O.W.s during World War II]), as
well as in terms of negative environments or negative aspects of organizational
traditions.
Chapter 3 lays out the framework for the rest of the book, as to the
overcoming of these obstacles, in terms of “single-loop”, “double-loop”,
and “triple-loop” politics. These
may be summarized as methods in which (1) only the immediate problem is raised,
and only an immediate solution is achieved; (2) some dialogue and change of mind
occurs with the persons involved; and (3) the shared organizational tradition or
environment may actually be referred to and possibly changed, or the shared
organizational tradition or environment may counteracts individual negativity.
Chapter 4 examines “Single-Loop, Win-Lose Forcing Methods”, typically
carried out by “Top-Down Ethics Generals”, or “Bottom-Up Ethics
Guerillas”. Chapter 5 looks at
“Single-Loop Win-Win Methods”—typically the mutually advantageous
“deal”. Chapter 6 examines
“Double-Loop Dialog Methods”, identifying three types—iterative (or
Socratic), action-science, and action-inquiry. Chapters
7-9 look at three types of Triple-Loop Dialog: “Friendly Disentangling”,
“Friendly Upbuilding”; and “Varieties of Postmodernism”. The
third type of triple-loop dialog is likely to occur where there are a variety of
cultures present in the organizational set-up, especially as found in the
situation of Western companies operating in the Third World. Chapter
10 looks at “Internal Due-Process Systems” as “Ethics Processing
Machines”. Chapter 11 seeks to
summarize how the various loop methods can be used to break down the problems
associated with the negative “archetypes” presented in Chapter 2.
The Conclusion reached is the not-too-startling one that today’s
leading paradigm should be “Proteus as Organization Citizen”. An
Appendix (pp. 219-234), explores “Varieties of Dialectic Change Processes”.
Though many of the observations arrived at in the book would appear to be
little more than common sense, the main emphasis attempts to assert left-liberal
value content in the pursuit of “good management”. At
no point are the possible enterprise and workplace problems and frictions
caused, for example, by U.S. big-government regulation in general, and
affirmative-action policies and overextended definitions of sexual harassment in
particular, seriously discussed. (The possible drawbacks of these policies
should at least be raised for the sake of establishing popular consent for them
through public discussion.) As the
presumptive audience of the book appears to be left-liberals of the
“politically correct” type who consider ethical behavior as being
unquestionably coterminous with the exercise of their own worldview throughout
society, the book is of more limited use in addressing those managers and other
persons who have differing interpretations of the lifeworld.
The
Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass.
Myron Magnet. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1993. ISBN
0-6881-1951-4. Pp. 256. US$12
(paper).
Myron Magnet’s book consists of an introduction and eleven chapters
with pithy titles, and includes notes (229-242) and an index (243-256). The
notes are not numbered in the text, but rather identified in the notes section
by page number together with a two or three-word snippet from the quotation. This
convention, combined with a relatively large and quite pleasing typeface for the
main text, increases the physical ease of reading the book.
The Introduction, “What’s Gone Wrong?” provides a snappy précis of the work. It
begins by discussing the enormous and incongruous contrasts of American wealth
and poverty, which foreshadows the imagery of a disassociated society invoked
later. The introduction is
forthright in claiming that the Sixties constituted a successful
cultural revolution which fundamentally transformed American society:
...
The cultural revolution was made by an elite of opinion makers, policymakers,
and mythmakers—lawyers, judges, professors, political staffers, journalists,
writers, TV and movie honchos, clergymen—and it was overwhelmingly a liberal,
left-of-center elite. Thus for the
last thirty years, the dominant American culture has been liberal culture;
notwithstanding Republican presidents in the White House, the ideas and values
that have come to Americans from their newspapers and network news programs,
their university (and increasingly their grammar and high school) classrooms,
their pulpits, their novels and movies and television sitcoms, their magazines
and advertisements and popular music, their courtrooms and their Congress, have
added up to a liberal, left-of-center worldview.
(22)
One’s
reaction to this initial statement will probably indicate what one thinks of the
remainder of the book.
In Chapter One, “The Power of Culture”, Magnet criticizes the
position of economic determinism (whose origins he traces to orthodox Marxism)
and argues for the supremacy of culture in determining human behaviour and
relations. He is probably not aware
of the partial similarity of his argument to Antonio Gramsci’s inversion of
the orthodox Marxist view of the ideological superstructure and the economic
base. Magnet argues that the
negative cultural ideas contained in the Sixties revolution wreaked havoc when
they were diffused from the “Haves” to the “Have-Nots” of American
society.
In Chapter Two, “The Underclass”, Magnet stresses how prone to
difficulties many of these persons actually are, as part of his continuing
effort in the book to demythologize the mystique of the helpless, innocent poor.
He also points out how well
immigrants to America with intact cultural values have done, even though they
often begin by working at jobs which “the Haves” harmfully denigrate as
“chump-change”.
Chapter Three, “The Hole in the Theory”, refers to explanations of
these phenomena based solely on economics. The
missing element, according to Magnet, is culture,
and an awareness of the evil propensities of human nature.
Chapter Four, “The Homeless”, describes examples of the sometimes
ugly behaviour of some of these people, and, after condemning the criminal
sub-element within the homeless, goes on to indict the curious Far Left
psychiatric theories that led to the release of hundreds of thousands of
psychiatric patients from state mental hospitals—who today constitute the
single largest category of homeless.
In Chapter Five, “Homelessness and Liberty”, Magnet further examines
what he sees as the ostensibly well-intentioned but ultimately harmful approach
of psychiatric de-institutionalization. Far
from helping psychiatric patients requiring long-term care, this approach has
caused them to fall prey to the most utterly degraded kinds of life.
Chapter Six, “Victimizing the Poor”, refers to the process by which
“the Haves” invariably tend to portray the poor as “victims of society”,
thus, according to Magnet, effectively denying that these persons can in any way
improve themselves through their own individual effort and moral fortitude.
According to Magnet, John Rawl’s popularily-acclaimed and immensely
influential work, A Theory of Justice,
played its part in justifying the virtual idolization of an undifferentiated
mass of “poor”:
To
Rawls, as in the moral imagination of the culture as a whole, the poor had moved
in from the fringes and become central. They
had become a measure of value, a point of reference, against which social
policies and arrangements were to be scrutinized. This
was an extraordinary development, making the condition of the poor, rather than
the overall national wealth or freedom or virtue or artistic achievement or true
democracy, the justification of the whole society. Thereafter
the Have-Nots... came to stand as a mute, unanswerable judgment upon the Haves
and the social system they uphold. (130)
Chapter Seven, “Race and Reparations”, concerns the difficult issue
of the racial composition of the underclass. Maintaining
a tone of civility throughout, Magnet argues that Sixties’ liberationism, with
its exaltation of an “antisocial” way of life which it saw as coterminous
with the ghetto hustler’s lifestyle, undermined the black family and
work-ethic, and with it black chances for advancement.
Chapter Eight, “Rebels with a Cause”, includes a coruscating attack
on the now-common view of the criminal as victim, entitled to special rights and
protections. Norman Mailer’s still
controversial-sounding essay, “The White Negro”, is cited as an illustration
of this glorification of the hoodlum. Magnet
is attempting here to trace the literary and intellectual roots of the present crisis of lawlessness. Magnet
argues that the punishment of crime is the cardinal function of the state. Its
apparent unwillingness to do so today is probably the gravest consequence of the
Sixties cultural revolution—and has the worst effects on decent blacks.
In Chapter Nine, "The Living Constitution", Magnet criticizes
judicial activism as a substitute for democratic decision-making. According
to him, this has been one of the main characteristics of America since Brown v.
Board of Education. Although he
supports the Justices’ decision, Magnet criticizes its having introduced a
legal pretext for subsequent wholesale judicial intervention. He
also argues that the noble ideal of a “color-blind” society envisioned in
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has in fact been overturned in favour of coercive
integration, “reverse-discrimination” and affirmative-action, which the
Supreme Court has unaccountably accepted as constitutional. The
idea of the so-called “living constitution” means that the Supreme Court
Justices can interpret the law in virtually any way they choose.
Chapter Ten, “Trashing the Culture”, is in some ways the most
alarming chapter in the book, as it gives many examples of the penetration of
the American academy by forces hostile to civilized discourse. Various
leading professors are describing the Bible and long-valued literary classics as
merely props for racism and sexism, and they will not tolerate anyone who speaks
favourably of these works. In a
philosophically chilling though instructive passage, Magnet cites one of the
leading deconstructionists:
Boasting
of his movement’s subversive intent, English professor J. Hillis Miller
defines a deconstructionist as “a parricide. He
is a bad son demolishing beyond hope of repair the machine of Western
metaphysics. (210)
Finally,
Magnet goes on to attack “Afrocentrism” (citing Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in
support) which, with its questionable notions of a black Ancient Egypt and a
teaching curriculum stressing “the emotional, intuitive, nonrational”,
further handicaps blacks in an increasingly technological society.
Chapter Eleven, “The Poverty of Spirit”, concludes the book on a
surprisingly optimistic note.
Magnet’s book is an exhilarating read; it is sharp in criticism while
maintaining the civil proprieties of discourse. In
that sense it probably represents the best of the Western civilization which it
stands to defend. Some might argue
that a massive ideational wave has been carrying the planet in more or less the
same direction (despite occasional lapses and detours) for hundreds of years. Now
that we have come to know what living in late modernity actually entails, it may
be time for the great counter-critique, for another cultural revolution.
Magnet’s trenchant book can certainly be seen as a signpost along the
way.
back to Contents
***********************************
Poetry Corner:
Three Poems
David
Adams is an attorney based in Houston who writes poetry frequently for the sheer
pleasure he takes in it--as do all of us, surely, who persist in the endeavor
during these very pragmatic times. John Harris is the President of The
Center for Literate Values.
The
Lost Karankawa
Vaguely
like peppermint, with stripes of gloss
In Gold and Evergreen; a Spanish Moss,
For Mistletoe, hangs from the rough oak beam,
With just as rugged on the wall, a Cross.
Within the stable stands the plowing team
Of oxen, chewing cud and blowing steam
A little; Elsie, who's the milching cow
Provides the nogging revelers the cream.
It was a goodly year in what is now
Called Needville: seven piglets from the sow,
A colt as fine as you could ever ask,
And pairs of heifer-calves from every cow.
The
crops were good that year, and every task
The settler set his hand paid off in cask
And peck and bushel-basket, boll and ear:
Increase, beyond what he could think or ask.
And
too, the wilderness that blessed year
Had given of her plenty: red pecans
Were more than squirrels to eat them; standing near
The Brazos bottom, oaks hid white-tailed deer.
Hundreds of deer! In stands of hard pecans
And harder oaks,the lumber for his plans
To barnbuild, and black willows, for a switch
To tan hides, cottonwoods for creekbed spans,
And upland, cedar scrub for fence, and rich
Grass prairie, good for hay; and nettled ditch
And slough filled every household milking-pan
With ripe dewberries, just as black as pitch.
David Adams
A
Catalogue of Slips
I sing the mighty arms that wielded flame
Upon a time, then lost the deadly skill,
As Samson, Sax, or Sasser, or Ankiel.
Or as Steve Blass, who, fresh from triumphing
In hated
Baltimore
, his lethal sling
Departed, sought from
Delphi
's oracle
A diagnosis, as he also sought
A physic from Hippocrates, and from
Clemente Cannon-Arm a sage advice
He sought; and too, the mighty Stargell asked,
Him wielder of the Ashen Club in all
The sieges in the grassy field of Forbes:
“So Willie,” Blass discoursed, “These errant
orbs
Go wild! I am undone! Can
glory then
Return, or can I Golden Trophy win,
My aimless arm now useless in the fray?
It is as though a stalking curse from one
Offended of the dozen deities
Had caught me from behind!” “Remember, Steve,
What Satchell Sage recorded in his Lore:
“Don’t never look behind you, something might
Be gaining on you,” Stargell thus rejoined.
David
Adams
Lost
Indictment
I
play a game before dawn—
An
insomniac’s game—
“If
I were dying,
What
would I say?”
A
fan revolves through the night—
A
propeller’s blades:
Its
drone kneads traffic
Into
hoarse dreams.
But
now immune to soft blur—
An
insomniac’s trance—
“If
I were flying,
Where
would I gaze?”
The
years, the hills, flatten out—
A
Siberian plain.
The
ones who killed me
Over
those years
(“Denounce
those crimes in detail
before
Justice’s Chair!”)…
I
lose their faces
In
the blonde steppe;
The
names they carved on my soul—
The
indictment’s précis…
Unlettered
grassland,
Engine’s
round snore.
Mock-pardon
murders again—
Uncondemning
the foul:
Those
wanton killers
Of
the child I was
Enjoy
no grandiose pass—
No
theatrical wave:
But
I am aging.
I’ve
lost their names.
No
field of innocents slaughtered—
Crematorium's
plume—
Pricks
my iced window
Seven
miles high.
No
witness sworn on a grave—
No
ensanguined resolve—
Can
rhyme the murmur
Turning
the blades.
I
age in games before dawn—
An
amnesiac’s games—
“That
voice of living,
Whose
face is it?”
I
spy a game with my son—
A
recuperant’s game—
Old
man in mourning
Called
by a child.
This
laughter nullifies fouls—
Unremembered,
unknown—
A
child’s eyes banish
Hell
to a dream.
John
R. Harris
back to Contents
***********************************
Dry Thaw
by
J.S. Moseby
Today the neighborhood looked late twentieth-century,
or even not so late. Lupino could faintly remember, as a boy, having to
open front doors with manually inserted and turned keys. Not only were the
iris-reading lasers of the BeyePass scarcely thought of: typical portals
of admittance were not even fitted with PressPads responding to
fingerprints. This particular door might have had either security feature
at one time (though almost certainly the BeyePass: these broad, low
rooflines suggested a state-of-the art residential area before the Freeze—they
were the very kind that kept caving in now under the weight of
long-compacted snow). Vandals had neatly prized the box from its
shoulder-level housing, here as on so many other front stoups. Whether or
not the thieves intended to rifle the premises for food or clothing or
weapons, they always made sure to come away with the security boxes, which
had infinite uses (when broken apart and reassembled) in stealing
identities, setting off explosives, screening entry to hideaways, and
other favorite criminal activities. Nobody had thought when all the
gadgetry was created that it would one day fuel a boom in grand larceny
and deadly assault. Who could ever have thought—who but a lunatic—that
the world would be reduced to its present state? All the same, the things
were like so many damn bullets sitting around in wait for an old-fashioned
revolver.
"Central," murmured Lupino into his Ambi,
"I’m at the extreme southern end of Elysian Fields. No scan on this
residence—another ten-eighty. Do you have any data on the caissons
installed along this block?" Something hissed and rasped in his ear.
The cold was getting at his fugging responder now, just as it had knocked
out the PanelPal in his squad car last month (and his had been almost the
last in the squad to go).
"Repeat? I can’t hear you. No, I don’t have
any fugging PanelPal—why do you think I’m talking to you? Never mind,
never mind. You guys…" and he discreetly switched the whole rig
off, which had a nasty habit of suddenly working just when you didn’t
need to be eavesdropped on, "not worth… the juice it takes to thaw
out your butts."
So Lupino fidgeted with an old screwdriver he now
carried about for just such contingencies, almost as if he were unlocking
the door instead of coaxing it from its icy frame; and when the panel
finally gave with a crisp crack, he drew his nineteen-fiftyish revolver
filled with those bullets which had recently served his thoughts in
metaphor. The StunDowners didn’t work, either—or not reliably enough
in these sub-zero conditions—but the old piece, he had found, would fire
true for six squeezes. Very twentieth-century, this new life. More so
every day.
Of course, he didn’t really give a damn about the
ten-eighty and its possible attendant crimes. If the place hadn’t
already been broken into, he probably would have jacked it himself. It was
almost midday, and he was even hungrier than usual. Elysian Fields, he
knew, had been inhabited as of about six months ago. Some of the houses
just across the bridge had betrayed trails of wood smoke through makeshift
vents in their roofs, and he could smell the acrid odor of charred logs
even now. There might be some food left in a few of these residences still—reports
of Vandals had been rare over here. But they would be. Who would
file a report, and how would he file it with virtually all of the vital
systems down?
The house possessed that pretentious, now fatally
ridiculous sprawl typical of about ten years ago, before the Freeze had
really set in down here and while power was still up and running. There
was barely enough light filtering through the shuttered windows to
illuminate his way. (A shutter had probably blown off, in fact, to produce
that milky band of haze: jury-rigged from plywood or even old cardboard
boxes, shutters were usually a desperate afterthought.) Nevertheless,
Lupino could almost have traversed this floor plan in complete darkness.
The ample foyer which eventually knelt down a step into a yet more ample
atrium, a formal dining area splaying off to one side and a theater or
studio off to the other… he didn’t like to use his Flare, just in case
a Vandal really were lurking in the shadows. Sleeping it off in some
closet, perhaps. If looters had made any entry into the place at all, they
would have hit the wet bar for sure. Sometimes there was even glass all
over the atrium floor. He had heard crunching under his thick soles since
his first step inside, but it sounded more like the frost on his boots
against the hardwood than like glass fragments.
As his eyes became adjusted to the penumbra, Lupino
began to move more quickly. Now, where was the damn kitchen? That was the
one room you could never be sure of finding in the same place—which made
food-hunting an even higher risk than it needed to be.
The bar, at least, had not been raided: that was a good
sign. A bottle of sherry left out on the counter appeared to have frozen
like a brick—but it was almost empty, anyway. Some whiskey under the
counter, better insulated and not as depleted, was still liquid. Lupino
took a sip, and winced delightedly. Amazing, that something which hit you
so cold could instantly turn to fire. Working laboriously through his
thick gloves, he managed to slip the bottle safely into his jacket. Now,
if only there happened to be some olives….
He noticed, as he leaned to reach the bar’s far end
(where a jar of olives graciously awaited him), that a caisson was in some
kind of alcove just off the atrium. What a weird place to put it! Must
have been where the hot-water heater was before—sometimes they did that,
the ones who had run out of money and just had to be preserved for
posterity. The shift apparently cut a few corners, though he didn’t know
the fine points of how the things were installed. He had never been very
curious. The very idea! Crats, who in hell would want to keep his body on
ice for a few hundred years, only to be brought back into this life of…
of trying to stay alive. But maybe that was the point. Maybe, for some
reason, they figured that a millennium down the road, things would
suddenly, miraculously be worth living for. People had to believe in
something, or… or they couldn’t keep living. But then, they hadn’t
kept living. That was the whole point. They had to believe in something so
they could die—they had to believe they weren’t dying so they could
die! What sense did that make?
Lupino gave one short laugh out loud (and was sorry he
had done so: he felt his lips crack painfully). In an almost unconscious
movement, he shattered the olive jar on the counter, since trying to
remove the lid would only have strained his wrist while producing the same
fragments in the end. He scarcely even bothered to step back—the
near-instinctive avoidance of the vinegary soup was all but effaced.
Instead, he immediately, expertly began picking the icy crust and glass
shards from the green nuggets. After a little sucking, they were edible,
even tasty.
He felt oddly festive. Something to eat, and a bit of a
show. A floor show—the prospect of that stupid caisson looming in the
far corner, flat on the floor! He had cut his patrolman’s eye-teeth
chasing Vandals (though, back then, they were mostly just adolescent
pranksters) out of empty or sparsely occupied houses, where they loved
nothing more than to pull the plug on any poor skag who had bequeathed
himself to the next eon. It was still rather warm then; sometimes, it was
downright hot. He could remember going about in shirtsleeves, back then.
The bodies would be ruined almost instantly, so there wasn’t really much
point in chasing the punks after they had played their joke. But he had
chased his share, full of a sense of duty, scarcely older than the
squealing perpetrators, convinced that the rule of law was the antidote to
that slow rot eating away at all of them—that shadow of impending doom
which, back then, had nothing much to do with temperature.
The funny thing (and Lupino almost smiled again: he
caught himself just in time) was that, if a body were to freeze in bed
today, it would probably be preserved at least as well for the future, and
at no extra charge. He didn’t know if a body so frozen, and otherwise
clean of natural ailments, could simply revive and open its eyes should
the weather ever let up miraculously, hatching a full day of sun. He didn’t
suppose it worked that way—he didn’t really see how it could
(frostbite, and all that). But it was certainly worth the risk of a laugh
to think of the stiff in that caisson in the corner. The electricity
needed to keep him safely iced had long since vanished out here—but he
might possibly never have thawed if the shut-down occurred after the
Freeze. No, no… that didn’t make sense, either. Why would you go to
the trouble of putting yourself in one of those things after you already
knew that you were going to freeze, anyway? All the people who had
"bagged" themselves had done so back in his cub days, as far as
he knew. But no, some of these things weren’t that old. Damn, his
fugging memory was even freezing up on him!
Lupino’s fingers lifted the revolver’s muzzle
reflexively (the deadly antiquity had never parted from his hand: he had
been picking out olives with his left). Yet almost as reflexively, he knew
that there was no real danger. The front door had squawked at the same
time as a new band of light flitted across the atrium. No Vandal would
have entered a house so carelessly—not even his own. (Lupino had a keen
sense for how Vandals lived, because he lived practically the same way: he
would slide silently through the doorway of his own apartment every
evening.) The pistol’s hammer never so much as came to cock. He just
waited, munching and watching the foyer.
"Hello?" questioned a voice finally—an
innocuous voice, husky but frail.
Still he waited. He swallowed the present olive’s
remnants without reaching for another.
"Hello? Is anybody here? Is there… I need an
officer. Please, I need help."
And still he waited. Footsteps were drawing nearer.
Everything told him that there was no danger—but you always waited for
everything plus one, as Sergeant Turk used to say.
A lean figure with bowed shoulders shuffled out of the
foyer and to the atrium’s edge.
"Watch the step," croaked Lupino.
The figure turned slightly without any hint of a start.
In the dim light, Lupino could discern a long beard laced with gray, and
also a couple of dark holes where the eye sockets bored. (He didn’t like
long beards himself: they got in the way of snaps and zippers. He
scissored his own back to a warm stubble once a week.)
"Are you…"
"I’m a cop. What d’you need?"
"It’s my daughter. She’s dying. Not enough
food… and I can’t keep her warm. We burned the last chair yesterday. I
can’t even thaw water. She hardly opened her eyes this morning. I’ve
got to get her…"
"The aid station. Yeah. You should have gone down
sooner."
"We couldn’t. There was no way to go. Yours is
the first squad car to pass this way in a month. I tried to flag down the
last one. I think he saw me, but…"
"Yeah." A patrol car was supposed to cruise
this sector daily, but Lupino well knew that most of his buddies found a
warm place to lie low, siphoned off their fuel to sell on the black
market, and came dragging in at their shift’s end. Sometimes he even
sold part of his haul to them—at no discount on the smuggler’s going
rate, since he couldn’t suppress his contempt for how they wore the
uniform.
Neither of them had moved an unnecessary muscle since
the exchange began. "Want an olive?" Lupino offered.
The old man, pausing only momentarily, took the step
down as if fearing a catastrophic fall and then shuffled across the
hardwood to the bar.
"Let ’em sit in your mouth for a minute."
And after studying how the old man attempted to grind several green
nuggets at once, despite the warning, he heaved a deep sigh which helped
his jacket to open a small gap, and fished out the bottle.
"Here."
The dark round eyes beneath the beetling brows flashed
for the first time, almost timorously, and the bearded jaw stopped
chewing.
"Go ahead."
From within the layers of clothing that could not
disguise a gaunt inner frame, the draught’s lightning bolt inspired a
visible shiver.
"Can I… she… this would really do her
good."
"Yeah. Well here, I’ll hold onto it for her. We’ll
get to her in a minute. Got to check this place out for food first. Did
you know… these people?"
"No. Just to wave at. Different circles. They were
up and coming. We were retired. Retire in luxury—that was our dream. Our
daughter was much younger than our son. She lived with us, until… and
then, pretty soon, it was just she and I. She’s a beautiful girl,
mister. I was thinking… if you seemed the right sort, I was going to
offer her to you. You… you’re a good fellow. She won’t have much of
a chance as things are going, even if we get her to…"
"Yeah." Lupino frowned painfully over his
shoulder—the other shoulder, on the side away from the caisson.
"The kitchen’s probably through there."
"You… you want me to check while you stand
guard?"
"No. The place is empty. You didn’t see anyone
outside, did you?"
"No. No one."
"I had to shoot a Vandal yesterday… or the day
before. They know they can’t break into the squad car. But the stupid
idiot thought he could lay for me on the passenger side. I keep my mirrors
turned so I won’t be blindsided when I walk up, and I noticed right off
that they were turned back up. Idiot. He thought I wouldn’t see that. I
nailed him with one shot."
"I noticed your Smith and Wesson."
"You know guns?"
"Uh-huh. Sort of. I did research for Dillinger and
Schultz. I went back and looked at old weapons, to get ideas. Sometimes
great ideas get discarded in the rush to be different. There was a stunner
we designed once, for use in power outages… I actually got the idea for
the essential feature from a crossbow."
Whatever that was. Lupino shook his head ever so
slightly. "Speaking of ideas… I’ve been having this idea lately.
It’s that we’re going back. In time. This gun, almost a century old.
But it doesn’t jam. Sure, they devise new things down in Base. But the
things we working stiffs actually use… we’re going backward. We’ll
be like cavemen soon. Maybe there’ll be… you know, those big
elephants."
"Mammoths."
"Yeah. At least we’d have something to eat! You
smart guys, why didn’t you pack us something to eat, if you saw all this
coming?"
"We didn’t. Nobody did. It was supposed to be
unbearably hot, don’t you remember? The Greenhouse Effect. Come now, you’re
not all that young, are you?"
Lupino, with an effort, remembered the phrase,
Greenhouse Effect. "Yeah. And that’s why… all those fugging
caissons…"
"People started preserving their bodies to avoid
the disaster. The very rich, at first. And then… and then the real
disaster occurred."
"Yeah, yeah. The Freeze. Didn’t they put
something in the air—you know, the atmosphere—to allow more heat to
escape?"
"That’s mostly legend. At the time, it was
political smear. Then it became legend. No. No, the big disaster, the real
disaster… it wasn’t the Freeze at all. It was a kind of insanity. The
craze to preserve one’s body for a better time. Even after the Freeze
started. Even when it should have been obvious to anyone that we wouldn’t
have steady electricity. Winthrop there… or Winslow, or Winfield… he
only put in that caisson… it was maybe four years ago, I think. If you
can believe it."
"I was just thinking, before you walked in… you
know, how he must have been there for ten years. How it wouldn’t make
any sense, otherwise."
"No. It didn’t make sense. It was insane. And
everyone did it. Everyone with resources, with training and a brain. It
was a kind of elitist thing. And then, for many of them, there was nothing
else. Winslow’s wife ran off on him, after his sons had been arrested
for… oh, when all those young people marched on the power plant."
Arrested, shipped out in chain gangs, and worked to
death, Lupino mused. "I remember that."
"It was all a kind of suicide, you see. Mass
suicide. Blame the Freeze, if you will. But we could have gotten through
this."
Lupino frowned at the remaining olives, then began to
stuff them into a pocket, one by one. He wasn’t sure that they weren’t
getting through this: he wasn’t sure what it meant to get through. And
it deeply disturbed him, not that he didn’t know, but that he hadn’t
yet even gotten around to asking himself the question.
***
Many emergency vehicles were now equipped with treads,
but Lupino was just as glad he had held on to his old model and its
steel-spiked tires. (Central hadn’t yet figured out that most patrolmen
wanted the treads because they came with larger fuel tanks, which meant
more of a precious commodity to auction off.) He was able to make good
speed down the empty streets. The face in his rear-view mirror, mashed
lopsided against the old man’s beard and half-smothered in thick
blankets, bore the tint of an ancient sheet of ice. The eyes never opened—they
might never open again. Nothing seemed very pressing in these
temperatures: nothing seemed to hurry, not death itself (whose arrest,
after all, had been achieved—as long as power had held out—by the
frigid caissons). But once he had seen how far gone the girl was, it had
struck him as obligatory to hurry. He still possessed that much of a sense
of obligation somewhere within him (he discovered, glancing in the mirror,
as if an unheard-of abstraction were also nestled in the blankets). That
the old man himself had not hurried only made a show of hurry the more
obligatory. Someone should still hurry in an emergency—someone should
still give meaning to the word "emergency". And the job was his.
It was that fight for meaning, perhaps—for the job—which kept him from
turning around one of the more sophisticated Vandals he would pin up
against the wall during the week and muttering, "Let’s team."
At any rate, it wasn’t the old man’s offer which
made him force the accelerator to the point of spin-out. No. When they
reached the aid station (the glow of the Subterrain first haloing the
distance like a sunrise, then the phosphorescent descent down the ramp
bringing an instant rise in temperature, then—at once—the station’s
exit), he played the hand which the old man had subtly dealt him.
"Get her back there now," he said. "This is my mate. Here’s
my card." No doubt, the old man himself must have thought that he had
just paired his daughter off. Yet Lupino could scarcely repress a note of
disgust when the attendant came back with a PalmCorder and said, "We
need her name, date of birth… basic Life Stats." What emerged from
him was something identifiable as a laugh only by the rush of hot air from
his nostrils. "How the hell should I know?" he responded. The
old man quickly seized the PC and addressed himself to the blanks.
Ever since Kena, he had hated women, hated them with a
detestation that rapidly cooled and grew as hard as the ice which mirrored
the sky above. The stupid trix had actually tried to write him a farewell
note: his detective’s acuity had led him to a single character traced
awkwardly with some cosmetic tool on one of the note pads he collected
(with the intent, one day, of writing down some of his thoughts). He had
toyed, for about five seconds, with the notion that she must really have
cared deeply to attempt such a struggle… but no, it was more likely an
attempt at a parting insult. What word would begin with a "c"?
Or was it an "o"? Or what word would a moron like Kena think
would begin with a rounded letter, or what Kena might think would be a
rounded letter?
Within days, he found out that the trop was in the
Captain’s sack. Probably why she had left him. Probably why she had
wanted to go out in the Underground Arcades so much—to locate a more
affluent keeper. What had he expected? He was stupider than she, to have
expected anything different. Yet his first actions (after seeing her with
the Captain) had been to come back to his apartment, load and hide every
weapon that would snuggle into his clothing somewhere, and set out for the
Officers’ Quarters. With every step he took, however, he had understood
better that the sensors would flag his steel, or else the IRR stun or kill
him after he had squeezed off one shot… and whichever one of the two he
took down with that shot, the other would look down sneering at him as he
died. It would make far better sense to slip a pick between Kena’s ribs
one fine day as she fluttered along the arcades, then wait along the
Transit Chutes for the Captain to come reeling out of his favorite club.
It had ended at an Exmas party, when the Captain—and
all the others—were as drunk as doctors. Lupino had nursed his drinks
all evening, watching the doors of the ape house open—watching, in
particular, how many hands Kena allowed to slip inside her blouse. She
steered clear of him most of the evening, but he noticed that she
frequently shot him rather soulful glances across the tables upon
satisfying herself that none of the scorts belonged to him. Maybe she
thought his lonesomeness was some kind of tribute to her, and was
acknowledging it. He had known, somehow, that she would come stumbling
over the bodies to intercept him as he made to leave. Sure enough, there
she was before his foot could touch the doorpad—just the two of them,
suddenly alone. He had spat in her face and, as she recoiled shrieking,
kicked her hard and low in the gut, where it wouldn’t show. He didn’t
really care if she told the Captain or not; but he had known that she
wouldn’t. It would make her look too much like what she was, and would
make the Captain too aware of what he had in her. In fact, she had already
been passed along twice (that he had heard of) since that eventful night.
A personal freeze had set in, meanwhile. It was
somewhat before the Exmas party (some days or weeks or months—who even
knew when Exmas was any more?) that he had taken to going armed with his
Smith and Wesson as well as the StunDowner. Not that he had turned
homicidal: all stunners were lethal unless at the limit of their range (an
irony he had happened upon once while idly pondering the word
"stun" in his squad car). On the contrary, there was something
like a suicidal impulse behind his new bravado. For some reason, he became
obsessed with the thought of confronting a Vandal with the century-old
revolver. It would be fun to go out literally blazing away. What he hadn’t
expected was that the old thing would save his life on a day so cold that
all the stunners were malfunctioning, as they inscrutably did in such
conditions. He had held off a band of ten Vandals, killing one and
wounding two others. They obviously had possessed no familiarity with the
classic six-shooter, for they had kept running even after his last shot’s
crack. The incident had been observed by Doan of the forty-third, who
quickly spread it around. Lupino grew famous over night. His nickname
changed from Loop to Cowboy.
The stupidity of all the admiration (the Captain had
promoted and decorated him before the precinct in the best of cheer,
Lupino repressing the notion of running an ice pick through his entrails
at the climactic moment) made him feel more isolated than ever—that and
the absurdity of the failed suicide. Not only was he still alive: his name
rolled over the Newspix for days, and he was allowed a wide tolerance in
assignments and hours. The irony (another irony hatched in loneliness) was
that the patrols he ran by gray, cloud-filtered daylight were infinitely
more dangerous than those the night shift supposedly performed. (The guys
had actually formed "safe houses" topside in abandoned areas
where they congregated to consume booze and the parentless girls they
"rescued".) Sometimes he wanted to blow the whistle on them all—but
how, and to whom? That wouldn’t even be suicide, probably: everyone
would just look at him as though he were insane, and then pass on by. It
all made him freeze a degree or two closer to absolute zero.
Nevertheless, he permitted the girl—this new girl,
this thin white sheet who turned out to have fierce blue eyes—to stay in
his apartment. "You can have the bed when I’m on duty," he
said—and otherwise, he paid her no more notice than to inform her when
he had brought in more food. The old man—Lupino ended up calling him
Kurt for some reason—was frequently a guest for coffee or a long
off-duty chat. Lupino liked him. He was smart: he knew big words, used
them with ease, and moved among the complex ideas they evoked with comfort
and enthusiasm. Yet Lupino also noticed (the old man called him
"Loop", apparently in affection, since he could hardly have
overheard the outdated nickname) that he became the object of stealthy
fatherly glances, and that Kurt would hug his Marta with a revealing
mixture of pride and encouragement when taking his leave. The girl had
plainly not told him that she lived as a virtual stranger in the young man’s
apartment (or the younger man—the man who was younger than an old man).
And Lupino found himself wondering more and more,
during those frequent on-duty moments when he had nothing else to occupy
his mind, why he didn’t make Marta his mate. (A lot of his time in the
squad car was spent in "gatoring", as old Sergeant Turk used to
call it incomprehensibly with a chuckle: heap the car with snow, ease into
the midst of several abandoned vehicles, and sit spying on the
neighborhood for illegal activity—or for signs of life, which was
usually the same thing now.) It was absurd to think for an instant that a
trix like Kena had affected him in some deep emotional way. If he just
didn’t want women spying on him and pilfering his possessions (most were
themselves pretty good at gatoring), then Marta would have been about the
lowest risk he had ever seen. She not only stayed out of his way in the
four-room-plus-kitchenette apartment: she did little things for him which
he only discovered in her absence, like cooking him something from the
cans he brought in, cleaning his boots, or mending his gloves. (Where in
hell had she found a needle? He could have gloves for the asking down at
Central, but… but he never told her that, because it would have cut off
one of their few meager lines of communication). In turn, he found himself
bringing her things—not flashy trash from the arcades, as Kena would
have craved, but coats and dresses from long-abandoned closets. He had
taken the measurements of her garments once with his belt while she was
asleep, and by now he had them by memory. So it didn’t seem like he
hated her, or even like he suspected her. Why would he—because of Kena?
No, it was more like… like something he just had to hold back from. Like
not getting too close to a heater when you know you have to go right back
out again… or not getting drunk when you know that your mortal enemy is
at the same party. It was a matter of survival. Sharing your life with a
mate was bad for survival.
One day, Kurt brought him the oldest guns he had ever
seen: a Winchester and a Colt Peacemaker. They were genuine cowboy
weapons, and he thought for sure this time that the old man must have
encountered something about the legendary shootout with the Vandals and
was teasing him over it. But there wasn’t a hint of jocularity in the
explanation which accompanied the firearms.
"They both use the same caliber of
cartridge," lectured Kurt. "A forty-four-forty. The pistol, of
course, will help you in close-range defense. But for longer ranges, you
need the repeating rifle. You slip the shells in here… and the lever
ejects an empty shell when brought down, then throws a fresh shell into
the chamber when…"
"Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen Westerns before,
Kurt," interrupted Lupino, shouldering him away from the carbine.
"Christ rats, man, this is almost in working condition! Where did you
ever find it?"
"It is in working condition. They both are.
That’s why I brought them to you. Listen to me. I’m not giving you
toys for your collection. The day may come when you need these to… to
defend my daughter. And yourself, of course. Stunners are all dependent on
recharging, and the Ministry controls all the power, ultimately. That
means that if the Ministry should decide to black you all out up
here..."
"What? Decide? Come on, Kurt, don’t start
talking like a con! The big guys need us as much as we need them. Probably
more. We make the streets safe. We keep the hospitals running."
Kurt withdrew into a deep armchair and raised those
brows which still beetled, even without a light sheet of ice on them.
"Very well. Let’s just say that the Ministry might at some time
have to conserve energy. A brown-out. What if they issued orders that all
good citizens should use no unnecessary energy? What if you were commanded
to take what weapons you needed from the precinct, and not to recharge any
at home—not even to bring any home? You’re a decent fellow,
Loop. You would obey, even though the command would be practically
unenforceable. You and a few others—the very ones they might want to be
dependent upon them in a crisis. Dependent, or at their mercy. No, wait,
just let me finish. The point is that these weapons are simplicity itself.
Get together all the forty-four cartridges you can from your arsenal at
Central. No one will ask any questions—they’ve probably been sitting
around for years, if you can even find them. If you can’t… well, I can
get you some shells, you can get the powder, and the lead can be melted
down over any flame, as long as there’s good circulation. You’ll need
a bullet mold."
"And this is in case the Indians attack?"
sniggered Lupino. But only half of him was involved in the jeer: the other
half was captivated by the notion of such perfect independence.
"It’s in case you have to fight for your life—and
for Marta’s. You’ll have a chance, a reasonable chance. And the more
they cut you off from the power, the more of a chance you’ll have.
Because, Loop, when they have to go farther and farther into the cold to
get you, they go back in time, and it’s the old weapons that will
work."
Lupino found shells, oddly enough, by making a rare
foray into the old business district and digging through a well-ransacked
recreational emporium. Even bow-and-arrow sets were missing—as were most
of the old-fashioned firearms, for that matter. But these had apparently
been stolen for their iron, if not for some other, unimaginable reason.
Boxes of shells lay about in a storage room like an ancient car in a shed,
full of dust, unappetizing to the most hearty of molds and protozoans.
After carting away to the squad car all that he could possibly use and
carry, Lupino improvised a slow fuse to blow up the rest. There was no
point in leaving the stash around until a bright Vandal finally caught on
to its value. From a block away, the explosion was duller than he had
expected. It might have been any one of a dozen bombs that went off every
day from end to end of the shrinking metropolis, blasting open impregnable
doors or reducing empty structures, sometimes, to a material-rich rubble.
He got his practice firing at dogs. He didn’t like
depleting his stun-weapons on them, yet they were a constant threat. He
had once seen a small pack devour an infant and take off the mother’s
arm before he could make his way across a bridge collapsed under ice. The
Winchester’s crack at first puzzled them. They would start but not run,
even if a patch of ice splintered at their feet—even, indeed, if one of
their number leapt into the air with a yelp. He could pick off entire
groups of four or five in so many shots, when he began to master the
sport. Finally, in a couple of weeks or so, they began to grow wise to the
method, and he could only bring down the leader before the others
scattered. It might have been a couple of months.
He remembered from these days an enigmatic scene. He
had sniped away at a band of dogs fighting over a human carcass until only
one remained, and he had pursued (in the thrill of the hunt) this survivor
into a wide-open residence. The dog got away thanks to the house’s roof,
which had fallen in some while back under the weight of accumulated snow
and left a gaping hole in the rear wall. As Lupino turned to leave, he
noticed the familiar squared, low-lying outlines of a caisson—and then
beside it, a huge dog which must have been surprised in the sudden deluge
of snow. The thick white blanket had frozen hard and cleared, preserving
the brute as if for some exhibit. Lupino could observe no red stains, and
the roof’s beams had come to rest without touching either caisson or
animal, forming over them a kind of lean-to. For days afterward, he
pondered: if the sun should return some fine year, and if both dog and
caisson-dweller should begin to thaw out, what would happen? If the dog
came to life first, would it gnaw off the reviving man’s leg… or would
it, under the benign influence of sun, warm human flesh, and stirrings too
distant to be called memories, wait patiently for the representative of
the master species to open his eyes?
He also thought about the implications of what Kurt had
said—the Ministry, rationing, brown-outs, high-level conspiracies. The
truth was that he thought about little else behind the superficial
diversion of plunking at dogs and poking through abandoned residences. He
didn’t like being manipulated, he didn’t like being ignorant, and he
didn’t like being comfortable. Ignorance and comfort were as deadly as
keeping a woman. He soon realized that he had actually come to enjoy the
lonely life of combing the topside wastes—and that those who might wish
to manipulate men like him would understand this attraction and skillfully
employ it to keep trouble on the margins. What did he know, after
all, about the Ministry? He had never even been granted a pass to ride the
Transit Chutes beyond Central—he had never even applied for such a pass.
What were things like, lower down?
He decided to ask Kurt the very next time they were
together. As it happened, the afternoon following this resolution brought
them within each other’s eyeshot from far ends of the Elevator’s
platform. Lupino was heading home after a day shift, and Kurt was
obviously going in the same direction to visit his daughter and
"son-in-law". (Lupino was not yet clear on exactly what kind of
employment Kurt had secured himself down here, but the old man’s
engineering abilities would have been in great demand.) The Elevator was
actually a series of a dozen shafts whose cars traveled up one side of the
Subterrain’s gigantic vault and then, their floors always perfectly
level, began the other side’s descent if summoned. The highway which fed
in from topside had once bored under a mountainous section of the city to
make an impressive tunnel (or what passed for impressive back in the days
of sunlight: Lupino could remember being awed by the descent as a toddler,
when some people who must have been his parents first drove this way with
him). The peripheries of the underground lanes had gradually widened with
the Freeze, and the lanes themselves had also shrunk to two as traffic
diminished to a trickle, at last virtually stilled with the sealing of the
far entrance and the mandatory parking of most vehicles just beyond the
aid station. Now there were layers and layers of apartments built up in
the rocky ribs like a hive, their invisible connective corridors served
from outside by the Elevator’s shafts. Lupino’s place was near the top—a
choice location, in a way (though quarters near the top were smaller),
because rising heat from the rest of the interior gathered aloft. As he
lay in bed between shifts, he sometimes wondered how far above his head
was the earth’s surface. Could he dig through the ceiling and reach it
in a crisis? He also wondered how far he would fall if the hive’s
steel-reinforced ribs should one day catastrophically yield.
Kurt subtly beat Lupino to the punch in the matter that
had instantly begun to loiter on the tip of his tongue as they closed
along the crowded platform. There were three other residents who shuffled
speechlessly into Shaft Five when its doors opened, and of course
discretion in such matters as this must be observed. (Mention of the
Ministry was not in any way forbidden, yet Lupino could not recall ever
hearing a public discussion of its actions.) Kurt nodded cordially to him,
and they shared a wall in the compartment’s rear, pressing their
shoulders flat against it. As the cable began to hum, the old man drew his
attention to the scene beyond the transparent plastic pane at their side—a
descending scene, which shrank into perspective like a colony of alien
life forms brought into focus through a lens.
"Look at that. The new trolley is beginning to run
beside the aid station—Aid Station Number Four. It’s supposed to reach
the Transit Chutes, you know. All electric."
The tarmac of the one-time traffic artery, now reduced
to a silver-gray sheet speckled in tiny pedestrians, halted its steady
approach upon their heels as the box slid to a noiseless, almost
imperceptible stop. One occupant disembarked between quiet kisses of the
automatic door. Those who remained said not a word. They stared at the
sealed door in a faint hypnosis as the quiet hum resumed. Kurt stared, too—yet
he was anything but hypnotized.
"Remarkable, isn’t it," the old man’s
voice continued soothingly, "how we can’t get the simplest system
to run topside, yet things like these shafts go without a hitch. The
engineering is flawless. Perfect craftsmanship."
The second stranger exited now, faintly pausing over
the car’s hairline seam with the floor as if to admire its artifice. The
door sealed upon his puzzled gaze.
"Twelve shafts operating more or less incessantly,
twenty-four hours a day, to serve a residential quarter with ten thousand
units, all lit and heated. And the Subterrain glimmers and purrs below
them throughout the same twenty-four hours. Shops are always open. Public
services are always available. Look at them, all those people getting off
the Shuttle from the parking decks to enter the arcades. Like ants.
Orderly, efficient… and happy. Under the circumstances, remarkably
happy. Never so much as a brown-out to dismay them."
"But you said…."
Lupino had been unable to bite back his words in time.
Fortunately, the final stranger was an incurious chambermaid wearing the
sanitized livery of her profession. She exited at Level 72 without so much
as a backward glance. Lupino’s eyes sprang from her back to Kurt before
the door had begun to shut.
Even after the lift began to hum once again, however,
the old man’s only response continued to be a vague smile directed
beyond the ceiling-to-knees window panel. Their compartment had now
migrated to the middle of the silver-gray sheet, as far as the naked eye
could tell—for that sheet itself was now a mere ribbon. The entirety of
the Upper Subterrain’s east end lay at their feet like … like some
game of lights, some clever, pleasant display of miniature tracks and
wharves and ramps, all teasingly lit with strings of minuscule bulbs,
which a wealthy nursery might construct for toddlers.
"You see, Loop," murmured Kurt through his
long beard finally, "the abyss on whose edge we balance is not
chaotic. It is, in fact, very well run, very well designed. I had no idea…
these last few months have been a great shock to me. We all tried to hold
out topside, as you call it, as long as we could, simply because we
thought there was nothing down here but a dark, dank network of sewers..
Quite amazing. I don’t know which is more amazing: the miracle of the
Subterrain, or the jealous secrecy with which it is guarded."
Lupino was about to say something like, "Then you
no longer think I’m going to have to use my Winchester in an hour of
sabotage"—but the irony (he was imbibing more irony every day, and
not just from Kurt) was too tame, too naïve. His mouth remained
speechlessly open. What he grasped at that instant was that, to his
"father-in-law", the threat of sabotage was more imminent than
ever.
As if he were not fully turned toward the window panel,
Kurt responded to the dawn of comprehension on his younger companion’s
face.
"Never has a population of this size been so
utterly at the mercy of... of them."
"Who?" questioned Lupino nervously, noticing
that their floor was next on the digital display.
Kurt turned back to him and bowed him toward the door
in one motion. "That’s the second reason for alarm. I don’t know
who. We don’t know."
When the door sucked itself away to reveal a carpeted
corridor, Lupino could scarcely get his legs to move. The old man smiled
again and coaxingly preceded him.
"But… but look," whispered Lupino slapping
his palm over the door frame as if to still a loose tongue and peeking up
and down the hallway, "I’ve met a lot of these swells. The Captain,
the Commissioner—even that guy, Senator Tovaglia, I heard him speak one
time at a dinner. They’re idiots! All of them."
Kurt drew him gently onto the carpet. The door silently
closed upon a lingering vision of sub-terrestrial paradise.
"When the topmost are at their cleverest, they
fill the ranks of the almost-topmost with buffoons."
"But every reason you have for being on the alert
is a reason for the opposite," protested Lupino, still in whispers.
His protest had the unwanted effect, apparently, of
terminating the discussion which he had longed to have. They were quickly
at his apartment’s door, then inside after a scan (he had read Kurt’s
iris into his BeyePass several weeks ago). Marta greeted her father with a
mute hug. Then the two men sat down and began to talk of… nothing.
Trivialities. Lupino’s discomfort was increased by the odd feeling that
Marta’s presence might be supposed to signal something: staying mum
before the womenfolk… or assuming, on the contrary, that the girl
already knew all their secrets. What might she have told him about her
father’s notions if the two of them were indeed man and mate? Had he
already betrayed to Kurt that he didn’t know as much as he should have?
It was an exasperating sensation, and he didn’t exactly know why.
Perhaps because it might reflect upon his manhood in the old geezer’s
eyes… but also, even more, because he truly had shut himself off from a
valuable source of information. That had never occurred to him before,
about Marta: a valuable source of information.
"What have you got in the sack?" he threw
into a moment of lull, uneasy now with silences. "Another gun for
me?"
"The pen is mightier than the sword,"
returned Kurt in one of his annoyingly inscrutable proverbs. The sack
certainly couldn’t contain a sword—and what in hell would he do with a
long knife on his rounds? Skin the dogs he shot?
"I know that you can read," continued Kurt,
producing a couple of thick volumes. Lupino had occasionally seen books in
the houses he searched topside, but few as hefty as these. "Marta
says you have ambitions of writing a book yourself."
How had Marta… maybe just a lucky guess, a gambit to
convince her father that she was an intimately cherished mate. Was their
true arrangement, then, so hard on her self-esteem? Lupino caught her
retreating figure in the corner of his eye just in time to see a heavy
blush sweep the transparent cheeks.
"This first book was written by one of Marta’s
great uncles. It’s about freedom… about freedom and pain, I suppose
one might say. About the necessary bond between the two."
"Freedom and pain," mused Lupino as he
received the book and began thumbing through it. "I should have a lot
of free moments reading this, because it’s going to be a big pain to
figure all these big words out."
"I think you’ll find it worth the effort. More
so than taking your pleasure along the arcades with your fellow citizens—these
drones who imagine themselves both free and amused."
Just like that, they were back in the thick of the
discussion he had wished to have—the one which really mattered. Yet he
was faintly bewildered by the transition’s suddenness. Kurt did not
allow him time to recover, but dealt him another blow, instead, by handing
across a still thicker volume.
"You won’t be able to make much sense of this
one, either. That’s okay. Any little bit of sense you get out of it will
reward your trouble. It’s an old engineering textbook of mine. I looked
for something better—something more on the novice’s level, I mean. But
I was astonished to find that no books of any sort were to be had anywhere
in the Subterrain. Not even in antique shops or junk piles. Not one.
Technical pamphlets, repair manuals… nothing of more than, say, twenty
pages. Another of my negative indicators. Anyway, I know you’re well
aware of all the fuss about the generators, the power plants, the
overloads. It’s become the stuff of legend among us. I remember telling
you something about old Winthrop’s sons and that desperate protest march
when we were having our very first conversation—the afternoon, you know,
when I thought Marta was going to die. And after all, the rumors were the
obvious explanation for everything bad that was happening, even before
they became myths. No power. Too much demand on the generators. Everybody
going into those insane electronic cocoons, and then the Freeze… we all
believed a conclusion that we had reached largely on our own, or so it
seemed, and which we were allowed to keep. Hard times were in the air
around us, even while the sun was still shining. Why, the whole caisson
craze would never have occurred if people had not already convinced
themselves of an impending doom, an apocalyptic..."
Kurt’s tone drifted off in pursuit of his gaze, which
had wandered to nowhere. This occasionally happened with him. Lupino knew
that he was at least twenty years older, that he recalled a lot more. He
had to be fetched back with a jolt whenever he started sifting back in
time for first causes.
"But…"
"Hmm?"
"But even though we all believed that the power
was shutting down... it really wasn’t? Is that it?"
"But there was also a very prominent theory,
already much-discussed back in those days of sun, that energy could be
produced by other means. Not water, or fossil fuel, or fission. Right
under our feet. Do you know what’s beneath the crust of the earth,
Loop?"
Lupino avidly wanted to learn more, but he was always
vexed when Kurt exposed the depths of his ignorance in this way,
especially in front of Marta. Why did Marta make a difference?
"Conspiring bureaucrats?" he said in a defensive jeer.
Kurt laughed heartily, letting him somewhat off the
hook. A wit, after all, might pose as a fool for a good joke’s sake.
"Read that book, and you’ll see. Read it first—just
read the first chapter. Heat, Loop—molten rock and metals are a
few miles below us. The stuff that surfaces through volcanoes. It’s a
practically inexhaustible supply of energy. And the beauty of building a
settlement like this below ground is that, the lower you get, the warmer
the temperature grows. Do you understand? Just by digging downward, you
create an environment where the climate, during an ice age, would be very
livable."
"But… you said several miles down. We’re…
nobody in the Subterrain is that far down."
"Nobody that we know of. Not you or I, at any
rate. But we really have no idea how deep this little bio-funnel of ours
goes, do we? And the energy is certainly flowing from somewhat, great
steady waves of it. Look at this—Marta, bring that here, will you? Look,
she’s opened a can of green beans. Where do you think these came
from?"
Lupino eyed the open can in perplexity—and also the
long, thin hand which held them. He peeked under his brows at the girl’s
face, and was surprised to find something like a conspiratorial smirk
concealed there (or left unconcealed only in his direction).
"Um… they come from topside. I bring those
things—those kinds of things—down here whenever I clean out a
place."
"No, Loop. You didn’t bring these home. I bought
them. The label isn’t like any I can remember from the days when we had
sun—but it was on sale long before the Freeze got really severe. And the
price for this can of beans was about that of a toothbrush or a sleep
band. There’s been no escalation of the price, and there should have
been a very steep one. These beans, and other food items like them, are
being grown underneath us somewhere through the use of artificial light
and, quite possibly, natural warmth."
Over the next few days, Lupino took to loitering along
the deeper arcade levels. He had never much liked the rows upon rows of
beauty shops, betting booths, antique dealers, hockey lanes, exotic
clothing stores, sun salons, swimming coves, tea shops, coffee shops,
ethnic cuisine… Kena could have lost herself in such surroundings for
days, but Lupino detested the purposeless drift of it all. Now there was
purpose to his drifting, however. He paced off the dimensions of every
floor, then took a Chute to the tier below, or else followed the corkscrew
esplanade. (He hadn’t known that they existed, those gently sweeping
walkways at each alley’s end. They were pleasantly lit, shedding a
phosphorescent brightness sufficient to keep alive avenues of potted palm
trees.) Below the shopping district, he penetrated the administrative
quarter, with its queues of discreetly illumined offices built into the
walls like a thousand man-and-desk sized cubby holes—and, of course, its
sandwich shops. Lupino was nursing a cup of coffee in one of these when he
happened to look up and see himself in a long mirror behind the counter.
His scraggly bear |
