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A Few
Words from the Editor
In my role as editor, I constantly marvel at how often certain
themes or harmonies of sentiment emerge during an issue’s preparation
without any sort of encouragement from me.
Perhaps contributors are influenced by irresistible current events
which leave them in roughly the same mood.
Yet so much happens in the world today, and the matter which I
paste together usually comes trickling in over such a broad expanse of
months, that I incline to view the convergence of interests more
spiritually. Since those who
read and sometimes write for Praesidium tend to have a certain orientation toward life, death,
beauty, human nature, and human culture, the correspondences within any
issue are bound to be, at the very least, numerous and latent.
Occasionally they grow a little less latent.
When Peter Singleton passed along to me something like a prose poem
(in his own words) about the moral struggles of the late Oriana Fallaci, I
realized that I had a metaphysical meditation which jibed well with J. S.
Moseby’s “magic realist” short story, “Continental Shelf”.
My own piece—the second half of a lengthy essay about the effects
of romantic adventure upon our cultural outlook—is certainly not
incompatible with these more creative works.
I should say, in fact, that we are all in agreement about how
things happen in life. The
most advertised and celebrated occurrences, full of sensual thrills and
electrifying surprises, really represent not much of a “happening” at
all. After a nerve-tingling
surprise, the mind eventually settles back into its previous repose.
Permanent change does not arrive in a burst of flame from without:
it seeps into our veins, rather, like the night’s coolness or a hard
day’s weariness. Paradoxically,
people who crave the spectacular event—the shock without any coherent
connection to all that has preceded it—do not change much as people.
They become little more than seismometers—gauges with needles
that drop back to zero as soon as the tremors pass.
Virtually everything between these covers had already been composed
when the most traumatic event of our nation’s spring—the cold-blooded
gun-down of 34 people at Virginia Tech—lit up the news media.
And yet, an Iranian friend of mine reminds me that such butchery is
typical on some of
Iraq
’s more dangerous streets. The
truth is that, not only does the plight of the average Iraqi civilian make
no impression on us whatever, but the deaths in
Blacksburg
have already passed from our conscious mind.
Our needles have slipped back to zero, where they await something
even more exciting. We do not
necessarily imagine that we shall get off scot-free from the next general
calamity. Yet the loss of an
eye or an arm or a friend or a parent would be the more tolerable in that
it would allow us not to change
on the inside. I am not now
waxing rhetorical. Of the 70
or so college freshmen whose paths crossed mine this spring, about a
quarter disappeared from class without any explanation at all.
Of the remainder willing to provide reasons for frequent absences,
two were arrested and sent to jail, half a dozen were involved in
high-speed car collisions, one ended in the hospital after a fist-fight,
and approximately 10 absented themselves when family members or close
friends were maimed or killed in similar incidents.
In other words, about half
of our young people starting out in college have sufficient leisure from
criminal involvement and life-threatening experience to ponder their world
thoughtfully through reading and writing.
The other half, I maintain, are in no very great danger of changing
profoundly as human beings. They
haven’t enough time on their hands to absorb what has happened to them,
though fully convinced that their life is richly supplied in happenings.
Mark Wegierski’s two short contributions imply how very perilous
to our future is such muddling of basic definitions.
Ideas have consequences—but events do not bear rational fruit
when they fail to generate responsible ideas.
We teeter upon the brink of an age where all our messy acquisition
of accidents, arrests, brawls, and massacres will be mere fodder for some
intellectual elite. We will be
“handled” in one way or another—deprived of guns, issued guns,
deprived of fossil fuel, issued passes for anthill transit systems,
rehabilitated for politically incorrect speech, sterilized for an
irresponsible fertility—the ideologues have a species-wide cure for
every complaint; and because the cures are ideological, all of them will
produce less unpredictability, flux, and movement.
They will change us so as to minimize change.
No doubt, the Leftist’s paradise of a high-tech-but-green
Eden
where sexual activity is creative, frequent, and healthy while
racial/ethnic slurs have slipped from the collective memory is a far cry
from the Rightest’s rip-roaring metropolis of financial opportunity
where scenes from Norman Rockwell impossibly cling to suburban steeples.
Yet both of these Neverlands—and all stops along the way to their
mad precincts—could only be inhabited cooperatively by sleepwalkers,
robots, or lobotomy-survivors. They
will seem a wonder only to the traveler—who will preserve his power of
wondering only if he takes care not to stay too long.
We must think more about our dead—about how
they lived and why they died. To
do this, we must do less of what is vulgarly called “living”, and
which often results in senseless dying.
If to live is to change, and if real change must be thoughtful
change, then we must re-discover that the unexamined life is not worth
living.
J. H.
back to Contents
***************************
Facilis
Descensus
Averno
,
Part II
A
Diffusely Comparative Study of Romantic Illusion and Social Dissolution
by
John
R. Harris
“Tros
Anchisiade, facilis descensus
Averno
:
noctes
atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed
revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,
hoc
opus, hic labor est.”
Vergil, Aeneid
6.126-129
“Trojan
son of Anchises, easy the descent to the Avernus.
Night
and day, the door of gloomy Dis lies open.
But
to retrace one’s steps and flee the bright air above—
Herein
lies the challenge, the labor.”
(continued
from
Winter 2007 edition, with all numbering sequent to Part I)
VII
.
Contemporary Romance: Aesthetic
Pre-emption
As we know from antiquity, the romance follows a high road and a
low road; and as we know only too well from our own time, most people do
not cherish the effort of climbing. One
could argue that the high road was traveled heavily for an impressive
number of decades in post-Renaissance Western literature’s history: I
doubt that antiquity provides enough benchmarks to justify its humble role
in this invidious comparison, or that the Middle Ages do not wholly
undermine it (for medieval literacy, though rare, was
discriminating)—but the claim itself is not prima
facie absurd. Allow me, in
any case, to neglect what must surely be a vast body of worthy material in
order to reach our present distressing state.
The romance’s paths today all appear to descend.
The psychological novel elicits little interest.
It is a mere historical curiosity even in graduate courses, where
the focus tends to linger on gender credentials (the superb female analyst
like Colette now canonized for an accident of birth) and anomalous
“confessions” (whose secondary merit as literature may range from Invisible
Man to I, Rigoberta Menchú). Indeed,
aspiring novelists have told me off the record that they dare not write of
anything except their racial or
sexual victimhood, for the university presses and rare Madison Avenue
houses where “serious fiction” steals a few crumbs of the budget will
have it no other way. There is
more than an inkling in this authorial “slumming” and
“poor-mouthing”, I believe, of hidden utopianism.
That is to say, the contemporary intellectual is far too alert to
cultural propaganda—too well initiated, too deeply jaundiced—to be
seduced into any kind of romantic journey, any quest of higher
possibilities. Yet, alas, that
cowardly traitor, the human heart, will not be weaned from hope to dwell
in a smugly sophisticated ivory-tower paradise of expectations reduced
right down to modernity’s oily tarmac.
This clever person, therefore—this novelist of our time—adopts
the strategy which Derrida has mapped out so well (except that Derrida
ascribes it to a dull laity, not to his inner circle): he or she postpones
paradise. All that we have
before us is Anti-Paradise: hence, by savaging what is before us, we clear
a space for what is nowhere before
us. “Everything
unknown...”—and we’re back to Tacitus again.
Deconstruction, in fact, is nothing less than the quest to justify
the untaken quest by subverting all familiar quests.
By clearing the ground of folly, it implicitly creates a place of
honor for the folly-not-yet-committed.
Deconstructionists will giggle in print (their embarrassment,
pride, and adolescent sense of irony inextricably mingled) that their own
traduction by romantic notions further demonstrates how all of us are
constantly traduced. Yet such
pliant logic is little in evidence when the post-structuralist’s first
cousin (or the post-structuralist on holiday) steps into the political
arena. The urbane wag, capable
even of self-deprecation in pursuit of irony, suddenly brooks no
opposition. All is speech
codes, political correctness, sensitivity training, “hate crimes”
legislation, and the abolition of private property.
I have mulled over this apparent contradiction in behavior for
years—for people strike me as invincibly logical even in their lunacy:
raving always conceals a set of unstated premises.
In this case, I believe we see the irresistible craving for
romance—for the quest after a personally
fulfilling pot of gold—leaking through the sophisticate’s seams.
Like so many fire-breathing young (or young at heart) Alexanders,
the literary leaders of our intelligentsia occasionally must wave their
spears in public on behalf of the always-unseen, always-not-quite-yet
utopia in whose favor their cynicism deposes all previous values.
Marxist revolutionary in the graduate seminar, champagne-sipping
Jesuit at the faculty soirée… at church with the saints, at the bar
with drunkards. (It was Dante,
not Tacitus, who famously recalled that proverb.)
If this is romance’s high road in our time, then its fatal
trajectory is rather less edifying than Aeneas’s.
At least Aeneas was aware
of having incurred intimately personal obligations.
His error lay in succumbing to a blunt calculus of bodies:
disappoint Dido on one side, disappoint the whole Teucrian tribe on the
other. No liar can be absolved
of his sin by pleading that he betrayed one person’s trust to confer
wealth and power on a vast horde: what the outer world approves is not
what the soul requires. Contrast
this sobering failure with the childish crisis of narcissism among our
ivory tower’s brightest. We
are to hold aloof from the naiveté of chasing horizons, yet—who
knows?—if we torch all the engines of transport, maybe we can found a
perfect world. Or maybe
enlightened aliens will discover us—for the cynic-revolutionary places
no end of confidence in satellite dishes beaming wish lists to far
galaxies. He is in every
detail Ortega y Gasset’s hijo
mimado: the “spoiled child” who doesn’t remotely understand how
technology works, yet expects it to disappear utterly or to fetch new gods
on gamma rays as the whim may move him.
The contradiction in chasing abroad while trying to turn inward
(for it is a real contradiction, incapable of conciliation) agonizingly
confronted by Vergil is so far from being suspected among our anointed
luminaries, indeed, that they often preach the bluntest, crudest forms of
“going out”. They are
veritable slaves to conquest. Though
they deplore gaudy commercialism and capitalist competition, they have
transformed the legal, medical, and teaching professions since World War
II into venues of society’s most cutthroat self-promotion.
The career’s the thing: women, in particular, have romanticized
the white-collar world as a setting for self-centered adventures promising
lucre and glory wherein collateral damage is no one’s particular fault
(certainly not the adventurer’s). That
other staple of the romance, self-discovery through sexual experience, has
likewise fallen prey to the hypertrophy of feminism.
The experience itself—the sex act, amputated of all emotional or
social appendages—has become for the “highbrow” a trove of pleasures
hunted down through a jungle of hypocritical decorum, and (naturally)
yielding delights independent of any particular supplier.
To be sure, what Walter Burkert calls the most elemental of all
narrative scenarios, “go and get”, is rendered instantly problematic
by differences in male and female anatomy.
Nature’s unwillingness to “get” in these particular
circumstances has frustrated more than one female trailblazer.
Possible solutions? A
resort to Lesbian love, much affected in the academy; an invigoration of
“stick it to ’em” spirit in professional activity, where the reality
of reified, commitment-free sex as a species of violence has grown
especially clear; or a variety of attacks through charges of
victimization, the lawsuit ranking among post-modernity’s favorite ways
of counting coup. The essence
of it all—the thing of quested-and-found things—is the acquisition of
something “out there”: a raise, a promotion, a title… a stolen
pleasure, an extorted settlement, an incited fear.
And the Athena-on-one’s-shoulder, the
Isis
, the rabbit’s foot?
Self-generated power—maximal use of sexual seduction,
intellectual wile, and institutional intimidation all rolled into one
bludgeon. With a bottle of
such lethal thickness, who needs the genie inside?
My last paragraph may be charged with having a) singled out women
for rebuke as contemporary romance-abusers, and b) forgotten that romance
is an art form rather than a “lifestyle”. I
believe that different aspects of a single response will satisfy both
objections. To begin with,
women have always consumed romance disproportionately to men.
One finds a direct correlation between the emergence of romance as
a literary genre in cultures around the world and the ceding of more
privileges (such as education and legal rights) to women.
This should come as no surprise to those who understand that
literacy awakens among human beings a sense of inner worth, of precious
individual uniqueness. Women
profit from the awakening along with other conventionally disparaged
groups.
Yet the literate woman (and here we are, to be sure, imagining a
woman of higher social status) remains as physically cloistered as her
forbears—perhaps more so, inasmuch as her more complicated setting has
portioned certain robust out-of-door labors such as water-hauling to
servants, or to incipient technology.
She sees less of the wide world than ever.
This would render her much more receptive to the Siren-song of
travel to exotic places presented so seductively by the romance.
Boccaccio remarks as much in the proem of the Decameron,
a work which he dedicates to his female readership.
The woman would also conceive more obscurely of the threats offered
by reality beyond her cloister, knowing of them only second-hand, for the
most part. A vague threat is
often a more dreadful one, for there is more than one way to magnify the
unknown (the truth is that even the original intent of Tacitus’s line is
much disputed). While some can
ignore the menace beyond the gate blissfully, others are extremely
unsettled by its blank face. The
romantic assurance that Lady Luck never abandons her initiates to complete
catastrophe (and simply reading the romance is a kind of initiation) would
have appealed especially to thoughtful but very partially informed
minds—such as a literate but sheltered woman’s.
By the eighteenth century, educated women were so generally
recognized as the romance’s “target audience” that José Cadalso
could recommend romance-reading, along with guitar-playing, as a sure way
for the amorous courtier to insinuate himself into his beloved’s good
graces.
This was more or less the state of affairs in our own society
immediately after World War II, as well, though during the fifties romance
novels were fast yielding ground to “women’s magazines” stocked with
serial fiction and, still more, to television dramas.
The “soap opera” was the American woman’s national badge of
dishonor, the proof-positive of her intellectual wool-gathering and
general ineptitude at facing harsh realities.
Women by the million thus consumed daytime serial romances, ironing
or folding clothes before a grainy black-and-white picture while their men
labored at “real jobs”. That
these jobs themselves were much romanticized by the stay-at-home sex,
being both unfamiliar in any detail and located in a population-dense
environment beyond the suburbs, may much have influenced the next phase;
or it may be, to a greater extent, that women rebelled primarily against
the suburb’s mere depletion of social contacts during the day.
My own suspicion (based on observation as well as inference) is
that the female is essentially more sociable than the male.
She has the ability to bear children, whether or not she chooses to
exploit it. Even in cases of
adult infertility, the woman has been raised
supposing herself capable of bearing a child.
This mere fact already suffices to sensitize her to social settings
more than the male, who is never physically
part of his child even if he sires a dozen.
Due to some combination of factors, then (and there were economic
factors, too), women began to forsake the home for the marketplace in
droves by the late sixties and throughout the seventies.
That the most published rationale for the exodus was seldom at this
time, “We need the income,” but rather an infinitely vaguer, “I want
to have my own identity,” would imply that the phenomenon was indeed
largely creative. Many women
were attempting to write the romance
of their lives, at least among the more educated (and remember: we are
still on the romantic high road). It
was precisely over the final decades of the twentieth century that
novels—“serious” novels—came to be written as if they were the
author’s diary chronicling her struggles to succeed in a man’s world.
That is, life had grown so romanticized that it began to dictate in
minutest fashion, like changing weather to a captain’s logbook, the
content of the fictional journey beyond the pale—when,
of course, the “creator” had any time left over to write.
The confusion of perceiver with thing-to-be-perceived in the
post-modern art work is a momentous development.
One finds it in visual art, where living persons are provocatively
painted or adorned and then stationed around the gallery, sometimes being
encouraged to interact with viewers. One
finds it in the theater, where players invite audience to participate
actively in the drama’s unfolding. One
finds it literature to the tenth power, where readers have even been posed
the task of organizing chapters as they will.
Surely we cannot suppose that so dynamic a relation between perceptor
and percipiendum, unique in the
history of art, should have nothing to do with what makes our era unique
in the history of human culture generally: the
collapse of universal literacy to nugatory levels within three generations
of the television’s acceptance into living rooms.
The fifties housewife wasn’t merely making her chores less
tedious as she absorbed soap operas. She
was not even merely confirmed in the suspicion that her own life was far
duller than most people’s. In
conjunction with both, but to a far greater degree, she was seeing
herself (or people who posed as someone like herself) dress, speak, and be
profoundly interesting. The
printed word could never have forged such a tight bond with gesture and
tone of voice, and theater could never have represented such detail with
such persistent, reach-out-and-touch proximity.
Even the movies, which must have had a share in the phenomenon,
were typically a once-a-week outing, nor did film genres of the time take
nearly as much cognizance of workaday America as did the television.
I call the phenomenon, for lack of a better term, aesthetic
preemption. Its victims
over-identify with the art work. They
cannot retain a more or less objective distance from the work, but rather become
part of the canvas in the act of perceiving it.
They preempt its artistic effect: they adopt a part.
The television serial, purged of reality’s delay and pointless
endeavor, seems more life-like than life itself: one’s own life appears
comparatively undigested. Even
a post-modern novel, wasting not a word in minimalist dedication to speed,
requires effort to visualize—and effort requires time.
Eventually, works of fiction will trail after successful serials
instead of preceding them, their publishers hoping to capitalize upon the
warm afterglow of a popular screened romance.
So TV-addicted America, and especially the female audience, began
to “preempt” the unveiling of the plot when it found itself in a
position to create a life as interesting as those it had voyeuristically
studied through a glass rectangle. Forgotten
housewives rebelled: they became “involved”.
Their days were turned into filming sessions.
The new medium was quickly rendered more malleable as the state was
compelled to supply an ever broader safety net beneath the tentative first
flights of aspiring artists: maternity leave, child care, “affirmative
action” hiring, guaranteed minimum wages, rigidly objectified criteria
for promotion, etc., etc. Not
all such measures were discernably indexed to gender: on the contrary, the
Woman’s Movement had effectively transformed the entire private sector
into a kind of Hollywood set where “dreams” of wealth, power, and
glory could be faintly realized by Citizen X with a finely engineered
degree of predictability. Once
such artificial, stringent manipulation was imposed upon the highly
competitive literate world’s volatile forces, the mystical influence of
a patron saint or leprechaun or magic potion proved redundant.
The new hero could do it all on his—or her—own.
Naturally, when “it” wasn’t getting done, friction around the
water cooler or coffee pot could reach super-heated levels.
It’s one thing to increase a guy’s working hours until he
decides to look for another job: it’s quite another to come between an
artist and her canvas. Hence
the egotistical ruthlessness of the late twentieth-century white-collar
world. Though usually
attributed to materialist craving, it makes far more sense as a rather
barbaric crisis of “artistic expression” in a strange land where
people can read, but no longer do so.
The material acquisitions themselves were mere end-of-chapter
flourishes published to commemorate an adventure’s successful
completion.
Alert academics (or observers of academics) will be very familiar
with how bewilderingly thorough aesthetic preemption is in shaping
intellectual exchanges. Such
impassioned illogic as is often shouted in one’s face during a
“debate” about social policy would belong at any other historical
moment to the street-corner rabble-rouser.
Now it is standard issue among the intelligentsia.
One’s interlocutor is no longer a highly trained mind, but a
“talking head” for an oppressed minority.
(Notice, by the way, how the very word “passion” has become in
these times ameliorative in a theatrical sense, suggesting that an
infusion of life-like vigor has successfully lit up a string of clichés.)
Indeed, the “old” print literature of yesteryear is openly
accused now in English departments of attempting the brainwash of its
consumers over benighted centuries. That
is, it was once intended to feed gullible fools their lines as they waded
patiently through its pages. Now
the Self-Made Woman preempts the lines by speaking rather than reading, by
living out the story rather than absorbing it passively.
If the only literature worth reading consists of her sisters’
after-the-fact transcriptions of their triumphs—their own Gallic
Wars—then she may say with complete candor, La
littérature, c’est moi.
VIII.
Maleness and Romance
And what was the male doing during these years of the female’s
“going out” into his traditional hunting grounds and killing his big
game? Did he assume a less
romantic, more Stoical posture in response to being nudged into the
margin? Well, hardly.
In fact, to him belongs the low road of romance.
Back in antiquity, on the contrary, the last gasps of the epic
genre and the first brave steps of history-writing had been produced by
and for males. Literate women
were infinitely more likely to scroll through Daphnis and Chloe (set suggestively in the homeland of the
Greco-Roman world’s greatest female love elegist) than the Aeneid or the Annales.
The same very likely remained true over the two intervening
millennia which I have virtually skipped.
Today, however, the tables have diametrically turned.
Men are less likely than women to continue their education beyond
the legally required level, in the first place; and, having decided to
attend college, they are also less likely to major in literary studies or
to do well in literary core courses. In
complementary fashion, they are more likely to consume “electronic”
romances of one kind or another: television serials, movies, and video
games. The fifties housewife
burning up her husband’s white shirt on the ironing board as she peers
at a soap opera has now been transformed into a jobless man watching
reruns of The Rockford Files between
interviews. Even
conventionally female-drawing television genres, such as hospital dramas
or sitcoms, have steadily admitted more coarseness (especially of a sexual
nature) and more provocative female characters in response to their
audience’s changing demography. As
I sit writing these words, a website titled “askmen.com” is apparently
surveying its vast audience to determine the hundred “hottest” females
available to the general public’s eye.
My impression of the voting, for which I am beholden to a
particular radio announcer, is that vast numbers of men with nothing
better to do in life are sitting through television serials very far
removed from yesteryear’s male-only police drama or Western.
It would seem, indeed, as though men had created their own romance
of questing far and wide (from their couch, and with a remote
channel-changer or mouse) after the most stupefying female “package”
in the universe.
Questing, going and getting, seeking the Holy Grail… I find such
activity, modified into “surfing” or “browsing” electronic
networks, no more implausible as a degraded species of creativity than the
American female’s odyssey of “self-discovery” in the marketplace.
Like the career woman, too, this romantically wired man wants his
victories to vindicate his personal power, not that of a lucky talisman or
secret code (though talismans and codes, with their odor of Gnosticism,
also occupy the scene: of them, more anon).
The man who successfully identifies his personal “maximum” for
sexual arousal from the thousands of voluptuous females represented on his
screens can retrieve and download minutiae about her private life until he
truly feels that he possesses her. He
may wallpaper an entire “trophy room” in her photos and build what may
properly be called altars piled with memorabilia of her purchased at
Internet auctions.
If such behavior does not constitute an imaginative pursuit of a
distant ideal and the acquisition of treasured relics along the way, then
the sun doesn’t set in the West.
I wrote at the beginning of this piece [see Part One in Praesidium 7.1: ed.] that my own adolescence depended heavily upon
the television as a social outlet—as a source, at any rate, of hopeful
scenarios about “going and getting” in an unpredictable, usually
hostile world. I understand
the syndrome as a drunkard understands alcoholism.
All the same, the ailment observes degrees—and the typical case
has grown exponentially more toxic since my childhood.
The old movies I consumed were based largely on books; even
television serials boasted writers of genuine literary talent.
From The Late Show’s
docket of old movies, I recall seeing Lawrence Olivier and Simone Signoret
in Term of Trial, Ian Carmichael and Peter Sellers in I’m
Alright, Jack, Richard Burton and Kurt Jurgens in Bitter Victory, John Mills and Dirk Bogarde in The Singer, Not the Song, Alec
Guiness and John Mills in Tunes of
Glory. Except perhaps for
the last, these films are unavailable today in any form whatever: they
might as well have been last year’s snow.
Their lead actors became legendary, however—and their stories
were stunningly instructive in the matter of basic human nature.
As I look back upon this very fragmentary list, I realize that the
central characters really didn’t “get” much of anything.
Even in Carmichael’s thickly ironic comedy, the dénouement was
quite sobering (climaxed by a magnificent speech which Carmichael delivers
in a kind of vatic frenzy). Of
course, there were less cerebral works within my ken, as well.
Yet these also surpassed—by a long shot, in my view—the most
mature films and serials that today has to offer.
Gary Cooper goes hunting Spanish treasure in the Western, Garden
of Evil, tripping over so many archetypal features of the mythic Other
World Journey along the way that one can scarcely doubt director Henry
Hathaway’s literary cultivation. Cooper’s
final line acidly sizes up just what going-and-getting usually amounts to
in this life: “If the earth were made of gold… I guess men would die
for a handful of dirt.” As
for television, the same years that addled the brains of my peers with Star
Trek offered Secret Agent, The
Prisoner, and Man in a Suitcase—all British imports, all capable of unnerving a
starry-eyed “trekkie”, and two out of three very uneasily received by
American audiences.
A corner has long been turned, it seems to me, in the
television/movie audience’s patterns of male consumption.
When men are not “writing their own story” in pursuit of an
Aphrodite born from a new kind of wave, they are vicariously savoring
psychotic varieties and degrees of violence.
Nothing from the days of my youth remotely approaches the graphic
portrayals of evisceration ubiquitous in today’s films.
Research indicates, however, that a steady diet of such viewing
fare produces passive onlookers—with extraordinarily high “revulsion
thresholds”, to be sure—rather than bloodthirsty criminals.
What is far more credibly implicated in the growth of violent crime
also happens to be the latest sort of viewing popular among young males:
the video game. Here aesthetic
preemption is taken to a new level. The
participant can actively “go and get” victim after victim through ever
more sophisticated simulations. The
“player” can “live” (in a fashion more participatory than looking
on, at any rate) the thrill of beating, raping, and murdering.
Many young males appear to consider this sort of diversion their
“real” existence, sleepwalking their way through life’s necessary
motions in a pitiable state until they can at last be reunited with their
controls. Make no mistake:
this is their odyssey, their adventure, their holy quest.
If the New Woman’s preempted romance is professional success, the
New Man’s is an insatiable will to power once known only to mythic
superheroes.
Writing of modern man’s quintessential “going and getting”
tool, Ortega y Gasset observed, “The new man desires the automobile and
enjoys it, but believes it to be the spontaneous fruit of an Edenic tree.
In the depths of his soul, he is ignorant of the artificial, almost
fantastical character of civilization, and will not enlarge his enthusiasm
for appliances to include the principles that make them possible.”
So for the romantic low road provided by advanced technology: the
contemporary Western male, hazed from the marketplace by women wanting to
“find themselves” rather than simply bring home a paycheck, is
becoming more of a brute as the latest technology renders his brutality
ever less vicarious and ever more plausible.
An oral-traditional tribesman—but lacking both oral fluency and
traditional reverence for precedent—is rising from this electronically
flooded swamp of cliché and formula, his muscles grotesquely bulging from
exercise machines rather than from useful labor, his life held just this
side of a gory adventure in rapine by the thinnest of threads.
Jails are already overcrowded, budgets of police departments
already exploded: what will restrain this post-literate sociopath from
carrying off loot and women like a pirate if his means of “virtual
piracy” should dry up in massive malfunction?
Deprived of inner resources by the failure of literate culture and
of outer opportunities by the success of that culture (i.e., by the
transformation of hard labor into romantic adventure, now coveted by
everyone), where will he turn, this creature who turns only outward?
What will he go and get, this creature who must always be going and
getting?
IX.
The Failure of Contemporary Faith
The spiritual genius of the Middle Ages lay in allegorizing the
inner search as an adventure: where is that fertile tradition now?
Just as educated Americans are “living” their romance today
rather than reading it, so Christian practice has turned outward with very
heavy emphasis in virtually all denominations.
Proselytizing is underscored in the self-styled evangelical
community. That one’s church
grows bigger is reflexively,
unreflectively interpreted as a sign of its health and success.
The believer’s obligations, beyond attempting to rope in more
members, consist largely of group behaviors—especially attendance of
Sunday services, but more generally of supporting church-sponsored events
and (in the closest approach to introspection) maintaining a “clean”
marriage in the eyes of the community.
I do not remotely intend here any disparagement of such virtues as
marital fidelity and a disciplining of sexual urges, let alone of
sacrificing one’s egotistical ambitions to the well-being of one’s
children. To the extent that
“going and getting” has yielded in this scenario to “staying put and
cultivating”, I regard the typically projected Christian habit of living
as very salutary. Yet the
resistance to the romance’s magnetism strikes me as unsteady, to say the
least. The believer does not
search his soul (or is not so represented in church practice) and then
emerge with a new commitment to his moral duty.
He grooms himself to suit the tribe, rather: he lives by the
tribe’s calendar and competes zealously for tribal honors.
A young woman may join a church group and vow pre-marital chastity;
a mature man may enlist in the army of Promise-Keepers and vow to take his
vows seriously. Joining, it
seems, must precede righteous action.
Little reading of any kind occurs at any point, and that either
directly from or explicitly indexed to sacred texts.
The liturgy has been purged of silence.
The being within finds no place to lay his head.
Ponder the history of American Christianity over the past
half-century, and you find a geometrically accelerating growth in its most
romantic forms. Since the late
sixties, when the nation was enduring a widely reported, somewhat
manufactured shift to an antinomian secularism, the more substantial and
consequential shift among the young, employed, married or
marriage-tolerant bourgeoisie was
from inward-turning to outward-turning patterns of devotion.
Within a very few years, religious services altered from strictly
scripted orders of worship in dark, sublime spaces inviting personal
reflection to crowded, brightly lit scenes of hand-shaking, spontaneous
testimonials, stool-and-guitar musical interludes, children’s sermons,
and “power” prayers (i.e., cheerleading paeans warbled into a
microphone, usually—as time went on—accompanied by sound-system
special effects and more hand-holding).
Simply to be on church property was to be in heaven.
The church compound came to provide gyms for church members, movie
theaters for church members, bowling alleys and billiard rooms for church
members, dating clubs for church members, bussed excursions to mall or
athletic event for church members… one’s life was far more thoroughly
and diversely occupied here, and far more realistically, than any
collection of video games might ever manage.
Middle America’s bland romance of the good life—the constant
variety of wealth wedded to technology, the “virtuous eroticism” of
sexual pleasure within monogamous bounds, the charmed security of having a
supernatural protector overseeing the whole carnival—solidified into
what must surely be the best example of aesthetic preemption ever
constructed.
It is small wonder that people conditioned to such extroverted,
non-literate habits should have been collectively roiled by that silly
romance, The Da Vinci Code.
In the romantic world, salvation is a high trump card, a magic
ring: a material possession or external rite which produces empirically
solid results. Slip the ring
in your mouth, and you can sneak away from your captors unseen: say a
fervent prayer in the right formula, and your child’s leukemia will
vanish. Church-sponsored
“info-mercials” in the southwestern United States have lately been
peddling what is quite literally called a talisman
(associated with the Virgin of Guadalupe) to be inserted under the
mattress before one’s bedtime prayers.
A young man, having sprung from a jaunty red sports car, assures us
that the talisman transformed his financial situation, and a voice-over
explicitly promises dividends in suerte,
amor, salúd, y dinero (“luck, love, health, and money”).
In such a “go and get” (or “go-getter”) atmosphere, the
objectified secrets to success are bound to be purloined sometimes, sold
on the black market, plastered up in walls, or stashed away for centuries.
If only one might find the hidden key, the vault of heaven would
open.
The edition of U.S. News
& World Report intended, apparently, to be something of a
Christmas issue for 2006 used the Da
Vinci Code craze —and quite correctly—as a springboard for
discussing Gnosticism.
“Some fear that the new Gnosticism ‘threatens the shape of the
Christian faith’,” reads a large-print caption, quoting the caveat of
a professor at Emory University. The
most interesting words here are some
fear. When Christendom was
healthy, Gnosticism was categorically heretical: secret passwords and
arcane symbols hushed up among the elect had nothing to do with the Jesus
who felt a sublime pity for masses which could not even name man’s true
hunger. Now the best that a
major publication’s staff writer can do to stress the matter’s
importance is some fear. The article
proceeds to treat such fears as curmudgeonly and rather silly, of course,
while Gnosticism is finessed toward the tolerant, open-minded end of the
“debate between progressives and traditionalists”!
The reader will have noticed that I have made no effort to
distinguish among denominations with regard to the corruption of romantic
extroversion. Frankly, I
believe such distinctions to be trivial.
No organized Christian denomination has come to my attention which
currently urges the importance—the primacy—of deeply individual
involvement with one’s faith. I
do not say “personal involvement”, but “individual”: romance, of
course, is intimately personal—but the persons at its heart are small
fish in a great ocean trying to defy their unpromising link in the food
chain. They are not
Stoic philosophers refusing to admit the moral relevance of any event
beyond the reach of their will—refusing, even, to call “bad” a
beloved child’s death from a dread disease.
On the contrary, the romantic protagonist’s personal longings
(for sex, power, or simply survival) eclipse every other crisis in the
universe for him. An
individualist’s adherence to right reason—to universal law—rather
than to some formidable tradition or mystical aegis (accessed precisely by
a “secret tradition”) is not for him.
Accordingly, Catholic and Protestant Christians, liberal and
conservative Christians, all seem to me united in their romantic
opposition to the individual—in their romantic emphasis that believers
should “go and get” their heart’s desire by following proper
channels rather than chasten and redefine that desire through
contemplation. One eloquent
proponent of a Catholic perspective recently wrote, “The writings of
Bacon and Descartes reveal clearly… 1) the desire to overturn the
received tradition and begin anew; 2) the denigration of authority; 3)
radical individualism; 4) skepticism; and 5) the centrality of method.”
This is a pretty standard attack on rationalism, and it is without
neither merit nor oversimplification.
Allow me in the present context merely to juxtapose the words of
liberal secularist Will Hutton: “In a world that is wholly private, we
lose our bearings; deprived of any public anchor, all we have are our
individual subjective values to guide us.”
Strange bedfellows, indeed—but the devout Christian conservative
and the unbelieving social progressive describe their loathing of
introversion in fully compatible terms.
Notice that neither targets the “odyssean” individual who
wanders far and wide sowing wild oats: not at all. The focus is on the
Socratic individual who stays put, minimizing the outer world’s
interference, and seeks the voice of God in his essential nature.
A rolling stone is not an individual, but a stone like any other
that stands out because it rolls. An
individual is not a rebel without a cause, or a counter-conformist.
He or she is primarily a soul
(in Christian terms), precious to God because it partakes of divine
inspiration sufficiently to long after, seek, and find goodness through
environmental clouds of witness. The
purveyor of romances is rendered nervous by this search because it resists
romance, ultimately—because, while it may be helped by wise direction
from without, it is independent of such direction; and, in being
independent, it is unresponsive to worldly ambition.
Visionaries of church and state alike seem nowadays to have big
plans for us, plans which will make us happy personally and also benefit
our community. They are
utopians one and all, these creative thinkers.
Heaven can move over and wait—they
have a blueprint that will work right now.
But what the soul requires and what the world approves will never
be the same: Vergil produced a negative proof of that proposition.
That certain souls will mislead themselves, even as certain souls
are misled by their ecclesiastical or political shepherds, is indubitable.
The truly introverted search, however, enjoys the advantage of
learning quickly and thoroughly from its errors, for the evidence is all
within sight, and only needs to be seen.
The worldly search, in contrast, can be drawn out for lifetime
after misspent lifetime, whether on the authority of the past or the
promise of a transformed future. There
is no end of variety: the planet is round, and always offers a new
horizon. If a significant
denomination of Christendom can yet be found which offers no remedies for
social dissolution, no maps to the perfectly harmonized community, no
legal agendas for building the virtuous state, but only salvation for
individual souls, then Christendom lives.
Yet the cacophony of competing “blanket salvations” for this or
that body of faithful, like a quick dialing through the satellite dish’s
endless fare, makes so weak a signal very hard to receive.
X.
Post-Literacy Meets Orality: The
Cataclysm
I posed the question earlier—and it was by no means
rhetorical—“What will the post-literate male, underemployed and
finding his most vital expression in simulated acts of mayhem, go and get
in his fully mutated form?” The
transition from massacring dozens of people on a screen to acquiring an
AK-47 so as, for once, to smell the blood is probably not a small step.
Young men inclined to murder become “better”, less inhibited
murderers as a result of their “simulation sessions”: that much is
true. Yet there is little to
suggest that young men fond of the simulators, by extension, typically
graduate to real murder. On
the contrary: boys who spend hours every day enacting such violent
fantasies are often known as “geeks” among their peers, which seems to
put them at the polarity opposed to real-life thuggery.
In the same way, young men who devote hours every week to visiting
pornographic sites online are very often hard pressed to sustain a simple
conversation with a comely lass. Recall
that life before a screen is not “real life” for most of our
technically savvy youths. It
is more real, in that real life is a senseless succession of
disappointments. The video
game, like the soap opera—and like the literary romance not so long
before—is an alternative to reality, a place to which society’s
forgotten members may flee.
I will confess that I first thought of young Islamic men turning to
suicide attacks when I studied the picture of jobless males dishing out
Armageddon in their bedroom from manual controls.
Upon consideration, I believe that such a connection exists, but
that it is more complicated than a + b = c.
After all, the extreme version of Islam which promises a harem in
heaven to a warrior expiring amid his infidel victims is not
a romance, appearances notwithstanding.
For one thing, the evolutionary forces which go into creating
romances are inoperative here. This
vision of apotheosis is, instead, oral-traditional.
The message consists primarily of an assured celebrity in the
tribal memory for killing the tribe’s enemies.
The beautiful virgins awaiting the martyr’s embrace in paradise
are readily misinterpreted by Westerners, and even more readily
caricatured. They do not
represent a sexual orgy, but rather the achievement of those marks of
respect most widely recognized in an oral-traditional community: many
wives, and the wealth implied therein.
The message remains crude, no doubt, to literate tastes—but it is
really no more so than the motives of Homer’s Achilles when he
volunteers to trade his life for eternal glory in his native isles.
What surprises us is that Achilles, in certain parts of the world,
is still very much alive. We
were similarly surprised—and outraged—when Japanese kamikazes
flew into our ships during the Second World War.
It was grotesque—it was more brutal, even, than what one would
expect of an animal. Yet to
young Japanese pilots, it was a means to undying honor within the tribe.
Furthermore (and in pursuance of the same point, really), the
romance’s hero is going it alone in a turbulent, almost incomprehensible
world. I have tried to
distinguish him from a true individualist, who he is decidedly not.
He is Everyman with a lucky charm in his pocket.
While the graduation, not to one lovely princess, but to scores of
exquisite brides at the story’s end might appear to be the very height
of good fortune—and all of this in paradise, no less—the latent
passivity of the romantic hero cannot be reconciled to the jihadist’s
berserk frenzy of destruction. Remember
that the romance was born of the Other World Journey’s archetypal
sequence, wherein the traveler moves quietly, keeps a low profile, and
often acquires or feigns some of the attributes of the dead.
In its more sophisticated forms, the romance continues to insist
that the protagonist should be rather befuddled about all that goes on
around him; for the thrusting of this naïf
into chaos creates an essential resonance with the reader’s
discomfort in his own too-changeable world.
The Islamic martyr is not this sympathetic lost yokel.
He is Genghis Khan, not Odysseus.
Nevertheless, it seems clear that bright, technically
sophisticated, yet radically disaffected young men are indeed prone to
romanticize jihad.
Virtually all Islamic males involved in terrorist incidents
throughout the Western world have been, not only literate, but fairly well
educated. The kamikaze
who blows up a bus in Tel Aviv may be a different story; but in our midst,
the killer’s profile begins to look alarmingly like our son’s
classmate’s—or like our son’s. Though
oddly distant now to our crisis-glutted national recollection, the rash of
murderous rampages in schools which harrowed the nineties was perpetrated
by these same young males, minus the profile’s Islamic element.
Something about Islam, or a certain strain of Islam, has spiced up
the stew from which these hapless boys emerge; but religion is not the
sole ingredient, and I venture to say that it is not even the most peppery
one.
Let us recall that Westerners-born-and-raised are starting to
embrace the romance of jihad
without any thorough exposure to Islamic custom, any profound knowledge of
Koranic law, or any ever-so-brief experience of an oral/tribal setting.
Far from having deep roots in a community inextricably bound to
their personal identity, these boys tend to spring from upwardly mobile
environments where lonely electronic amusements are abundant, where the
family physically relocates every few years, and where extended family and
neighborhood ties are non-existent. A
context more unlike the streets of Gaza is scarcely imaginable… yet our
adolescent males are too often ready to die in an annihilating blaze, even
without virgins waiting on the cataclysm’s far side.
It appears fair enough to say, then, that the jobless young male
addicted to video games might
metastasize into a suicide-bomber. If
he memorizes a few passages from the Koran along the way, he probably
takes from them something very different from what another jihadist
halfway around the world find there: not a transcending sense of purpose
within the ethos which suckled him from birth, but… fearful
courage. Manly virtue.
For what we have not given our young men in the West—what we
give our own sons less and less, and what young men around the world find
less and less of as they Westernize—is manliness.
Western culture, as human history’s quintessentially literate
venture, is perhaps insuperably romantic.
It writes things down, so that they may be analyzed; these things,
having been analyzed, become susceptible to change; the Westerner, having
changed all things (or at least rendered all things subject to change),
acquires an ethic of transformation.
Metamorphosis—the soul of the Journey to the Other World: the
fully developed Westerner is not intimidated by the most horrid mutations,
by the most vertiginous flux, because he has come to associate it with
cocoon-to-butterfly improvement. His
very gender is subject to alteration: like that sage of the Underworld,
Teiresias, he may become a “she”—and then shift back again on a
whim, or explore some third gender. Death
itself is potentially soluble. Genetic
engineering, cryogenic preservation, travel at the speed of light…
there’s more than one way to beat the devil.
And the Westerner, like a true romantic, knows that he will
eventually “get lucky” in his search for ways.
Such a mentality negates the most important qualities of manliness.
The man stands firm. He
is here and not somewhere else:
he honors his word and defends his territory unto death.
His gender is that of the epic hero and the mythic demigod—the
figure whose fallen corpse becomes the mountain range marking the tribal
border. To the extent that
manliness has been able to withstand the transformative seductions of
literacy, it has always reaffirmed the boundaries beyond which change must
not proceed. Like a racked
Aeneas (or like the crucified Christ), Literate Man has had to define the
No Man’s Land between moral duty and the community’s material
progress. Aeneas actually fell
on the wrong side of the line, and “leaders” such as Machiavelli’s
Cesare Borgia have been ceding territory ever since.
So hopelessly haggard has that line grown, indeed, that celebrated
“conservative” scholars may hold up Machiavelli as a paradigm of
something like “manly realism”—the “manly ability”, I suppose,
to throttle conscience and go get the loot.
This is the manliness of a buccaneer; and I will write nothing very
insightful in remarking the current popularity of such figures—pirates,
hoodlums, hired assassins, etc.—in electronic narratives.
In our advanced state of degradation, the less academic expression
of this “ideal” is actually the more honest.
The ”true man” is a muscled-up bully who imposes his will by
force, yet who in fact wills nothing much differently than might an
ape—whose relations with women, for instance, are dictated by his
seething libido rather than by anything remotely akin to will power: a sybarite on steroids.
No one in his right mind would maintain that the late Oriana
Fallaci was anti-occidental, or in any wise an apologist for the many
haters of the West. La
Rabbia e L’Orgoglio (The Rage
and the Pride), composed within weeks of the September 11 attacks and
through the anguish of an advancing cancer, made Fallaci persona non grata among the politically correct Italian ruling elite
(and also a champion among ordinary Italians).
Signora Fallaci had more manly courage in her little finger, for my
money, than 90% of the men (at a conservative estimate) who speak any
cousin of the language native to Regulus.
Endowed with such credentials, Fallaci should be dealt the utmost
attention in her testimony against the dominant vector of Western culture
as offered in a much earlier book, Se
Il Sole Muore (If the Sun Dies).
A rambling reportage of America’s romance with the Space Race
during the sixties, the work is largely devoted to bravery.
Fallaci does not seek to conceal her admiration for the first
astronauts: they remind her of the men who reared her during the dark
years of Fascism (including a grandfather who slapped her for sniveling as
American bombs hailed upon Florence).
Yet an insoluble perplexity torments her, as well, throughout this
unique search for truth—this odyssey through a foreign land which draws
her ever deeper into herself, like a medieval allegory.
She cannot quite come at an adequate explanation—or perhaps an
adequate justification—for America’s need to replace nature with
artifice. Her scruples are not
the peacenik’s or the hippie’s: the girl who injured her leg trying to
cycle away from falling bombs (in yet another air raid) did not mature
into a tree-hugger. What
ultimately bemuses Fallaci about American culture, I think, is the unmanliness
that taints its unquestionable manhood.
To attempt a lunar landing, where a single miscue would leave
one separated from the human race forever, perhaps—even in
death—appears to demand stunning courage.
Yet the same ethos which generates endless volunteers for a probe
of the black abyss also endorses frivolous abuse of resources and—of all
things—laziness as a habit of
daily life. Raze a forest and
build a highway, push a button and avoid five seconds of manual effort…
the instances of such ignoble surrender to lethargy under the illusion
that technology somehow demonstrates an assertion of moral will pile up
about her in the most unlikely places, in the most absurd manner, as she
tours various training facilities and launching sites.
Cicero had chosen the word frugalitas
to sum up the truly philosophical life in one of his last treatises
(the Disputationes Tusculani:
see 3.8.16): “frugality”, that brave virtue—often distorted in
contemporary usage—of taking minimally from the outside, of placing
one’s treasure within. What
Fallaci’s book disturbingly chronicles is the inconsistency of
extravagance with moral courage. A
brave man shouldn’t need to have his pillow plumped electronically.
In the technologically sophisticated world pioneered by Americans
and now being exported all over the globe, men
no longer know how to go about being men.
When the latest machine malfunctions and threatens mass
destruction, perhaps one man will leap up from somewhere and have his
life’s finest moment fighting the behemoth’s high-tech guts with a
wrench. On a typical day,
however, the drone who mops the floors and collects the trash does more
heavy lifting than any of the lavishly paid technicians around him. The
technicians, of course, represent that small minority of educated men
(smaller all the time) who have been able to find work more profitable
than collecting trash, so their presence may scarcely be said to
constitute an escape valve. Furthermore,
while their muscles are too weak to transport a computer monitor up a
staircase, let alone do conventionally “manly” tasks, they
are the successful providers in this dichotomy, and the manual laborer a
pitiable beast of burden. The
latter cannot support a family unaided, and indeed has grown uninviting to
females thanks to his penury. The
Male Provider is a powerful archetype; yet the males among us most capable
of yoking an ox to a plow are least capable of fulfilling that image
today, for bread now comes in a wrapper.
To be sure, hands still move shovels at certain low-lying points in
the modern economy. Little
discussed among economists is the grim reality that, beyond a certain
fluctuating border, the use of human drudges for age-old tasks becomes
more cost-effective than designing and producing new technology run by new
technicians. A robot to
collect and empty a whole building’s trash could readily be
engineered—but the waif loitering around the parking lot would do the
job instantly and for bottom-rung wages.
These are the fabled “jobs that Americans won’t do” for
which, it is argued, vast supplies of unskilled immigrant labor are
required. The situation is
neither particularly novel nor unique to the United States: impoverished
Irish were shuttled back and forth to Scotland as farm laborers for
decades before World War II, Poles were similarly used in the factories of
northern France, and now the Islamic population of the Middle East and
North Africa is massively altering Europe’s demographic landscape.
As technology advances and new techniques are not
developed to catch thousands of displaced white-collar workers on the next
rung down, a new class of underemployed citizen arises.
In fact, intermediate rungs on the ladder are rapidly disappearing.
Yet the educated, unemployed male, having grown accustomed to (or
been raised to expect) a technician’s level of pay, disdains the
gardener’s pittance; while gardeners, in turn, are being paid as well as
their fathers only if they can secure a clientele of the royally salaried
technician elite. Since the
native-born male does not seek seasonal work or crave a gypsy’s
existence, but rather wants a steady job and a place to call his own, he
falls ever nearer to the bottom in this shuffle.
His education suddenly appears to serve no better end than to
awaken him to his group’s historical decline and to mock him with the
awareness that less “manly” men are buying property and siring
children while he withers away.
For, unless this man can reinvent the plow and reform urban zoning
codes so as to permit him an ox, his powers as a provider must inevitably
be linked to the salary he draws. Salaries,
alas, are hard to come by, both because technology has shrunk the volume
of steady jobs and because the large-scale entry of women into the work
force has further shrunk the pool for the male.
(As well as from the preferential hiring practices enforced in some
professions, women may well have profited from an ability, either natural
or cultural, to outperform males in sedentary, enclosed situations
involving constant social interaction.)
Consider, finally, that the educated male traditionally found his
mate from among the very class of women who now exceed him in earnings and
hence, by the reigning measure, are
more manly than he is. The
resulting dilemma has created excruciating problems for both genders.
I could personally bear witness to the misery of a young, bright,
beautiful, lavishly paid, and nationally recognized female attorney who
(while consulting me professionally about her book manuscript) confessed a
terror of being “taken in” by some man who only wanted her money—a
terror inspired in her, quite clearly, by her more experienced sisters in
the field. Such women seem to
adopt the protective strategy of never allowing themselves to be courted
by a man who earns less than they: a patently bizarre outcome to a
feminist uprising which demanded at every stage, and continues to demand,
higher pay for women.
An economic problem, then, this matter of frustrated manhood?
Alas, it runs even deeper than that.
The successful amassment of wealth in the private sector tends to
require a certain lubricity, an ability to hedge on agreements and to cut
corners in production. The
good provider, that is, may not be a very upstanding specimen of
manliness. (The salesman’s
“firm handshake” and “straight look in the eye” are rather
loathsome mimicries of manly gestures, a manipulative invocation of a
vanished era.) Even
professional work in the public sector, where the profit motive is largely
tamed, often calls for a willingness to compromise in ways which women
find fairly routine—but which may well disgust some men as excessively
humbling. If such
“invertebracy” were not repellent enough to the true man, mere
material wealth in itself—let it have been acquired ever so scrupulously
or ever so openly—represents an unmanly objective, an ambition exposed
top-to-bottom to such whims of fortune as the Stoics refused to serve.
Perhaps the marginalized “geek” finally graduates from gunning
down adversaries on his computer games to “Web-mastering” for large
companies; perhaps a generous salary and the envy of neighbors will
suffice to calm his alienation. What
about those of his classmates in whom electronic romances never produced
marketable skills, however, and who now shampoo his carpets?
How long will they lap up
the relicts of his dirty shoes?
I am now in a position to repeat—in a more coherent manner, I
hope—that the contemporary Western male is likely to find a certain
seduction in daydreams of driving an explosive-laced truck into the
building where he used to work, the battlecry of some dishonored truth
trilling from his throat as he grins over the steering wheel.
Islamic terrorist organizations would no more decline this man’s
assistance than he would refuse to consider their variety of dishonored
truth (for the key here is lost honor, to be recovered in a bloodbath).
Though the jihadist’s vision of death by, with, and on the sword
is no romance, for reasons I have explained, it can easily become so in
the mind of a young man reared to be independent and upright only to find
himself universally avoided and despised.
The oral community admires its martyred sons for obliterating
themselves in a pool of infidel blood.
The obsolete male of the late-literate West will similarly—in the
strangest of ways—exit consciousness in a beatific vision of community.
Surviving neighbors will curse his memory, fear his name, marvel at
his daring, bid up his possessions on e-Bay, fantasize about being his
mate, and otherwise bear witness to his eternal impact upon a neighborhood
which collectively looked straight through him when he lived.
From the castaway who is not allowed to wash up on one of the
romance’s exotic isles, but only to perish at sea with other
“losers”, he has metamorphosed into a tsunami from the sea bed—a
wall of destruction that will reach even those happy few heroes and
heroines on the beach and utterly rewrite their ending.
Could he possibly conceive of his own end as happy, even in the
exhilaration of suddenly being a man?
One struggles to imagine his last moments: they might indeed be
romantically passive, since he need only pilot the bomb-laden vehicle
rather than wield a scimitar, and he might indeed be contemplative enough
to savor the “luck” of having so many destinies bowing before his
fingertips. As for the
triumphant return—the rescued princess, the purloined treasure, the
unveiled knowledge—his narrative must admittedly remain mutilated, for
one can scarcely picture him at T Minus One anticipating a celestial harem
rather than a mourning mass of terrestrial girls who had once derided him.
Unfortunately, this young man has nothing but
romances from which to patch his cliché-ridden tale.
Whatever he finds to cover the gap where happiness should have gone
can be very approximate, because all of his late-literate, post-literate
generation are content with loose fits.
XI.
Can Escapism Be Escaped?
To the extent that human beings cannot exist without hope, the
romance is a salutary accretion to a mature culture, where literate
people, steadily more aware of their individual duties, grope after a
focal point amid the general flux of manners and morals.
Patience can indeed be a virtue: it is not always irresponsible
onlooking. If the
“onlooker” is also standing fast in some body of principle, he may
well be generating more force than any of the objects he observes
streaming by him in the current. In
my personal recollections, I should perhaps credit the romance with
inducing the abstemious torpor of my own youth—an abstracted confidence
that “something better would come” which held me aloof from the toxic
levels of “participation” imbuing the seventies and eighties.
I am happy, in retrospect, that I did not participate.
What keeps a young man from joining in is often not a mature
understanding of the principles he faithfully supports—how could it
be?—but simply a naïve belief that a benign power will escort him
through the Strange Land’s ghouls if he remains immobile before thumps,
teases, and menaces. I will
not say that the sunlight I finally found at the far end of my youth’s
otherworldly tunnel has in fact rendered me happy—or not so in such a
way as a young man might have understood.
The young man probably would have given up the journey to join the
Dance of Ghouls had he known that the sun would rise again on such a
desert. It is the rare
saint—or that wonder of the world, the Stoic Sage—who can rejoice in
the company of truth as he would in the company of warm bodies.
May God pity us all in our need for touches, images, and stories!
The real problem, however (for an uplifting story is
God’s pity), comes when romance does not navigate a turbulent world by
subtly indexing higher goals to specific tasks, but pours its energies
into that world, instead, and mingles the two until they fuse: for then
there can be no escape from the world.
Hope is doomed to disillusionment.
Everyone, after all, must die in the flesh: science may find ways
to postpone natural death, but our own protracted survival would then have
to absorb ever more “accidents” which deprive us of those who enrich
our lives. Love will fade
after its flower, and the petals pressed between wax sheets will be more
pathetic than seductive as reminders: if we cannot retain a tenderness for
the child’s spirit shocked by a suddenly withering body, then our
one-time princess will become an enchanted reptile morphing in the wrong
direction. Knowledge itself
eventually trips over its own tracks, a trail of flotsam circling a null
and final Charybdis. Were we
to explore the very fringe of the universe visible to our technology, we
could still not demonstrate that, immensely far beyond this fringe, an
infinitely vast amount of universe does not negate every law we had ever
“discovered”, reducing our accumulated wisdom to a dropped stitch in a
Navaho rug.
Clearly, romance in the contemporary world predominantly carries
our imagination outward into fantasies of material wealth, power, glory,
and sensual “fulfillment” (as if any sensual appetite could ever be
fulfilled). Our
“dreams”—as the politicians like to call romantic illusions—have
destroyed us. That for which
we reach cannot at last be grasped; and, in our hurt-child frustration, we
cannot turn within to the comforts of philosophy or true faith.
Literacy has made us inquisitive, and inquiry has made us
experimental, and experiment has made us inventive… but as we have
invented more and more solutions to age-old obstacles, the very
thoughtfulness which inaugurated our creative chain has drifted into range
as an obstacle. We have lately
invented shortcuts which bypass the “nuisance” of thinking out a page
of printed words. Our romances
were first transformed to fully visible images, then into the environment
of our lives, as if we had been sucked into one of the screens we watched
for amusement. We play parts
and await the crowns and embraces promised to our character by the
formula. Nirvana, of course,
is constantly partial or postponed: something more is needed.
So we apply what remains of our highly trained ability to making
the imperial crown more jeweled or the princess’s image more palpable.
I am surprised, frankly, that a major industry has not already
sprung up around the designing of verbally savvy appliances programmed to
address their sovereign with honorific epithets, or of robotic sexual
partners programmed to make love in whatever vein suits their master (or
mistress).
I will not be so fatuous as to suggest that a return to a Great
Books reading list might re-connect post-literate man with his
found-and-lost soul. |
