The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (45 page)
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Authors: Anthony Esolen
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The elation could not last. Even in the early Romantic poets there is a tang of morbidity about it: “I have been half in love with easeful Death,” writes Keats, trying to resist the melancholy by recalling the lovely song of a bird (
Ode to a Nightingale,
52). By the time of Darwin, men will hear not the warble of a thrush but the roar of a preying lion. Nature, red in tooth and claw—that will be the heartless goddess of the age. Men will hear that a life lived according to Nature will be bloody: and some will learn that lesson well. He predates Darwin’s
Origin of the Species,
but Ebenezer Scrooge speaks the gospel of that
other
Nature, not the one prettified with daffodils: “If they would rather die,” he says of the poor of England, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population” (
A Christmas Carol
).
Ode to a Nightingale,
52). By the time of Darwin, men will hear not the warble of a thrush but the roar of a preying lion. Nature, red in tooth and claw—that will be the heartless goddess of the age. Men will hear that a life lived according to Nature will be bloody: and some will learn that lesson well. He predates Darwin’s
Origin of the Species,
but Ebenezer Scrooge speaks the gospel of that
other
Nature, not the one prettified with daffodils: “If they would rather die,” he says of the poor of England, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population” (
A Christmas Carol
).
In America cooler heads seemed to prevail, for a time. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about the conflict between one’s “natural” feelings and the often merciless laws of the community. Despite what sentimental teachers like to say about it now, his novel
The Scarlet Letter
emphatically
rejects
the possibility of wholesome life outside the bounds of law and common morality. That may be what the adulteress Hester thinks she wants, but the person who actually goes out and lives in the wilds among the Indians is the villain, the malignant Chillingworth. Hawthorne’s friend Herman Melville wrote perhaps the last epic in the western world, an epic in mighty prose:
Moby-Dick.
In that novel, Nature is embodied in the brain and brute might of the great white whale, an offense, as Captain Ahab sees it, to order and justice and man’s puny strength.
The Scarlet Letter
emphatically
rejects
the possibility of wholesome life outside the bounds of law and common morality. That may be what the adulteress Hester thinks she wants, but the person who actually goes out and lives in the wilds among the Indians is the villain, the malignant Chillingworth. Hawthorne’s friend Herman Melville wrote perhaps the last epic in the western world, an epic in mighty prose:
Moby-Dick.
In that novel, Nature is embodied in the brain and brute might of the great white whale, an offense, as Captain Ahab sees it, to order and justice and man’s puny strength.
And all while this appeal to Nature rings out, man is busy, crisscrossing the continents with railroad tracks, steaming down the great rivers of America, smelting ore for the steel for the first bridge across the Mississippi, the first bridge across the Hudson, the first bridge across San Francisco Bay. Missionaries and rapacious colonialists enter the heart of Africa, whether to tame it, or to be made savage by it, is sometimes hard to tell. James Fenimore Cooper admires the Last of the Mohicans, and makes him talk like a medieval knight with an American accent.
William Morris helps to spur a cult of the medieval and chivalric, stripped of the theology that made sense of it all; it’s the same William Morris who, in
News from Nowhere,
will imagine a socialist realm of lovely androgyny.
1
Owen Wister, at the end of the century, writes the story of a noble Virginian out West—just as the West emerges from nature to civilization.
2
In
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,
Mark Twain seems to satirize the dreamy worship of the pre-civilized, revealing those knights of old to be little more than thugs or pleasant imbeciles in armor, and their ladies, raucous, coarse, and vulgar. A Connecticut Yankee is banged on the head at the factory one day, and finds himself transported to an age of ignorance. He becomes the Boss in short order. Yet all this new Boss can bring Arthur’s people is the paltry legacy of an urban life: soap, advertisements, and baseball. Those, and mass electrocution.
News from Nowhere,
will imagine a socialist realm of lovely androgyny.
1
Owen Wister, at the end of the century, writes the story of a noble Virginian out West—just as the West emerges from nature to civilization.
2
In
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,
Mark Twain seems to satirize the dreamy worship of the pre-civilized, revealing those knights of old to be little more than thugs or pleasant imbeciles in armor, and their ladies, raucous, coarse, and vulgar. A Connecticut Yankee is banged on the head at the factory one day, and finds himself transported to an age of ignorance. He becomes the Boss in short order. Yet all this new Boss can bring Arthur’s people is the paltry legacy of an urban life: soap, advertisements, and baseball. Those, and mass electrocution.
Nature can be honored rightly, if she is kept in her place. But that is hard to do, unless one acknowledges a God above Nature.
But this worship of Nature is, for a while, a potent drug, and leads to the Romantic worship of man. It’s easy enough to go from believing that, given the right social circumstances, man can be made perfect to believing that he already possesses that perfection, and all we need to do is to liberate it. In the Renaissance, Christopher Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus
dramatized the fall of a man who sold his soul to the devil so that he could become a demigod for twenty-four years. He spends most of those years dabbling in petty tricks—cheating a horse salesman, or fetching grapes out of season for a pregnant duchess. Then he sweats and frets through his last hour on earth, and the final curtain reveals his dismembered limbs and blood splashed over the walls of his study. In the Romantic age—and this heady spirit is still with us—Goethe recasts Faust as a soul struggling for the fullness of human knowledge and love.
Doctor Faustus
dramatized the fall of a man who sold his soul to the devil so that he could become a demigod for twenty-four years. He spends most of those years dabbling in petty tricks—cheating a horse salesman, or fetching grapes out of season for a pregnant duchess. Then he sweats and frets through his last hour on earth, and the final curtain reveals his dismembered limbs and blood splashed over the walls of his study. In the Romantic age—and this heady spirit is still with us—Goethe recasts Faust as a soul struggling for the fullness of human knowledge and love.
For the poet Percy Shelley, Prometheus the rebel, not Zeus, is the bearer of truth: meaning that the divine spirit of man, inspired by universal Love, and not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, now gives the law. Religion must break the bonds of tradition and hierarchy. Shelley’s Prometheus sees a vision of Christ upon the Cross, and prays—mercifully!—that he will die:
Fix, fix those tortured orbs in peace and deathSo thy sick throes shake not that crucifix,So those pale fingers play not with thy gore.O horrible! Thy name I will not speak,It hath become a curse. (
Prometheus Unbound,
1.600–604)
Why should he not die quickly, seeing that he is no savior? Man must save himself. Or why does he need saving at all? Be true to yourself, and you cannot sin:
Nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is. (Whitman,
Leaves of Grass,
1271)
I don’t mean to subject the Romantics to scorn beyond what they deserve. There is a great nobility and mystery in man, and in man as the pinnacle and purpose of the natural world. Wordsworth was not wrong to turn his attention inward and ask how nature in his rural boyhood formed the finest thing he had any direct experience of, namely his mind. For he saw mountains and rivers, “purifying thus / The elements of feeling and of thought” (
The Prelude,
1.410–11). The problem is when we try to substitute Man for God.
The Prelude,
1.410–11). The problem is when we try to substitute Man for God.
It’s a problem that the politically correct have not caught up with, as they continue, long after anybody has really believed in it, to press for the perfect society, the perfectly happy man, males and females perfectly the same, children perfectly wise, and old people perfectly childlike and pliable. It’s enough to make one laugh as he picks his way through the ruins. People cheat, steal, brawl, and idle their hours away. Well, some people have always done things like that. Christians called it our propensity to sin. But
that
explanation won’t do, if you have rejected the whole idea of sin. Then it must be that some vague thing called “society” has made us so, or our upbringing. We’re
socially constructed,
that’s what the politically correct social scientists tell us, generally exempting themselves from the diagnosis. All we need, then, is to rig up the right technology of government and education to fix the mistake. And who will run these vast programs? We know who. People who cheat, steal, brawl, and idle their hours away.
that
explanation won’t do, if you have rejected the whole idea of sin. Then it must be that some vague thing called “society” has made us so, or our upbringing. We’re
socially constructed,
that’s what the politically correct social scientists tell us, generally exempting themselves from the diagnosis. All we need, then, is to rig up the right technology of government and education to fix the mistake. And who will run these vast programs? We know who. People who cheat, steal, brawl, and idle their hours away.
It’s far more refreshing to encounter the worship of man in its pristine Romantic state, when it had the swagger of a soldier about it. Lord Byron set the tone for
that
Romantic ideal—the lonely breaker of all rules, seducer of women (and sometimes men), railing against stale, “respectable” religion and its God so comfortable for old ladies in charitable societies. That’s a caricature of Byron, admittedly—a caricature he cultivated. The real Byron longed for some object on which to bestow his passion and his genius, and
not
the phony pieties of people who thought they could improve mankind with just the right program. So when the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey (who were intelligent enough to have known better) conceived a plan to settle in Pennsylvania and establish a society based upon the idea of human perfectibility, Byron had a hearty laugh at their expense:
that
Romantic ideal—the lonely breaker of all rules, seducer of women (and sometimes men), railing against stale, “respectable” religion and its God so comfortable for old ladies in charitable societies. That’s a caricature of Byron, admittedly—a caricature he cultivated. The real Byron longed for some object on which to bestow his passion and his genius, and
not
the phony pieties of people who thought they could improve mankind with just the right program. So when the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey (who were intelligent enough to have known better) conceived a plan to settle in Pennsylvania and establish a society based upon the idea of human perfectibility, Byron had a hearty laugh at their expense:
All are not moralists, like Southey, whenHe prated to the world of “Pantisocracy;”Or Wordsworth unexcised, unhired, who thenSeason’d his pedlar poems with democracy;Or Coleridge, long before his flighty penLet to the Morning Post its aristocracy . . . (
Don Juan,
3.93.1–6)
But give the man a chance to fight for real freedom, and the world finds Byron not writing a poem about it, or hawking himself on the political market, but in the mountains of Greece, battling the Turks. He had once written about what a shame it was that Greece should suffer tyranny, remembering her old victory over the Persians:
The mountains look on Marathon—And Marathon looks on the sea;And musing there an hour alone,I dream’d that Greece might still be free;For standing on the Persians’ grave,I could not deem myself a slave. (
Don Juan,
2.701–706)
Mill the TotalitarianI looked forward . . . to a future [of] convictions as to what is right and wrong, deeply engraven on the feelings by early education and general unanimity of sentiment, and so firmly grounded in reason and in the true exigencies of life, that they shall not, like all former and present creeds... require to be periodically thrown off and replaced by others.John Stuart Mill,
Autobiography
(ch. 5)In other words, Mill the liberal is also Mill the secret totalitarian, replacing religious faith with his own philosophy, etched into the minds of the young—who would all have to be subject to the State’s training, to produce the State’s and Mill’s visions of the greatest good for the greatest number. Nor will the State ever succeed in this if the family remains a strong countercheck. Therefore the family must be recast; and, as always, the father’s authority is the first to go.
To Greece then he did go, and laid down his life preparing for war. To this day the Greeks honor Lord Byron as one of
their
great patriots.
3
their
great patriots.
3
Byron knew, in his heart, that man was not worthy of such airy exaltation as the Romantics were prone to offer him. But events would make it clear how frail the idol was. Yes, man could steer a steamboat down the Hudson, or make ten nails in a factory in the same time that he used to make one. These brought good things under his control; people could eat better, live in warmer houses, and dress more cleanly. Yet the Industrial Revolution which lifted millions of people into what would have counted, a few generations before, as wealth and ease, also brought an inevitable dislocation. People crowded the cities for work. Slums grew everywhere. Children were herded into factories, to work at foul or dangerous jobs twelve hours a day. Man seemed at the mercy of the machine. War did not magically disappear once the telegraph had been invented. Man used it to send military instructions more readily.
The irony is that today, you will find the “progressives” railing against the Industrial Revolution, while force-feeding us all the same meal of “progress” and “revolution” that left us with colitis in the nineteenth century. This is the self-contradiction inherent in liberalism or progressivism: the brave new world you work for today becomes the accursed backwards world you will try to subvert tomorrow.
Meanwhile, in a self-abasement that continues apace, social evolutionists such as Herbert Spencer, the popularizer of Darwin, while hailing the “progress” of man from superstition to agnostic enlightenment, at the same time demoted him to the status of a greater ape.
4
A kind of genetic fallacy has bedeviled the West ever since. The new “science” of sociology, led by the aggressively atheistic Emile Durkheim, purported to see in man’s moral codes the fossils of ancient and forgotten ways of life. That approach continues today. The whole question of whether stealing or adultery
is
evil is evaded. It is as if a sophomoric young man should say to the young lady he wishes to seduce, “You first came to think it was wrong because your parents taught you so when you were little, and
therefore
we may do as we please.” A similar reduction of moral philosophy to psychosocial paleontology is the rule in other disciplines, too.
4
A kind of genetic fallacy has bedeviled the West ever since. The new “science” of sociology, led by the aggressively atheistic Emile Durkheim, purported to see in man’s moral codes the fossils of ancient and forgotten ways of life. That approach continues today. The whole question of whether stealing or adultery
is
evil is evaded. It is as if a sophomoric young man should say to the young lady he wishes to seduce, “You first came to think it was wrong because your parents taught you so when you were little, and
therefore
we may do as we please.” A similar reduction of moral philosophy to psychosocial paleontology is the rule in other disciplines, too.
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