The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (46 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

BOOK: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides)
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Men wove tales of the gods to explain what the thunder was saying—and
therefore
there is no Being whose essence it is to exist. Men invented the taboo against incest to prevent strong sons from uniting to overthrow the dictatorial father, and
therefore—
well, Freud was a moralist who understood that civilization must collapse without sexual prohibitions, but there would be others around to draw the logical conclusions.
5
Even in the nineteenth century, communities of “free love” sprouted up in Europe and America, wherein godlike and enlightened men and women would concede their natural freedoms to a socialist system, and exercise their natural rights to rut like beasts.
6
Man is a god; man is a beast. Man was everything and anything, but man.
 
I’d like to enumerate four responses to the disillusionment that followed.
 
What the Industrial Revolution wrought
 
One came from the Left, and is still with us. Man the beast must be dealt with
en masse,
by smart people who can maneuver him. So Marx became the father of modern propaganda: he couldn’t run a business, and had no love for people who struggled to save a little capital to run one, but he did think he could touch the passions of people resentful that others enjoyed more than they did. “Workers of the world, unite!” he cried. “You have nothing to lose but your chains.”
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Not true. They had plenty to lose. They would lose their love for their native land. They would lose their childhood faith. They would lose the sense that they were men, not atoms in a great mass. They would lose the dignity of having been created by God to fill a particular place, though it might be a humble place. And they would have chains fixed to their every limb, as the following century would show. For though nobody outside of the academy preaches doctrinaire Marxism anymore, the fundamental assumptions of Marxism are still in place among the Left in the West. With one exception: Marx was a prude, and the Marxism of the Soviet Union did not smile upon sexual debauchery. The Marxism of the modern West has learned better. Tolerate—indeed, encourage—the “individualism” of lewdness, then collect the payoff in power, when people prove incapable of governing themselves.
 
In a sense it’s unfortunate that Marx is so reviled. It’s the Adolf Hitler Effect: the harm done by the man or his cause is so obvious and so overwhelming, we fail to notice the more widespread mischief done by people, sometimes well intended, sometimes not, who accept some of the same principles and put them in practice for supposedly benevolent ends. That too will be a legacy of this turn to the State, if not as object of worship, at least as a nearby Great Father, to heal our wounds and cleanse us of sin. “Father, we cannot do good,” say the believers of old, “so grant us your grace.” “We
can
do good,” say the half-believers of the modern age, “but, Mr. President, we can’t manage on our own.” Such liberalism becomes an atheism without the stark courage of atheists, appealing to the needy and the meddlesome. The women’s suffrage movement, whatever we may think of its justice, thus went hand in hand with the movement for Prohibition—empowering the State, and weakening the American attachment to liberty and individual responsibility.
 
A second response came from those admirable and sad men who lost their faith, but who did not rejoice over the loss. They felt keenly, as Marx did not, the vanity of a life wherein the imagination could not look to the heavens. Some, like Freud, tried to face up to the loss, resigning themselves to a civilization that simply was not going to fulfill the heart of man.
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These might well have agreed with Augustine, who famously prayed to God, “Our hearts are restless, till they rest in thee” (
Confessions
1.1), but, unlike Augustine, they could not believe in the existence of the One in whom alone man’s heart could rest. More tried to substitute for faith something else. I think of the new industry of philanthropy, or the staid English respectability of those Victorians who did not exactly believe, and did not exactly disbelieve, but knew how important it was to pretend. Best among them, perhaps, was a man who knew he did not believe, and knew he was the worse for it: the poet and essayist Matthew Arnold. The Enlightenment insistence on logical deduction had killed his faith not only in God, but in all liberal political substitutes. Here he stands at an old Swiss monastery, acknowledging both losses, and sympathizing with the monks still living and praying there:
 
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
 
The other powerless to be born,
 
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
 
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
 
Their faith, my tears, the world deride—
 
I come to shed them at their side. (
Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,
85–90)
 
 
 
 
The Factories’ Failure
 
And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this,—that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages.
John Ruskin
,
The Stones of Venice
(6.16)
 
 
Ruskin understood what Marx the economist did not: the measure of a nation is not its gross national product, nor the equitable distribution of material goods; the measure of a nation is the men it produces, and the goodness and beauty of the lives they lead. It is a deeply conservative insight.
 
 
Is there such thing as bad art?
 
Arnold would have loathed what has become of criticism in our day. Niggling little professors, carving out for themselves little cubicles of specialization, now teach “late nineteenth century American women’s literature,” or something of the sort, while possessing but a small fraction of Arnold’s literary, historical, and philosophical learning, not to mention his exact taste. That would be bad enough by itself, except that we have covered over our ignorance with incomprehensible jargon. Why not, considering the theories that prevail in academe (with deconstruction the most notorious of a flea-infested lot) deny that there is objective truth to communicate, let alone objective standards of beauty to guide us in communicating it? All is political, in the Hobbesian sense of a struggle for power. Why, one “scientific” linguistic text on my shelf even denies that men naturally have deeper voices than women do. That too has been part of a dastardly patriarchal plot. The very assumption that a text can mean anything at all is, according to the anarchist of language Jacques Derrida, “theological” or “logocentric.” When we reject it we free ourselves for “a world of signs which has no truth, no origin, no nostalgic guilt,” no transcendent meaning, and no human purpose other than the joy of diddling about with signs that point nowhere (
L’écriture et la différence
).
 
But the sad wisdom of Matthew Arnold is richer than this shallow refusal to acknowledge wisdom at all. If Arnold lost his faith in God, he at least turned to a noble substitute, high culture. We will be saved, he believes, by the purifying fire of art, granting us at least the serenity of the ancient Greeks, who saw and loved the beautiful, and loved it all the more because they knew how painfully transient was the beauty of a youth or the glory of a city. Therefore they memorialized their love in song and stone, and therefore too we ought to treasure what Arnold called the touchstones of great art. The purpose of criticism, he says—as opposed to every motive now current in our academy—is “to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the kind; and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best, without the intrusion of any other considerations whatever” (
The Function of Criticism at the Present Time
). The good we will gain from that? Man “may begin to remember that he has a mind.”
 
Note that well. We are not to judge a third-rate abolitionist tract like
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
as great art or deep political wisdom merely because we agree with its politics. We have a mind. We will not dignify, either, the bigotry of a Margaret Atwood, whose novel
The Handmaid’s Tale
slanders Christian evangelicals with whom she clearly has never broken bread, merely because she can string a sentence or two together. We have a mind. The Left, I admit, has no monopoly on bad art. But it has a near-monopoly on the principle that there is no such thing as bad art, so long as the politics are correct. A crucifix in a pail of urine? That’s deep, brother.
 
Arnold’s ideals were honest and powerful enough to have survived, coughing and trembling, to our present day, wherein we still find, here and there, someone who believes in the old-fashioned ideals of a “liberal” education, allowing the mind to climb above the skirmishes of contemporary and provincial fads, cultural, political, and economic. But the Nazis too fancied themselves patrons of the arts, nor has good taste, as fine a thing as it is, ever restrained the malice of the heart, if occasionally it does restrain the violence of the hand. No one, I think, knew that better than Arnold himself:
 
We would have inward peace,
 
Yet will not look within;
 
We would have misery cease,
 
Yet will not cease from sin. (
Empedocles on Etna,
232–235)
 
 
Which explains why he sees, in his funeral tribute to his kindly, liberal Christian father, the Rugby schoolmaster Thomas Arnold, a willingness and capacity to save others that he himself does not possess:
But thou would’st not
alone
 
Be saved, my father!
alone
 
Conquer and come to thy goal,
 
Leaving the rest in the wild.
 
We were weary, and we
 
Fearful, and we in our march
 
Fain to drop down and die.
 
Still thou turnedst, and still
 
Beckonedst the trembler, and still
 
Gavest the weary thy hand. (
Rugby Chapel,
124–33)
 
 
 
But even in Arnold’s day this attachment to high culture—to poetic touchstones, as Arnold called them, whence we could derive, as from the bee, sweetness and light
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—was fading, and the liberal cult of the Bohemian artist helped it along. If you don’t revere your fathers, you will not revere Virgil and Cicero. The history of schooling from his day to ours is a story of long retreat from the classics, from what is difficult and excellent, to the coarse and stupid and self-gratifying; from a lad in his garret poring over Gibbon, to romper-room textbooks that use pictures and slogans and political correctness and group projects and other blaring noise, like the magazines in a checkout line at the grocery, to elicit the planned response. A glance through the stacks of any local library will be prove it. I’ll have more to say about popular culture in the next chapter, but to call our television “mediocre” is to misuse that fine word. A landfill is not mediocre.
 
Nietzsche: The honest atheist
 
A third response came from those who saw through the failure not only of the cultural ideal of Arnold, but also of the political ideals of liberal quasi-Christian reformers like Gladstone. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard come to mind. These men laugh to scorn the effeminate and bland. For those who would turn the Christian faith into a comfortable social pose, or into a set of self-pleasing activities whereby the privileged “serve” the poor and continue to make as much money as they like, Kierkegaard takes us back to the dreadful mystery of Mount Moriah, where Abraham was commanded by God to sacrifice his son Isaac, and there he went in the darkness of faith. Better that there should be no “Christians” at all, that the true faith might live again, says Kierkegaard!
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