The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (47 page)
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Authors: Anthony Esolen
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Then there is Nietzsche, who hates what he wrongly took to be the Christian cultivation of weakness, sapping what is supposed to be the strong, free, playful, cruel self-affirmation of the masters of mankind.
Reason vs. PrideQuarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then you may hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man.John Henry Newman
,
The Idea of a University
(discourse 5, part 9)Our politically correct educators, having abandoned faith, or consigned it to dusty private corners, now try to save the world, preaching “multicultural awareness” or “lifelong learning” or other such twaddle. Lash the ogre with a noodle.
For every liberal who supposes himself brave for having smiled at the quaintness of old moral precepts, Nietzsche stands ready with a challenge: to go “beyond good and evil,” to leave far behind even the pretense of obeying a moral order. Nietzsche, antichristian and loather of liberalism, rises to the pitch of eloquence when describing the milk-and-water creature that his world pronounces as “good”:
The diminution and leveling of European man constitutes
our
greatest danger, for the sight of him makes us weary.—We can see nothing today that wants to grow greater, we suspect that things will continue to go down, down, to become thinner, more good-natured, more prudent, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian—there is no doubt that man is getting “better” all the time. (
On the Genealogy of Morals
)
But the liberal wants to have sin, without the dash of cruelty; to be a careerist, consumed with ambition, yet all for “mankind”; to enjoy the power to smother, but for the good of the soul gasping for breath. Nietzsche was honest enough to face the implications of his atheism. He saw that “tolerance” was but a ruse, to salve the timid consciences of the stale, conventional, self-satisfied liberal. A certain failed artist in Austria would see through the ruse, too, and six million Jews would die for it. The liberal prides himself on setting us all free from the God of our forefathers. He never bothers to notice the beast looking over his shoulder, waiting for him to finish clearing the area. Nietzsche at least bothered to notice.
Finally, a fourth response can be heard, disunited, but running counter to the religion of material progress, of governmental centralization, of social control, and of universal mediocrity. It stresses the dignity of a man’s conscience, as with John Henry Newman,
11
or an aristocratic scorn for government in the service of gratification, as with Henry Adams.
12
It is suspicious, as was Chesterton, of both the insatiable moneymaker and the insatiable money taker.
13
It calls for piety, for rootedness in place and time, as did John Ruskin, who when he talked about craftsmanship was better than his sometimes socialist politics.
14
It remembers the beauty and goodness of man and woman, not indistinguishable, and not put out to the service of the state; that appreciation we find in the poetry of Coventry Patmore.
15
There are dozens to choose from, but I’ll end this chapter by touching upon insights from three men of letters and one great Pope: Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo XIII.
11
or an aristocratic scorn for government in the service of gratification, as with Henry Adams.
12
It is suspicious, as was Chesterton, of both the insatiable moneymaker and the insatiable money taker.
13
It calls for piety, for rootedness in place and time, as did John Ruskin, who when he talked about craftsmanship was better than his sometimes socialist politics.
14
It remembers the beauty and goodness of man and woman, not indistinguishable, and not put out to the service of the state; that appreciation we find in the poetry of Coventry Patmore.
15
There are dozens to choose from, but I’ll end this chapter by touching upon insights from three men of letters and one great Pope: Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo XIII.
At first blush it seems preposterous to consider these men together, as they appear to share so little. And a Pope, of all people? Dostoyevsky, that titanic and tortured mystic, hated the Roman Church for what he saw as its betraying true religion to political power. Murder and rape cannot move his gentle “idiot,” Prince Myshkin, to passionate indignation, but the Roman Church can.
16
Dickens, too, had nothing kind to say for Rome, associating it with unnatural repression of the human spirit.
17
When Catholics complained about their treatment in his novels, he was abashed, and wrote one of his poorest works in response,
Barnaby Rudge
. In it he stands up for the civil rights of Catholics, but also continues to criticize what he saw as their nature-denying code of regulations. Browning was downright friendly to the Church, but his less perceptive readers adopted him as the apostle of Bright Vistas Ahead and Good Liberal Progress, which he was not. And as for Pope Leo, if anyone other than Catholics paid attention to his encyclicals, I cannot find a trace of it.
16
Dickens, too, had nothing kind to say for Rome, associating it with unnatural repression of the human spirit.
17
When Catholics complained about their treatment in his novels, he was abashed, and wrote one of his poorest works in response,
Barnaby Rudge
. In it he stands up for the civil rights of Catholics, but also continues to criticize what he saw as their nature-denying code of regulations. Browning was downright friendly to the Church, but his less perceptive readers adopted him as the apostle of Bright Vistas Ahead and Good Liberal Progress, which he was not. And as for Pope Leo, if anyone other than Catholics paid attention to his encyclicals, I cannot find a trace of it.
Yet I do place them together, because we find in each what we cannot find all at once in the Romantics or in any of the other reactions to Romanticism. These things, too, we should do well to heed. They might help us clear our systems of the politically correct dysentery. Today, they are dismissed as old-fashioned, or excoriated as hateful. Not coincidentally, they are indispensible to preserving the riches we have inherited from our intellectual and spiritual ancestors. They are as follows.
The Last Refuge of Scoundrels?Breathes there the man,
with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land?
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand?Sir Walter Scott
,
The Lay of the Last Minstrel
(6.1–6)Then we sure have a lot of dead souls now. Our students are
taught
to dismiss their native land, as if cynicism were some hard-won virtue. Scott loved his native Scotland, not because he believed she should be independent of England—but simply because she was Scotland.In this, Scott rejected the Enlightenment cosmopolitan ideal laid out so simply by Thomas Paine: “My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”
If you want to be called a simpleton or a vicious scold, the quickest way is to acknowledge that
evil
really exists. In today’s relativism, the only thing that is
wrong
is to call something else
wrong
.
evil
really exists. In today’s relativism, the only thing that is
wrong
is to call something else
wrong
.
But for these four men, there is no Romantic air-brushing of the wicked, a moral slouching that still infects our art. Dickens’ villains destroy themselves by their cruelty. That cruelty may be hardhearted and power-hungry, as in Ralph Nickleby, who hangs himself in despair at the end of
Nicholas Nickleby
, or silent and malevolent, as in the lawyer Mr. Tulkinghorn, caught in his own snares (
Bleak House
), or luridly affable on the surface, as in Fagin the Viper (
Oliver Twist
).
Nicholas Nickleby
, or silent and malevolent, as in the lawyer Mr. Tulkinghorn, caught in his own snares (
Bleak House
), or luridly affable on the surface, as in Fagin the Viper (
Oliver Twist
).
Dostoyevsky, who considered Dickens the greatest writer of his century, learned from him that anatomy of evil. Unforgettable are his mawkish, debauched Fyodor Pavlovich, who rapes a poor idiot girl and sires upon her the bastard son who would grow up to be his murderer (
The Brothers Karamazov
); or the icy intellectual anarchist Peter Verkhovensky, a prescient model for all those in the twentieth century who would kill millions in the name of secular progress (
The Devils
). So adept was Browning at portraying the evil mind, that many critics have been taken in by it, concluding that the poet refused to pass judgment—not on a mad strangler of a woman (“Porphyria’s Lover”), nor on an aristocrat who snuffs the life out of every beautiful thing he owns or marries (“My Last Duchess”), nor on a tawdry killer who had set his own wife out to a whoredom she would not endure (
The Ring and the Book
). As for Pope Leo, he never bothers to prettify with verbal talcum powder socialists and nihilists and other destroyers of the human spirit, of peaceful and independent family life, and of the highest aspirations of the heart.
The Brothers Karamazov
); or the icy intellectual anarchist Peter Verkhovensky, a prescient model for all those in the twentieth century who would kill millions in the name of secular progress (
The Devils
). So adept was Browning at portraying the evil mind, that many critics have been taken in by it, concluding that the poet refused to pass judgment—not on a mad strangler of a woman (“Porphyria’s Lover”), nor on an aristocrat who snuffs the life out of every beautiful thing he owns or marries (“My Last Duchess”), nor on a tawdry killer who had set his own wife out to a whoredom she would not endure (
The Ring and the Book
). As for Pope Leo, he never bothers to prettify with verbal talcum powder socialists and nihilists and other destroyers of the human spirit, of peaceful and independent family life, and of the highest aspirations of the heart.
Dickens’ Mr. Gradgrind, calmly and respectably, rubs out the imaginations of the young children in his charge. “Teach these children facts, nothing but facts!” (
Hard Times
). We have inherited the system-making itch, with this difference: our students, fed the meringue of self-esteem, do not even know facts. Dostoyevsky ridicules “liberals” who believe that the right programs will make the world a paradise, and who then somehow forget to free their own serfs. Browning turns the progress-monger of his day into a shallow journalist, embarrassed when the Catholic bishop he is interviewing insists upon the small yet important truths that ordinary men can find. The journalist would place such commoners under control, but, says the wise bishop,
Hard Times
). We have inherited the system-making itch, with this difference: our students, fed the meringue of self-esteem, do not even know facts. Dostoyevsky ridicules “liberals” who believe that the right programs will make the world a paradise, and who then somehow forget to free their own serfs. Browning turns the progress-monger of his day into a shallow journalist, embarrassed when the Catholic bishop he is interviewing insists upon the small yet important truths that ordinary men can find. The journalist would place such commoners under control, but, says the wise bishop,
Ignorance and weakness have rights too.There needs no crucial effort to find truthIf here or there or anywhere about:We ought to turn each side, try hard and see,And if we can’t, be glad we’ve earned at leastThe right, by one laborious proof the more,To graze in peace earth’s pleasant pasturage.Men are not angels, neither are they brutes:Something we may see, all we cannot see. (
Bishop Blougram’s Apology,
857–65)
Here the bishop genially elucidates the old and forgotten virtue of modesty, which instructs us, even if we don’t believe in the sanctity of family or common human life, to leave alone what we will probably ruin by our meddling. Applied to social questions, it is the principle of
subsidiarity,
defended by Pope Leo in one encyclical after another. It is based on a humble admission that common people may know quite a few things that are hard to articulate, and that intellectual elites and politicians know much less than they think they know, regardless of how well they can articulate it.
subsidiarity,
defended by Pope Leo in one encyclical after another. It is based on a humble admission that common people may know quite a few things that are hard to articulate, and that intellectual elites and politicians know much less than they think they know, regardless of how well they can articulate it.
But that’s offensive to our leaders today.
They’ve
graduated from college, you see. It’s downright superstitious to posit a truth that a logic-chopper or a statistic-cooker has missed. And to impose limits on the power of government is to squelch progress. Where we are progressing to, the chief lemmings never say.
They’ve
graduated from college, you see. It’s downright superstitious to posit a truth that a logic-chopper or a statistic-cooker has missed. And to impose limits on the power of government is to squelch progress. Where we are progressing to, the chief lemmings never say.
“It is better to cherish virtue and humanity,” says Burke, “by leaving much to free will, even with some loss to the object, than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of a political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist” (
Reflections on the Revolution in France
). My four exemplars agreed: goodness and beauty spring from a care for the small and the local, and not from a fascination with grand political and social abstractions.
Reflections on the Revolution in France
). My four exemplars agreed: goodness and beauty spring from a care for the small and the local, and not from a fascination with grand political and social abstractions.
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