The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (48 page)
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Authors: Anthony Esolen
BOOK: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides)
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Dickens is savage in his satire against the liberal penchant for “helping” a faraway and disincarnate Mankind. In
Bleak House,
the tireless solicitor of charitable contributions, Mrs. Jellyby, pesters her fellow citizens to pledge money to assist the natives of Borioboola-Gha, a place as wild as its name, somewhere in the heart of Africa. What are the citizens paying for, you may ask? Why, “the general cultivation of the coffee berry—
and
the natives—and the happy settlement, on the banks of the African rivers, of our superabundant home population.” It’s often easier to see evil in its inception, when it slinks naked and snarling from the mind of man, than afterwards, when we’ve grown used to it and dressed it up in finery. In the mind of Mrs. Jellyby, the natives, whom she pretends to wish to raise to her exalted position, are objects of mass management, to be “cultivated,” like coffee beans. We also see that her charity is tangled up with imperial motives. Let’s make Borioboola-Gha gratefully tributary to England and her English émigrés, who will be doing all the real cultivating, both of coffee beans and of Borioboolans.
Bleak House,
the tireless solicitor of charitable contributions, Mrs. Jellyby, pesters her fellow citizens to pledge money to assist the natives of Borioboola-Gha, a place as wild as its name, somewhere in the heart of Africa. What are the citizens paying for, you may ask? Why, “the general cultivation of the coffee berry—
and
the natives—and the happy settlement, on the banks of the African rivers, of our superabundant home population.” It’s often easier to see evil in its inception, when it slinks naked and snarling from the mind of man, than afterwards, when we’ve grown used to it and dressed it up in finery. In the mind of Mrs. Jellyby, the natives, whom she pretends to wish to raise to her exalted position, are objects of mass management, to be “cultivated,” like coffee beans. We also see that her charity is tangled up with imperial motives. Let’s make Borioboola-Gha gratefully tributary to England and her English émigrés, who will be doing all the real cultivating, both of coffee beans and of Borioboolans.
And more: the scheme will
remove a surplus.
Not only does Mrs. Jellyby want the Borioboolans to stay in Africa; she’d be happy to send extra Englishmen there, too. Dickens calls it “telescopic philanthropy.” That pattern serves well for our intra-imperialists in the social service and poverty industry. Send surplus college graduates, many of them with the temperament of Mrs. Jellyby, into the Borioboolan ghettos, or rather into nice apartments not too near the ghettos, to tell the people there what social coffee beans they need and how to plant them.
remove a surplus.
Not only does Mrs. Jellyby want the Borioboolans to stay in Africa; she’d be happy to send extra Englishmen there, too. Dickens calls it “telescopic philanthropy.” That pattern serves well for our intra-imperialists in the social service and poverty industry. Send surplus college graduates, many of them with the temperament of Mrs. Jellyby, into the Borioboolan ghettos, or rather into nice apartments not too near the ghettos, to tell the people there what social coffee beans they need and how to plant them.
What’s lacking is a direct, incarnate confrontation of one human being with another. People are patronized, reduced to “cases,” handled according to rule. It doesn’t then matter if the procedures are a pointless lesson in Biblical brimstone, favored by some social reformers before our time, or an equally pointless lesson in how to fill out a welfare form and qualify for food stamps. The results are at best temporary, and the victims of the assistance are rendered moral children or idiots. Dickens shows us instead what is to be done, not by giving us an alternate Program, but by embodying charity in the person of his most politically incorrect heroine, Esther Summerson. She reveals, by her diligence and patience and winsome cheer, that in its truest sense an
economy
really is the
law of the household.
Governments and philanthropists fail where Esther succeeds, because she dispenses with the telescope. She sees wickedness and despair and wretchedness for what they are.
economy
really is the
law of the household.
Governments and philanthropists fail where Esther succeeds, because she dispenses with the telescope. She sees wickedness and despair and wretchedness for what they are.
When Esther enters a hovel of brickmakers, whose men have degraded themselves beneath the beast, she gives us no nostrums about the inherent goodness of man, nor does she preach to people who cannot yet hear the preaching. “Have I read the little book wot you left?” snorts one of them at the prim preachstress, Mrs. Pardiggle, whom Esther has been cajoled into accompanying on her “rounds.” “No, I an’t read the little book wot you left. There an’t nobody here as knows how to read it; and if there wos, it wouldn’t be suitable to me. It’s a book fit for a babby, and I’m not a babby.” That does not stop Mrs. Pardiggle from plying her shrewish trade, degrading the angry and violent men. But when Esther and her cousin Ada meet a woman with a little child at the moment of its death, we see what human beings can do—neither gods nor beasts, nor abstractions in a mass, nor economic counters, but human beings:
Such compassion, such gentleness, as that with which [Ada] bent down weeping, and put her hand upon the mother’s, might have softened any mother’s heart that ever beat. The woman at first gazed at her in astonishment, and then burst into tears.Presently I took the light burden from her lap; did what I could to make the baby’s rest the prettier and gentler; laid it on a shelf, an covered it with my own handkerchief. We tried to comfort the mother, and we whispered to her what Our Saviour said of children. She answered nothing, but sat weeping—weeping very much.
Yes, the action is small. It won’t feed millions, or bring civilization to Borioboola-Gha. It does more: it revives a suffering human soul. So too Ebenezer Scrooge, born again as a child on Christmas Day, does not shovel his amassed wealth into vast Programs, but gives a check to two men to buy “common necessaries” for the poor, and then sends a turkey to the home of his clerk, Bob Cratchit. He will need no telescope for his love. Simply seeing before him the crippled Tiny Tim will do.
Dostoyevsky portrays a similar dynamic in
The Brothers Karamazov.
The self-serving, ambitious, shallow young monk Rakitin wants to rouse a revolution against the rich not because he loves the poor, but because he envies the rich their power.
18
Replace, for our age, “Rakitin” with the name of any prominent feminist, “rich” with “men,” and “poor” with women, and change the pronouns and adjectives accordingly. The liberal Miusov despises the monks in the monastery adjacent to his land and uses all the legal means he can to harass them, utterly unaware of how much material assistance and spiritual consolation they provide for the poor serfs whose cause he pretends to uphold.
19
Replace “Miusov” with the name of a contemporary city councilor or mayor, and “monastery” with “church” or “Boy Scouts.”
The Brothers Karamazov.
The self-serving, ambitious, shallow young monk Rakitin wants to rouse a revolution against the rich not because he loves the poor, but because he envies the rich their power.
18
Replace, for our age, “Rakitin” with the name of any prominent feminist, “rich” with “men,” and “poor” with women, and change the pronouns and adjectives accordingly. The liberal Miusov despises the monks in the monastery adjacent to his land and uses all the legal means he can to harass them, utterly unaware of how much material assistance and spiritual consolation they provide for the poor serfs whose cause he pretends to uphold.
19
Replace “Miusov” with the name of a contemporary city councilor or mayor, and “monastery” with “church” or “Boy Scouts.”
Two Roads Diverged, and ...The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.William Blake
,
The Marriage of Heaven and HellThere will be a pretty clear path from William Blake and the Romantics to those who preached free love in the 1960s (Herbert Marcuse, for instance, in
Eros and Culture
). If excess and gratified desire make for wisdom, the generation of Woodstock must be the wisest the world has ever seen. If they haven’t produced much great art, or penetrating philosophy, or far-seeing statesmanship, well, that’s no evidence against their wisdom. It’s just that they have been too busy—gratifying themselves.Still it’s refreshing to hear Blake cry out
against
the safe and acceptable. We preach hedonism, but without the thrill of the bold and dangerous.
Ivan Karamazov, a young man of noble ideals and powerful intellect, sees through the phony revolutionary and the phony liberal. But he too is plagued by the telescope. He finds it easy, he says, to love humanity. It’s the neighbor he can’t stand—the neighbor whom Christ commanded his disciples to love, and not a disincarnate and conveniently abstract Mankind. So Ivan, picking at the sores of his soul, collects newspaper clippings describing atrocities committed against innocent children, and declares that, though he can bring himself to believe in God, he cannot believe in the world that God has made, a world in which one little girl, beaten and locked in a privy by her mother and father, would weep out her prayers to Jesus.
20
Ivan’s is a powerful testimony; yet, for all that, we never see him in the company of children, though there are plenty of them nearby, suffering. That work of mercy is left to his brother, the childlike monk Alyosha, too simple to be a political climber, too honest to pretend to love where he hates, and too loving to insulate himself from the sight and smell of a drunken soldier, his angry, unpleasant, and heartbroken family, and his dying son.
21
20
Ivan’s is a powerful testimony; yet, for all that, we never see him in the company of children, though there are plenty of them nearby, suffering. That work of mercy is left to his brother, the childlike monk Alyosha, too simple to be a political climber, too honest to pretend to love where he hates, and too loving to insulate himself from the sight and smell of a drunken soldier, his angry, unpleasant, and heartbroken family, and his dying son.
21
It is precisely Dostoyevsky’s point, as against the Romantics, the liberals, and the radical revolutionaries, that one man cannot really help another unless the encounter is embodied, nearby, and grounded in a faith that breathes life into his charity and unites him, soul to soul, with his fellow creature. If Jesus is correct, then agnostic or merely material liberalism is not only wrong, it is deadeningly wrong. That is, it may be that we can love our neighbors as ourselves only by seeing both our neighbors and ourselves as loved by God, whom we adore and to whom we pray in humility. If we do not, then the neighbor at best becomes an annoyance to be dealt with humanely, and preferably not in a way that will require a mop for our floors. To put it another way: bureaucratic charity, secular and utterly impersonal, is not charity at all, but a mercenary exchange, without the honesty of street corners and lipstick.
Browning in his turn gives the lie to the adulators of classicism, from the genial Arnold to the fiery Nietzsche. He was a determinedly bumptious poet, eschewing the clean and polished line for masculine vigor; a regular right cross of a metricist. Along with that ruggedness comes a healthy respect for artistic order and the pure philosophical reason that accompanies it, and an even healthier recognition that neither can provide the fullness of knowledge or the joy we long for in life. So, for instance, in his poem “Cleon,” the speaker, a Greek philosopher of the first century writing a letter in response to his philosophical king, expresses a hunger for love and truth that his own philosophy cannot satisfy:
Indeed, to know is something, and to proveHow all this beauty might be enjoyed, is more:But knowing naught, to enjoy is something too.Yon rower, with the moulded muscles there,Lowering the sail, is nearer it than I. (291–95)
The older he grows, the more he learns, and the more painfully he feels the contrast between the hunger and the few palsied days that remain to him. Cleon is, in essence, the heroic agnostic Victorian, yet the answer to his dilemma proves too lowly, too scandalously small and bodily, for him to grasp. He ends his letter to the king with an afterthought, a dismissal of one “Paulus,” a “mere barbarian Jew”:
Thou wrongest our philosophy, O king,In stooping to inquire of such an one,As if his answer could impose at all!He writeth, doth he? well, and he may write.Oh, the Jew findeth scholars! certain slavesWho touched on this same isle, preached him and Christ;And (as I gathered from a bystander)Their doctrine could be held by no sane man. (346–53)
Browning, like Dickens and Dostoyevsky, sees what the politics of the twentieth century will deny, even as it denies also the high and somber classicism of Matthew Arnold: that a soul in love, learned or not, might be granted to see truths that the great bustlers in the world miss cleanly. For now we have populism and demagoguery, but no thriving popular culture; we have petty rules passed down from on high to lend proper hygiene to our financial and familial affairs, but neither the cleanliness of classical form nor the fire-etched plainness of the Ten Commandments. What is lost is the simply human, and, as Christians recognized, once we lose that, we lose our clearest signs of God. Says Browning’s greatest heroine as she lies dying:
Through such souls aloneGod stooping shows sufficient of His lightFor us i’ the dark to rise by. And I rise. (
The Ring and the Book,
“Pompilia,” 1826–28)
At stake in all these issues is man’s ability to apprehend, even in his humble duties of work and family, what Dante had named as the power that holds all the universe in being, “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”
22
We are playing for keeps here. The poet Shelley sang of love, but could never condescend to confine himself to a single woman. He was too idealistic for that. By the end of the century, Bertrand Russell and his fellows at university will be preaching the Higher Sodomy
23
—and why not, if our thoughts and desires are merely animal phenomena? And, if we strip away the residue of the old world-view inherited from Christendom and from classical Greece and Rome, what else did nineteenth century man have to boast of, that was not finally merely a comfort to his animal nature? Browning saw the alternatives clearly. We’re either brutes in a cold, dead, meaningless universe, in which case any talk of goodness or progress or enlightenment is arrant sentimentality, or we are men made by and for Love. So he writes, in the voice of a Persian physician who has met someone with a strange medical history, a fellow named Lazarus:
22
We are playing for keeps here. The poet Shelley sang of love, but could never condescend to confine himself to a single woman. He was too idealistic for that. By the end of the century, Bertrand Russell and his fellows at university will be preaching the Higher Sodomy
23
—and why not, if our thoughts and desires are merely animal phenomena? And, if we strip away the residue of the old world-view inherited from Christendom and from classical Greece and Rome, what else did nineteenth century man have to boast of, that was not finally merely a comfort to his animal nature? Browning saw the alternatives clearly. We’re either brutes in a cold, dead, meaningless universe, in which case any talk of goodness or progress or enlightenment is arrant sentimentality, or we are men made by and for Love. So he writes, in the voice of a Persian physician who has met someone with a strange medical history, a fellow named Lazarus:
The very God! Think, Abib; does thou think?So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too—So, through the thunder comes a human voiceSaying, “O heart I made, a heart beats here!Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!—Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine,But love I gave thee, with myself to love,And thou must love me who have died for thee!”The madman saith He said so: it is strange. (“An Epistle of Karshish,” 304–12)
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