The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (50 page)
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Authors: Anthony Esolen
BOOK: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides)
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Hacks, charlatans, hucksters, empty suits. We had the angry Rachel Carson, dying of cancer, cooking up statistics to show that pesticides were the cause, that pesticides would destroy all the birds on the planet. She succeeded so well that DDT was banned all over the world, condemning much of malarial Africa to poverty and underdevelopment.
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Or Margaret Sanger, hater of blacks, hater of Catholics, admirer of Hitler, portraying herself as scientific, hiding her crusade against Christianity behind the rhetoric of care for children.
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Or John Dewey, benevolent and learned, working to sever American education from its roots in the classics, to clear the way for a more “democratic” curriculum, designed to produce citizens in the new world—citizens who would be docile to their new governors.
3
Conservatives produced their share too: we could have done without the bigoted radio personality Father Coughlin, and although there were communists in the State Department in the 1950s, and although they were passing military information to the Soviets, America could have used a better man than the self-promoting Joe McCarthy to ferret them out.
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Or Margaret Sanger, hater of blacks, hater of Catholics, admirer of Hitler, portraying herself as scientific, hiding her crusade against Christianity behind the rhetoric of care for children.
2
Or John Dewey, benevolent and learned, working to sever American education from its roots in the classics, to clear the way for a more “democratic” curriculum, designed to produce citizens in the new world—citizens who would be docile to their new governors.
3
Conservatives produced their share too: we could have done without the bigoted radio personality Father Coughlin, and although there were communists in the State Department in the 1950s, and although they were passing military information to the Soviets, America could have used a better man than the self-promoting Joe McCarthy to ferret them out.
These sorts of distorted and distorting men and women might have lived in earlier centuries, but their debasing ideas never could have gained currency had Western culture not been dragged into the pragmatic pit by the hubristic promises of the Enlightenment and the Romantics.
It was a century (really, a century and a half) of technological wonders. It’s not easy to decide which invention changed life the most. The airplane? The radio? The telephone? Penicillin? Probably the microchip; possibly the automobile, which suddenly acquainted people familiar with cities far away, and estranged them from their own neighborhoods. The television wiped out local entertainment, not to mention local church clubs and fraternal organizations. It did so with very little compensation by way of great or even halfway decent art (
The Twilight Zone
, Rod Serling’s series of morality plays with overtones of Greek tragedy and the New Testament, was one exception). My dark horse candidate would be the refrigerator. It was Clarence Birdseye and his frozen vegetables, ease and not drudgery, that set women looking out of the home for things to do.
The Twilight Zone
, Rod Serling’s series of morality plays with overtones of Greek tragedy and the New Testament, was one exception). My dark horse candidate would be the refrigerator. It was Clarence Birdseye and his frozen vegetables, ease and not drudgery, that set women looking out of the home for things to do.
Inventions came so quickly that people began to assume that the near future would look nothing like the past, whose wisdom might as well be discarded. “History is bunk,” said Henry Ford. But the future, that was a different matter. Long before anybody coined the ugly term “political correctness,” it was politically correct to believe that in the future everybody was going to be healthier and richer and happier, and that our beloved institutions would have to adapt to it, or die. Even the reader who considers himself inoculated against PC brainwashing might be surprised to notice that this notion of progress is not self-evident, nor has it always been held as dogma. The Athenian in the days of Pericles or the Englishman in the days of Chaucer would have laughed at the idea that the future would inevitably be better than the present.
But by the twentieth century, the idea of “progress” is unassailable. A
Life
magazine article from 1965 gives us a typical example of the silliness: we are told that by the year 2000, we’d all be flying private planes and we’d have increased our intelligence by 50 percent.
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It was all nonsense; the flood of new, bulky, body-moving and matter-changing inventions was about to come to a halt.
Life
magazine article from 1965 gives us a typical example of the silliness: we are told that by the year 2000, we’d all be flying private planes and we’d have increased our intelligence by 50 percent.
4
It was all nonsense; the flood of new, bulky, body-moving and matter-changing inventions was about to come to a halt.
One of the features of an ideology based on false premises is that it contradicts itself. Thus, a very different strand of “political correctness” predicted the horrors of the world to come, sometimes (understandably) because of the depredations of government, or the spread of stupidity (George Orwell’s
1984
, Ray Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451
). More often, the world was going to come to misery because of a fearful explosion in population or a worldwide nuclear disaster or uncontrolled pollution (
Soylent Green
,
Logan’s Run
,
The Omega Man
,
Silent Spring
,
Cat’s Cradle
).
1984
, Ray Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451
). More often, the world was going to come to misery because of a fearful explosion in population or a worldwide nuclear disaster or uncontrolled pollution (
Soylent Green
,
Logan’s Run
,
The Omega Man
,
Silent Spring
,
Cat’s Cradle
).
What all the rosier futurists had in common was a detachment from history, and an obliviousness to the nature of man, which is not, after all, infinitely malleable. But it was assumed, without much thought, that because modern man had motorcars and medieval man had horses or his two feet, modern man must be superior, and medieval man might be ignored.
The churches got in on the act. Liberals came to preach a Jesus not much different from Buddha, a man like us in all things including ignorance and maybe sin. The true gospel lay not in Jesus’ miracles nor in his claim to be the son of God, and certainly not in his redemptive death on the Cross and his resurrection. Those latter were deemed merely mythical, a bald lie told by the diabolically cunning apostles or a bald lie believed by the rustically credulous apostles or an instance of mass hysteria undergone by the stark raving apostles. The call went forth not to repent, but to work hard for liberal political programs, ostensibly to feed and house and clothe the poor, for the Kingdom of God is of this world.
Even the plodding Roman Catholic Church, like a rustic who discovers moving pictures while everyone else has moved on to the computer, held its Second Vatican Council to herald a new day in the church’s engagement with the world. The documents of that council taught no new doctrine, and are notably conservative in many ways. They affirm Latin as the language of the Church, they call for the revival of ancient chant, they insist upon a separation of roles for laymen and clergy, and they defend the sanctity of human life from conception to death.
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But a document is a document, and a spirit is a spirit, and in a battle between the two, one should bet on the spirit every time. The “Spirit of Vatican II,” summoned from no one knows where, marched forth in triumph and leveled centuries of Catholic tradition in the name of embracing the future, when all along, in the midst of the council fathers, something was happening that would empty thousands of Catholic schools and hospitals and convents and seminaries, their buildings sold or torn down. That something, which I’ll be discussing soon, was the Sexual Revolution.
5
But a document is a document, and a spirit is a spirit, and in a battle between the two, one should bet on the spirit every time. The “Spirit of Vatican II,” summoned from no one knows where, marched forth in triumph and leveled centuries of Catholic tradition in the name of embracing the future, when all along, in the midst of the council fathers, something was happening that would empty thousands of Catholic schools and hospitals and convents and seminaries, their buildings sold or torn down. That something, which I’ll be discussing soon, was the Sexual Revolution.
Certainly one of the energizing myths of the twentieth century has been that of the limitless possibilities opened up for the ambitious, creative individual. “Be all that you can be,” sang a notorious commercial for the United States Army, using the lures of college scholarships and high-paying careers to bring in recruits. In one breathtaking slogan it contradicted the essence of an army, which can only fight if its men are not for themselves but for the platoon, and for one another.
Here we need to distinguish between one form of individualism and another: between what I’ll call the individualism of competence and the individualism of desire. The former individualism has come under suspicion, based as it is upon the traditions of family, civic duty, and hard and often unrewarding work. This kind of individualist is oriented towards the community in a powerful but easily overlooked way. He announces to his neighbors, “You may depend on me. I’m in charge of my household. My children won’t loiter about your streets, or break your windows, or burn your barns down. Should any of them do so, let me know, and I assure you we’ll pay for it and it won’t happen again. I can take care of my property. If you need a hand fixing your carburetor, I know a little about that, and I’m not bad at sawing, planing, turning, and joining, either. I never could get the feel of cement, though, and I may some time ask you to help me lay down a sidewalk. But rest easy: this house is in order.”
A Book You’re Not Supposed to ReadThe Everlasting Man
by G. K. Chesterton; Ft. Collins, CO: Ignatius Press, 1993.Chesterton’s an antidote to the scientism that would see in man nothing more than an interesting animal, and to the dull modernism that can no longer see how one Man changed the world utterly.
Now this form of individualism—manly, tied to duty, more than able to fulfill the responsibilities of ordinary domestic and civic life—has been buffeted throughout the century. Let me list a few of the ways:
1. Ordinary men and women were considered incapable of educating their children. They must leave that to the experts, and, increasingly, the experts were not teachers of their choice. Compulsory schooling spread from Bismarck’s Germany across the continent, in some places under the banner of “efficiency,” but in America, due to the influence of the tradition-despising Dewey, under the banner of “democracy.” (In the early days of our current century, naturally, a court in California ruled that parents may not educate their children without a state-issued teacher’s certificate.)
2. The home was no longer sacrosanct. “A man’s home is his castle,” went the old saying, meaning that, in that one place, no matter how humble it was, a man was fortified with traditions and laws against outsiders, including the State. But universal suffrage built a road from the home to the capital of every nation in the West: and a road takes traffic two ways. That movement should be seen against the backdrop of the social sciences, with their offspring in social work and state welfare agencies. All at once, a stranger from a government office or from a charity with close ties to the government could hold a hammer over the head of a poor family. The result is, all in all, to demote first the father and then the mother, and introduce, regardless of good intentions, dependency and chaos into every city in the western world.
3. Traditions fell into disuse. In their various ways, such diverse thinkers as Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Friedrich von Hayek,
6
and others going all the way back to Sophocles, had argued for what Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead,” the respect the living owe to their forebears, which they show not by following blindly all that their forebears have done, but by being inspired by their example, carrying on their work, and shunning any hasty departure from established wisdom. This reverence for tradition, as Hayek pointed out, allows a man to drink from the wisdom distilled from millions of past experiments. It is perfectly compatible with the individualism of competence.But almost everywhere one turns, one sees twentieth century statesmen and intelligentsia and artists treating tradition with a sneer. There are plenty of heartening exceptions—T. S. Eliot, Tolkien, Sigrid Undset, Francois Mauriac, Edward Hopper, Russell Kirk. But in music we have the defiantly antimusical atonalism of Alban Berg—and what difference does it make if simple people can’t stand it? We have incompetence in painting and sculpture masking itself as anti-representationalism, meeting a cold reception from the people (with some brilliant exceptions: Joan Miro, Paul Klee). We have the Bauhaus architecture of Le Corbusier, with his up-to-date dismissal of all that had passed for warm, human places to live and work in. A “machine” for human dwelling, that is what he said he strove to build. Newspapers, schools, “scientists” ranging out of botany and into social planning, self-styled philosophers and artists, united to cry down the old, the shopworn, the faded, and herald a new day of free love or psychic enhancement or redefined families or whatever the commercials of the day happened to hawk.
4. Machines, and the cheap materials made available by plastics and other products of industrial chemistry, turned the artisan into the rare worker for the rich, rather than a common fellow in every neighborhood.
5. The grand selling of college degrees, deflated in intellectual value, demoted the mere working man, and set him up as easy prey.
6. Religion, which once bound the individual to his community, defining his relationship to the people among whom he worked and played, recast itself as therapy. It was degraded to a personal choice, one among many, and therefore sought, if at all, as a hobby that might give solace to Mrs. Smith, even as Mrs. Jones preferred psychotherapy or Mrs. Brown preferred the massage parlor.
Marx’s FruitIn terms of having his teachings implemented, Marx, perhaps, saw far more success than any other political writer in history. His impact was, to say the least, dramatic:On body count alone,
The Communist Manifesto
could win the award for the most malicious book ever written. Now that we have more accurate calculations of corpses—perhaps upwards of 100,000,000—even the tenured Marxists are a bit squeamish about tooting the
Manifesto
as a horn of plenty.Benjamin Wiker
,
10 Books That Screwed Up the WorldBetween Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the lesser imitators, Marx’s followers freed quite a few people of their mortal chains in the twentieth century.
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