The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (52 page)
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Authors: Anthony Esolen
BOOK: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides)
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The more popular destroyers of community life and traditional faith tempted the people with the drug of license. The Great Depression and World War II interrupted a sexual revolution that had begun long before the 1960s. What with the automobile, the slow takeover of family businesses by large corporations, the increased demand for “higher” education, the pill, the replacement of local sports and entertainment with the mass product peddled over the radio and the television, not to mention the school’s insatiable fascination with matters that are not the school’s business, it is no surprise that sexual activity eluded the oversight of family, community, or church.
If we examine them in the light of our distinction between two different kinds of individualisms, and in the light of who profits and who loses by them, we can see that every important political and social development of the twentieth century enriched and empowered the State and the narcissist at the expense of the community and the free, competent, dutiful individuals that were its pillars.
Take, for example, the federal income tax. At a stroke it made everyone beholden to the empire for tax “breaks,” and the empire learned that the canniest use of the tax system was not to collect money fairly to pay for roads and railways, but to influence behavior—to bring the subjects to heel. The enormously enriched Empire also saw, in the West, that it could entangle more people by shrewdly calculated “gifts” than by threats. One American court decision, typical of the century, placed every college in the country under the imperial eye: no matter for the local culture, for the college’s traditions, for the free decisions of trustees or faculty or students. So long as a single student received one dollar, not of federal money but of federally backed student “loans,” that college must abide by sheaves of federal regulations. It was as if the student were a mere bagman, delivering the money over from the Empire to the subsidiary school’s treasury.
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Or take freedom of speech. We know what kinds of speech the American Founders were most careful to protect: the kinds that had been most curtailed in European nations, namely, religious speech and political speech. We also know, from the laws they and their contemporaries passed, that they did not regard obscenity or even profanity as worth protecting. Certainly they took no care to ensure that people could draw or paint whatever they liked and sell it on the streets. They had the common sense view that speech was speech. But by the end of the twentieth century, it was precisely political and religious speech that came under scrutiny. Who benefits from such speech, if proclaimed boldly and vigorously, in the public square? The local community does. It cannot exist without it. There is no way the people of Altoona or Ironwood can condemn violations of what they consider central to their common welfare, unless they can speak their minds and their passions without fear of reprisal. But political correctness (and the sickly sweet tyranny of a nanny state, a
tyrannanny
, wherein you can be punished not for an action but for the wrong feeling) curbed that speech. Nor could the community unite to celebrate its submission to the divine law and its gratitude for divine favor. The sometimes tricky negotiations that could unite Protestant with Catholic, and Christian with Jew, and believer with unbeliever, were snatched from the people most concerned, by a small club of overschooled judges. But if the people of Ironwood are not competent to determine what kind of prayer should be said in the locker room before a football game, to unite the players without unduly hurting the feelings of any tackle or linebacker, then the people of Ironwood are not competent to determine anything at all. Then Ironwood is a fiction, or a specter.
tyrannanny
, wherein you can be punished not for an action but for the wrong feeling) curbed that speech. Nor could the community unite to celebrate its submission to the divine law and its gratitude for divine favor. The sometimes tricky negotiations that could unite Protestant with Catholic, and Christian with Jew, and believer with unbeliever, were snatched from the people most concerned, by a small club of overschooled judges. But if the people of Ironwood are not competent to determine what kind of prayer should be said in the locker room before a football game, to unite the players without unduly hurting the feelings of any tackle or linebacker, then the people of Ironwood are not competent to determine anything at all. Then Ironwood is a fiction, or a specter.
A Book You’re Not Supposed to ReadThe Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot
by Russell Kirk; Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2001.[John] Adams himself had been a farm boy, a teacher, a lawyer, a legislator, an ambassador; he knew men and things; talk concerning a “state of nature” or “natural equality” or universal benevolence exasperated both his common sense and his New England morality. (76)A book that may change your mind—and your life. To read Kirk is to climb to the top of a high hill to survey the logic and experiences and passions of great political and ecclesiastical thinkers, statesmen who struggled with the eternal questions—many of whom have been unconscionably ignored: Brownson, Disraeli, Calhoun, J. F. Stephen, Paul Elmer More, and many others. It is a university education, in a few hundred pages.
One more example: pornography. A few cases in America, over the decades, settled the matter. A picture of a naked body is not speech; it does not function as words do; it makes no proposition that can be analyzed rationally; it asserts no truth. It “expresses” something: mainly, it expresses one’s desire to paint or shoot a picture of a naked person and make money from it. Here again the principle of a free community should come into play. If you are Hugh Hefner and you want to persuade the people of Hollidaysburg to let the drug stores carry your wares, then by all means go to them and argue that having
Play-boys
in the hands of idle teenage boys would conduce to the common good, would be just and right, would help the trolleys run on time, would concentrate the boys’ minds on their studies, or would make for excellent streamers for the Memorial Day parade. Persuade them. If you can’t persuade them, go somewhere else. But the courts swept that wholesome debate aside. All at once we have that small club of judges determining what does or does not violate some vague restrictions which they have arbitrarily established, while pretending to defer to vague “community standards.” It did not occur to the majority that such “standards” are themselves often the products of energetic and passionate debate, of commendation and condemnation and compromise.
Play-boys
in the hands of idle teenage boys would conduce to the common good, would be just and right, would help the trolleys run on time, would concentrate the boys’ minds on their studies, or would make for excellent streamers for the Memorial Day parade. Persuade them. If you can’t persuade them, go somewhere else. But the courts swept that wholesome debate aside. All at once we have that small club of judges determining what does or does not violate some vague restrictions which they have arbitrarily established, while pretending to defer to vague “community standards.” It did not occur to the majority that such “standards” are themselves often the products of energetic and passionate debate, of commendation and condemnation and compromise.
By the middle of the century, as I’ve suggested, “modern” had come to denote all things “scientific,” up-to-date, intelligent, and bold, as opposed, it was thought, to the sickly sentimentalism of such popular artists as Norman Rockwell, or such writers as Dickens. High art turned away from what a common person might at least apprehend. An unlettered old woman might kneel before Michelangelo’s
Pietà
and be moved to tears, without knowing a bit about sculpture or the Renaissance; but artists had no use for such people. The result was some very fine and unusual art, and a great lot of trash. That’s because, for all their vaunted boldness, for all their drearily homogeneous originality, the artists traded the solid judgments of history and tradition for the caprices of the academy and the self-styled intellectuals. For every T. S. Eliot—an innovator steeped in tradition
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—you had thirty or forty “famous” poets who were strictly unreadable, spared the necessity of writing grammatical sentences that could at least tell you whether a lizard was bleeding, even if you did not know what that portentous action meant or why you should care.
Pietà
and be moved to tears, without knowing a bit about sculpture or the Renaissance; but artists had no use for such people. The result was some very fine and unusual art, and a great lot of trash. That’s because, for all their vaunted boldness, for all their drearily homogeneous originality, the artists traded the solid judgments of history and tradition for the caprices of the academy and the self-styled intellectuals. For every T. S. Eliot—an innovator steeped in tradition
15
—you had thirty or forty “famous” poets who were strictly unreadable, spared the necessity of writing grammatical sentences that could at least tell you whether a lizard was bleeding, even if you did not know what that portentous action meant or why you should care.
It became more and more difficult for people to recall when one could make a name for oneself across the country by writing verses that were quite good, and obviously beautiful, and expressive of something dear to the hearts and minds of his countrymen. There would be no more John Greenleaf Whittiers, no more Longfellows.
Robert Frost is arguably the most underrated writer in English in the last two hundred years. He was dismissed by the politically correct academy on precisely the same grounds that make him good. He was dismissed because people actually read his poems; he may have been the last genuine poet of the American people. Certainly it did not help that he wrote with a clarity that belied a profound meditation upon good and evil, human loves and hate, the beauty and terror of nature, our longing for permanence and our resignation to change and death. Consider the last two lines of “The Oven-Bird,” a poem about a small ground sparrow, one of the few songsters in the dead summer. It could be a comment—Frost never bludgeons us with his Great Ideas—about the thinness of the modern world:
The question that he frames in all but words Is what to make of a diminished thing. (13–14)
Eliot could hardly do better:
This is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper. (“The Hollow Men,” 95–98)
The dead hand of academe lay upon the throat. Novels and poems and plays of the late century smelled of the faculty lounge. “Serious” novels were still read by people who thought themselves better educated than their fellows, but there could be nothing like a Dickens writing novels that ranked among the best in any language, serially, for a popular weekly magazine. Meanwhile, almost all of what people did read was unrelievedly banal: romance novels put out by formula, suspense novels with clipped or infantile sentences, and weird fantasy novels trying desperately to echo J. R. R. Tolkien, that kindly man of the Middle Ages who heard the songs of Valhalla above the drone of trams and trains. Never have books been so cheap; never has it been so easy to obtain a first-rate education in the classics of ancient and modern literature; never have so many readers walked the earth; and never has so much paper been stolen from more practical and hygienic uses.
Still, the finest writers of the century cry out for a return to the local, the earthy, the solid realities of male and female, the community-building role of tradition. Flannery O’Connor’s “You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead” is a scathing satire against the clumsy do-gooding of liberal social work, powerless against the hard realities of sin and guilt. Sigrid Undset seems to cast the entire century aside as she sets her epic novels in the Scandinavia of the Middle Ages, dramatizing, in
Kristin Lavransdatter
and
The Master of Hestviken,
the slow awakening of a human soul from barbarism and selfishness to humility and life; yet she saw, as the Nazis swelled in might on the other side of the Baltic, into just what barbarism Europe was slouching.
Kristin Lavransdatter
and
The Master of Hestviken,
the slow awakening of a human soul from barbarism and selfishness to humility and life; yet she saw, as the Nazis swelled in might on the other side of the Baltic, into just what barbarism Europe was slouching.
Graham Greene, a hater of American bravado and no conservative, did what few dabblers in Marxism dared. He actually went to the miserable Communist nations and watched the oppression. In
The Power and the Glory,
set in socialist Mexico, he shows that the might of love, which is the humility of the despised and beaten Christ, triumphs over the deadly materialism of the modern socialist state.
The Power and the Glory,
set in socialist Mexico, he shows that the might of love, which is the humility of the despised and beaten Christ, triumphs over the deadly materialism of the modern socialist state.
Malcolm Muggeridge visited the Ukraine after the
New York Times’
liar Duranty did, wrote about what he saw, and was consigned to intellectual Siberia by the elites in England. That began his long sojourn from atheism to faith. Many years later, in his old age, he would write the biography of a small Albanian nun whom the world at once admired for her charity and despised for her supposed ignorance: Mother Theresa.
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New York Times’
liar Duranty did, wrote about what he saw, and was consigned to intellectual Siberia by the elites in England. That began his long sojourn from atheism to faith. Many years later, in his old age, he would write the biography of a small Albanian nun whom the world at once admired for her charity and despised for her supposed ignorance: Mother Theresa.
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