An article published in March by Steven Wasserman, In Defense of Difficulty and subtitled A phony populism is denying Americans the joys of serious thought., begins:
It is a commonplace to bemoan the vanishing of serious criticism in our popular culture. The past, it is said, was a golden age. More than 25 years ago, Russell Jacoby put it sharply in The Last Intellectuals, when he decried the disappearance of the “public intellectual” since the heyday of the fevered debates over politics and literature that broke out among Depression-era students in the cafeteria at New York’s City College. Much had gone awry: “A public that once snapped up pamphlets by Thomas Paine or stood for hours listening to Abraham Lincoln debate Stephen Douglas hardly exists; its span of attention shrinks as its fondness for television increases.”
We should remember that public schools, as we know them, didn’t educate those colonists or the farmers of the Midwest. There were some schools set up and run by clergymen or parents or local political leaders, but much of the education took place in the home which would typically have a small library including some version of the Bible, some version (perhaps expurgated) of Shakespeare, and then perhaps a copy of Pilgrim’s Progress in some regions or some of the Latin or Greek classics in other regions or even both in some households in various regions. Lincoln was himself famous for lacking much in the way of formal education or even formally directed self-education. In a similar way, I had relatives in my grandmother’s generation who’d finished formal education in sixth grade but read serious novels and history books—I inherited copies of works by Flaubert and Balzac and Sterne from that earlier generation by way of an aunt who was a 1930 high school graduate with high tastes of that sort.
Take the prior description of American education before public school barbarism as an oversimplification which is meant to communicate the flavor of the situation. In any case, learning to read with the Bible as your text develops concentration in a way not possible with even the more rigorous schoolbooks (even McGuffey’s and other collections of short works, etc) let alone the See-Spot-Run books and… It should send shivers up the spines of educated people, or anyone caring about the minds and moral characters of exploited children, to think about Sesame Street and other more recent innovations which blazed the path more fully developed during breaks from the violence during the Superbowl.
Not all aspects of a deep, deep problem can be discussed at once and Wasserman is speaking of of a specific phenomenon: the disappearance of those who once wrote essays for the middle-brow magazines as well as the higher literary magazines, of those who once wrote introductions to serious books. He is speaking of those such as Russell Kirk who added substance and intelligence and civility to the conservative side of discussions or arguments and of those such as Lionel Trilling who played a similar role for liberals of the modern sort. The efforts of these and other intellectuals, sometimes prestigious academics who put some substantial effort into writing and speaking to a wider audience, appealed to the types of Americans who once ran through decent and good quality novels and history books and biographies at their local libraries. And maybe those self-learners and the sometimes isolated readers of more demanding works wanted, even needed, some help in achieving a wider or deeper understanding. There were substantial thinkers of various beliefs and faiths who provided at least a structure for gaining that wider understanding; there were the conservatives (such as Kirk) or liberals (such as Trilling), the Christians (such as Flannery O’Connor) or the Jews (such as Chaim Potok). Yes, sometimes it seemed almost redundant for other public intellectuals to provide basic discussions of novelists because some, such as Miss O’Connor and Rabbi Potok provided powerful insights in the conversations and actions of their works of fiction and in their nonfiction writings.
This effort to provide for a developing American intellect was, in a manner of speaking, followups or commentary to be read after or along with Charles Eliot’s Harvard Classics. In my essay, Intelligence vs. Intellect, I discuss the issue of communal mind or intellect by responding to The House of Intellect by Jacques Barzun, a very prominent public intellectual who expressed the opinion in that book that the effort to raise the level of intellect in the United States was a failure, leaving active individual minds, or “living intelligences,” which are strong but also shallow since they’re not part of a greater intellect. But the heroic effort was made by Eliot and by the likes of Kirk and Trilling and those of their quite separate groups and those of other groups, during the fifty years between Eliot’s publication of those Classics and Barzun’s pronouncement of failure. As Wasserman tells us:
In the postwar era, a vast project of cultural uplift sought to bring the best that had been thought and said to the wider public. Robert M. Hutchins of the University of Chicago and Mortimer J. Adler were among its more prominent avatars.
Those “great books” programs failed, as did the effort to nurture a middle ground, middlebrow literature—including histories and other nonfiction as well as many novels, some of which have held up well and most of which haven’t. Even a more focused, though unorganized, group which comprised what can be labeled the “Catholic literary renaissance” failed to influence their major part of the mainstream though Flannery O’Connor’s masterpiece, A Good Man is Hard to Find was produced in the heyday of the efforts of Rod Serling and others to use television for good cultural purposes. If creative storytelling of a higher sort was dying, if political and moral thinking was collapsing to policy-wonking, why would anyone expect any public demand for commentary upon past literary efforts? There is a demand for such commentary in certain Catholic and Calvinist circles and perhaps the circles of those—including some of those Catholic and Calvinist thinkers—who would revive respect for the works of the great pagan thinkers of Greece and Rome, but such demand is meaningless without some current efforts to produce serious creative efforts. Even serious efforts quickly seen as failures would allow some chance for survival of the West, even if only as a tributary into another civilization being born. As it is, even the most serious of Western thinkers are but traveling the same path to irrelevance as the most mindless of mainstream American politicians or academics. After all, that path is along a river which can no longer be fed entirely by what lies far behind.
The end result of this process, under my description and understanding or those of Wasserman, is:
We inhabit a remarkably arid cultural landscape, especially when compared with the ambitions of postwar America, ambitions which, to be sure, were often mocked by some of the country’s more prominent intellectuals.
But those ambitions, at their highest, concerned second-hand thought, commentary upon serious works in an age when serious works weren’t being produced—outside of a lot of specialist works and an occasional worthwhile novel or narrative history. Samuel Johnson was part of the production of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and of The Wealth of Nations as well as being a worthy commentator (if wrongheaded) upon Shakespeare. Russell Kirk and Lionel Trilling wrote a lot about dead white guys and a lot against living guys, white and from upcoming or reviving countries of various colors. Few of the writings or the battles are likely to be remembered by any but those who will one days study the strange detachment from reality by modern thinkers, where you can define reality as a Creation in the Christian sense or a Cosmos in the pagan sense. It is those `cosmic’ structures which are the most important and most necessary part of any tradition and, yet, the modern thinkers, even Kirk who was a devout Christian, worked on a piece—perhaps a wall or window of a once-great cathedral—and left alone the disturbing truth that the vandalism of a Rousseau or an Emerson, let alone the later vandalism of a Marx or a Dewey, was that of barbarians looting from the rubble of not just a decaying city but a decaying Creation or Cosmos. In the end, Kirk and Trilling didn’t have the vision of Samuel Johnson, let alone the nearly God-like vision of Augustine of Hippo. But Augustine was looking at Creation, however imperfect and incomplete his worldview compared to what is possible nowadays—and is, I think, at least partly realized in my writings, fiction and nonfiction. Yet, no one is interested in the major and necessary effort to rebuild our understanding of Creation, that is, to reshape our own minds to better accord with reality and to make better sense of our religious beliefs. Policy-wonking is the work of our age, even for those who seem capable of far better.
As I’ve stated above and in other writings, this discussion of literature is largely beside the point. Good books are good because of the way they engage objective reality, if sometimes by way of concentrating upon the events occurring inside one particular, contemplative human being. It’s a little unfair but also a little insightful to claim the modern literary elite of the sort discussed in this essay or in Wasserman’s article were but barbarians who were trying to preserve some of the individual masterpieces but not noticing that the West was falling not because of the attacks of philosophical or literary radicals or mindless barbarians; the West was falling because its intellectual and other leaders had not properly addressed the good work of Columbus as well as that of Newton and Sterne—had not integrated that good work into an enriched and more complete understanding of a Creation or a Cosmos. I imagine some of them had an intuition that something was wrong at that higher level, but, outside of a small number of creative writers, Flannery O’Connor being my personal favorite, they failed to even explicate that greater problem. The best most Christian critics could do was advocate the thoughts of someone, perhaps Burke, who had—at least “sort of”—been a Christian in some past century. Pagans couldn’t even do that much since it is hard to think the world will be saved if we adopt the political insights of a citizen of a Greek city-state, circa 350BC; to be sure, some advocates of Aristotle and others did write as if that were possible but that is the sort of belief only a highly (over-?) educated man could hold. More damagingly to all of us and not just to pagans, such an effort ignores the changes to human being which have taken place over the previous 2500 years, the enrichment and complexification seen very clearly in our communities and also in our individual selves if we look closely. These changes are seen more clearly by someone who has made the effort to re-understand Creation in light of modern knowledge about the empirical aspects of that Creation. And those changes affect everything, even affecting our understanding of revelation in a recursive sort of way, and certainly affecting our understanding of the literary and aesthetic aspects of human culture.
Yet, if I think Wasserman failed to penetrate to a deeper level of understanding, he does see the damage wreaked upon the modern, American mind and soul:
The ideal of serious enjoyment of what isn’t instantly understood is rare in American life. It is under constant siege. It is the object of scorn from both the left and the right. The pleasures of critical thinking ought not to be seen as belonging to the province of an elite. They are the birthright of every citizen. For such pleasures are at the very heart of literacy, without which democracy itself is dulled. More than ever, we need a defense of the Eros of difficulty.
Good commentary but I’m going to point out a problem in the midst of good stuff. By speaking of democracy in this way, Wasserman shows too clearly his limited viewpoint. There is nothing in the experiences of the past two centuries which would prove, even weakly, that democracy is even a viable moral option, let alone the clearly superior one. Wasserman’s own words indicate the problem.
I’m not saying that democracy would work only if all men and women, boys and girls, devoured good novels or informative and reliable works of history. Yet, for democracy to work, we need such efforts to be distributed to the level of not just nationwide publications of various viewpoints; we need some way for those who do learn about Iraq, perhaps by reading books from local libraries or by reading on the Internet the writings of some of the many critical thinkers who are dissenting academics or retired military personnel or diplomats, to become known and respected, to be consulted by the voters in a smalltown or a city neighborhood or those gathered at one of the churches in a farm district before everyone signs on for a war desired by some politicians and armaments manufacturers. We would need this distribution of knowledge and reliable judgment for democracy to be a morally well-ordered form of government. Some would say that this isn’t viable—if so, democracy isn’t possible under conditions where the voters would be electing men more inclined to attack Iran while not knowing, in any meaningful sense, much about the reasons to attack or not to attack. To borrow Churchill’s comment about journalists: American voters would be—in fact, are—like the courtesans (court whores) of the ages, desiring power without responsibility. Specifically, we Americans want to be able to `support’ a war without being required to find out about the real issues and without being required to think about those issues in light of knowledge and disciplined judgment. This allows us to hold parades during or after a war while feeling free to fight the war so long as it doesn’t inconvenience us or to pull the plug if it does. In any case, knowing history, or knowing someone of moral sanity who knows history, is part of what we need to be moral citizens of a morally well-ordered democracy. But we also need to have critical skills which can most readily come from the serious works, and commentary upon the serious works, which deal with such moral issues as war or a citizen’s responsibilities.
I don’t wish to reduce literature to a useful activity but rather to deny there is a true gap between utilitarian considerations and those of that triad of the good and the true and the beautiful. This claim itself can only be evaluated, provisionally, by an individual with some serious knowledge and disciplined skills in judgment or, more authoritatively, by a community with a number of individuals with overlapping but somewhat separate bodies of knowledge and skills of judgment.
And, to somewhat repeat myself, any sort of a living civilization or major part of a civilization requires the ongoing production of creative thought rather than just commentary upon existing works. If we miss either one, it would be like having a brain missing the region which puts together coherent sentences or the region which makes sense of sentences as they are constructed in our brains. Those who can utter but can’t evaluate their own utterances will produce streams of gibberish. Any evaluative capability without some ability of creative utterance would produce a silent critic. Take the previous two sentences as applying to individuals and to communities, both of which really mean individuals and communities as they respond to each other and cannot be truly separated from each other.
[In my next posting, I plan to address this issue with respect to Christians as such and not just as citizens of a once Christian civilization.]