By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, April 26, 2024
Imagine you have a pair of X-ray glasses, like they used
to sell in the back of comic
books.
Now imagine they worked.
Now, imagine they worked even better than the ads
suggested. Not only could you see through that girl’s sweater, you could see
through the girl, to the wall of your classroom behind her. And the glasses
could see through that, too; into the next classroom, and the next. Through the
outer wall, and through the building next door, and the one after that until
you were seeing through the hills, forests, mountains, the curve of the earth,
the moon and the planets beyond. Your glasses could see through everything
until you saw the nothingness of space beyond.
In short, seeing through everything means seeing nothing.
Your X-ray glasses are no better than a blindfold.
This idea is not original to me. It’s one of the great
insights of C.S. Lewis, who writes in The Abolition of Man:
“You cannot go on ‘seeing through’
things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see
something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because
the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden
too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through
everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is
an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”
Lewis believed that some things are simply—or
complicatedly, but discoverably—true. There is an order, a reality,
a moral universe outside of ourselves that is true because it is real, and it
is real because it is true. “This conception in all its forms, Platonic,
Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike,” Lewis said, “I shall
henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao.’”
For the Abrahamic faiths, one way to glean an
appreciation of the Tao is to imagine how God sees us and our actions. God has
a better pair of X-ray glasses that can see through whatever He wants to see
through to see the truth—or Truth—of the matter. As I wrote in Suicide
of the West, the whole concept of “God-fearing” is wildly underappreciated.
“The notion that God is watching you even when others are not is probably the
most powerful civilizing force in all of human history. Good character is often
defined as what you do when no one is watching.” Well, if you think God is
watching and speaking to you through conscience—or through what Adam Smith
called “the impartial spectator” within us—you’re going to think twice about
your actions. Or at the least it will give you a strong incentive to think
twice.
Believing there is something outside of you, judging you
by an external ethical or moral standard, gives you a standard to think about
yourself that is outside yourself. I love Lewis’ illustration of the point: “I
myself do not enjoy the society of small children: because I speak from within
the Tao I recognize this as a defect in myself—just as a man may have to
recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind.” In just one sentence, Lewis
admits an honest truth of his own faults while illuminating a deeper truth
about the world.
What got me thinking about this is I planned to write
about the broader pedagogical wrong turn that has gotten all of these
universities in trouble. George Packer has an excellent essay in The
Atlantic on precisely that. And while focusing narrowly on
Columbia and the role of its 1968 protest makes sense for the story he wants to
tell, I think that story is merely a chapter in a much older story. Indeed, his
story of what happened in 1968 at Columbia leaves out examples that, I think,
tell the broader story of the 1960s better. The birth of the Berkeley
Free Speech movement in 1964, for instance, is arguably the wellspring
from which Columbia ’68 was born. And the Guns on Campus Crisis
at Cornell in 1968-69 is a better example of the surrender of elite
universities to intimidation and threats of violence.
But revisiting The Abolition of Man reminded
me that none of this started in the 1960s. (I shouldn’t need to be reminded of
that given that this is the arguably the central point of Suicide of
the West.) The ’60s were definitely a highwater mark in the eternal battle
between the Enlightenment and the counter-enlightenment. The campus revolts did
indeed mark the capture of these institutions by counter-enlightenment thought.
But they were nonetheless mere fronts in an older and larger war.
The tyranny of feelings.
Let’s return to The Abolition of Man, one of
the greatest books of the 20th century. It’s often forgotten
that the book begins as a critique of education. On the first page, Lewis
recounts a textbook’s treatment of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s visit to a
waterfall in which the Romantic poet overhears two tourists admiring the falls.
One calls the waterfall “pretty,” the other says it’s “sublime.” I don’t want
to get in the weeds, but the gist of Lewis’ critique of the textbook’s
treatment of this scene is that Lewis believed that the educational
establishment was teaching children that there is nothing intrinsic about the
waterfall—whether pretty or sublime: It’s just a thing, and our feelings about
it are all that matters. There is nothing outside ourselves that matters, our
feelings do all of the work. “Meaning”—aesthetic, moral, religious—is something
we bring to the otherwise meaningless reality around us. There is no Tao, just
a contest of tastes.
This is, in miniature, perhaps the central debate of
modernity. It plays itself out not just in the realm of aesthetics and art
criticism, but in virtually every sphere of intellectual, political, cultural,
and philosophical debate.
Let’s stay on art. It’s a subject I know preciously
little about, but I know enough to know that the art world has these debates
all the time. In 1961, Piero Manzoni produced 90 tins of his own feces, and
resparked a tiresome—and old—argument about whether art has to be
conventionally beautiful or whether it merely needs to express feelings about,
well, something. If it expresses these feelings cleverly
or authentically, if it makes a “statement,” “speaks truth to
power,” then it’s art.
It should be no surprise that in a world without
objective standards, “feelings” become the standard of truth and meaning. How
many campus controversies boil down to the fashionable view that you cannot
argue with feelings? Feel oppressed? You’re oppressed. Feel angry? Well,
perception is reality. Authentic feelings are invincible in any argument where
the rules are rigged to enthrone feelings as the sovereign of the realm.
Authenticity, being “true” to oneself, is one of the
central values of those on one side of the contest of tastes. Does the art
speak to one’s “personal truth”? Is it sincere? As Édouard Manet said in 1867,
“The artist does not say today, ‘Come and see faultless work,’ but ‘Come and
see sincere work.’” Inherent to this view is that the only truth worth
discovering and celebrating is the truth found within ourselves. The flip side
of this view, central to Manzoni’s cans of crap, is that the conventions and values
of the larger society are worthy of only critique or mockery. You see, Manzoni
“saw through” the inauthenticity, the nothingness, not just of the “art world”
but of the world itself.
But, again, contests of tastes are really about contests
of power. Who decides what’s art? Who decides whether something speaks truth to
power? These debates can have a Mobius strip logic to them. The ability to
declare who is “powerful”—and therefore deserving of ridicule, protest,
mockery, “truth-speaking”—is itself a form of power. The critics who praised 90
tins of excrement as art were exercising power, while prattling about speaking
truth to it.
Packer writes about white student radicals who occupied a
building at Stanford a week after the ’68 Columbia revolt:
To them, the university was not a
community dedicated to independent inquiry but a nexus of competing interest
groups where power, not ideas, ruled. They rejected the very possibility of a
disinterested pursuit of truth. In an imaginary dialogue between a student and
a professor, a member of the Stanford chapter of Students for a Democratic
Society wrote: “Rights and privacy and these kinds of freedom are
irrelevant—you old guys got to get it through your heads that to fight the
whole corrupt System POWER is the only answer.”
Nietzsche has a similar project. He arguably gave birth
to nihilism, but he was not a nihilist per se. He believed that the “death” of
God left a void, a nothingness, in His wake. And the void required men of will
to fill it with something else. And what is will but feelings put into action?
These great men were akin to artists, creative supermen whose artistic medium
was civilization itself.
Nietzsche’s project, however, was a great act of
philosophical question-begging, for it assumed there was no Tao in the first
place. The “Nietzschean ethic can be accepted only if we are ready to scrap
traditional morals as a mere error and then to put ourselves in a position
where we can find no ground for any value judgements at all,” Lewis writes. “It
is the difference between a man who says to us: ‘You like your vegetables
moderately fresh; why not grow your own and have them perfectly fresh?’ and a
man who says, ‘Throw away that loaf and try eating bricks and centipedes
instead.”
This idea that reality—or human nature, or society—is a
canvas upon which you can draw whatever you like, or a lump of clay you can
shape however you please, wasn’t just the stuff of artists and philosophers.
Indeed, Nietzsche was a kind of Typhoid Mary who carried the contagion into the
empirical realm. He was a forerunner of philosophical pragmatism, which set
about to downgrade the definition of truth to a kind of practical tool. The
pragmatist’s razor, Louis Menand’s phrase, was wielded by pragmatists like John
Dewey “to slice to pieces what he regarded as the paper problems of traditional
metaphysics.” This of course begs another question, that metaphysics—the
science of the Tao—is an irrelevancy in the first place.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, the legendary Supreme Court
justice, was a fellow traveler of the pragmatists and one of the great
champions of seeing through everything to the point where everything was just a
contest of power in a Tao-less universe of uncaring physical forces. “I can’t
help preferring champagne to ditch water—I doubt if the universe does.”
For Holmes and other pragmatists, the Tao was a fantasy, a myth agreed upon, to
get through the long dark night of a meaningless universe.
In a letter to the pragmatic philosopher William James,
Holmes admitted “all I mean by truth is what I can’t help thinking [is true].”
In another letter to a friend, he said, “All I mean by truth is the path I have
to travel.” In a letter to the historian Lewis Einstein, he asserted that “Man
is like any other organism, shaping himself to his environment so wholly that
after he has taken the shape if you try to change it you alter his life.” He
added, “All of which is all right and fully justifies us in doing what we can’t
help doing and trying to make the world into the kind of world that we think we
should like; but it hardly warrants our talking much about absolute truth.”
While James talked about the cash value of truth, Holmes believed that truth
was whatever one was willing to fight for. “You respect the rights of man—,” he
wrote to the socialist intellectual Harold Laski. “I don’t, except those things
a given crowd will fight for—which vary from religion to the price of a glass
of beer. I also would fight for some things—but instead of saying that they
ought to be I merely say they are part of the kind of world that I like—or
should like.”
In short, truth was merely the laurel won by men fighting
in a contest of will.
This view runs through the history of the West like a
cold river cutting a path through the liberal and moral breakwaters of our
civilization. This was the way Carl Schmitt, the admittedly brilliant “crown
jurist” of the Third Reich. For Schmitt, quite popular in some corners of the
left for a long time and newly popular in some corners of the illiberal right,
everything was about power.
“The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the
exception proves everything. In the exception the power of real life breaks
through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.” For
Schmitt, the whole concept of “humanity” is nothing more than a liberal
democratic “ideological instrument of imperialist expansion.” All politics—all
of it—is nothing more than a contest of power between us and them, friend and
enemy. “The specific political distinction to which political actions and
motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”
It was this worldview that inspired Julien Benda to write
his wonderful, if rambly, Treason of the Intellectuals. Everywhere
Benda looked, he saw intellectuals reducing all of politics to contests of will
and power. “Our age,” he famously observed, “is indeed the age of the
intellectual organization of political hatreds.” More to the point, Benda
argued that the intellectuals
“teach man that his desires are
moral insofar as they tend to secure his existence at the expense of an
environment which disputes it. In particular they teach him that his species is
sacred insofar as it is able to assert its existence at the expense of the
surrounding world. In other words, the old morality told Man that he is divine
to the extent that he becomes one with the universe; the new morality tells him
that he is divine to the extent that he is in opposition to it. The former
exhorted him not to set himself in Nature “like an empire within an empire”;
the latter exhorts him to say with the fallen angels of Holy Writ, “We desire
now to feel conscious of ourselves in ourselves, and not in God.” The former,
like the master of the Contemplations, said: “Believe, but not in ourselves”;
the latter replies with Nietzsche and Maurras: “Believe, and believe in
ourselves, only ourselves.”
Socrates believed in the Tao; his amoralist critic
Callicles scoffed at the idea that nature favors anything other than strength,
believing that strength makes truth, might makes right. “The educators of the
human mind now take sides with Callicles against Socrates,” Benda observed, “a
revolution which I dare to say seems to me more important than all political
upheavals.” The intellectuals, as a class, reject the pursuit of knowledge as a
good unto itself. Nietzsche, Sorel, and the other lodestars of his age, scorn
“the man of study” in an unapologetic indulgence of the “desire to abase the
values of knowledge before the values of action.” This corruption of the
intellectual pursuit of truth, beauty, knowledge, the Tao, did not stay in the
universities and salons, it spilled out into the newspapers and parliaments,
thanks to scribbler-activist intellectuals, many largely forgotten. (Who talks
of Georges Sorel, Charles Peguy, Richard Ely, EA Ross, Charles Maurras or
Gabriele D’Annunzio, and their like anymore?)
But some—with names like Lenin, Trotsky, and
Mussolini—managed to write their names more indelibly in the history books with
blood. But they all moved whole nations toward the abattoir. “In all the great
States today,” Benda wrote, “I observe that not only the world of industry and
big business but a considerable number of small tradesmen, small bourgeois,
doctors, lawyers, and even writers and artists, and working men too, feel that
for the sake of the prosperity of their own occupations it is essential for
them to belong to a powerful group which can make itself feared.”
I find this stuff fascinating and could go on playing
connect the dots, I fear at book length, along these lines. But I should try to
bring this in for a landing. The intellectuals of the 1960s, named-checked in
the current bout of introspection—Marcuse, Foucault, Fanon, et al—were not
nearly so original or creative as their fans claim. They merely took the old
Nietzschean schtick and updated it for the “post-colonial age.” Their
arguments, stripped of jargon and agenda, featured the same glorification of will
and strength, the same rebellion against rules and systems, the same insistence
that politics was merely a contest of power and control, the same project of
organizing hatred. These thinkers “saw through” everything that is good and
just—not perfect, but better than all of the alternatives—about liberal
institutions and principles and just saw “power.” And what they wanted was
power. The obsession with power flattens all distinctions, between power justly
and unjustly applied, between tolerance and intolerance, between good and evil.
In contests of power, the only prize is the seizure of it. And such contests
are always zero-sum.
The pro-Hamas mobs, like Hamas, believe that compromise
is surrender to oppression. There can be no two-state solution, no
acknowledgement that Hamas is evil because, after all, evil is a Tao-word. The
only acceptable use of the word is as a political weapon, to justify the use of
objectively evil means toward desired ends. They cannot admit that Israel hews
to a moral standard, however imperfectly, in its conduct of a defensive
war, because that would not only concede that Hamas doesn’t hew to any standards
at all, it would concede that such (Western, Judeo-Christian) standards
meaningfully exist or have any legitimacy. They prefer to “see through”
Israel’s actions and focus on the power alone, ignoring or denying Israel’s
attempt to use it responsibly. Hamas, however, does indeed have a corrupt
Islamist conception of the Tao, they do believe they are doing God’s will. But
their nihilist friends in the West do not. All they understand is the
Schmittian friend-enemy vision of power. And since Hamas is a friend, its
enemies are their enemies. This is the only way to explain the darkly hilarious
effusion of groups like “Queers for Palestine.”
Packer writes:
“The ideas of one generation become
the instincts of the next,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. Ideas born in the ’60s,
subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies,
and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve
become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group
identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and
oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as
free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are
violence. There’s nothing to debate.
I agree with Packer, of course. But none of this started
in ’68. And it won’t end in ’24. This is a constant battle. Because the real
battle line runs through the human heart. C.S. Lewis believed that educators
should illuminate the Tao. But Lewis lamented that the educators had ceased to
be illuminators of the good, preferring the power to be “conditioners” of
whatever they deemed to be the good. “The Conditioners, then, are to choose
what kind of artificial Tao they will, for their own good reasons, produce in
the Human race.”
The good news is that such efforts fail. The crooked
timber of humanity is not a medium for artists to make whatever they want. The
bad news is that the effort to create new men—Soviet Man, Aryan Man, Woke
Person, whatever—often creates deformities and “men without chests.” And men
without chests see no reason to value anything other than power. I’ll give the
last word to Lewis.
“We make men without chests and
expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to
find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
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