The Oracle of New Haven

In an interesting recent interview (posted here) passed along the today by a good friend, the Yale English professor and celebrated intellectual Harold Bloom speaks on a variety topics, primarily the five books of literary criticism that have most shaped his own work in that field. Along the way he mentions two that would be at the top of any humanist's list--Ernst Robert Curtius' magisterial European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages and M. H. Abrams' essential study of Romantic literature and aesthetics, The Mirror and the Lamp. Not only does Bloom rightly praise these books, but he does so in a thoughtful, insightful way.

Then, unfortunately, Bloom turns to politics, where his vision seems far dimmer. In a completely gratuitous observation, Bloom arguing for the importance of an educated populace, says that Tea Party is an example of the dangers posed to democracy by an essentially uneducated rabble. Going still further, Bloom insists that the Tea Party resembles the early supporters of Hitler who brought him to power and then ... well, we all know what they ended up being responsible for. For several reasons, this comparison is laughable. Indeed, in the area of mob psychology, one would do better to read Ann Coulter's Demonic, which explores that topic in some (albeit polemical) depth, than the half-baked musings of Harold Bloom.

First, as many have pointed out--chief among them Mark Steyn--it is rather remarkable that America's mob, if we can take the Tea Party as such, is not a mob that clamors for power or its own benefit; instead of demanding that the government spend more to make their lives easier, Tea Partyers plead with the government not to spend money unnecessarily, not to provide the student loans, medical benefits, inexpensive pension plans, subsidized cars, and government sinecures that might well improve their lives and their families' over the near term. Agree with them or not, one has to admire a political movement that takes as its chief aim that the government not grow larger, not control more of its citizens' lives, when it might be taking to the streets demanding government largesse as so many other groups in our recent history have done. As Steyn points out, we have recently witnessed in England, France, and Greece large destructive mobs angrily denouncing the mildest of government austerity measures, burning buildings, beating spectators, looting shops, and spreading fear and panic among their fellow citizens. These things the Tea Partyers have not done: indeed, last summer, when the Democrats in Congress and the mainstream media tried desperately to prove that the Tea Partyers were unruly and dangerous demonstrators hurling racial epithets, they found not a shred of evidence on behalf of their claims. In a world awash with cell-phone photography instantly transmissible around the globe, no one anywhere was able to provide any evidence at all to show that the Tea Party was violent, racist, intemperate, or anything other than a peaceful, if vocal, group expressing to the world their deep conviction that America is on the brink of financial ruin. A thesis, by the way, for which one can easily find evidence far more abundant than one can for the theory that the Tea Party is destructive. (One staggering statistic, relayed early on in Mark Steyn's new book, After America: at current levels of spending, the United States will by 2020 require 20% of global GDP simply to finance American government debt. To object--even strenuously--to such ruinous policies is hardly destructive: on the contrary, it is the single most constructive thing the average American citizen can do to save the country from permanent financial collapse.)

One might point out further that if he had wanted an example of a truly destructive, thoroughly uneducated mob, Bloom might have looked toward the flash mobs wilding through the Wisconsin State Fair or the streets of Philadelphia. They are truly destructive, since their activity offers nothing beneficial and seems the definition of nihilism in action, and one suspects that the folk that comprise these gangs are far less educated even than the Tea Party.

And, finally, there is the matter of education itself that Bloom raises. It is in fact true that many of Hitler's violent early followers were indeed restless, uneducated thugs, frustrated with their inability to get ahead economically. It is equally true, however, as George Steiner frequently points out, that the society that not only allowed Hitler to come to power but which in large part abetted his ascent was the most well educated society in the world to its time: a society who humanistic education perhaps remains unmatched even in our own day. It was, after all, Martin Heidegger who spoke so lovingly of the "fair hand" of "Der Fuhrer." As Clive James charateristically put it in a review of Primo Levi's Drowned and the Saved, "It is undoubtedly true that some people who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But some people who can't remember the past aren't. More disturbingly, many of those who can remember the past are condemned to repeat it anyway. Plenty of people who remembered the past were sent to die in the extermination camps. Their knowledge availed them nothing, because events were out of their control. One of the unfortunate side effects of studying German culture up to 1933, and the even richer Austrian culture up to 1938, is the depression induced by the gradual discovery of just how cultivated the two main German-speaking countries were. It didn't help a bit. The idea that the widespread study of history among its intellectual elite will make a nation-state behave better is a pious wish. Whether in the household or in the school playground, ethics are transmitted at a far more basic level than that of learning, which must be pursued for its own sake: learning is not utilitarian, even when--especially when--we most fervently want it to be."

And there's the rub. When Burke spoke of an untutored populace as dangerous for a free society, he didn't mean untutored in academic subjects. (If that had been his point, then the more we gather knowledge over the centuries, the better our governments would be, which is not exactly the type of ameliorative view of history that a conservative like Burke would embrace. If it were true, then we would be far wiser than Lincoln, to say nothing of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, and Jay.) No, by "untutored," Burke meant untutored in the virtues. One doesn't need to be a polymath to know that it's better to have a hard-working, honest, caring neighbor than one who memorizes the encyclopedia; a knowledge of classical Greek is fine, but a knowledge of one's limitations and the willingness to mend them is far more profitable to the average citizen and his neighbors. Or, as John McCain would say, character--not sheer education--is destiny.

In his interview, Bloom makes some wonderful points about literature and its proper study. But in speaking about politics, the dauntingly learned Bloom shows that he lacks not nowledge but wisdom. He might have looked to Noam Chomsky as a cautionary tale. Chomsky is a linguistic theorist of unmatched brilliance, but when it comes to politics, he is simply about as wrong as it is possible for a person to be. In the classroom, we will learn from Chomsky and Bloom. Outside the classroom, on the streets of the Republic, where all, no matter what our intellectual achievements, are equal, we will be guided by the wisdom placed within us by God and, if we have character, treasured--a wisdom honed by humility and experience.

Culture and Politics

In an essay reprinted in a wonderful collection, published in the Coleccion Austral and entitled Mi Religion y Otros Ensayos Breves, Miguel de Unamuno, the remarkable Spanish philospher of the turn of the twentieth century, offers a thought-provoking meditation on the relative value of politics and culture entitled, appropriately enough, "Politica y cultura." The essay argues that the region of Catalonia in the Spain of Unamuno's day was doomed to remain backward, undeveloped, and left behind by the march of progress because the inhabitants of the region devoted all their passion to politics and the fight for power and left little for culture, broadly defined. Indeed, he goes so far as to say that when a society is overly proccupied with politics, its culture stagnates, much to the detriment of its inhabitants.

To be sure he is right: in the end, culture--if we can define it as being, roughly, the expression of a society's relationship to the spiritual and eternal--is far more important than politics, which at best is but one aspect of culture. Nevertheless, much though TMH reveres Unamuno, we must take issue with him here, since we think that he overstates the case. Yes, politics is usually ephemeral, and, yes, it ought to be rooted more firmly, more thoughtfully, in culture. To be sure, a cultured discussion of politics is going to be one more amenable to compromise and to the promotion of civility, if not unity, which often is very desirable. And yet, when one is faced, as one frequently is in politics, with forces that, consciously or not, might destroy the order one is defending, then one may need to leave the museum, take up the mace, and fight in defense of that political system that provides the freedom that makes culture possible.

For it is a fact that throughout history, the highest and most noteworthy cultures, those have spoken with the most reverberate voices, are those which possessed political freedom, however imperfect those freedoms may appear today. The legacy of Athenian culture, for example, far suprasses that of the authoritarian city-state of Sparta; the culture of Republican Rome is far more valuable to subsequent history than the culture of the Empire after it was firmly entrenched. (That the Golden Age Latin writers wrote under the very early Empire is beside the point: Vergil, Horace, and Livy were all educated as free men, and if they wrote under Augustus, they may well have believed that Augustus was not an absolute ruler and that the Empire of their day shared power with the ancient Republican institution of the Senate. So argued Theodore Mommsen, perhaps the greatest modern historian of Rome.) To move to much more recent times, it is the modernism of Western Europe in the twentieth century that proved so vital: though many still read Joyce, who now reads any Soviet authors? Who, for anything other than historical reasons, watches the operas of Madame Mao?

But to ensure the freedom that sparks such creativity, man must always be willing to enter the political trenches. If the twentieth century has shown us anything, it is that freedom is not guranteed--it can be preserved only with care and with vigorous defense against those who think that liberty is a zero-sum game in the sense that they believe that they must take your freedom or mine in order to enjoy their own. If Alain Finkielkraut is correct that "Barbarism," to use Clive James' translation, "is not the prehistory of humanity but the faithful shadow that accompanies its every step," then one must always work vigorously--and in a democracy, that means politically--to ensure that society will successfully overcome the temptation to barbarism. Unfortunately, that means that sometimes we must dirty our hands and not just with the dust of fine old books.

And this is not to say anything that the Renaissance didn't know. In some ways, as Anthony Grafton and others have argued, the Holy Grail of the feverish cultural accomplishments of the Renaissance was the search for the perfect polity. The great scholars of the Renaissance studied Cicero and Demosthenes, Livy and Thucydides, in large part to learn from them about what made the best regime in which a man could realize his full spiritual potential, could be most free. This is the spirit of the deeply cultured Edmund Burke, the great English Parliamentarian of the late eighteenth century, who thought that important as culture was, the political life was necessary as well in order to ensure the peace and stability necessary for culture to flourish. And it is certainly the perspective of, say, the Federalist Papers, which everywhere look with a cultured eye to Roman history for lessons that shaped their view of how best to build our new Republican government. In the nation that they so carefully constructed culture has indeed flourished, but it has done so because, not in spite of, the Founders' strenuous efforts in peace and war.

Unamuno was no stranger to the great combative virtues of a passionate devotion to the truth and a clear assertion of what he thought was right. And while he is correct that man's spirit is more important than his wealth or status, wealth and status are doubtless the least worthy of political goals. The greatest goal of politics is to provide a polity that will ensure the greatest freedom for all--a freedom which will produce a truly great culture.