Quote of the Day

"I hate Russia (the govt. not the people), I do not admire her as you do. Admitting that her offensiveness and organization were dictated by the pressure of the world, the fact still remains that she stands now as a strangler to freedom of the individual, and I fear she is on a totalitarian trek from which there is no retreat."

-Norman Mailer, from a letter to Beatrice Mailer, February, 1946

This and other letters from Mailer were recently published in The New Yorker article In the Ring: Grappling With the Twentieth Century.

Trilling: The Liberal Imagination and its Discontents

Louis Menand wrote an (occassionally) insightful essay on the novelist and critic Lionel Trilling for this week's New Yorker. It was Trilling's book, The Liberal Imagination, that put him on the map, says Menand, as it was one of the works, along with Arthur Schlesinger's The Vital Center, George Orwell's 1984, and Richard Crossman's The God That Failed, that "helped make the case for liberal anti-communism." This was of course a weighty debate in the years after World War II, as the Soviet machine made its presence felt and its intentions toward the West clear. There were a great many on the American Left in those days who were so worried about the totalitarian threat from right-wing fascism that they were blind to the totalitarian threat from left-wing Stalinism. It was Trilling and other liberals who had the intellectual courage to stand opposed to the naivete of many of their ideological comrades, and expose Soviet communism for what it truly was. Menand cites this excerpt from Trilling's letters, for example:

I expect a quantum of injustice in any imperium, expect contradictions as the price of order—what brings me to the puking-point is the fine feelings. And what brings me to the fighting-point is the increasingly sure sense that Stalinist power aims at the annihilation of anything that does not contribute to power. There has never been a power-ideology that so wished to destroy every human quality that did not add to itself.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Trilling that comes out of Menand's essay is that not only was he critical of leftist supporters of the Soviet system, but that he had the integrity to question the very nature of modern liberalism itself. He saw literature, with its exposition of the great complexities of the human condition, as a kind of rebuttal to the liberal's faith in the possibility of finding a political system that could fulfill every imaginable progressive dream.

In Trilling’s view, the faith that liberals share, whether they are Soviet apologists, Hayekian free marketers, or subscribers to Partisan Review, is that human betterment is possible, that there is a straight road to health and happiness. A liberal is a person who believes that the right economic system, the right political reforms, the right undergraduate curriculum, and the right psychotherapy will do away with unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy. The argument of “The Liberal Imagination” is that literature teaches that life is not so simple—for unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy happen to be literature’s particular subject matter. In Trilling’s celebrated statement: “To the carrying out of the job of criticizing the liberal imagination, literature has a unique
relevance . . . because literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.” This is why literary criticism has something to say about politics.

Later in the essay, a similar point is made about the facile liberal hope for unrelenting human progress:

When Freud published “Civilization and Its Discontents,” in 1930, Trilling wrote a review dismissing the book as absurd. But the magazine he wrote it for, The New Freeman, folded, and the review never appeared. That was when Trilling was still a Marxist. After 1950, he became infatuated with “Civilization and Its Discontents,” and especially with Freud’s notion of a “death drive.” The death drive is one of the most fantastic creatures in the Freudian menagerie, and Trilling took the concept exactly as Freud intended it: as naming an innate, biological resistance that people have to being made better. The death drive was designed to discredit the claim, made by renegade Freudians like Wilhelm Reich and, later on, Herbert Marcuse, that the right kind of political and economic change would do away with “discontent,” with neurosis. Freud’s argument, Trilling wrote in his last major work, “Sincerity and Authenticity,” “may be thought to stand like a lion in the path of all hopes of achieving happiness through the radical revision of social life.”

Finally, Menand emphasizes Trilling's skepticism over the student revolts of the 1960s era, this not so much a case of liberal naivete over the tragic nature of the universe, but about the errors of political commitment motivated purely by a desire for a cause, rather than by the merits. The subject of Trilling's essay On the Teaching of Modern Literature, Menand tells us, was a complaint about the eagerness of his students at Columbia "to engage in the process that we might call the socialization of the anti-social, or the acculturation of the anti-cultural, or the legitimization of the subversive." And a few paragraphs later: "The students didn't really care about the issues; they simply wanted 'the gratifications of being political.'"

It requires vigilance, to be sure, to steer clear of such psychological minefields on the path to philosophical discovery.

Abuse at the LIRR

Here is the first in what I know will be many more examples to be discussed on this blog of government agencies abusing their power as stewards of our tax dollars. There is no doubt that the private sector must bear some blame for its "excesses," but government officials aren't angels, either. This is a great data point in support of the arguments of free-marketeers and low-tax advocates, like me: is this how you want your money spent? On golf outings for retired railroad workers collecting thousands of dollars in disability? Key point:

In one six-month period, rain pay cost the railroad $1.1 million. “Some of these things are ridiculous,” said Gerard P. Bringmann, general chairman of the Long Island Rail Road Commuter Council. “It makes absolutely no sense. Any company would go bankrupt that operates that way.”

BHL and the French Left

Christopher Hitchens reviews Bernard-Henri Lévy's new book, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism, in this week's NYT book review. BHL is an interesting character, one of those rare European leftists who has grown disillusioned with the European left. Hitchens says that "If you wanted to sum up his political outlook in a phrase, you would find yourself borrowing Orwell's remark that it's not enough to be antifascist; one must also be in principle antitotalitarian. BHL, according to Hitchens, "insists" that the left "renounce any version of ultimate or apocalyptic history, along with any mad schemes to create heaven on earth. A secular, pragmatic humanism will be quite demanding enough, thank you." So here is one more example of the politico-philosophical evolution of the generation of 1968.

Adam Kirsch also reviews the book here in the New York Sun. Some money quotes:

Gone, he writes, are the left's inspiring and necessary ideals: its universalism, its love of justice, its sympathy with the oppressed, its commitment to truth-telling. In their place is a toxic brew of hatreds: of America, conceived as the imperial culprit behind all the world's crimes; of Israel and the Jews, who now occupy the same place in the left's demonology that they once held for the nationalist right; even of liberalism itself. Mr. Lévy compares the left — especially, but not exclusively, the French left — to a decomposing body, whose process of decay is releasing noxious pathogens...

...There is, first of all, the left's hatred of liberalism — the idea and the very word, which is anathema in French politics. This looks paradoxical to Americans, who are used to associating the word "liberal" with the left wing of the Democratic Party. But in Europe, liberal still carries its original 19th-century meaning as the philosophy of individual freedom; and this freedom, to the French left, is nothing but the Trojan horse of an all-devouring capitalism...

Mr. Lévy offers the best summary I have seen of [the left-wing] worldview, which can be glimpsed in the works of many influential left-wing philosophers and journalists. "We are in a world in which, on the one hand, we have the United States, its English poodle, its Israeli lackey — a three-headed gorgon that commits all the sins in the world — and, on the other side, all those who, no matter what their crimes, their ideology, their treatment of their own minorities, their internal policies, their anti-Semitism and their racism, their disdain for women and homosexuals, their lack of press freedom and of any freedom whatsoever, are challenging the former." After reading "Left in Dark Times," it is impossible to deny that the left, whatever its past glories — and Mr. Lévy remembers them all, from the Dreyfus affair to the events of 1968 — is now a danger to truly liberal values. A danger, despite its decrepitude: for as Mr. Lévy says, "even when they're not in charge of anything, ideas are what, for better or worse, drive, and allow us to change, the world."

Posturing Rebels, Then and Now

This being the fortieth anniversary of that watershed year 1968, many of today's public intellectuals and artists who came-of-age during that era have been doing some critical reflecting on it. One prominent example was David Mamet's renunciation in the Village Voice of the ideas he accepted as "articles of faith" during the 1960s, namely, that government is corrupt and business exploitive. I have more recently come across a similar essay by another famous playwright--by way of a review of his latest play in The Weekly Standard--which appeared within days of Mamet's article in March, this one in The Sunday Times of London, and penned by Tom Stoppard.

While Mamet titled his piece "Why I am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal," Stoppard opted for the less-inflammatory and somewhat more illustrative heading, "1968: The Year of the Posturing Rebel." And, it is important to note that, in Stoppard's case, he was not renouncing an ideology he had once fully embraced, but rather reaffirming an opposition to it that he had always held. Stoppard remembers that he was "embarrassed by the slogans and postures of rebellion in a society which, in London as in Paris, had moved on since Wordsworth was young and which seemed to me to be the least worst system into which one might have been born – the open liberal democracy whose very essence was the toleration of dissent." He continues:

What repelled me was the implied conflation of two categorically different cases. The “free West”, God knew, was all too often disfigured by corruption and injustice but the abuses represented, and were acknowledged to represent, a failure of the model. In the East, though, the abuses represented the model in full working order.

It is, of course, rather fitting that Isaiah Berlin shared similar sentiments on the matter, given that he has been such an inspiration for Stoppard's work (most notably, Berlin's writings on the Russian thinkers of the nineteenth century provided much of the basis for the philosophical dimensions of The Coast of Utopia). As told by Michael Ignatieff in his biography of Berlin, regarding a lecture that the great historian of ideas gave in New York City in 1968 (when else?), "he saw the 1960s revolution as an uprising against the boredom, security, and lack of existential challenge in the post-war capitalist boom. He thought the anger was about psychological malaise, hypocrisy...alienation...class consciousness...and not oppression of the majority by a wicked or deluded minority."

This shrewd observation--that the left-wing rebels of the '68er generation were searching desperately for a grand cause based on which they could unite, and against which they could protest, but that would require a vast distortion of the truth, namely, that the inequalities in American society during those years were akin to the totalitarian oppressions that had brought Europe to its knees before and during the second World War--was a central argument, too, in Paul Berman's book Power and the Idealists. He remarked there that:

The New Left was a young people's movement motivated by fear...It was a fear that, at least in the Western countries, social progress rested on a lie, a fear that prosperity was theft, and Western wealth was Third World exploitation, a fear that Western civilization comprised a system of manipulation designed to mislead its own people and everyone else...It was a fear, in sum, that in World War II, fascism, and more specifically Nazism, had not been defeated after all--a fear that Nazism, by mutating, had continued to thrive into the nineteen-fifties and sixties and onward, always in new disguises...And so, the New Left in its youthful anxiety found its way to an old and mostly expired panic from its parents' generation, and bent over it, and fanned the dead embers, and breathed on them, and watched aghast as the dying flames leapt up anew...And with a disguised Nazism apparently in command at home and across the Western world circa 1968, the need for an extremely radical resistance seemed to cry out from every stone.

Again, it is remarkable to note the similarities between Berlin and Berman, and unfortunate that the latter seems not to have acknowledged the former in any of his writings. But the common theme here--the criticism of the radical uprisings of the 1960s all over the Western world--is a fascinating one, not least because of the intellectual journey that many have taken since then, as evinced my Mamet, Berman, and many others, who have looked back at that time, aghast at what they witnessed and what, in some cases, they took part in. It is the story of youthful idealism, transformed by the passage of time and a more mature sense of perspective about the very real freedoms that we are blessed with in this part of the world, and how they can be so easily forgotten, or taken for granted, or harshly criticized, all under the shadow of an imagined state of bondage.

J.S. Mill and the Liberal Conceit

One of the many, many books that encumbers my shelf space but has as yet gone unread is the classic 1988 work by political philosopher and economist Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. This is one of those books that, following the sage advice of French literature professor Pierre Bayard, I can feel comfortable discussing despite being unfamiliar with its contents, and because of its well known thesis: the "fatal conceit" of which Hayek was speaking was the idea that "man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes."

One of the philosophical problems I would like to attempt to solve over the course of my career is the identification of the bedrock principles of the liberal, or left-leaning, brain as opposed to the conservative one. This insight from Hayek qualifies as a critical distinction between the two archetypes. Liberals tend to believe in the unlimited potential for human progress, and along with it in their own ability to shape human nature, or human institutions, to help fulfill those progressive objectives. In some liberal minds, it seems to me, this belief is so strong that it swells into a self-righteousness, a conceipt, so to speak, by which they define their very existence. I think that this helps to explain the contempt that many liberals have for those who disagree with them, and their unwillingness to consider arguments contrary to their views, even when the facts are stacked heavily against their policy choices.

Conservatives, on the other hand, do not believe that human progress is inevitable, and tend to emphasize the importance of custom, and the potential consequences that can be created by drastic attempts to reshape society. Too often, liberal objectives require policies that simply defy the inclinations of human nature, both individually and collectively. Conservatives believe that the world must be dealt with as it is, rather than as we would like it to be.

This short essay by Roger Kimball in Standpoint discusses the philosophy of John Stuart Mill, and the consequences of his progressive beliefs. Kimball identifies Mill's work as a foundational component of modern liberalism (along with that of Rousseau). On Mill's utilitarian program, Kimball argues that "It is a recipe that has proven irresistible to those infatuated with the spectacle of their own virtue." This strikes a divisive tone and threatens to undermine any and all noble attempts to pick up the downtrodden, but nevertheless, there is something to it--the self-righteouss spirit, the naive belief in unlimited and uninterrupted human progress, the subordination of reason to emotion, that rest at the bottom of the liberal program.

Kimball cites one particularly interesting example of Mill's philosophy that serves to expose a flaw in the liberal armor--his support for "experiments in living" and his contempt for tradition. With these corollaries firmly in place, Mill argued that all human progress had been the result of social, moral, and intellectual innovators that, in their own time, had been shunned by their societiers as dangerous radicals. Mill argued, on the basis of this observation, that innovation in these realms should be forcefully encouraged. But as Kimball astutely points out:

Granted that every change for the better has depended on someone embarking on a new departure: well, so too has every change for the worse...This means that we have at least as much reason to discourage innovators as to encourage them, especially when their innovations bear on things as immensely complex as the organisation of society.

To my mind, this is a good example of the difference between the liberal heart and the conservative mind. The liberal "thinks" with his emotions, and thus looks on instances of human progress with congratulatory sentiments, turning away from the negative outcomes of radical changes gone awry. The conservative mind, on the other hand, looks not only on isolated examples of when innovator X produced human benefit Y, but on the more general category of the causal relationships between innovations and their aftermaths. The sum total is not nearly as sunny as the best-known parts.

The Steel Cube Was Brilliant

Toward the beginning of Manhattan, one of Woody Allen's greatest films, a hilarious encounter takes place at the Museum of Modern Art between Isaac (Allen's character) and Mary (played by Diane Keaton). While discussing some of the works they have just viewed, it becomes clear that their stark disagreements about which were "good" and which were "bad" are very much a consequence of their differing evaluative perspectives, Isaac taking a sensory, and Mary a much more intellectual, that is to say, philosophical or analytical, approach. As just one example, when Isaac dismisses a "steel cube" that was on display, Mary replies, "Now that was brilliant to me...to me it was very textural, you know what I mean? It was perfectly integrated and it had a marvelous kind of negative capability."

I have no idea what Mary means by any of this, and I don't think anyone is supposed to. This is Allen's way of poking fun at the haughty intellectual persona. But doesn't there have to be more to art than sheer visual appeal? How do we evaluate a painting or a sculpture or a building or a novel or a film or a poem? What is "good" art? Isn't there a set of aesthetic criteria inherent in the simple question: "do you like this, or not?" I think that there is. Otherwise, we would fall into a kind of artistic relativism where Michelangelo is no different from graffiti, and Beethoven on par with the latest winner of American Idol.

Though I spend much less time these days strolling around art museums than I did during my six months in Europe last year, I have caught a few exhibits at the Met and MOMA, and continue to think about the nature of art and how we evaluate it. This essay by Richard Eyre from the UK magazine Standpoint makes an effort to begin to define what we mean by "art" as opposed to "culture." It suggests some of the key characteristics of the former:

Art – good or bad, high or low – must have form, it must have shape. It’s a way of knowing the world, of giving form and meaning to things that seem formless. A work of art has to have ambition beyond wanting to please the audience or appease fashion, a desire to examine the world – people or nature or society – and make it look or sound or seem new. A work of art should introduce something to the world that didn’t exist before...Art is everything that politics isn’t: politics generalises about people, art particularises. Art is about the “I” in life, not about the “we”, about private life rather than public life. There has to be a complexity about art but that’s not the same as obscurity...There must be mystery, a sense of unknowability in a work of art – as there is in every human being. In art reality must be given the chance to be mysterious and fantasy the chance to be commonplace. The DNA of art is metaphor: that’s the genetic cell without which nothing can be mutated by craft into art.

Art strives towards the mythic – towards seeing heaven in a grain of sand. Art is unquestionably a form of magic, conjuring something from nothing – sounds from the air on a musical instrument, a human being in paint on a stretch of canvas, a world with a pen on a page of paper. Art must be serious about itself. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be funny, but it means it can’t be trivial. But seriousness alone – any more than sincerity alone – isn’t enough in itself. There has to be an element of pleasure in art, of sensual enjoyment – be it of a combination of sounds, of words, or textures, or of images. Art has to ravish the senses, but not only do that. There has to be a moral sense. You have to be able to feel that the artist has a view that human beings possess a moral sensibility. That’s not the same as the artist being a moralist – or being a “good” person. The artist may be saying “this is how you should live your life” but it must be inferred, not preached. Art is not polemic.

There must be passion in art. Passion gives us a sense of life lived more intensely, with more meaning – more joy, more sorrow. “We are all under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve,” said Victor Hugo. We can spend our period of reprieve in a state of listlessness, or we can fill the period of our death sentence with experience – lived experience or the experience we gain from art. Art reflects, expresses, invokes and describes the ambiguity of humanity. Whatever the form of art, however realistic or however fantastical, it offers up a commentary on being alive, on the infinite messiness of humanity. Art doesn’t improve our behaviour or civilise us. Art is useless. It doesn’t clothe the poor or feed the hungry. It’s as useless as, well . . . life, but it’s precisely our awareness of the uselessness of life that makes us want to struggle to give it purpose, and to give that purpose meaning through art.

The philosopher Simone Weil wrote this: “The love of our neighbour means being able to say to him: What are you going through? It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not as a specimen from a social category labelled ‘unfortunate’ but as a man exactly as we are. To forget oneself briefly, to identify with a stranger to the point of fully recognising him or her, is to defy necessity.” Art is a way of “defying necessity”, drawing us into a heightened awareness of other people’s feelings and other people’s lives. It enables us to put ourselves in the minds, eyes, ears and hearts of other human beings.

This is a lot to digest, and there are some points I disagree with that will be addressed in a future post. For now, I will share some thoughts from a trip to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam last summer, when it occurred to me that, perhaps, there are three primary planes across which you can assess a work of art: aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual.

An aesthetic assessment is about pure visual appeal. I think of Monet in this category, for example. His paintings are just magnificent to look at, the impressionistic reproduction of natural beauty that he mastered so remarkable. But why, exactly, do I find it remarkable? What one person considers beautiful, another may think trivial. Who defines the standards for a visually appealing painting, or a delightful melody, or a striking city skyline? Is the evaluation of these kinds of things purely subjective? And that is really what this discussion is about: investigating the existence of objective evaluative standards for human creations. I assume that there have been studies on this topic in the field of neuroscience, where brain functionality can be measured based on various stimuli. I will have to look into this further, because, as with so many other fields where philosophy and empirical science are dependent on, rather than at odds with, each other, it would be a step forward to understand the connection between our thought processes and our physical sensations when presented with a particular aesthetic.

An emotional assessment is about what a work of art says to the viewer, what memories it prompts him to recall, what feelings it induces. This, I suppose, is a purely subjective category. It is all about the individual, the private as opposed to the public, as Eyre indicated in his essay. I would also include in this category works that induce empathy with other human beings, another important characteristic of art that Eyre identified. Of course, empathy was a fundamental part of Isaiah Berlin's philosophy, as he thought it critical to the survival of tolerance (defined as acceptance of difference rather than as acceptance of all things as equally valid) in a liberal society. In this context, to the extent that art encourages empathy, it is essential to the Western conception of freedom, and anathema to the totalitarian regime. Perhaps this is where we can begin to answer the question: what is the purpose of art and why do we need it?

The intellectual assessment of art is a very broad category. It is, in general terms, about the ideas that constitute the work, and, more specifically, these ideas may be about style, history, philosophy, or theology. The Biblical scenes depicted in Renaissance painting come immediately to mind here, as they can be evaluated across all four of these sub-categories. I would also place much of modern art here because it seems to me to be much more about the technique and how it differs from most aesthetic movements of the past, which were about representations of reality rather than abstractions from it.

But this is just a rough outline of how I have begun to classify and analyze things. Of course no single work of art is to be bound to any particular category, and in fact most works could probably be evaluated by any of these criteria. For me, purely subjective aesthetic judgments have never been enough. I want to understand the ideas behind art so that I can defend properly the things I like and the things that I don't. There are some obvious parallels between this discussion and the broader one about moral relativism. I suppose that the debate about subjectivity and objectivity in art is a component of the larger debate between timeless, universal principles and historicist, culturally-specific values. Yes, that sounds right to me. More to come after further reflection.