Ivory Tower Note:
Vanishing
10 February 2014
It has come to this: photographs of the apartment. Yesterday, I dashed across the street for breakfast and then paid a visit to the madhouse that is Fairway on Sunday. Aside from that outing, I had not left the building since last Tuesday. How much of this can be attributed to the postponed Remicade infusion and how much to what used to be called “the vapors” is unclear. What’s certain is that the beastly weather makes things worse.
I slept very late — too late. The penalty for oversleeping is bad dreams. I found myself in Battery Park, with no wallet, no money, no nothing. I had searched my bag for a blank check, but not only had I not found one but I’d left the bag behind as well. So: no camera. That’s what must have roused me: it’s one thing to fret about money and “the material things,” quite another to worry about the quality of blog entries!
The waking world wasn’t much of an improvement. The Times was a parade of horribles, or so it seemed. The vanishing middle class, the vanishing American behind the wheel of a taxi, the vanishing Wikipedia editors vexed by the difficulty of working with a smartphone — everything was slipping away. Then, The Nation. The Nation now arrives with the Monday paper, don’t ask me why, instead of in the mail. I always read the back first; that’s where the reviews are. I stopped in the middle of a long piece about neo-evangelical movements during the Cold War, because I had to eat something. Also, I couldn’t take the onslaught of distress. I’d read about a wicked judge in Pennsylvania who jailed naughty kids willy-nilly, the crazy hyper-development of China’s urban areas, and the Romanian New Wave in film. The Romanian New Wave sounds more hopeless than novel.
Whilst boiling an egg, some residue of Paul Krugman’s column about the soft-headed, hard-hearted Republican Party made contact with an ongoing conversation that parts of my mind are having on the subject of commercial concentration. Commercial concentration — the consolidation of business activities — makes sense from many short-term economic viewpoints (it increases efficiency, improves systems of control, and guarantees a reliable output), but it inevitably slashes jobs, at every level from the factory floor to the executive suite. What hit me in the kitchen was that the process of concentration is aided and abetted by peace, by stable social conditions. With everything running along smoothly, it is easier than ever to merge and to acquire. The result is all around us: wide income disparity, increased executive control. One neighbor loses a job, then another, but as long as you’ve got cable you’re assured that things are fundamentally okay.
Nobody wants war or social instability. But I’m not seeing much creative destruction. Where’s the capitalism?
***
I have been reading every essay in Simon Leys’s collection, The Hall of Uselessness, on the alert for the gratuitous disparagement of same-sex marriage and parenting. As noted here, I had been shocked to discover the bracketing of “homosexual families” with such evils as “incestuous fathers” and “despotic leaders” in a footnote to Confucius, and I wanted a better sense of the extent of this tarnishing tendency of mind. I came across another gem, this one not quite so ripe, in an essay on Chesterton.
On society: “It has been left to the very latest modernists to proclaim an erotic religion which at once exalts lust and forbids fertility … the next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially sexual morality. And it is coming not from a few socialists … The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow, much more in Manhattan.” (He was writing this is 1926.)
And this — which is ominously apposite to our present situation (I do not believe for instance that it is a mere coincidence that we are witnessing simultaneously the development of a movement supporting euthanasia and the development of a movement in favour of homosexual marriage):
Leys goes on to quote a chunk of Chesterton. (He was writing this in 1997.)
My sympathies are usually with Leys. He appreciates the wealth of tradition. He is somewhat more horrified than I am by the arrogance of modernity and the disasters wrought by its incompetence — but I’m horrified, too. Where we cannot agree is, I venture, on the place of Augustine in Christianity. Very simply, I believe that Augustine has no place in Christianity. A preachy bully, he imposed his sexual peculiarities — he could never sleep with a man, but he could never fully love a woman — upon Western orthodoxy. Perhaps these peculiarities are not so peculiar; I daresay they’re not exactly rare among heterosexual males. That doesn’t make them any less stunting, especially for the majority of human beings that doesn’t share them.
***
Authority and power. The trick is to imagine an authority that doesn’t depend upon power, and then to realize it. Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi come to mind, two fiercely courageous moral leaders. I’d be happier if neither of them took office (thereby attaining political power), instead of continuing to shine as beacons of high humanity. Power is a toxic substance, easily mishandled. Mandela handled it well; we can only hope that Daw Suu, if she gets it, will do the same. Better not to have to worry. Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan used to be an admirable man.
Closer to home, I look for cultural authority. Some will argue that cultural authority has been dissipated in the recent past, but I’m of the opinion that there has never been a cultural authority, just the cultural preferences of the powerful. Over centuries, these preferences have spurred important human achievements in the fine arts, but now, the powerful have developed other preferences, and are no longer committed to maintaining the fine arts. How is opera to survive without millionaire patrons? How are the fine arts to be made approachable by ordinarily intelligent citizens? How to salvage and promote courtly grace, if only as a habit of mind?
Writing that last bit, I feel as foolish as Cicero flying from Mark Antony.