Gotham Diary:
Not Intellectual
24 February 2015
Il y a quelques jours, il me semblait que je … que j’oops! En anglais, s’il vous plaît! Quelques jours se sont passés depuis qu’on a pris une verre avec le prof!
A few days ago, it struck me that I am now old enough to read about Karl Marx — to read a biography, that is. Among the giggles, I hear gasps of dismay from those who shudder to recall last year’s apparent infatuation with Hannah Arendt. I shouldn’t worry about my falling in love with Marx and his ideas. I’m certain that I’ll find in Marx an interesting critic of his own times (and what interesting times they were!) but an almost lunatic visionary when it came to the future (it is difficult to make forecasts in interesting times). The inevitabilities that Marx foresaw have become not only implausible but unimaginable. That is, you can share Marx’s visions only to the extent that you can overlook what you know, or ought to know, about human nature.
Nevertheless, Marx was on the ground in the white water of the Industrial Revolution, a passionate observer of the metamorphosis of just about everything by the entrepreneurial power of capital, a transformation unlike any seen before, and never to be repeated unless everything is forgotten. That’s why he intrigues me: I’d like to know more about what he thought he saw. And that’s what I mean when I say that I am old enough to read about Marx — perhaps even to read what he himself wrote. The old, overarching antagonism is dead. We no longer live on a pole between Bourgeois and Bolshevik. Personal property is no longer the issue that it was when few people had very much of it. No, our fault line runs very differently: between the cosmopolitan and the orthodox.
Which makes relatively recent history difficult to understand. I’m talking about the days of my youth. This came up yesterday, when I wrote about my refusal to to attend the premiere of The Sound of Music. The mere consideration of that episode unleashed the vivid memory of a whirlwind of arguments and contentions that blasted me whenever I tried to distinguish right from wrong. There was, of course, the right and wrong of my parents’ understanding. But there was another, very different standard, according to which my parents’ way of life was corrupt, incoherent, self-deluding, and very bad for the health of society — at least insofar as society itself was not condemned as a criminal enterprise. It would be wrong, very wrong, to associate this upsetting standard very closely with Marxism; it owed much more, as I would learn later, to Nietzsche and the intellectuals — among whom John Carey, quite rightly in my view, puts Adolf Hitler. And trust me: the middle classes, c 1960, were not a pretty sight. They were still immured in Balzacian anxieties about status and respectability. There was still the paralyzing dread of vulgarity — which was nothing other than the fear that one’s origins would be found out to be (as indeed they were) common.
Almost immediately, first American, then European, and finally global civilization experienced one of those origami folds that reassesses everything. Suddenly, there was nothing to fear about being middle class, because everybody who could afford the minimal accoutrements was middle class, and just as middle class as anybody else. There is no such thing as “common” anymore. That concept is defunct. The only alternative to middle class today is poor, and very few people really believe that poverty reflects a want of virtue. Billionaires, meanwhile, are just middle class folks with too much money.
But that’s now. When I was growing up, as I say, the middle class was still producing intellectuals. Before I continue, has anyone out there north of thirty-five noticed that intellectuals have disappeared? (There is something today called the “public intellectual,” but I believe that that’s quite different.) The intellectual was not necessarily a very smart person who knew a lot about the world, but often, au contraire, an ideologue, someone who had crammed a lot of more or less indigestible systematic thinking into his brain. And, as John Carey has taught us, the intellectual was usually as horrified by his bourgeois origins as his parents were by their common antecedents. As a result, the intellectual spouted frenzies of bad faith. There was the bad faith of the bourgeoisie, but there was also the bad faith of his own pretense that he was cut from some superior cloth, that by dedicating his intelligence to the cultivation of conceptual ideas he was purifying himself of his upholstered upbringing.
It’s hard to believe that intellectuals used to be so obnoxious — but, worse than that, they were, like all ideologues, exhaustive, orthodox. They alone knew what was really right, and everyone else (in America, anyway) was a fraud.
I’m going through all of this because I want to make it clear that my dismissal of The Sound of Music, yesterday, was in no way doctrinaire. The movie was fake, all right, but not because it exploited workers or constituted capitalist propaganda. No. The Sound of Music was, like so many artifacts of that artistically neutered decade, sheer junk.
I was accused of aristocratic sympathies in those days, and I should have been happy to acknowledge them, had I not understood, especially as an adopted child, that there is nothing elective about Western aristocracy. Once upon a time, there might have been, maybe (one always thinks of William Marshall), but for hundreds of years the only way for an outsider to penetrate the aristocracy has been in the person of his offspring, with an accent on great- or great-great-grandchildren. After a few generations, your commonness washes out like a bad dye. But your yourself do not, by virtue of your aristocratic sympathies, become a member of the aristocracy — ever. A class — moreover! — which does not exist in the United States. Where were my aristocratic sympathies going to get me?
Well, they did get me this: I was no longer a target of Marxism. Marxism, like Barbara Bush, had done with me. As a putative aristocrat, I could settle down comfortably with my true character, which was, just like everyone else’s, totally bourgeois.
It will not surprise the regular reader to hear that I am re-reading, painstakingly this time, Georges Duby’s study of The Three Orders.