Cultural Amnesia

SO THIS IS
a book about how not to reach one.
If I have done my job properly, themes will emerge from the apparent randomness and make this work intelligible. But it will undoubtedly be a turbulent read. The times from which it emerged
were hard on the nerves, even for those of us who were lucky enough to lead charmed lives. I hope that the episodically intermixed account of direct experience from my own charmed life will
alleviate the difficulties of a densely woven text, but I make no excuse for them. If this book were not difficult, it would not be true.

To younger readers who might find themselves wondering why it is so full of forgotten names, and takes such a violently
unpredictable course, the first thing to say is: welcome to the twentieth century, out of which your century grew as surely as a column of black smoke grows from an oil fire. The second thing,
though an adjunct of the first, is even more important: there is a lot at stake here. In the nineteenth century,
in the time of the great philologist Ernest Renan, and
despite the contrary evidence already provided by the French Revolution,
Studia humanitatis
was still thought of as an unmixed blessing. If the eighteenth
century had meant to usher in the age of reason, the nineteenth century, with the cold snick of the guillotine ringing in its ears, meant to supply some of the regrettable deficiencies of
reason by the addition of science. Apart from the prophets—Dickens, despite his inborn optimism, was one of them—few people with any aspirations to a philosophical view doubted that
the extension of human knowledge would, in Renan’s typically generous phrase,
élargir la grande famille
: produce a race of the enlightened to
lead a life of mathematically calculable justice. By now, after the twentieth century has done its cruel work, that is exactly what we doubt. The future of science, Renan’s cherished
avenir de la science
, can be assessed from our past, in which it flattened cities and gassed innocent children: whatever we don’t yet know about it,
one thing we already know is that it is not necessarily benevolent. But somewhere within the total field of human knowledge, humanism still beckons to us as our best reason for having minds at
all.

That beckoning, however, grows increasingly feeble. The arts and their attendant scholarship are
everywhere—imperishable consumer goods which a self-selecting elite can possess while priding itself as being beyond materialism; they have a glamour unprecedented in history—but
humanism is hard to find. For that, science is one of the culprits: not the actual achievement of science, but the language of science, which, clumsily imitated by the proponents of Cultural
Studies, has helped to make real culture unapproachable for exactly those students who might otherwise have been most attracted to it, and has simultaneously furthered the emergence and
consolidation of an international cargo cult whose witch doctors have nothing in mind beyond their own advancement. By putting the humanities to careerist use, they set a bad example even to
those who still love what they study. Learned books are published by the thousand, yet learning was never less trusted as something to be pursued for its own sake. Too often used for ill, it is
now asked about its use for good, and usually on the assumption that any goodwill be measurable on a market, like a commodity. The idea that humanism has no immediately ascertainable use at
all, and is invaluable for precisely that reason, is a hard sell in an age
when the word “invaluable,” simply by the way it looks, is begging to be construed
as “valueless” even by the sophisticated. In fact, especially by them. If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into this new century, it will need
advocates. Those advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.

It was terrible, that age. Bright, sympathetic young people who now face a time when innocent human
beings are killed by the thousand can be excused for thinking that their elders do not care enough, and indeed it is true that complacency tends to creep in as the hair falls out. But their
elders grew to maturity in a time when innocent human beings were killed by the million. The full facts about Nazi Germany came out quite quickly, and were more than enough to induce despair.
The full facts about the Soviet Union were slower to become generally appreciated, but when they at last were, the despair was compounded. The full facts about Mao’s China left that
compounded despair looking like an inadequate response. After Mao, not even Pol Pot came as a surprise. Sadly, he was a cliché.

Ours was an age of extermination, an epoch of the abattoir. But the accumulated destruction yielded one constructive
effect, salutary even if solitary. It made us think hard about the way we thought. For my own part, it made me think hard about all the fields of creativity that I seemed to love equally,
whatever their place in a supposed hierarchy. I loved poetry, but such towering figures as Brecht and Neruda were only two of the gifted poets who had given aid and comfort to totalitarian
power. I loved classical music, but so did Reinhard Heydrich and the ineffable Dr. Mengele. I loved modern fiction in all its fearless inclusiveness, but Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the
author of that amazing phantasmagoria
Voyage au bout de la nuit
, had also written
Bagatelles pour un massacre
, a
breviary for racialist fanatics. On examination, none of these exalted activities was a sure antidote in itself to the poison of irrationality, which is inseparable from human affairs, but
fatal to them if granted a life of its own. And for the less exalted activities, examination was scarcely necessary. I loved popular music, but one look at Johnny Rotten was enough to show you
why even the SS occasionally court-martialled a few of its personnel for nihilistic behaviour beyond the call of duty, and more recently there have been rap lyrics distinguishable
from the “Horst Wessel Song” only in being less well written. I loved the art sports, but so had Leni Riefenstahl, who also provided evidence that there was nothing
necessarily humanist about the movies:
Triumph of the Will
is a spectacle everyone should see, but no one should adore. It would have been nice to believe
that comedy, one of my fields of employment, was of its nature opposed to political horror, but there were too many well-attested instances of Stalin and Molotov cracking each other up while
they signed death warrants, and there was all too much evidence that Hitler told quite good jokes. If there was no field of creativity that was incorruptibly pure, where did that leave
humanism?