In the 15 Dec 2010 NRO, K.J. Lopez interviews Michael Knox Beran, author of The Pathology of the Elites. In this interview (all of which is worth reading), Beran touches on the problem with modern literary criticism and its moral vacuity in the guise of moral relevance.
LOPEZ: Can the elites develop new moral protocols to foster self-knowledge and prevent hubris and overreaching?
BERAN:[Lionel] Trilling thought that one could find a substitute for the older, God-grounded morality in what he called the “moral realism” of art and more especially of the novel. “For our time,” he wrote in The Liberal Imagination, “the most effective agent of the moral imagination has been the novel of the last two hundred years…. [Its] greatness and its practical usefulness lay in its unremitting work of involving the reader himself in the moral life, inviting him to put his own motives under examination, suggesting that reality is not as his conventional education has led him to see it.” Yet in the seminaries where so many of our elites are trained, it is no longer respectable to derive moral illumination from art. Trilling himself showed how liberal critics were converting art into an adjunct of the social imagination. He pointed to thinkers who, like the critic V. L. Parrington, classified works of art in the light of their creators’ sense of “social responsibility.” Such thinkers, Trilling said, supposed that Henry James would have been a better novelist if his books had been “pleas for co-operatives, labor unions, better housing, and more equitable taxation.” The tendency to interpret works of art in terms of social categories is if anything more widespread today than it was in Trilling’s time. In the modern university works of art are too often studied, not for the light they throw on the moral imagination, but for the degree to which their creators evince a sense of ethnic or racial or sexual grievance.(emphasis mine)
The greatest act of violence that modern literary criticism has inflicted on the Western canon is to declare the author dead—thus obliterating the authors’ meaning and replacing it with the readers’—and thereby render the text unable to challenge the world view of the reader. Today’s students of literature are encouraged to view the text only through the lens of Marxism and its feminist, ethnic, psychoanalytical, and queer variants, and then only in light of the latest, most fashionable tropes and grievances. I would not be surprised, for example, to see some of the pet pieties of my day to have already been devaued and declared “reactionary” or whatnot by the current crop of academics (regardless of whether they themselves touted the discredited pieties back in the day), as enthusiastically rebuked as bell-bottom pants and disco of the 1970s were overthrown by peg-leg 501s and New Wave in the 1980s.
But everyone here already gets that. Pity more don’t.
Pity: the other subject of the interview that caught my eye.
LOPEZ: Are the elites’ ideas always bad? Are their intentions always good?
BERAN: The ideas of our elites are likely to be bad, and their intention dubious, as long as they confuse pity with compassion. […] Pity, Arendt argued, is a concern for the misery of another unprompted by intimacy with, or love for, the sufferer. Compassion, by contrast, is a love directed “towards specific suffering” and concentrates on “particular persons.” It can be exercised only by individuals or small groups, not by agencies or bureaus. Pity, Arendt wrote, “may be the perversion of compassion.” Because the pitier “is not stricken in the flesh,” because he keeps his “sentimental distance,” he has often shown “a greater capacity for cruelty” than the confessedly cruel.
David Hume said that pity was a “counterfeited” love. It is the false compassion that results when men exercise their kindness by committee: It is the look in the eyes of the welfare clerk or the public-housing official. In his 1995 book The Revolt of the Elites, Christopher Lasch argued that the philosophy of “social democracy” favored by so much of the modern elite — a philosophy that would expand “the state’s custodial and tutelary functions” — degrades “both the victims, who are reduced to objects of pity, and their would-be benefactors, who find it easier to pity their fellow citizens than to hold them up to impersonal standards, attainment of which would entitle them to respect.”
Though I am aware that human society has always been infernally corrupt one way or the other, I have to wonder how many societies were afflicted by this particular disease:
José Ortega y Gasset argued in The Revolt of the Masses that many of the troubles of the modern period can be traced to the decline of what he called “directing minorities” ? that is, intelligent elites. The difficulty which any elite (whether aristocratic or meritocratic) confronts is the corrupting effect of power. The difficulty for our contemporary liberal elites is all the greater because, as Trilling shows, they have used a philosophy of social pity to conceal their desire for power even from themselves.
Yeah. How do you show someone who is convinced of his or her own righteousness—as evidenced by the fact that they vote to “care for” the unfortunate — that their virtue is actually vice? That they are the long-suffering spouse of an alcoholic who — out of a misplaced sense of love that masks a deeper guilt — keeps bailing him out of jail, keeps paying his DUI fines, runs to the store for another fifth of Jack or whatever he demands she get him “if she really loves him.” And that she’s been enabling his alcoholism because that puts her in the driver’s seat and permits her to feel morally superior to her lush of a husband?
I don’t know. Who wants to wake up one morning and find that you’ve been the biggest problem all along, and that your hated adversaries were right?
Nobody, that’s who. Which is why we’re so totally screwed.
How? Teach ancient texts, insisting the ancient’s intentions are respected for themselves. They didn’t happen to have these modern prejudices and for damned sure knew how to expose falsehoods.
The thing to remember is that no one can deny reality forever. Moral and intellectual bankruptcy do not tend to prolong the life of any ruling class, no matter how insistent they are on their rectitude. Without getting too Marxist, a 21st century economy will not long permit itself to be run by a 20th-century meritocracy, any more than 18th-century economies were content to be run by 13th-century aristocracies. By 1789, hardly a soul believed that the gentry had any moral authority. We are not far from such a point now.
Christopher Lasch argued that the philosophy of “social democracy” favored by so much of the modern elite — a philosophy that would expand “the state’s custodial and tutelary functions” — degrades “both the victims, who are reduced to objects of pity, and their would-be benefactors, who find it easier to pity their fellow citizens than to hold them up to impersonal standards, attainment of which would entitle them to respect.”
Amen, brother. And those of us who would “teach a man to fish,” as it were, are seen as unfeeling brutes.
degrades “both the victims, who are reduced to objects of pity, and their would-be benefactors, who find it easier to pity their fellow citizens
IMHO, that’s because pity, itself, is a mask for the elites basic contempt for the lesser folk. It’s a mask the elites use themselves when they look in the mirror, helping hide that, for them, the phrase “all men are created equal” has never resonated in their irreligious souls.
What we’re dealing with, here, is sin.
Yes, I know — phrasing it that way tosses it into the bin called “religion”, dismissable. But the religion-based metaphors are the best worked out, and therefore the easiest to use; trying to avoid them leads to obfuscation. The most important part of that metaphor is soul, the deep portion of identity and self-regard that underlies all behavior.
The defining characteristic of sin is that it corrodes the soul of the sinner. A person who sins finds it easier and easier to do so as time goes on, easier and easier to define the sin as necessity or virtue, easier and easier to sneer at genuine virtue. Lenin didn’t start out wanting to kill peasants; on the contrary, he intended to benefit them, to provide them better lives against the depredations of the nobility. But he killed a few, just to eliminate the opposition, and from there it escalated until the murder of millions was not just necessary but virtuous.
Simple pride, a decent self-regard, is a necessary component of a healthy soul. When it evolves into self-importance that dismisses the aims, hopes, and feelings of others it has become the sin of hubris. Want and desire are inevitable components of the soul, and serve as motivators for achievement; when they become covetousness and lust they are sins that feed upon themselves without much in the way of limits. Here we see the essential nub of sin: dismissal of the Other as inconsequential or irrelevant.
Religion attempts to combat this by positing Deity, an abstract that cannot be dismissed under any circumstances. Those who wish to dismiss Deity must then concoct some other abstract to the same end, but the concept of Deity is relatively simple, and the substitutes are always limited and inevitably become more complex. Whether or not God exists in an objective sense is in large part irrelevant. As a societal construct Deity serves as a limiter, a governor or balance-wheel that prevents sin from getting out of control. Complexity is the goal of the lawyer (pejorative sense), the person who wants the rules codified so as to find loopholes in them. Deliberate construction of a Deity-substitute complex enough to “lawyer the rules” allows sinners to call their sins virtues, and removes the balancing factors from the system.
In the end it comes down to Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, and to John Donne:
No man is an Iland, entire of itselfe;
Every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the Main;
If a Clodd be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the less,
As well as if a Promontory were,
As well as if any Manor of thy friends or of thine own were;
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in Mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the Bell tolls;
it tolls for Thee.
Forgetting or ignoring that is sin.
Regards,
Ric
Oedipus Tyrannus
I would not be surprised, for example, to see some of the pet pieties of my day to have already been devalued and declared “reactionary” or whatnot by the current crop of academics…
This is largely because our current crop of academics think see The Wild One as the pinnacle of critical thought:
“What are you rebelling against, Professor?”
“Whaddya got?”
Good post Dicentra, thanks.
Here’s an idea (or half of one, at least):
We should start a Center for Elite Studies. Its mission will be to produce a better elite, since the current one is failing us all.
We should start a Center for Elite Studies. Its mission will be to produce a better elite, since the current one is failing us all.
Doomed to eventual failure.
Our current universities were designed to provide outstanding elites—and they may have done, back in the day—but eventually, the faculty will once again become infested by arrogance and elitism and impracticable ideas. It may not be Marxism again, but the intelligentsia will always eventually arrive at the conclusion that it ought to be in charge of the unwashed masses.
Until we humans can find a way to redeem ourselves from our own fallen natures, there is no permanent fix to any problem that confronts humanity, especially the will to power and its accompanying arrogances.
We’ll have better luck banishing entropy from the universe.
“Forgetting or ignoring that is sin.”
– The seventh, and most deadly of sins, self pride.
– A theological wing of the 15th Century church did an extensive set of studies of the basic list of sins, quite aside from simple moral considerations, looking at the effects of such sins on the existing societies.
– Their conclusion: Of all the sins of society and man, self pride was the most insidious and destructive, and invariably leads to all the other sins, because it springs from the most deadly form of self delusion, righteous narcissistic indulgence, putting ones self above all else.
– It would seem to be bourne out by the fact that so many on the Left are rapaciously anti-religious, far beyond any normal reasoning. I suspect they have an almost morbid fear of any dialectic thinking, which also fits with their moral bankruptcy, and refusal to debate honestly.
– Use of the alcoholic is a good analogy. Self delusion that all is fine, and its everyone else that’s got a problem.
– But there is one potential fix. Intervention.
– You stop enabling and break the alcoholic/co-dependent transaction, remove the resource, and change the social setting.
– For voters it would be removing the Congressional tendency to grow government and tax and spend endlessly by electing politicians that listen and do what the electorate actually wants.
Tea party Intervention!™
“The elites”
Ah. Nomenclature problems.
I think you misunderstood my intention, di. The center studies the existing Elite (such as it is) in order to understand why the current system produces an elite that is undeserving of the designation. The idea (such as it is) would be to put the elite to the same critical examination that it has endeavored to put to society.
An institution for the advanced study of the Institution of Advanced Study and other cadres of advanced studiers, as it were.
Who would be involved in the Center for Elite Studies? More elites, I imagine.
I was hoping the fellows would be selected for their merit.
In The Thanatos Syndrome Walker Percy has his watcher figure say
like the agw crowd?
[…] Continue reading Tags: corrupt-one, gasset, masses, ortega, revolt, society, wonder-howBookmark the permalink. ← White House Commission: Biologists Can Engineer Custom Organisms … Oxford Reference Online: New and Updated Titles | Luther College … → © 2010 The Knowledge Blog – Dominima var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-20235547-1']); _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.dominima.net']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); […]
If I call it a project and abandon the institutional aspect, does that answer the objections?