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Pressing questions and persistent vitality
The belief in man—man as an individual—man as an individual free to think as he
pleases and say as he thinks—man as an individual answerable only to his conscience
and his God—this belief is not easy to articulate in realistic and self-evident terms
in an industrialized society and in such a world as modern physics has revealed to
us. And yet, without a new and convincing articulation of belief in the unqualified
right of the individual human being to think as he pleases and say what he thinks,
regardless of the preconceptions and the creeds, the opinions and the prejudices,
of governments or parties or organizations or churches, civilization as we have known
it—civilization crowned by science and by art—civilization carried forward by the
creative spirit and the inquiring mind—would be unthinkable.
The modesty of the true scholar is neither a gesture nor a joke. To him it is quite
literally the case that a science of anything presupposes a vast ignorance concerning
it: an ignorance, indeed, so vast that even its very nature may never be understood.
He as a scientist, in other words, may never become clear as to what it is of
which he is ignorant, or ought to consider himself ignorant; he may never learn just
what it is that he should seek to know. Meanwhile, however, he has his method; he
does know how to proceed within the field of ignorance he has managed to define.
. . . So he is always busy, with scarcely the time to pause and tell us, should we ask,
how much he knows; and more particularly, how much of what he knows.
Those who think of the truth as the sum of what we read in the newspapers or may
find in the Encyclopaedia Britannica move sanely enough at one conventional level.
Such reports are not ordinarily false. They designate real events, objects truly discoverable
on the scale of the human senses; and they trace the relations of these
objects and events on the plane of human action. But the form thus assumed by
those facts is a mere image. In their aspect and individuality our ideas are signs, not
portions, of what exists beyond us; and it is only when experiment and calculation
succeed in penetrating beneath the image, that (for instance, in mathematical
physics) we may gain some more precise, although still symbolic, notion of the
forces that surround us. We and our knowledge are a part of nature: it is therefore
inevitable that the rest of nature, in its concreteness, should be external to us. . . .
Absolute truth is hidden from us, and the deeper our science goes, the more ghostly
it becomes. In entering that temple we have passed out of the sunlight. We are no
longer surrounded by living objects, but by images of the gods.
The long history of man, besides its ennobling features, contains also a disrupting
malice which continues into the present. Since the rise of the first neolithic cultures,
. . . man has hanged, tortured, burned and impaled his fellow men. He has
done so while devoutly professing religions whose founders enjoined the very opposite
upon their followers. It is as though we carried with us, from some dark tree
in a vanished forest, an insatiable thirst for cruelty. Of all the wounds man’s bodily
organization has suffered in his achievement of a thinking brain, this wound is
the most grievous of all, this shadow of madness, which has haunted every human
advance since the dawn of history and which may well precipitate the final episode
in the existence of his race.
Through the 18th and 19th centuries—from Crèvecoeur’s notion that America had
produced a new man, through Jefferson’s belief in the wealth, promise and magnificence
of the continent, and Turner’s faith in a frontier-born culture and frontier-
nourished institutions—runs the refrain that American values spring from the
circumstances of the New World, that these are the secret of the “American Way of
Life.” This has been both an example of our special way of dealing with ideas and
an encouragement to it. For lack of a better word, we may call this a leaning toward
implicitness, a tendency to leave ideas embodied in experience and a belief that the
truth somehow arises out of the experience.
Faith in science is faith in the hope, the fruitfulness and value of the human adventure.
It is a faith that action will be, within limits, effective, and that the effects of
action will be humanly rewarding. There will be little time or inclination to speculate
on the meaninglessness of life, or to allege meaninglessness. Inquiry itself will
render so much possible in the way of new discriminations and hitherto unsuspected
varieties of goods and value in the world that the world itself will become
charged not with one preordained meaning, but with ever-new awarenesses and interests.
The habit of inquiry will liberate the spontaneities of imagination. The human
adventure, in science itself, in art, in human relations will be sufficient nourishment
for a faith in humanity and its future.
Whole philosophies have evolved over the question whether the human species is predominantly
good or evil. I only know that it is mixed, that you cannot separate good
from bad, that wisdom, courage, and benevolence exist alongside knavery, greed, and
stupidity; heroism and fortitude alongside vainglory, cruelty, and corruption.
I could scarcely sleep for excitement the night after seeing the periodic table—it
seemed to me an incredible achievement to have brought the whole, vast, and seemingly
chaotic universe of chemistry to an all-embracing order. . . . To have perceived
an overall organization, a superarching principle uniting and relating all the elements,
had a quality of the miraculous, of genius. And this gave me, for the first time, a sense
of the transcendent power of the human mind, and the fact that it might be equipped
to discover or decipher the deepest secrets of nature, to read the mind of God.
One of the mysterious things about newspapers is that the items in them have no
connection except the dateline . . . and it is this dateline that enables us to enter the
world of the news, as it were, by going through the looking glass. Just as Alice in
Wonderland went through the looking glass, when you enter the world of the telegraph
or of the circuit, you really become involved in the information process. When you
enter through the dateline, when you enter your newspaper, you begin to put together
the news—you are producer.
Instead of offering us freedom, the uncontrolled flow of pictures distracts us from
the task of determining for ourselves what might be real enough to really matter.
We face the prospect of being reduced to the status of consumers who, given a hyperabundance
of choices, lack the ability to choose. Those in power benefit from this
abandonment of discernment; they get to make the choices for us. Thus the liberty
of an unchecked image environment may prove to be less a blessing than a subtle
form of tyranny, and the democracy of the camera a perverse kind of fascism.
Is the scientific and technological revolution now in progress actually any more sweeping
than that which took place more slowly during the 3,000 years since Homer wrote?
Is not the difference between the scienceless and machineless world of his time and
that which the 20th century now possesses and cowers under as great as any that is
likely to be between our present world and that of the 21st century? The heroes of
the Iliad would be as bewildered in New York or San Francisco as we would be distressed
by Troy, Ithaca or Mycenae. But if we could meet together in some grove or
porch where nothing need remind us of the presence or absence of those changes
that time has made in our environment, and if we were to discuss not religion, technology
or science, but love, hate, tragedy, pathos, and the paradox of man’s persisting
inhumanity despite his capacity for pity and tenderness, then I think we
would understand one another quite well and realize that . . . we are not new men
but the same old paradoxical creatures, “the glory, jest and riddle of the world.”
Nothing comes harder than original thought. Even the most gifted scientist spends
only a tiny fraction of his waking hours doing it. . . . The rest of the time his mind
hugs the coast of the known, reworking old information, adding lesser data, giving
reluctant attention to the ideas of others . . . , warming lazily to the memory of successful
experiments, and looking for a problem—always looking for a problem,
something that can be accomplished, that will lead somewhere, anywhere.
A challenge is being mounted to some of the central assumptions of mainstream social
science. The strict separation of theory and data, the “brute fact” idea; the effort to
create a formal vocabulary of analysis purged of all subjective reference, the “ideal
language” idea; and the claim to moral neutrality and the Olympian view, the “God’s
truth” idea—none of these can prosper when explanation comes to be regarded as
a matter of connecting action to its sense rather than behavior to its determinants.
The refiguration of social theory represents, or will if it continues, a sea change in
our notion not so much of what knowledge is, but of what it is we want to know. Social
events do have causes and social institutions effects; but it just may be that the road
to discovering what we assert in asserting this lies less through postulating forces and
measuring them than through noting expressions and inspecting them.
Mercurial ribbon licking the cut lip of the Blue Ridge—
Science has been uncommonly successful as a strategy to command the future
because it admits no distinction between ends and means. There are no higher ends
in science than truthful knowledge, and there are no other means allowed on the
way than truthful knowledge. In an age in which ideologies claim, not so much arrogantly
as insolently, that they are justified in using men as means, this central value
in the ethic of science has a right to be put at the center of the Reformation.
The scientist himself does not want to go to the moon; he knows that for his purposes
unmanned spaceships carrying the best instruments human ingenuity can invent will
do the job of exploring the moon’s surface much better than dozens of astronauts.
And yet, an actual change of the human world, the conquest of space or whatever we
may wish to call it, is achieved only when manned space carriers are shot into the universe,
so that man himself can go where up to now only human imagination and its
power of abstraction, or human ingenuity and its power of fabrication, could reach.
From the records of history it seems to be clear that the theologies and philosophies
which take time too seriously are correlated with political theories that inculcate and
justify the use of large-scale violence. . . . For those whose philosophy does not compel
them to take time with an excessive seriousness, the ultimate goal is to be sought
neither in the revolutionary’s progressive social apocalypse, nor in the reactionary’s
revived and perpetuated past, but in an eternal divine Now, which those who sufficiently
desire this good can realize as a fact of immediate experience. The mere act
of dying is not in itself a passport to eternity; nor can wholesale killing do anything
to bring deliverance either to the slayers, or the slain, or their posterity. The peace
that passes all understanding is the fruit of the liberation into eternity.
Our democracy has overripened to the point where our politicians poll us before
they speak their minds, which creates no leaps of inspiration, but instead a circle of
confusion. Agility isn’t buoyancy, doesn’t make us happy. This reliance on the common
wisdom puts the cart before the horse because of course the theory was not
that the people might somehow formulate enlightened national policies—rather that
collectively, intuitively, they could best fathom who ought to be entrusted to do so.
The uncontrollable brute whom I want to put out of the way is not to be punished
for his misdeeds, nor used as an example or a warning; he is to be killed for the protection
of others, like the wolf that escaped not long ago in a Connecticut suburb.
No anger, vindictiveness or moral conceit need preside over the removal of such dangers.
But a man’s inability to control his violent impulses or to imagine the fatal consequences
of his acts should be a presumptive reason for his elimination from society.
René Descartes
A few months ago I read an interview with a critic; a well-known critic; an unusually
humane and intelligent critic. The interviewer had just said that the critic
“sounded like a happy man,” and the interview was drawing to a close; the critic
said, ending it all: “I read, but I don’t get time to read at whim. All the reading I
do is in order to write or teach, and I resent it. We have no TV, and I don’t listen
to the radio or records, or go to art galleries or the theater. I’m a completely negative
personality.”
A poem is not the same poem from reading to reading, because the reader is not
the same reader.
The rise of mass communications, the growth of large organizations and novel technologies,
the invention of advertising and public relations, the professionalization of
education—all contributed to linguistic pollution, upsetting the ecological balance
between words and their environment. In our own time the purity of language is under
unrelenting attack from every side—from professors as well as from politicians, from
newspapermen as well as from advertising men, from men of the cloth as well as from
men of the sword, and not least from those indulgent compilers of modern dictionaries
who propound the suicidal thesis that all usages are equal and all correct.
Why do expatriates yearn for home? For they do yearn for it. The paradigm is those
thousands of Englishmen in colonial India who dreamed their whole lives of a rosecovered
cottage in Surrey. Is it a sentimental attachment to family and clan? Patriotism,
after all? Are we all, in the end, involuntary exiles? Surely we voluntary ones
long for home in another way. We chose to go. We are where we want to be. Is our
homesickness a theatrical pose, just another facet of our disponibility? . . .
The superrich make lousy neighbors—
I nap well on airplanes, trains, buses, and cars and with a special proficiency at concerts
and lectures. I am, when pressed, able to nap standing up. In certain select
company, I wish I could nap while being spoken to. I have not yet learned to nap
while I myself am speaking, though I have felt the urge to do so. I had a friend named
Walter B. Scott who, in his late 60s, used to nap at parties of 10 or 12 people that
he and his wife gave. One would look over and there Walter would be, chin on his
chest, lights out, nicely zonked; he might as well have hung a Gone Fishing sign on
his chest. Then, half an hour or so later, without remarking upon his recent departure,
he would smoothly pick up the current of the talk, not missing a stroke, and
get finely back into the flow. I saw him do this perhaps four or five times, always with
immense admiration.
For many years I kept my uneasiness about becoming a success in education to myself.
I did so in part because I wanted to avoid vague feelings that, if considered carefully,
I would have no way of dealing with; and in part because I felt that no one else
shared my reaction to the opportunity provided by education. When I began to
rehearse my story of cultural dislocation publicly, however, I found many listeners
willing to admit to similar feelings from their own pasts. Equally impressive was the
fact that many among those I spoke with were not from nonwhite racial groups, which
made me realize that one can grow up to enter the culture of the academy and find
it a “foreign” culture for a variety of reasons, ranging from economic status to religious
heritage.
Jessy has not lost her capacity for autistic delight. What makes her happy today? Once
she’d exult over her discovery that “70003 is a prime!” Then numbers became what
she calls “too good,” so good that she would speak them only in whispers, or refuse
to say them at all. Then her interest subsided; other things evoked her secret smile.
Stars. Rainbows. Clouds. Weather phenomena. Quartz heaters. Odometers. Street
lamps. A strange procession of obsessions, eliciting for a year or two an intensity of
emotion approaching ecstasy, then subsiding into mere pleasure. Wordless once,
now she could be thrilled by a word, a phrase. “Asteroid explosion.” “Digital fluorescent
number change.” Recently it’s anything to do with banks, checks, above all
fees. “There’s a fee in feeling! And feet!” We know that special smile, that faraway
gaze. But don’t, don’t ask her “Why are you smiling?” The phrase itself (and there
are others) invites desolation, the banshee wail. We don’t know why.
One dubiously sunny Irish summer day in Dublin I was walking along the city’s eastern
beach-rim when my friend told me that this wasn’t just any eastern beach-rim—
the kind of place in, say, Barcelona or Sydney where you might casually toss
Frisbees—but in fact literary holy ground: Sandymount strand. A sophisticated modernist
shiver, dressed in a bow tie and a bowler hat, with a pince-nez and a small
mustache, sauntered up and down my spine.
I fell in love with Gilbert and Sullivan at a tender age, and imbibed all the words
and music before I could possibly understand their full context and meaning. I therefore,
and invariably, enjoy a bizarre and exhilarating, if mildly unsettling, experience
every time I attend a performance today. An old joke, based on an ethnic
stereotype, that may pass muster as a mock on a privileged group in an age of political
correctness, asks why the dour citizens of Switzerland often burst into inappropriate
laughter during solemn moments at Sunday church services: “When they get
the jokes they heard at Saturday night’s party.” Similar experiences attend my current
Sundays with Gilbert and Sullivan, although my delays between hearing and
comprehension extend to 40 years or more!
After September 11, I saw for the first time that the flag—along with all its red, white,
and blue collateral relations—is what a semiotician would call “polysemous”: it has
multiple meanings. The flag held aloft by the pair of disheveled hitchhikers who
squatted next to their backpacks on Route 116, a mile from home, meant We will
not rape or murder you. The red, white, and blue turban worn by the Sikh umbrella
vendor a friend walked past in Dupont Circle, not far from the White House, meant
Looking like someone and thinking like him are not the same thing. The flag on the lapel
of a Massachusetts attorney mentioned in our local paper—on seeing it, his opposing
counsel had whispered to a colleague, “I’m so screwed, do you have a flag pin
I can borrow?”—meant I am morally superior. The flags brandished by two cowboyhatted
singers at a country fair we attended on the day the first bombs fell on
Afghanistan meant Let’s kill the bastards. The Old Glory bandana around the neck
of the well-groomed golden retriever I saw on a trip to Manhattan meant Even if I
have a Prada bag and my dog has a pedigree, I’m still a New Yorker and I have lost something.
The flag in our front yard meant We are sad. And we’re sorry we’ve never done this before.
Though it may seem sacrilegious to say so, I can’t help feeling that in certain respects
the Internet has a lot in common with the Talmud. The Rabbis referred to the Talmud
as a yam, a sea—and though one is hardly intended to “surf” the Talmud, there
is something more than oceanic metaphors that links the two verbal universes. Vastness,
a protean structure, and an uncategorizable nature are in part what define
them both. When Maimonides, the great medieval commentator, wanted to simplify
the organization of the Talmud, and reduce its peculiar blend of stories, folklore,
legalistic arguments, anthropological asides, biblical exegesis, and intergenerational
Rabbinic wrangling into simplified categories and legal conclusions, he was
denounced as a heretic for disrupting the very chaos that, in some sense, had come
to represent a divine fecundity. . . .
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