Totalitarianism is not over. It survives as residues, some of them all the
more virulent because they are no longer hemmed in by borders; and some of
them are within our own borders. Liberal democracy deserved, and still
deserves, to prevail, but in both components of liberal democracy’s name
there are opportunities for the ideologist: in the first component lies
inspiration for the blind devotee of economic determinism, and in the second
for the dogmatic egalitarian.
From within as well as without, the Procrustean enemies of our provokingly
multifarious free society are bound to come, sometimes merely to preach
obscurantist doctrine in our universities, at other times to fly our
airliners into towers of commerce.
What they hate is the bewildering complexity of civilised life, which we will
find hard to defend if we share the same aversion. We shouldn’t. There is
too much to appreciate. If it can’t be sorted into satisfactory categories,
that should make us take heart: it wouldn’t be the work of human beings if
it could.
Does culture, then, provide the ultimate rejoinder to totalitarianism? There
was never a time like now to be a lover of the arts. Mozart never heard most
of Bach. We can hear everything by both of them. Brahms was so bowled over
by Carmen that he saw 20 performances, but he had to buy 20 opera
tickets to do so. Manet never saw all his paintings in one place: we can.
While Darcey Bussell dances at Covent Garden, the next Darcey Bussell can
watch her from Alice Springs.
Technology not only has given us a permanent present, but has given it the
furniture of eternity. We can cocoon ourselves, if we wish, in a new
provincialism more powerful than any of the past empires. English is this
new world’s lingua franca, not because it was once spoken in the British
Empire but because it is spoken now in the American international cultural
hegemony. Born to speak it, we can view the whole world as a dubbed movie,
and not even have to bother with subtitles.
Should we wish, we can even savour the tang of alien tongues: a translation
will be provided on a separate page, to be dialled up at a touch. We can be
world citizens without leaving home. If that seems too static, we can travel
without leaving home. The world is prepared to receive us, with all its
fruits laid out for our consumption and wrapped in clingfilm to meet our
sanitary standards. Gresham’s law, that the bad drives out the good, has
acquired a counter-law, that the bad draws in the good: there are British
football hooligans who can sing Puccini’s Nessun dorma.It
would be a desirable and enviable existence just to earn a decent wage at a
worthwhile job and spend all one’s leisure hours improving one’s aesthetic
appreciation. There is so much to appreciate, and it is all available for
peanuts. It has always been part of the definition of humanism that true
learning has no end in view except its own furtherance.
In the 19th 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 18th
century had meant to usher in the age of reason, the 19th 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 20th 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 civilisation civilised
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 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.
Humanism wasn’t in the separate activities: humanism was the connection
between them. Humanism was a particularised but unconfined concern with all
the high-quality products of the creative impulse, which could be
distinguished from the destructive one by its propensity to increase the
variety of the created world rather than reduce it. Builders of
concentration camps might be creators of a kind – it is possible to imagine
an architect happily working to perfect the design of the concrete
stanchions supporting an electrified barbed-wire fence – but they were in
business to subtract variety from the created world, not to add to it. In
the connection between all the outlets of the creative impulse in mankind,
humanism made itself manifest, and to be concerned with understanding and
maintaining that intricate linkage necessarily entailed an opposition to any
political order that worked to weaken it.
As the late Edward W. Said wrote after the attack on the World Trade Centre,
Western humanism is not enough: we need a universal humanism. I agree with
that. The question is how to get it, and my view is that it can’t be had
unless we raise our demands on ourselves a long way beyond decorating our
lives with enough cultivation to make the pursuit of ambition look civilised.
The ideologists thought they understood history. They thought history had a
shape, a predictable outcome, a direction that could be joined. They were
wrong. Some were intellectuals who shamed themselves and their calling by
bringing superior mental powers to the defence of misbegotten political
systems that were already known to be dispensing agony to the helpless. The
way to avoid the same error now is not through understanding less. It can
only be through understanding more.
The getting of wisdom is a hard road. Most of us are not equipped by nature to
travel it at high speed, and some of us must crawl like babies. Our chafed
hands and knees can easily make us wonder if the journey is worth it.
If I could go back in time and design my own birth, I would introduce the
genetic material that might have made me a bit less of a dunderhead. Even
today, in my seventh decade, I meet people 40 years younger who are patently
more sensible than I was when I set off on my great adventure. I was their
age then, but they are my age now: old heads on young shoulders. What I had
to learn by trial and error, they seem to have been born knowing. But
perhaps they have had the luck to be born into a better time. If so, and if
they are to stay lucky, the worse time had better not come back. For those
it didn’t kill or maim, it injured the air. Uncertainty was something we all
breathed in, back then. The horrors of the past and present made us nervous
about the future, and the habit is hard to shake. The young might do well to
tie a handkerchief over the rear-view mirror and just get on with it.
The world is turning into one big liberal democracy anyway. Terrorism will
punch angry holes in it, but in the long run nothing will stop the planetary
transformation. Even if armed with a secondhand atomic bomb, an obscurantist
can do nothing for the poor. Most of the poverty on Earth is caused by the
number of people being born who would ordinarily never have been conceived.
Prosperity gave them life. All too frequently the life seems not worth
living, but when we cry out at the injustice we are asking for more
democracy, not less.
Subsidiary populations that migrate into the liberal democracies are seeking a
legitimate economic advantage in comparison with the homelands they left.
They are understandably reluctant to accept that their economic disadvantage
in the homelands they left might have been at least partly due to the
culture in which they grew up.
In their adopted countries they are often encouraged in this reluctance by
local humanitarians who think it illiberal for an imported culture to be
criticised for its backwardness. But when the zealous young men of the
imported culture begin to practise terrorism under the encouragement of
their religious leaders, even the local absolutists for human rights come to
see the point of restricting the freedom of religious leaders to preach
violence against the adopted state. So eventually the rule of law under an
elected, replaceable government will have even the humanitarians behind it.
It can’t lose.
Why, then, bother to ponder how we got out of the maelstrom? Why be an Ancient
Mariner, who stoppeth one in three and boreth them to tears? The only answer
comes from faith: faith that the rule of decency – which at last, and
against all the odds, looks as if it might prevail – began in humanism, and
can’t long continue without it.
How will we know if our earthly paradise is coming to pieces, if we don’t know
how it was put together? It was the human mind that got us this far, by
considering what had happened in history; by considering the good that had
been done and resolving to do likewise; and by considering the evil and
resolving to avoid its repetition. Much of the evil, alas, was in the mind
itself. The mind took account of that, too. The mind is the one collectivity
in which the free individual can thrive: which is lucky, because live in it
he must.
Even within ourselves there are many voices. Hegel, when he said that we can
learn little from history, forgot about Hegel, author of the best thing
about history that has ever yet been said. He said that history is the story
of liberty becoming conscious of itself.
© Clive James 2007 Extracted from Cultural Amnesia, published by
Picador on May 18 at £25. It is available from BooksFirst for £23 with free p&p:
0870 1608080 or timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
Clive James online
In the first of three exclusive films for Times Online on the figures who
have shaped our world go to timesonline.co.uk/clivejames
Clive James tells the stories of: Coco Chanel and the Nazis: “During the
occupation she took the easy path. She took on a powerful German protector.
It paid off in a big way in the early stages: she would not have wanted for
butter or sugar.” Albert Camus:“Though he sometimes fudged the research and
often fell victim to the lure of a cadence, Camus was stuck with a
congenital inability to be superficial: he could be glib, but would regret
it while correcting the proofs.”
Chairman Mao:“To concentrate on Mao’s late-flowering monstrosity is surely
misleading. His early-flowering humanitarianism is a much more useful field
of study.”
Part two premieres on Saturday, May 19:mEvelyn Waugh, Tony Curtis and Margaret
Thatcher
Part three premieres on Saturday, May 26: Sigmund Freud, Louis Armstrong and
Sophie Scholl
