Leszek Kolakowski and the Children of Abraham
Lezsek Kolakowski and the Children of Abraham
Leszek Kolakowski and the Children of Abraham
September 1, 2010
(I wrote this review in 1983 but never published it. For a more recent piece on some of the same issues, also see, Tolstoy and the Last Station of Modernity.)
A Review of F. E. Peter, Children of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. Princeton University Press, 1982.
Leszek Kolakowski, Religion: If there is no God. . . On God, the Devil, Sin and other Worries of the so-called Philosophy of Religion. Oxford University Press, 1982.
F. E. Peter’s book Children of Abraham offers an interesting and systematic treatment of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions that demonstrates their essential unity. Professor Peters achieves this by concentrating on six areas that are outlined by his chapter titles: “Community and Hierarchy,” “The Law,” “Scripture and Tradition,” “The Liturgy,” “Asceticism and Mysticism,” and “Theology.” His intent is, as he states, “to illuminate how these affiliated religions approached common issues.” His perspective is one that holds the monotheistic religions as sharing the same source, attested by the opening paragraph of his book:
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all scriptural religions, that is, they affirm the existence of a divine revelation in written form. “The Sacred Writings,” “The Scripture” or “The Book” are practically interchangeable terms among the three, and their adherents can all be identified as “People of the Book,” as the Muslims in fact call them. More, these revelations from on high represent God’s intervention in history; and, indeed, the same God: the Jew’s Yahweh, the Christians’ God the Father who is in Heaven, and the Muslims’ Allah is one and the same deity, with the same history, the same attributes and, in fact, the same name.
This statement of their shared origin informs much of the discussion of Professor Peter’s book and enables him to cut through, as it were, the malignant growths of countless sectarian debates, animosities, and misperceptions.
His perception of their oneness surfaces again during his discussion of Islam:
What was understood to have happened was that a new prophet had appeared in the Judeo-Christian tradition and had promulgated a new revelation, or rather a new version of revelation, which had as its object not the abrogation of the old Law but its restoration to its original vigor.
Here his analysis probes the common origin, which Islam shares with Judaism and Christianity, and shows that, far from an entirely new revelation, Islam, as Christianity before it, marks the “restoration” of the “old Law” to its pristine purity. Conversely, his perspective aids him to discern common absurdities that mar the historical development of each religion:
And each community lived in the conviction that God had spoken to it for the last time: the Jews, for the first and final times; the Christians, for the second and final time; the Muslims, for the third and final time.
Although Peters does not expand on the illogicality of this conviction, such an idea is implicit in his work, given his emphasis on their shared origin.
The progressive universality of each dispensation is developed in his chapter “The Law”:
Moses was given the Law to modify pagan custom for the better, and so provide a bridge from idolatry to a belief in the unique God. . . . The Law appears, then—and most clearly in its cultic and sacrificial aspects—to be a transitional and ameliorative instrument rather than final and perfect, at least when viewed from a historical perspective.
Certainly this progressive bridge suffuses the Torah—the covenant code and the Book of the Kings document precisely the struggle with the “cultic and sacrificial aspects”—as well as the books of the prophets. But what is noteworthy here is Peter’s realization that the Law was not final and perfect but a transitional and ameliorative instrument—one that guided and directed the Jewish covenant community to belief in one God. Later, Peters also suggests that Muhammad provided this bridge for the pre-Islamic peoples by preserving “within the hajj [pilgrimage] a treasure-trove of early Semitic cult practice,” much as Christ had preserved aspects of the Jewish cultural background of his day.
Although the strongest point of Peter’s book is his demonstration of the shared origin of the revealed religions, it is also, paradoxically, the most conspicuous weakness. For Professor Peters, all religions are pretty much the same. There is a sense in which he never takes any issue seriously. His tone itself exudes skepticism, and one wonders if “common” in his vocabulary does not often carry a pejorative nuance. And although he claims objectivity and rationality, his biases are those of what he calls a “secular historican,” one who believes categorically that all religions ultimately and merely amount to a struggle for political power.
Leszek Kolakowski’s book Religion concentrates on exactly the issue that Peters refuses to consider, whether or not God exists. By quickly surveying the history of the philosophy of religion, Professor Kolakowski covers both the major critiques of religious belief and the major counter-arguments of such philosophers as Descartes, Leibniz, and Pascal. He also discusses theodicy, skepticism and mysticism, eternity and inevitable human failure, reason and eros, the relationship of knowledge and language, and the link between belief in God and death. Despite the expansive sweep of his discussion, his concerns find their center in his oft-repeated thesis:
I take the act of worship as unremovable and instrinsic to any description of the phenomenon of religion. The socially established worship of the eternal reality: this formulation comes perhaps closest to what I have in mind when talking of religion.
Though he marshalls what Abdul-Baha calls in Some Answered Questions the “proofs and demonstrations of the existence of God,” Kolakowski believes the act of worship to be superior to all such arguments—as Abdul-Baha put it, “When man feels the indwelling spirit, he is in no need of arguments for its existence.” But to stop at this observation would be to ignore much of what is of value in Kolakowski’s book. For one thing, his definition of religion as “the socially established worship of the eternal reality” refutes the conception of an individual faith that can be separated from the communal matrix. Religion, by its very nature, presupposes social cohesion—albeit a cohesion enigmatically based on individual worship.
Kolakowski further elaborates his definition in the following passage:
Religion is not a set of propositions, it is the realm of worship wherein understanding, knowledge, the feeling of participation in the ultimate reality . . . and moral commitment appear as a single act, whose subsequent segregation into separate classes of metaphysical, moral and other assertions might be useful but is bound to distort th esense of the original act of worship.
He convincingly makes the case that religion is not merely a “set of propositions” or rational constructs; rather, it is, as he states elsewhere, “a way of life.” And although the human mind is capable of analyzing its act of worship, of separating it into metaphysical, moral, social, and rational elements, of looking at the mountain, the mind cannot comprehend either itself or the mystery it contemplates. Far from constituting a flight into vague irrationality, Kolakowski’s position asserts the fundamental difference between religious and empirical or scientific truth. This difference is basically one of validation: “The only reliable access to religious truth is by way of a private experience which cannot be satisfactorily rendered in intersubjective discourse.” Yet modern science asserts its now “fanatical rationalism” by affirming self-assuredly “what is or is not knowledge.”
Kolakowski’s position, like that of all Christian apologists of the 20th Century, is an embattled one. He himself recognizes the fact and acknowledges at length the decline of religious belief over the last century or so. His emphasis throughout the book on “two irreconcilable ways of accepting the world and our position in it” would largely concede defeat were he not correct that historically the two “colliding” viewpoints have at least forced one another to be consistent in their reasoning about their respective beliefs. Still, there is something wistful about his thinking. Against the vast panorama of the century, Kolakowski’s attempt to breath new life into Christianity possesses a certain amount of wishful thinking that is similar to W. H. Auden’s quixotic call at the end of his Enchafed Flood to renew “the ruined walls of the city,” because Baha’u’llah revealed no man can renew the city: “Once in about a thousand years shall this City be renewed and re-adorned. . . .That city is none other than the Word of God revealed in every age and dispensation.” T. S. Eliot’s comments on The Waste Land indicate at least an honest confrontation with modernity: “Now there is nothing in which to believe . . . Belief itself is dead . . . therefore my poem is the first to respond properly to the modern situation and not call upon Make-Believe.”
In all fairness to Kolakowski, perhaps he is honestly thinking of Christianity when he writes,
A religous worship reduced to its secular utility and oblivious of its original function can survive for a time, no doubt, yet sooner or later its emptiness is bound to be exposed, the irrelevance of its form to its content will become apparent, its ambiguous life sustained by credit from a non-existent bank will come to end and the forgotten links with the Sacred will be resumed in another place, by other forms of religiosity.
Coming as this excerpt does a few pages from the end of the book, it cannot be read (however he may have intended it) as anything other than a requiem for all Christianity and particularly for Catholicism, which he focuses on and which has undeniably been reduced to its secular and political utility in a few countries that readily come to mind.
We now live in a time of transition, the interregnum, between the decaying of old cities and the renewing and re-adorning of the ancient one. And while many observers are refusing to take any religion seriously, while many are choosing to “call upon Make-Believe” to shore up their swiftly eroding position, religious and secular, the major and minor plans of God to renew the ruined walls proceed.
To My Opposite Number
Daniel Rifenburgh, Advent
To My Opposite Number in Texas. May 2, 2010
A Review of Daniel Rifenburgh’s Advent: Poems. The Waywiser Press. London, 2002.
Daniel Rifenburgh studied with Donald Justice and Richard Wilbur, with the latter providing an Introduction to Rifenburg’s only book of poems, Advent. Though not mentioned on the book flaps or in Wilbur’s introduction, Rifenburgh, whom I’ve come to know through Facebook, was, he tells me, a student of the poet Robert Hayden, when he was a visiting professor of poetry at the University of Louisville during the spring semester of 1969. Since I myself had been a student of Hayden’s at the University of Michigan a decade later, I was delighted to communicate with someone else who had also studied with him. We exchanged a number of messages. I ordered a copy of Advent and he mentioned he had ordered a copy of my book, The Grove of the Eumenides, which includes my essay “Robert Hayden in the Morning Time.” He remarked “Hayden got me a creative writing scholarship,” but he had never bought his Collected Poems, which seemed odd to me. If I had studied with anyone of Hayden’s ability, though I don’t know who that would have been, I would have at least read all his work and chosen to own his books. It’s a pity that Rifenburgh didn’t. He might have found much that would have helped in both form and content.
Though I have never cared for most of the poetry of either Richard Wilbur or Donald Justice, finding them small academic poets, campus poets, writing usually on narrow, personal, limited subjects, I thought I’d not hold that against Daniel Rifenburgh and tried to give an impartial reading to his poems, when Advent arrived. The Note on the Author informed me that Rifenburgh had spent three years in Vietnam after his study at the University of Louisville, which made me recall Hayden’s bemoaning in poignant poems and prose his students “brutalized” in that conflict, wondering if he might have had in mind Rifenburgh among them. Wilbur’s introduction didn’t impress me at all, nor did his citing some lines from Rifenburgh, which included, “Wandering between the Word and its infinite extension.” I can respect a poet who believes in Jesus Christ and whatever historically evolved denomination or persuasion he or she chooses, or dissents from. I am not entirely unsympathetic at all. I stem from a long line of Christians of many denominations. Christianity is a humane, spiritual, and true vision of life, when not corrupted by human beings, which is the problem, since we seem to have the capacity to vitiate everything. I even find Christianity infinitely preferable to Marxism, capitalism as a religion, and the other endless substitutes for transcendence that modernity has and does produce. I’m well aware that I’ve already violated innumerable sacred doctrines, religious and secular, but must be honest before my own conscience, and what I actually found and think about Rifenburgh’s poems.
Getting past the first poem was the problem. I can’t even take it seriously in terms of what it’s saying. “To My Opposite Number in Samarkand” is in epistolary form, addressed to someone in the East, who hears, “The gong inside the old Buddhist temple,” and the call to prayer from “The high towers of the mosques.” Nearby, the reader is told, stands “the lone orthodox church, unevangelistic.” One senses there’s a severe judgment in the word “unevangelistic,” less than full sympathy with Eastern Christianity. Rifenburgh, I should explain, lives in Texas, perhaps known more for evangelism than the high church style, and maybe that influences his word choice. After allusions to Dante, Virgil, and Parmenides, the persona seems to take refuge in poetry, a thoroughly modern gesture, time honored for over a hundred and fifty years. What poet can quibble with that? Yet, an ersatz, and even Matthew Arnold knew and understood it as such. To his credit, so does Rifenburgh. He soon turns to the lines quoted by Richard Wilbur, after remarking on the overwhelming experience of reading Montale,
Or, so it seems, in the afterglow of such reading,
As if light had an enduring stepchild in the world
Wandering between the Word and its infinite extension,
Finding play in the interstices and lacunae
Where even breath must pause
In its tally of declensions
And what enters then by a grace
Commands our strictest reverence.
His “strictest reverence,” for the Word, is further implied in the closing stanza, in which he writes to his “Opposite Number,” to speak in the ear of the Boddhisatvas, by implication all the Ways of Opinion, “Parmenides.” The subordinate clause, “if you’re able,” slips in a derisive note, sticking the interlocutor right in the guts, if he hasn’t gotten it by now. In another poem, Herman Melville receives similar treatment, which I think constitutes a misunderstanding of Melville’s complexity: “call it a lack,” “a bible would do him little good.”
“To My Opposite Number in Samarkand” and the last one in the book are clearly intended as “bookends,” if you will, that frame the poems in between of mostly much broader range, with many on Rifenburgh’s experiences in Texas and South America. His sequence of poems titled “Andean Music,” for instance, explores his time working as a newspaper reporter in Latin America and Peru. I was struck in particular with the poem “VI. El Condorito,” about “Che Ernesto,” not the Marxist hero, flying down from the mountains of Macchu Picchu in a hang-glider. Later, together, they “headed, in the dark before the dawn, up to the sacred city.” Such poems are the best of his work, involved with life. In terms of other poems, Aristotle in his Poetics emphasized one of the crucial abilities of the poet was to choose the right material to work with. Rifenburgh often seems to me to lack such a sense of decorum, though our times may tend not to like that old tag. It is something poets forget and neglect at their peril. And it is always a temptation for the poet to write with his or her doctrine and not the heart.
The last poem of the book is the title poem, “Advent,” and the reader is meant to feel the weight of the book leading up to it, emphasizing its importance to Rifenburgh. After describing a rainy day and the material decay of various leaves, he writes,
The mind, too, sheds a tattered cloak
And recalls elements of the old story:
The hoop round the omphalos of Christ, Marian,
The cold coin imprisoning Caesar,
A tocsin of alarm dilating the pupils of Herod,
And now the heart shunts the oil
Of incarnation out of its chambers again
In time with the last drumbeats of the rain.
We defeat the world through surrogates, and but briefly,
While placid beasts feed in drizzling pastures,
Building strength for the flight into Egypt,
Yet the son must be born in us, says the Father,
Or wither, when new oil floods the ventricles
And we become, however briefly, His surrogates
Or betrayers.
And for this, in Winter's dead zero,
We must sing, sing Hallelujah.
The choice laid before the reader is the exclusivism of truth, for, from whatever perspective, this truth is the Truth, either we are “His surrogates / Or betrayers.” Some Muslims, Jews, and others might say essentially the same thing. Influenced by the commonly shared Old Testament, the Western world, especially, has a penchant for this kind of approach to whatever the word “religion” means. Not a new idea, nothing tricky about it, just straight out in your face. I like that. Some Christians enjoy it as “scandalous.” That’s fine. That helps me know where I stand. And I respect Rifenburgh’s conscience, conviction, and interpretation. I stand with his “Opposite Number in Samarkand,” and I am proud of it. Rifenburg’s subject is as fit for poetry as anything else, and I don’t find it offensive, just out of touch with all of human history and religious experience, especially the last five-hundred years. Both religious and secular exclusivisms do that to people. They can keep people isolated from other equally valid traditions of the meaning and purpose of life, often not that different at the core from Christianity or an enlightened humanism, if one can be fair and open about it, make the brotherly effort to understand. Rifenburgh exhibits no such openness but continues along the line of what he had stated in the first poem, “Parmenides was right, / None of this exists!” Many Christian denominations have wisely moderated their thinking and teaching beyond caustic either/or’s.
Writing off the history and religious experience of much of the world is perhaps not an entirely efficacious approach for any human being, especially a poet, who must be open to all that is human, if he is truly to serve the Muses, the daughters of Zeus, the sacred servants of All. Had Rifenburgh read Robert Hayden’s poetry years ago he would have found a much more open and universal perspective on life than he has spent his minor talent on. Toward universality, not exclusivism, is where the Divine Being, the Lord of history, has been guiding, and continues to guide, humankind. All peoples are able. In the light of the fullness of the literary tradition, which includes all nations and peoples, poets should encourage humanity to choose to travel together and be tolerant of their fellow human beings. We are all human, fallible, and not a one of us has ever had, or ever will have, the entire Truth, though it is human to think otherwise. At a time when it can seem some people in the United States and elsewhere are pushing toward religious fascism or secular utopia, it might help to step back from the brink and reflect on the healthy effect that pluralism and tolerance have had on civilization. People around our small planet need to value pluralism and universality more, not less.
Saul Bellow. Ravelstein. Allan Bloom.
Ravelstein by Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow. Ravelstein. Allan Bloom.
The Closing of the American Soul.
November 23, 2009.
When Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein was published in 2000, I did not rush out and buy a copy but closely followed the many reviews that began to appear. I had read almost all of Bellow’s work up to his last novel but felt for some reason that the time was not right to read Ravelstein, despite my having ravenously devoured Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind when it had been published in 1987, and anything related to it. I trusted my intuition and attended to other interests, while more reviews continued to come out. Occasionally, I would stumble on one and read it, thinking Ravelstein was a book that I’d have to read someday. Then in 2005 I bought a copy when I happened upon it in a bookstore, but I didn’t read it. I put it on a shelf, waiting for the right moment. This fall, a year and a half into working on writing an epic poem, I realized I needed Saul Bellow’s help. I needed to know how things really stood with the Jews. Even more than Commentary Magazine, I knew I could count on Saul Bellow to tell me the truth. He never lied to me in the past. I remembered Ravelstein and retrieved it. The right moment in the life of my soul had come.
After reading Ravelstein, I reread most of the articles and reviews I had been collecting for years. I was struck by the shoddiness of the typical piece of writing published in national newspapers, magazines, and academic journals. Schools of journalism might provide their students with a modicum of technical training but certainly are not capable of cultivating the necessary sensibility to read and understand a subtle and complex literary creation, while English departments, under the rigor mortis of Deconstruction theory and the like, have abandoned and betrayed literature and poetry, rendering many of their students incapable of even writing a clear, intelligible sentence. The review that interested me was by a writer, Cynthia Ozick, who insightfully perceives what Saul Bellow is about, though she only touches on Bellow’s ruminations on the soul in passing, in The New Republic, “‘Soul’ being his most polemical term.” These curious facts fascinate me and convey something very important about the present state of cultural affairs. We have lost the soul and few can even recognize it. Few are willing to discuss it.
Many of the thirty or more reviews focus on the surface layers of Ravelstein, emphasizing it’s a roman-a-clef; that is, the characters correspond to real people, Allan Bloom, as Abe Ravelstein, and Chick, as Saul Bellow himself. But the novel is much more than that, much more than mere biography. Ozick is very perceptive about that fact, unlike the journalistic hacks so much of the media presents as “reviewers.” Much is sensationally made of Bellow’s disclosing Bloom’s homosexuality and death from AIDS, as though that really amounted to everything in terms of the book. Technical critiques, plot summaries, gossip, and so on, all substitute for understanding and interpretation. Bellow tells us what the book is about if only we’ll listen, remain open and sensitive to detail.
Abe Ravelstein, a university professor of political philosophy, though Chick at times dismisses him as such, achieves the rarest kind of success, a best selling book that turns him into a millionaire, Allan Bloom’s own intellectually demanding book, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy, and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987):
He had gone over the heads of the profs and the learned societies to speak directly to the great public. There are, after all, millions of people waiting for a sign. Many of them are university graduates (48).
Only “The great public” is worthy of a writer’s aspiration. We live in a time when most writers are content to settle for a low, narrow, constrained, academic audience, a coterie, made up solely of people in university circles, “creative” writing programs, and so on, preaching to the choir. Allan Bloom and Bellow chose humanity, in all its plenitude, as much as could listen and understand, at a high and demanding level, as had Rabelais, Cervantes, and Shakespeare. The university does not captain the great ship of literature. Poets, playwrights, and novelists are the trustees of the literary tradition, not academicians. They are the last people poets should be writing for. The secondary crowd of secondary scholars write secondary things and achieve only secondary results. During the last eighty years, since the New Criticism, the Age of Criticism has only continued to devolve into ever more effete and alienated theories of life and literature, which have nearly sunk the great ship. American English departments have proven themselves unworthy stewards of the literary tradition, of what is noble in human nature, in the great public.
In the novel, Ravelstein admits that Chick had suggested the idea of writing the book, believing Ravelstein only had to write up all his lecture notes to achieve a popular success. The interplay of their two characters shapes and structures the entire book, with Bellow often evocatively emphasizing the contrasts. Once Ravelstein dies, the novel continues because it is about the ideas of Bloom, their critique, and not the mere memoir Ravelstein had wanted. For in the end, it’s the differences between Ravelstein and Chick that count in the overall meaning of the book and in the meaning of the resolution about life and death. Another significant theme is their reflections on the “viciousness” of modern history, as demonstrated by the Nazi treatment of the Jews and other Eastern European atrocities. Ravelstein helps Chick to come to understand the dark side of history and humanity—“viciousness was universal.”
Yet Chick informs the reader at one point that he is not writing about Ravelstein’s ideas on the political philosophy of Western civilization since Plato. Rather, Ravelstein thought he was essentially commissioning Chick to write a memoir of his life, believing Chick has the literary gift for it. The fact is, however, that Bellow does write about Allan Bloom’s ideas, indeed, critiques them, as well as Bloom’s life. In his treatment of Ravelstein, Bellow goes right to the core of Bloom’s shortcomings, both as a thinker and as a man, which is not to say that Bellow doesn’t give Ravelstein credit for his contribution to “the correct ordering of the soul.” The original title of Ravelstein’s book, Chick explains, was “Souls Without Longing,” the Platonic longing for fullness of being, as in Plato’s Symposium and Aristophanes, “the missing portion to complete” our highest, true self.
Repeatedly Chick discloses that Ravelstein is an atheist, a secular, assimilated Jew, hates his own father and family, fails to love his neighbors, is dying of AIDS, and other unfavorable, contradictory elements of his character and life. In recruiting Chick, Ravelstein had told him, “I want you to show me as you see me, without softness or sweeteners.” If those were Allan Bloom’s actual words, he was a brave man to invite America’s greatest modern novelist to show him warts and all and definitely got what he asked for. Chick, interested in the “chicks,” the real passions of life, more so than abstract ideas, now with his second wife, is advised by her, Rosamund, that Chick should “leave it to others to comment on his ideas,” meaning Ravelstein’s ideas. He responds, “Oh, I intend to. I’m going to leave intellectual matters to the experts,” which resonates with a deceptive irony that ought to tip off any sensitive reader. Saul Bellow often had little respect for academic “experts.” I’ve already mentioned he dismisses Ravelstein at times as a mere professor, a teacher.
Bellow is actually writing about the soul and the afterlife and chastens the failure of Allan Bloom to give them both their proper due. In one discussion of Platonic longing, Chick mockingly states, “Ravelstein was in real earnest about this quest driven by longing.” Ravelstein looked for longing in his students, acquaintances, and friends. Chick describes himself as a Jew, though engaged and struggling with modernity, with religious conceptions implicitly within the more customary framework of Judaism. On the other hand, Ravelstein, the learned professor, is out on the edge, in every way, with “his esoteric system,” almost counter-culture, like the students he criticizes in his book. By critiquing the life of Ravelstein, Bellow is critiquing the ideas of Allan Bloom, at a very deep level, for Bloom’s book ultimately reflects its author’s secular and atheistic outlook, even while it appears to affirm the transcendent values of Plato and the Greeks. Chick rams this home when he says, “for most of mankind the longings have, one way or another, been eliminated.” Ultimately, this is just as true of the picture Chick paints of Ravelstein, “portrays,” he self-deprecatingly puts it, and is Bellow’s deepest criticism of him.
Near the end of the book in Chick’s reflections on the afterlife, Chick reveals that even the brilliant atheist Abe Ravelstein, when confronted with the impending seriousness of death, accepted that there must be an afterlife. By then, Ravelstein had moved on from Greece and Athens to Jerusalem. Chick recounts earlier in the novel his memories as a child being intensely struck by the vivid experience, the “first epistemological impressions,” of the sheer miracle of life, “the pictures,” as he phrases it, of existence, his “intimate metaphysics.” When Ravelstein, facing death from AIDS, asks Chick what he imagines death would be like, Chick answers it would mean the pictures would stop, which Ravelstein respectfully broods on. Chick reflects,
No one can give up on the pictures—the pictures might, yes they might continue. I wonder if anyone believes that the grave is all there is. No one can give up on the pictures. The pictures must and will continue. If Ravelstein the atheist-materialist had implicitly told me that he would see me sooner or later, he meant that he did not accept the grave to be the end. Nobody can and nobody does accept this. We just talk tough (222).
Striking at the heart of Allan Bloom’s ideas, Saul Bellow reveals their weakest point, standing no more on a sure foundation, for all of Bloom’s formidable intellectual accomplishment, than all the modern nihilists Bloom denounces. For Chick had earlier revealed, while discussing the pictures at length, that he, unlike Ravelstein,“had no intention, however, of removing, by critical surgery, the metaphysical lenses I was born with.” Socratic “longing” is not enough and cannot alone restore the soul, neither for the individual nor the modern world, yet the scale of values made possible for Bloom a historical position from which he could critique modernity, but proved untenable when confronted with the grave.
In 2002 in an interview with Antonio Monda, published in Do You Believe (2007), available online on The Jewish Daily Forward, Bellow laconically answers the point-blank question “Do you believe in God?” with one word: “Yes.” He dismisses further discussion, believing “it’s a subject whose importance is diminished by conversation.” A few years earlier, in 1999, Norman Manea interviewed Bellow, published eventually in 2007 in Salmagundi. The long, wide-ranging interview covers Bellow’s life and personal views on many issues. In it Bellow states,
I stopped arguing with myself about belief in God. It’s not a real question. The real question is how have I really felt all these years, and all these years I have believed in God; so there it is. What are you going to do about it? So it’s not a question really of the intellect freeing itself from bondage, it’s the question, first of all, of trying to decide whether this is bondage and then just accepting what you believe because that’s all you can do by now (161).
Like Chick, and in the end even Ravelstein, Bellow didn’t believe “the pictures stop.” As with all of Saul Bellow’s books, his probings at the soul of modernity is at the core of Ravelstein, and at the core of Chick’s criticism of Bloom’s ideas, of the groundless, unsustainable ideas of modernity. And so even Bellow near the end of his life could honestly acknowledge to Norman Manea that his earnestness “was more an experience of nostalgia for me than it was a spiritual reality.” Yet the cloying political correctness of our secular, nihilistic age and the journalists, academicians, and writers so caught up in rigid adherence and obeisance to the ruling orthodoxy of scientism, do not know what to make of a serious writer like Bellow who has the temerity actually to believe in and write about God, and such spiritual matters as the afterlife. Many choose to ignore this part of his work. This is the state of the human soul that is still with us, even as it has demonstrated so fully its bankruptcy as a vision of life in every department of human endeavor. Beyond the stale ideas of modernity, Bellow’s down-to-earth answer to the ideas of Allan Bloom, as in an interview, quietly affirms, “all these years I have believed in God; so there it is.”
White Guilt. Shelby Steele.
Shelby Steele
White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. Shelby Steele . HarperCollins, 2006.
The approval by voters of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative merely marks another step along the path of a much deeper cultural shift on the part of blacks and whites. The old formulas have not worked, are not working, and definitely never will work. In his book White Guilt, Shelby Steele tells us why, explains the sorry spectacle of over forty years of misguided government intervention in the lives of black people and the social devastation and erosion that “redemptive liberals,” white and black, have wreaked upon a people, undermining their earlier comparable independence and social cohesion.
Shelby Steele clearly states the real problem of the black community is one of underdevelopment. Poor leadership has failed for decades to teach that “black Americans are capable of being fully responsible for their own advancement” (60). Elsewhere, in his Bradley Lecture, Steele remarks, “Our great mistake was to begin to rely on white guilt instead of ourselves.” After the achievements of the 1960s civil rights leaders who wanted individual rights, the new generation of black militants resorted to anger, pressure, and intimidation to stigmatize white society into a debilitating sense of guilt for the wrongs of slavery and Jim Crow in order to win concessions of monetary and social compensation. It worked. Both sides got what they wanted. A paltry coin. Release from stigma. But the Faustian bargain was at the expense, for many, of further self-development and self-reliance in the black community, leading to a worsening of the social problems that all peoples are prone to when they begin to blame others for their problems. Breaking out of this pernicious system is the challenge before us all.
Nowhere has the mutually destructive relationship been more blatant than in the policies of affirmative action:
“Preferential affirmative action, the classic ‘results’-oriented racial reform, tells minorities quite explicitly that they will not have to compete on the same standards as whites precisely so they can be included in American institutions without in fact achieving the same level of excellence as whites. The true concern of ‘results’ reform is the moral authority of the institution. Minority development is sacrificed to the magnanimity of the institution” (61).
As with the University of Michigan, so with all American institutions desperately seeking to distance and disassociate themselves from the racist white supremacy of the past. Steele’s critique of such practices is utterly scathing, peeling back layer upon layer of corruption, duplicity, deceit, all carried out at the expense of young people, black, white, Asian, and so on. The institution is more interested in social engineering and proving to the world that it is not implicated in racism. Sacrificial lambs on all sides.
In his dissent to the decision of the other Supreme Court members in Grutter versus Bollinger, Justice Clarence Thomas quotes a passage from the abolitionist Frederick Douglass:
“What I ask for the negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us.... I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! ...And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! ... [Y]our interference is doing him positive injury” (“What the Black Man Wants,” 1865).
Steele writes that the dissent of Justice Thomas, like that of Frederick Douglass, is a “fiery and indignant demand that blacks be seen and understood first of all as human beings” (144). Paternalism, by whatever American institution, the Supreme Court or the University of Michigan, constitutes a flagrant and intolerable injustice that sends waves of disruption down through the decades and generations, overwhelming and disrupting the development and dignity of a people, all people.
Shelby Steele’s great book helps us to understand what has happened to us all and sets a new course away from the interfering good intentions that have led to extremely bad results. It is difficult to take the advice of Frederick Douglass. To do nothing. To trust in the innate capacities of human beings. To look to the individual to work out the meaning of his or her own destiny. To resist making ourselves feel good at the demeaning expense of others. Somehow we must learn a deeper meaning of justice, struggle together towards a deeper measure of understanding and life together as people, citizens, Americans, human beings. The wisdom of people like Shelby Steele and Justice Clarence Thomas will help us get there, tap into the deepest springs of human motivation and achievement.
Given Dr. Steele’s experience teaching in university English departments, I found his critique of race and gender studies in literature and education particularly striking and perceptive of the sophistries involved, having myself met on many occasions his reform-minded academic “Betty,” an educator full of misguided good intentions.
Shelby Steele’s White Guilt is a book of such penetrating insight into the dynamics of black and white misfortune and lost opportunity that no person remotely interested in the racial issues of our time should fail to read it.
If the University of Michigan is truly interested in the equal opportunity and success of black students, I challenge my alma mater to organize, fund, and promote a conference, a summit of people of wisdom, people who have two feet on the ground, as soon as possible, with the following keynote speakers, hosted by U of M Professor Carl Cohen, if he is willing: Ward Connerly, Thomas Sowell, Bill Cosby, Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Juan Williams, and MSU Professor William Allen.
Editor, Robert Hayden’s Collected Prose. University of Michigan Press, 1984.
Alumnus ’80 & ’81
Why Voters Should Approve MCRI
Black Rednecks and White Liberals. Thomas Sowell.
Thomas Sowell
Black Rednecks and White Liberals. Thomas Sowell. Encounter Books, 2005.
The approval by voters of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative corroborates Thomas Sowell’s observation in his Preface to the book, referring to “a growing willingness to consider views that differ from the racial orthodoxy that has prevailed largely unchallenged from the 1960s onward in intellectual circles and in the popular media.” The education, government, business, and media elites of Michigan all banded together to hammer into the population the same old tiresome racial orthodoxy, to no avail. The people had had over forty years of it, experienced it in lived life, and would have no more of it. By an overwhelming fifty-eight percent, they voted to change direction, try something different from the orthodoxy of the liberal elites. Thomas Sowell’s book Black Rednecks and White Liberals suggests further lines for reconsideration and change.
In this context, I believe the most interesting essays in the book are “The Real History of Slavery” and “Black Education: Achievements, Myths and Tragedies.” Rejecting the Kunte Kinte view of slavery found in Alex Haley’s Roots, Sowell emphasizes that slavery was a worldwide phenomenon practiced by virtually all peoples and nations, not at all exclusively by white Western nations. Sowell perceives why the contemporary discussion of slavery is usually so distorted:
“Why would anyone wish to arbitrarily understate an evil that plagued mankind for thousands of years, unless it was not this evil itself that was the real concern, but rather the present-day uses of that historic evil? Clearly, the ability to score ideological points against American society or Western civilization, or to induce guilt and thereby extract benefits from the white population today, are greatly enhanced by making enslavement appear to be a peculiarly American, or a peculiarly white, crime” (111).
All of this feeds directly into the radical politics of affirmative action racial preferences. It skews our understanding of the real historical evils of slavery and substitutes emotional Hollywood distortions for the complexity of human experience.
Narrowing the history of slavery from the long record reaching back over three thousands years, in Europe, Africa, China, India, every region of the world, it was nevertheless only the Western world that developed moral compunctions against slavery and launched a “bitter worldwide struggle, which lasted more than a century, to destroy the elaborate systems and institutions for the ownership and sale of human beings” (114). Of particular interest is Sowell’s discussion of slavery under Islamic societies, in North Africa and elsewhere, which enslaved far more people than were ever brought to the Western hemisphere. Cervantes in Don Quixote has an incredible account of his five-year enslavement after the battle of Lepanto in 1571. Sowell’s discussion throws interesting light on the conditions to which European and African slaves found themselves subjected. Many millions of Europeans and Africans were enslaved over the centuries in Islamic countries, facts that ought to be studied much more after 9/11.
Similarly, Sowell emphasizes it was black tribal leaders who practiced slavery “before, during, and after the white man arrived” (120). Connecting the real history of slavery with its distorted uses by those who today want to fight for racial spoils, Sowell writes,
“Yet what was peculiar about the West was not that it participated in the worldwide evil of slavery, but that it later abolished that evil, not only in Western societies but also in other societies subject to Western control or influence. This was possible only because the anti-slavery movement coincided with an era in which Western power and hegemony were at their zenith, so that it was essentially European imperialism which ended slavery. This idea might seem shocking, not because it does not fit the facts, but because it does not fit the prevailing vision of our time” (134-135).
Visions hang on beyond their time, beyond their usefulness, such has been the case with racial preferences, which are predicated on a distorted sense of actual historical slavery. By addressing the real history of slavery, Sowell restores the proper perspective needed to come to terms with the complexity of American slavery and the perspective needed to find new ways to work together today. He observes at one point “Africans did not treat Europeans any better than Europeans treated Africans. Neither can be exempted from moral condemnation applied to the other” (139). If Michigan is seeking a new understanding of equality, one place to begin might be to realize, as Sowell says elsewhere, the prevailing vision of slavery of the “morally self-anointed” is wrong. To find a new future, we must recognize our understanding of the past is flawed, reconsider its complexity, understand no one is blameless, and move forward together.
In “Black Education: Achievements, Myths and Tragedies,” Sowell reconsiders the prevailing vision of the actual history of black education and demonstrates that it too is much different from the skewed account so many politically motivated radicals and liberals use to justify failed educational programs and policies:
“The quest for esoteric methods of trying to educate black children proceeds as if such children had never been successfully educated before, when in fact there are concrete examples, both from history and from our own times, of schools that have been successful in educating black children, including those from low-income families. Yet the prevailing educational dogma is that you simply cannot expect children who are not middle class to do well on standardized tests, for all sorts of sociological and psychological reasons” (203).
Sowell further states that this dogma is false for both black and other minority children and discusses a number of outstanding schools reaching from after the Civil War to the present, such as the M Street School, later to become known as Dunbar High School in Washington, DC.
After a long survey of these and other schools, Sowell writes,
“What the record of successful minority schools shows, both in history and among contemporary schools, is that educational achievement is not foredoomed by economic or social circumstances beyond the school grounds, as the education establishment constantly strives to prove. Poverty, broken homes, and unruly environments are not to be ignored, downplayed or apologized for. But neither are the failings of others proof that the education establishment is doing its job right. Perfect students with perfect parents in a perfect society cannot learn things that they are not being taught–and that includes an increasing number of basic things in our public schools” (217).
While the howls of protest to this passage might be the usual ones from the education establishment, I would argue his stress on working with students where they are and expecting “work and discipline” (221) from them is a no-nonsense approach that ought to be tried more often than not, instead of the latest pitying, enabling, undermining educational theory that asks little or nothing of kids and gets little or nothing in return. Higher expectations of their families, whether single parent or not, ought to play a part, though Sowell dismisses the idea that without parental involvement there is no hope for the child, insisting that the individual student can take charge of his or her life and achieve despite the family situation.
Excoriating the victimhood approach to education, Sowell laments that “the history of successful black schools has attracted virtually no interest from either historians or educators. That history does not advance any contemporary political agenda, though it might help advance the education of a whole generation of black students” (225). Far from blaming all educational problems of black students on racism, the usual liberal scapegoat, Sowell has no patience with such facile excuses and lays the blame squarely on the students themselves: “By and large, black students do not work as hard as white students, much less Asian students” (228). He goes on to blame a culture of non-achievement, comparing it to red-neck and lower-class whites and Asians who suffer from “the same counterproductive attitudes toward education” which are “just as self-defeating.” Failure is not restricted to any particular pigmentation or race, nor are the real reasons for such failure always unique to any particular race.
In a fine section of this chapter on education, Sowell highlights the views of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, documenting that their attitudes on educational expectations and other matters were much closer than the common politicized opinion today would have it. The necessary resources and exemplary individuals run rife throughout black history and experience. I would argue what is needed is for more people to hear and respect such scholars as Thomas Sowell, learn from them, and work together to chart a new path together into the future.
In his conclusion Sowell essentially challenges educational leaders and students “to work harder and abandon the counterproductive notion that seeking educational excellence is ‘acting white’” (244). He ends his essay on black education in a way that calls to mind Bill Cosby’s recent addresses wherein Cosby has said more studies are not needed. The problems are known. The black community is in crisis and needs to take action: “Despite the heartening achievements of some black schools, which have repeatedly demonstrated what is possible even with children from low-income backgrounds, the general picture of the education of black students is bleak. Much of what is said–and not said–about the education of black students reflects the political context, rather than the educational facts. Whites walk on eggshells for fear of being called racists, while many blacks are preoccupied with protecting the image of black students, rather than protecting their future by telling the blunt truth. It is understandable that some people are concerned about image, about what in private life might be expressed as: “What will the neighbors think?” But, when your children are dying, you don’t worry about what the neighbors think” (245).
Though bleak, attitudes are changing, will continue to change, will, as Ward Connerly has remarked, take time to change, creating a new climate of expectations and performance, on all sides. The passage of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative registers such change. Neighbors of goodwill do exist, are distressed, worried, and concerned, willing to help, where they can, if allowed. It needs to be said much more often that 14% of black voters approved the proposal. They are people who want much of what Sowell discusses in terms of education for their children and community. These two essays ought to be read by anyone serious about assessing where we are after the passage of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, and where, together, we are all going from here.
Winning the Race. John McWhorter.
John McWhorter
Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America. John McWhorter. Gotham, 2006.
John McWhorter’s Winning the Race has a strong sociological approach to the issues of black America, surveying the history of the development of the inner cities and the welfare system, leading to the dependence that later found expression in affirmative action and racial preferences. My background being more literary in nature, I do not have the grounding for assessing McWhorter’s sociological arguments and data and will focus on his discussion of racial preference and its dynamics, of which I have personal experience, on the ground shall we say, and extensive knowledge and interest.
Referring to radical race elites and leaders, McWhorter states,
"What people like this are seeking is, sadly, not what they claim to be seeking. They seek one thing: indignation for its own sake. And that means that the alienation that they are expressing is disconnected from current reality" (5).
Highlighting the psychological drive of the protest impulse, McWhorter continues,
“This is therapeutic alienation: alienation unconnected to, or vastly disproportionate to, real-life stimulus, but maintained because it reinforces one’s sense of psychological legitimacy, via defining oneself against an oppressor characterized as eternally depraved” (6).
He refers often throughout the book to the implicit theater entailed in such attitudes and the misguided strategy of relying on such theater for advancement and self-definition, instead of “rolling their sleeves up and working out concrete plans for change” (7). Putting aside the emphasis of more traditional black leaders, such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, on personal responsibility and initiative, increasingly after the 1960s civil rights generation, “the main culprit was whitey and his ‘systemic racism’” (13). I cannot help feeling it’s an old story, but, one that cannot be told too often, still today, given the continuing mutual recrimination and the evasion of the obvious.
The more interesting chapters to me deal directly with affirmative action, racial preference, and the serious damage done by race elites allowing for years the continuation of the “acting white” mentality to spread and pollute the springs of self-reliance, independence, and education for black youth, in their inmost consciousness:
“To understand that we are dealing with therapeutic alienation rather than racism brings us to implications for grappling with the black-white achievement gap in the present and future.... To set the bar lower for black students out of a sense that the achievement gap is due to socioeconomics is mistaken. Because the factor is not socioeconomic but cultural and self-perpetuating, the lowered bar only deprives black students and parents of any reason to learn how to hit the highest note. Much of the time, there is not even any way for black people to know what it would actually be to perform at that level–because they never have to” (263).
A devastating critique of a devastating system, one that all people, white and black, have participated in creating and maintaining, much to the detriment of ourselves and our young people. McWhorter’s honesty about racial matters and race preferences is truly admirable. How else can we all come to understand what the situation truly is and then decide what to do about it? Alas, one can almost count on one hand the scholars intelligent and honest enough to state simply the truth about many “black students on campus”:
“So few of them have grades or test scores high enough to qualify under the regular evaluation procedure. In response to claims from the occasional whistleblower that standards are being lowered for black students, administrators are trained to insist that this is not true. Yet, simple and readily available data show that each year, there is but a sliver of black students with the grades and test scores considered sine qua non for serious consideration if students were white or Asian” (264).
Laying the blame squarely on “teen culture” and the failure of black and white parents and leaders to have sufficiently high expectations for all students, McWhorter faces what virtually no one else in America will. It’s our fault. We’ve got the pernicious system we’ve created, along with all the social and personal destruction that goes with it. I like the way he puts it at one point: “a new sense of black identity in the sixties has led to a quiet cultural disconnect from the ‘school thing’” (273). Instead of “self-defeating cultural patterns,” McWhorter argues for the cultural patterns that produce success for all people. For decades, Caribbean and African immigrants, Asian boat people, and others who have entered urban schools have flown past the kids held back by the misguided ideas of the race elites: “As long as black students have to do only so well, they will do only so well” (295). Like Ward Connerly, John McWhorter clearly advocates expecting more of black kids, knowing only then can society and educators elicit from students their highest potential.
In the light of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) and the misleading allegations surrounding gender that have been used to scare white females into voting against it, McWhorter asks a simple question that Michigan women ought to consider: “Whites listening to defenses based on ‘diversity’ should ask themselves a simple question: Would you allow this of your own children?” (308). Cutting to the quick and ending his book on the hopeful note that black kids are every bit as capable of competing and achieving as anybody else, McWhorter quite rightly states, lampooning radical race elites who benefit from the affirmative action gravy train, “The simple fact is that America is quietly getting past race despite the best efforts of the Soul Patrol to pretend otherwise” (377).
The work of John McWhorter ought to be even more widely known than it already is in Michigan and throughout the country. On November 8th, Michigan’s concerned citizens should turn more to his understanding of what went wrong and what is required for success.
If the University of Michigan is truly interested in the equal opportunity and success of black students, I challenge my alma mater to organize a conference, a summit of people who have two feet on the ground, as soon as possible after November 8th, with the following keynote speakers, hosted by U of M Professor Carl Cohen: Ward Connerly, Thomas Sowell, John McWhorter, Shelby Steele, Bill Cosby, Juan Williams, and MSU Professor William Allen.
Ending racial preferences in Michigan and throughout the Nation is essential for creating an atmosphere of high and equal expectations for all our children, capable of Winning the Race, in all senses of the phrase. Together we will find our way towards a new meaning of what it is to be an American, as did Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man, not white OR black, but white AND black. And all the shades of humanity beyond.
Enough. Juan Williams.
Juan Williams
Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure that are Undermining Black America–and What We Can Do About It. Juan Williams. Crown, New York. 2006.
The major shortcoming of Juan Williams book is that he doesn’t go far enough. But more of that later. It should first be said that he goes very far indeed, saying much that has needed to be said for years, if not decades. No mean achievement. The subtitle itself sets out much of the structure of the book: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure that are Undermining Black America–and What We Can Do About It. Williams’ discussion is built around Bill Cosby’s speech in 2004 on the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, as well as Cosby’s numerous other talks throughout the country since then, including Detroit.
Williams laments the lack of any real leaders in the black community in the tradition of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Dubois, and Martin Luther King, Jr., all of whom in Williams’ view shared a commitment to black self-reliance and self-determination:
“In its place is a tired rant by civil rights leaders about the power of white people–what white people have done wrong, what white people didn’t do, and what white people should do. This rant puts black people in the role of hapless victims waiting for only one thing–white guilt to bail them out” (32).
He lambasts both Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton as never having really accomplished much, in a way similar to John McWhorter’s scathing reference to “black theatrics.” Returning often to Bill Cosby’s speeches, concurring with Cosby, Williams states, “At some point, people have to take a personal accounting, turn away from any self-defeating behavior, and be sure they are doing everything in their power to put their families and their communities in a position to prosper and advance” (43). Jackson and Sharpton have “slowed the emergence of any new model of national black political leadership” (47). Juan Williams never suggests that Bill Cosby is in a sense the model–Cosby himself has repeatedly stated he’s an entertainer, not a leader, but merely someone sick and tired of it all and speaking out to wake people up to how bad things really are. Williams’ book goes a long way towards helping people do just that by facing the unpleasant facts.
Some of those facts include the diversion of attention and resources from the truly pressing needs of the black community to a futile fight for reparations for slavery. The chapter title says it all: “The Reparations Mirage.”
In a chapter on education, Juan Williams frames his discussion with Cosby’s provocative challenge, “What the hell good is Brown v. Board of Education if nobody wants it?” The dismal statistic of a 50 percent black drop out rate from high school, the best students pilloried as “acting white,” behavior way out of control, and so on, all adds up to deep and endemic crisis for young black people and the community. Cosby, Williams, and others are to be applauded for caring enough about the students themselves that they have publicly confronted and discussed what the issues really are, unlike those who, as Cosby cuts to the quick, are worried “they would lose their gig.” Indeed, there are black leaders and school officials who deserve to, and should, lose their “gig,” for the sake of the children and the future good of the black community.
On the national level in regard to black crime, Juan Williams similarly asserts there has been a failure of leadership:
“Never a word was spoken about the need for black Americans to take up their own war on drugs and on crime as a matter of personal responsibility.... All the silence could not blind anyone to the neon lights flashing sad facts about the severity of black crime. By 2004 federal data showed that black Americans–13 percent of the population–accounted for 37 percent of the violent crimes, 54 percent of arrests for robbery, and 51 percent of murders. Most of the victims of these violent criminals were their fellow black people. This legitimate fear of violent crime by black people spread into every corner of the nation” (116).
To these sad facts, Cosby and Williams rightly emphasize the utter crisis that confronts black America, all of America, and the need to wake up, take personal responsibility, and begin at the most basic level of society, with rebuilding the black family and community, citing the past in about 1950 when 78% of black children were raised in two-parent homes, compared to today with approximately only 34%. Williams also repeatedly emphasizes Cosby’s other major points, education and hard work, giving many inspiring examples.
Part of that rebuilding involves confronting the glorification of violence and sex in hip-hop and rap music and videos. Increasingly widely criticized, and justly, by many people, black and otherwise, for the misogyny and demeaning portrayals and exploitation of women, Williams discusses a number of disturbing and shocking incidents and rappers, highlighting that again black leaders, by failing to speak out and condemn “the corruption of rap for all these years” has “resulted in real damage to the most vulnerable of black America–poor children, boys and girls, often from broken homes” (133).
Throughout his book, Juan Williams demonstrates a firm command of the history of black people in America, the heroic struggle for freedom and dignity. Bringing it alive for black people today, he shows how black history is indeed relevant to the current problems of phony leadership and community crisis. He seems to be saying the resources are there in the past and in the people; we need to do a better job of drawing on the best and striving to live up to it; we need leaders who can set the right standards, point us in the right direction, and demand we struggle for the mountain top.
My only misgiving with his book is that he seems studiously to avoid the subject of affirmative action, which I believe is a significant part of the problem, undermining self-determination and providing false excuses for failure or the lack of personal development. Unlike John McWhorter who directly takes on affirmative action, Williams may feel it’s best just to discuss the need for personal and community responsibility, cultural improvement.
I would argue the psychological chains binding the wrists of the black community must be cut, if any true progress is to be made. After all, the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI), up for a vote in the very same year Williams publishes his book, will almost certainly pass and quite probably help further lead to a nationwide end of racial preference. Williams ignores the entire issue. It seems to me that Ward Connerly, Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, and others are more perceptive in this regard, kicking the destructive, misbegotten crutch away. But for anyone interested in an insightful survey and analysis of the issues that will remain and must be confronted on November 8th, Juan Williams’ Enough may be one of the best places to begin.
Creating Equal. Ward Connerly.
Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences. Ward Connerly.
A Courageous Man and a Brilliant Book.... March 25, 2000
In Creating Equal, Ward Connerly returns the *human* dimension to the realities of race in America. Where so often what the poet Robert Hayden called "race rhetoric" substitutes for thought and dialogue, Connerly confronts long-held affirmative action doctrine with compelling insight into the pervasive devastation race preferences have actually had for all people. His emphasis on the necessity of basic human virtue and morality stands as both an indictment of us all and a call to struggle together toward a new vision of what it means to be an American.
At last someone other than a radical black or white "civil rights professional" has found a way to speak to these issues and reach all Americans--not merely the campus crowd.
Connerly rightly deserves to be more widely known not merely as an opponent of race preferences but rather as a matchless defender of free speech and conscience, a cause for which he has also suffered dearly at one university after another throughout our country.
Whatever shape our future will take regarding race, Ward Connerly’s personal and public odyssey will be part of the answer, as it is a clear sign for renewed hope that reason and sanity may yet prevail.
A Dream Deferred. Shelby Steele.
Shelby Steele
A Dream Deferred : The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America. Shelby Steele.
Reawakening the Dream.... December 7, 2000
This morning, sometime around three or four AM, I woke up thinking about Shelby Steele’s A Dream Deferred. I read it a number of months ago and have been wanting to write a brief note about it. There are so few intelligent, reasonable, sane voices speaking about racial matters in America I feel it as a duty to try to acknowledge those who are so scorned by the forces of both white and black extremist liberalism. The thought that impelled me out of bed was that I owe it to my memory of the best friend I’ve ever had in my life, who happened to be black, long deceased and sorely missed. So I struggle for words, knowing I will never meet that high mark. Others may criticize Mr. Steele for emphasizing this and underplaying that, but I want to praise his thoughtful probing of the dynamics of affirmative action and how it assuages white guilt while keeping some black people from developing their highest potential. As a former college English instructor, I occasionally had minority students who were accustomed to being handed A’s and were shocked to receive C’s. Repeated experience convinced me that affirmative action was part of the problem. They lacked the self-discipline and responsibility that Steele extolls: "Very often those who educate poor blacks feel excused from the responsibilities of high expectations and academic rigor by the very conditions that make such expectations mandatory."
My students had had years of misguided low expectations from both teachers and administrators and had ultimately internalized them. I recall one student telling me he had to have a grade higher than a C. When I responded that he should read the Harbrace Handbook from cover to cover and do as many of the exercises as possible, he stared at me in disbelief. I encouraged him to be gentle with himself and to expect to retain only perhaps sixty to eighty percent of his study but that with time and continual effort he would achieve a more sophisticated level of literacy.
Having started as a TA in the early 1980s when most students in writing classes received the C they deserved, I found it difficult to hand out largely all B’s, while the pressure for all A’s sent me looking for another way to make a living so as not to participate in the fraud of "higher" education. Misguided white guilt only complicates matters for serious, capable minority students and makes it all the more unlikely they’ll be called upon to strive to develop their abilities to the highest degree possible. Steele perceptively touches on how university administrators are exacerbating this decline.
On another note, Steele states "to be human is to be responsible" and profoundly probes the intricacies of human motivation, responsibility, and the ways in which affirmative action and the thinking of politically correct race elites erode individual agency:
"Race should *never* play a role in social reform for many reasons, not least of which is that it is *always* used to help people avoid full agency for their fate. It always transforms the responsibility that free minorities should carry into a commodity that others will use for their own moral power. Race absolutely corrupts those who use it for redemption and absolutely weakens those who use it for advancement" (112).
To all of which I say, "amen." I hope, indeed struggle to hope, that men like Shelby Steele, Ward Connerly, Thomas Sowell, David Horowitz and others will find the resources to continue to set a new course from the lamentable situation that plagues race relations today, especially in the university, though the struggle against patronizing white guilt for true individual responsibility and achievement exists in all walks of life. It seems to me that it is a struggle that must be fought primarily by intelligent blacks and minorities who have had enough of the insult of affirmative action to stand up and fight for the unquestionable respect and honor they so rightly deserve and merit.
Quest for Cosmic Justice. Thomas Sowell.
Thomas Sowell
The Quest for Cosmic Justice. Thomas Sowell.
Chastising the Self-Anointed.... June 27, 2000
Thomas Sowell may be one of the most despised black men in America-despised by extremist liberals, black and white, because Sowell has devoted his abilities to exposing their destructive ideologies of social redemption as counterproductive to the best interests of all Americans. Widely known for his provocative, nationally syndicated newspaper articles and other books, he focuses, in The Quest for Cosmic Justice, on the misguided thinking behind the modern impulse to reform the very nature of the human condition from individual responsibility, competition, and performance to the tragic consequences of affirmative action and universal egalitarian equality. Sowell locates the source of much of the problem in the academy, law schools, and government where "new elites" are quietly repealing the American Revolution. The "morally self-anointed," as he calls excessively liberal reformers and radicals, "have for centuries argued as if no honest disagreement were possible, as if those who opposed them were not merely in error but in sin.... Given this exalted vision of their role by the anointed visionaries, those who disagree with them must be correspondingly degraded or demonized." Marx, Lenin, Hitler, and Mao all followed this procedure, as have utopians of similar or less horrible results.... That comparable dynamics rule the day, especially in the humanities in many American universities, will not surprise those who have any real experience of those departments. Sowell evokes the American political system and tradition in the hope of preventing its further erosion.
One of the many perceptive and striking points Sowell makes in the book involves "The High Cost of Envy." Pointing out its dangers broadly to poor people, he writes,
"The very terms of the discussion encourage them to attribute their less fortunate position to social barriers, if not political plots, and so to neglect the kinds of efforts and skills which are capable of lifting them to higher economic and social levels."
The acquisition of such "skills, education, discipline, foresight," needed to improve their lot, becomes less likely, as the "ideology of envy" blames others for exploitation and racism, undermining their own will to act, while rendering "more successful members suspect as traitors." Sowell observes this same "bogus explanation" can keep entire societies in poverty, making me think of my recent experience as an accredited participant at the United Nations Millennium Forum, May 22-26, 2000, where I witnessed Kofi Annan’s wise proposal for a Global Compact with business swept aside and essentially replaced with the "sophisticated modern versions of the envy vision spread by the Third World intelligentsia, often seconded by the intelligentsia in more fortunate countries."
Summing up in a passage that has very wide application, Sowell states,
"cosmic justice attempts to create equal results or equal prospects, with little or no regard for whether the individuals or groups involved are in equal circumstances or have equal capabilities or equal personal drives. To do this, it cannot operate under general rules, the essence of law, but must create categories of people entitled to various outcomes, regardless of their own inputs . . . assuming with little or no evidence that only malign intentions or systemic bias could explain unequal results. ’Affirmative action’ is perhaps the classic example of this approach but it is only one example."
His insight into the subtleties of modern ideologies is truly remarkable, as is his own high and demanding sense of justice.
Alas, I seriously found myself wondering at times if Sowell’s Quest for Cosmic Justice is not a voice in the wilderness, as always, one come much too late. But I take heart in knowing such people as he, Shelby Steele, and Ward Connerly have the courage to speak out on race and other matters and in the end hope that events will unfold for the good in ways I can not imagine and that now seem so often unlikely. In this context, I recommend reading Robert Conquest’s Reflections on a Ravaged Century, a parallel meditation on the dilemmas of modernity.
Hating Whitey. David Horowitz.
David Horowitz
Hating Whitey: And Other Progressive Causes. David Horowitz.
For Betty - Oh God, What Have We Done.... June 16, 2000
One brings to a book everything one is and has been through. Let me discuss David Horowitz’s Hating Whitey by seemingly digressing a little on my own experience. I grew up in the white suburbs of Detroit during the `60s and `70s and have vivid memories of the Detroit riot and my uncle and aunt’s bakery being almost burnt to the ground, while their neighbors and friends were increasingly driven out by violence and the erosion of social order. In the end, they too accepted the inevitability of flight for their lives. More than forty years of programs and promises of "renaissance" have only produced a dysfunctional city that often can neither educate its young nor reliably provide the most basic services such as snow removal and, for a couple of days now, electricity.
At the University of Michigan I studied with Robert Hayden, a former Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress, who thought of himself as a human being, first and foremost, though he begrudgingly accepted Afro-American, despite his preference at times for Negro, coming from an older time. The child of an interracial marriage, Hayden loathed the divisiveness of racial politics and lacerated radical blacks on more than one occasion. Ultimately, his vision of human oneness melded with that of Martin Luther King and similar figures, challenging us all to a deeply demanding spiritual ethic, a universal standard holding all accountable, before which all must struggle and strive.
David Horowitz devastatingly chronicles the result of the lack of such a standard on race relations during the last forty years; the result in the university; the result in the media; the result in the legal system; the result in politics; the result in the hearts and minds and souls of our entire nation.
As one who has edited the poems and prose of a human being usually identified as black, I have had the experience several times of being invited for job interviews at colleges only to be met with disbelief and gaping mouths when I, a whitey, walked in through the departmental door. I am one who has lived through almost everything about which Horowitz writes regarding academia, including losing a tenure track job as the result of a relentless and byzantine conspiracy of "colleagues" who wanted a black in the position, one widely perceived by those fit to judge as nowhere near my intellectual equal and who eventually had to be removed from my post for incompetence.
Horowitz’s major shortcoming, typical of the modern secular mind, liberal or conservative, is that his critique, unlike Dostoevsky who understood the nature of modernity, does not go deep enough into the spiritual collapse that underlies the dynamics of race, as they underlay the collapse into communism. This failure is also evident in his Destructive Generation, which is, nevertheless, another of his brave and brilliant books. Perhaps someday Horowitz will plumb further into the depths of radical causes.
Being a white man and given the politically charged nature of race today, Horowitz demonstrates a rare streak of moral strength and courage by his daring to speak his conscience against black racism and the misguided designs of race elites. Fortunately, he is not alone. Along with Hating Whitey, those truly interested in beginning to understand and confront the race dilemmas of America should also read Ward Connerly’s Creating Equal, Shelby Steele’s A Dream Deferred, and Thomas Sowell’s The Quest for Cosmic Justice, works by exceptional, heroic human beings who have all been slandered as Uncle Toms by more than one race radical.
UNvanquished. Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali
UNvanquished : A U.S. - U.N. Saga. Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
Global Tragedies of Our Own Making.... October 30, 2000
I’ve often thought or returned to passages in Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s UNvanquished since reading it in the early summer of 1999. Throughout the debate and defeat of the CTBT, the charades over Congressional withholding of funding to the UN, Jesse Helms’ appalling performance before Security Council Members in January of 2000, my attending the Millennium Forum as an accredited participant at the UN in May 2000, watching and hoping the requisite will might be found at the Millennium Summit in September 2000, I have repeatedly found myself recalling Boutros-Ghali’s devastating critique of US undermining of the United Nations, struggled to fight off a pervasive sense of tragedy and lost opportunity, lost since 1992 when Boutros-Ghali’s Agenda for Peace was shunted aside.
How many echos I’ve heard from the couple of hundred books I’ve read on the League of Nations and United Nations. How frightening it has been to watch my fellow citizens so obsessed with their own little private, selfish worlds, turning away from international responsibilities and duties, scape-goating the UN for our own failures and loss of nerve. During the last year, I’ve interviewed on over 230 radio stations about my own book, Into the Ruins, on the UN, in my own terms, and have heard firsthand all the extremist arguments against the participation of my country in the Organization, attempting to refute them as best I can.
There are many who understand the seriousness of the situation. William H. Luers, the President of the UNA-USA, writes a comprehensive appeal for UN support in his "Choosing Engagement: Uniting the U.N. with U.S. Interests" in the September/October 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs. The UNA, World Federalist Association, and others have done much to educate and elevate discussion about the necessity of our global cooperation through the United Nations. Alas, I often doubt, in the end, such efforts will save the day. Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s Unvanquished reveals why. Having read all the writings and memoirs of the UN Secretary Generals, I believe UNvanquished stands alone as the most insightful, courageous, heroic work ever written about the realities of the United Nations and its Member States, especially the US.
Having failed the League of Nations and themselves, the global community rose from the ashes of World War II to form a more perfect union. As the Millennium Summit has recently demonstrated on paper, while most of the US media ignored it, the Member States understand precisely what needs to be done. Events already suggest they, we, still lack the will and shall quite likely have to suffer the dread forces of history in order to find it.
Tower of Babble. Dore Gold.
Tower of Babble: How the United Nations has Fueled Global Chaos. Dore Gold. Crown Forum, NY, 2004.
Half the Babbling Story.... July 12, 2006
Dore Gold tells the story of the corruption and failure of the dream of world organization and peace. Created in the aftermath of World War II, “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” the United Nations, the Allies against the fascist powers, has been infiltrated and hamstrung by despotic, racist, authoritarian regimes to the point of not being a mere irrelevancy but an active irritant and cause of international disorder.
Given Gold’s background as an Israeli diplomat, much of his focus and concern is on the anti-Semitism of the Arab and Third World block during the last few decades and its continual usurpation and undermining of the human rights machinery of the United Nations. While many observers might argue with the details of Gold’s critique, alleging perhaps that he hates the United Nations, distorts the facts, and so forth, I must say his animus runs deeper. The UN has failed to live up to the ideals of its Founding Fathers, and subsequent leaders, in the West and East, have failed to work diligently enough to develop the UN into a sufficiently humane and democratic system of international cooperation and governance. Without such strenuous efforts at developing the UN into something other than an instrument or tool of national policies, the UN shouldn’t entirely be blamed alone for its miserable results. In any event, there is plenty of blame to go around. Mr. Gold never recognizes that Western powers must bear their part of the load.
However, I agree fully with him in this regard:
"It is time to recognize that it has utterly failed to achieve its founders’ goals to halt aggression and assure world order" (238).
Reinvigorating the UN, as he says, may indeed be a long way off but it is the task that lies at hand. The Allies must summon the will to do it or create another international coalition worthy of their ideals. The sooner, the better.
Vendor of Sweets. R. K. Narayan.
R. K. Narayan
The Vendor of Sweets. R. K. Narayan.
India’s Kali Yuga.... December 21, 2000
The novelist R. K. Narayan (1906-) was born into a Tamil-speaking, Brahmin family. For several years he attended Christian schools in Madras, where he was raised by his grandmother, a devout Hindu who taught him the traditional songs and prayers. His fiction often presents a persona who undergoes a crisis that drives him back in some way to a resolution suffused with an evocation of the Hindu past. Often portrayed as a simple pious Hindu, R. M. Varma, of the University of Jodhpur, more insightfully observes, "Cultural ambivalence is a marked characteristic of Narayan’s fictional technique and he hovers between his Hindu faith and lack of it. He merely uses it as a landscape in his fiction."
In his brilliant The Vendor of Sweets (1967), Narayan presents a character named Jagan who owns a small shop that sells sweetmeats. Presented as somewhat of a religious crank, he is a follower of Gandhi who still works his spinning wheel and sits in his shop reading the Bhagavad Gita in between customers. Jagan lives in an idealized traditional India of long ago incongruously conflated with the modern present.
Jagan’s only son Mali fully lives in the modern world, not only of India but of America as well. Dropping out of college, as Jagan had as a young man out of misconstrued loyalty to Gandhi, Mali, without consulting with his father, enrolls in a creative writing program in Michigan and helps himself to Jagan’s attic stash of rupees in order to pay his expenses. Narayan consistently portrays Mali as a son who has lost all the traditional Hindu virtues while Jagan spoils him and makes excuses for him.
After three years in America Jagan abruptly receives a cable announcing Mali’s return with "another person" whom upon arrival at the train station he introduces as his wife, Grace. Jagan suffers a severe shock. His son has not only gone to America, where he in fact does begin to eat beef, but married there without informing his family. Further disoriented because the girl is a Korean-American, Jagan thinks she is Chinese and reflects, "Don’t you know that one can’t marry a Chinese nowadays? They have invaded our borders. . . ." Having stopped reading the Bhagavad Gita while receiving letters he believed were from Mali in America, but were actually from Grace, Jagan starts reading it "becoming mentally disturbed once again." Narayan subtly dramatizes his reading of the Gita as linked to his disturbed relationship with his son and thereby with modern India. Before long Grace, his new daughter-in-law, begins to take charge of the house and care for Jagan, his wife having died while Mali was in America. Soon she transforms the part of the nineteenth-century house in which she and Mali live with modern Western paintings and furnishings.
In one of the few revealing statements by Mali, "with a gesture of disgust," he says to his father, "Oh, these are not the days of your ancestors. Today we have to compete with advanced countries not only in economics and industry, but also in culture." Satirizing the trash creative writing programs churn out in America, Narayan underscores simultaneously the gulf between father and son, traditional and modern.
Shock upon modern shock rolls over Jagan. His son not only lived unmarried with a foreign woman of mixed descent in his ancestral home but shamelessly concealed it from his father. As Jagan explains to the cousin, "Even my grandfather’s brother, who was known to be immoral, never did this sort of thing." His "dirtied" home, "which had remained unsullied for generations, had this new taint to carry." Since all of Jagan’s traditional, conventional relations have already "ostracized him" over the "beef-eating Christian girl for a daughter-in-law," Jagan realizes they would "remove themselves further" should they learn of the "latest development." In a significant moment of honesty, Jagan observes he "felt grateful for being an outcast, for it absolved him from obligations as a member of the family." Jagan sits in the dark by the Sir Frederick Lawley statue, a relic from the British past, and meditates on his own arranged marriage in a richly embellished chapter that brilliantly evokes the traditional marriage customs of the joint family system in India and devastatingly insinuates the decayed state of his own house and modern India.
Jagan awakens in the dawn from his night of memories, fantasizing again of entering "a new janma." In regard to the traditional ceremony marking a man turning sixty, the narrator honestly concedes again that Jagan himself "had had his fill of these festivals." In his own way, the narrator frequently intimates, Jagan has picked over and repudiated various customs from the past. So one relative is imagined as saying how could the son Mali be different with "a father like Jagan." Narayan suggests a subtle, logical, and culminating connection of decline between father and son.
The values of the Ramayana and other sacred texts have no resonance for Mali. Jagan, lost and faltering, unable to cope fully with the clash of his traditional values with the modern world, resolves absurdly to retreat across the river, taking his bank book with him, after agreeing to pay for a lawyer for Mali and offering an airline ticket for Grace to return to America: "It’s a duty we owe her."
V. S. Naipaul has remarked of Narayan’s The Vendor of Sweets that it is "a novel in which his fictional world is cracked open, its fragility finally revealed, and the Hindu equilibrium . . . collapses into something like despair." In his "On Alternative Modernities," Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar has similarly observed, "Everywhere, at every national or cultural site, the struggle with modernity is old and familiar." Narayan has so thoroughly undermined and complicated Jagan with the tensions of twentieth-century life, deep within the structure of the narrative voice itself, only the most shallow or tendentious reading can fail to perceive the scathing critique of both the antedated and bankrupt, traditional and modern, values of India and Western civilization.
Roadside Dog. Czeslaw Milosz.
Czeslaw Milosz
A Roadside Dog. Czeslaw Milosz.
Antinomies.... October 24, 2000
In A Year of the Hunter, Czeslaw Milosz unequivocally writes, "Poetry’s separation from religion has always strengthened my conviction that the erosion of the cosmic-religious imagination is not an illusion and that the vast expanses of the planet that are falling away from Christianity are the external correlative of this erosion." Road-Side Dog exudes this same consciousness, yet, interested only in Christianity, he fails to perceive that vast expanses of the planet have also left behind the Islamic, Hindu, Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist religions.
Like his contemporaries, Milosz is a child of dualities and contradictions, as he discloses in Unattainable Earth: "Sometimes believing, sometimes not believing, / With others like myself I unite in worship." Though "loyal and disloyal," he performs what is in itself an act of affirmation. One reason for such tensions must be his recognition that we are "In an intermediary phase, after the end of one era and before the beginning of a new one." In another entry he writes, "There is only one theme: an era is coming to an end which lasted nearly two thousand years, when religion had primacy of place in relation to philosophy, science and art. . . ." Milosz recognizes the validity of his own honest doubts and the abyss of evil and historical calamity that is swallowing everything before it, yet he does so while continuing to "unite in worship." Similarly, in "Lecture V" of The Collected Poems, the persona affirms "We plod on with hope," and then allows, "And now let everyone / Confess to himself. eHas he risen?’ eI don’t know.’" It was perhaps these lines that led Pope John Paul II to say to Milosz, as he reports in A Year of the Hunter, "You always take one step forward and one step back." In an essay in New Perspectives Quarterly, Milosz describes himself as a believer, while in A Year of the Hunter he refers to an experience in church on Palm Sunday as an "intuitive understanding that Christ exists." These contradictions achieve their fullest expression in "Two Poems" in Provinces: The first poem celebrates earthly life and its values, while the second poem, "A Poem for the End of the Century," bitterly, ironically recalls the religious past. Of these two contrasting poems, Milosz writes in a headnote that "taken together" they "testify to my contradictions, since the opinions voiced in one and the other are equally mine." To highlight either side over the other would be a distortion of his psyche. Milosz conveyed his complexity to the Pope when he replied, "Can one write religious poetry in any other way today?" I have often thought of Virginia Woolf’s Mr. Ramsay in To The Lighthouse, ascending the island rocks, exclaiming, in one of the most poignant settings of modern literature, "There is no God."
Perhaps because Milosz perceives our age as an intermediary one, he finds it more possible than most poets to hold out hope for the future. His hope, though, as we have seen, is not naive, foolish, or unaware of the incessant disintegration. It is that of one tried by experience, who yet believes there are reasons for such a poem as "Thankfulness." To give "thanks for good and ill" manifests a trust that transcends our usual human self-centeredness and that submits to the power of the mystery of being, a trust that acknowledges in another poem "They are incomprehensible, the things of this earth." Such trust is also the prerequisite to finding "Eternal light in everything on earth." Although from the viewpoint of traditional Catholic belief some might think such lines are suffused with vague gnosticism, accuse him of having fallen off from the faith, of "willing belief," as he says of himself in The Land of Ulro, one must recognize the honest complexity of his commitment if one wishes to confront, as he has, the undeniable damage that has been visited upon all organized forms of religion and government during the modern era.
In reference to religion, while recognizing the undeniable damage, Milosz has often expressed his skepticism and uneasiness with Catholicism. Although he seems to favor at times reversion to Catholicism, suggests he himself is a heretic, harbors the conceit of possessing the true truth among the great religions, he also writes of going "forward, but on a different track," of a "new vision," "a new awareness," "new perspectives," as in A Year of the Hunter:
Why should we shut our eyes and pretend, rejecting theobvious, that Ancient Rome is again in decline, and this time it’s not pagan Rome under the blows of Christianity, but the Rome of the monotheists’ God? Since this, and nothing else, is the undeclared theme of contemporary poetry in various languages, obviously this conflict has already crossed the threshold of universal consciousness. . . . Perhaps . . . new perspectives will open up . . . .
Milosz has worked more deeply with the spiritual dislocations of modern life than any other poet of the twentieth century since T. S. Eliot.
In regard to government, Milosz’s experience prepared him to understand where we have been and where we are going in a manner unique among modern poets. All the more eloquently rings his plea in his Nobel Lecture for sanity eventually to prevail among the nations of the earth:
We realize that the unification of our planet is in the making, and we attach importance to the notion of international community. The days when the League of Nations and the United Nations were founded deserve to be remembered.
This realization of the importance of international community can be found throughout his writings. Its source, beyond his own experience, was, by his own testimony, his uncle, Oscar Milosz, poet and seer, who predicted the "triumph of the Roman Catholic Church." Narrow Catholic hopes aside, history, lower case, moves toward the vindication of both of them, as well as of all those who have stood throughout this century for the further development of international institutions through which the nations may cooperate for the protection of the weak and vulnerable, for the protection of the little ones. If "There are no direct lessons that American poets can learn from Milosz," the fault lies entirely with us and the age of academic criticism that has almost strangled the life out of poetry.
John Milton. Harold Bloom.
John Milton. Harold Bloom.
Abdiel Agonistes.... October 24, 2000
John Milton’s reputation has unjustly suffered a diminution during the last two centuries. The romantics, repulsed by his religious theme of the earthly pilgrimage of the soul, corrupted his poem by maliciously interpreting Satan as the hero, despite Milton’s unequivocal condemnation of Satan and his equally lucid characterization of the repentant Adam as the true hero. T.S. Eliot and those who ape his opinions also find Milton the man and his religious beliefs repellent. The poets of the modern era deride Milton because, in general, they have abandoned religious belief and turned to vague forms of idealism, as in Whitman’s Democratic Vistas, and to the creation of idiosyncratic ersatzes, as in Poe’s Eureka. John Keats’s Endymion and the Hyperion poems fail as much because of their superficial content as their poor structure and execution. In Auden’s analysis, "the modern problem" hamstrings the romantics as much as Yeats or Pound. Milton never suffered from such a malady and hence the envious detestation he has received from minor poets who are unquestionably his inferiors. Milton possesses a serious vision of history and humankind that could only achieve full expression in the most demanding form of poetry--the epic. But most poets of the last few hundred years have not found themselves entrusted with such a vision. Much to the contrary, they excel in every imaginable type of turpitude and triviality that the human mind is capable of producing. Like Yeats they have often thrown together every decadent principle or superstition that has ever happened along. This sorry state of affairs has become so common in postmodern poetry that anyone who would attempt to restore epopee to its glorious heights of noble seriousness and serenity would find ranked against him every academic hack and, as Milton phrased it, every "libidinous and ignorant" poetaster who has "scarce ever heard of that which is the main consistence of a true poem." Milton knew the "consistence of a true poem," and both Paradise Lost and many passages scattered throughout his prose attest to it. In The Reason of Church Government he surveys the abilities of such masters as Homer, Virgil, Job, and Sophocles. Along with the modern loss of belief in God has gone his high and serious belief in the office of the poet. Equally banished from the modern conception of poetry is all respect for positive values, morals, and virtues. The story of twentieth-century literature is the abuse and misguided replacement of such healthy standards with the perversions of modernism and postmodernism. In brief, "the modern problem."
Unlike in the work of Jacques Derrida and his academic flies, the "presence" of God is a reality for Milton. Here in the abstract Milton gives us what throughout Paradise Lost he has been dramatizing--the "principles and presuppositions" to which Adam, representative man, must obediently submit, not merely in Eden, but for the fulfillment of his life during his journey on the earthly plane. In Satan, Milton presents the picture of the rebel, almost a type of the Renaissance hero Benvenuto Cellini, who through pride usurps power and whose fundamental actions and motives have their most appropriate modern analogue, as many have observed, in the archvillains Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Such men fully embody the will to power that the nihilist Nietzsche, as Thomas Mann put it, glorified. Such totalitarian dictators were the inevitable product of the romantic fascination with Satan, as though he were a hero and not an arrogant aspirant after power. Such cultural confusion reveals itself in Goethe’s Faust as well as in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Such errors in judgment, such fundamental confusion of values, mark the modern era and set it off from the spiritually healthier times of Dante, Langland, Spenser, and Milton--healthier only in terms of possessing to a degree a unified spiritual vision that provided universal standards with which to confront the damnable deeds of their day. Far from the banal optimism of the modern era, as in Whitman, they know that the long hard way of man is through suffering and turmoil and that the assurance Michael gives Adam about future generations abides eternally: "Doubt not but that sin / Will reign among them." Despite Freud’s "freeing" man from sin, the twentieth century proved to be the most sinful in history, precisely because the unique spiritual reality of each soul and its fundamental limitations were denied. The violent, arrogant, insidious deeds of the archvillains of modern political nihilism alone account for the suffering and deaths of hundreds of millions of people, while much of the so-called intelligentsia of the West and East defended or prepared the way for the slaughter. Whereas Virgil denounced war except as the last resort for establishing peace, modern poets have often ignored the inhumanities of our century--save for those like Pound whose totalitarianism abetted the brutalizing of millions of innocents and the early Auden who approved "the necessary murder." Here at the end of the twentieth century when humankind still stands technologically capable of destroying much of the vast expanse of the globe and much, though not all, of its population, here when a more trustworthy political form has yet to be securely established to channel the will of the citizens of the international community, epopee must again take account of the social domain and man’s earthly journey through these immense atrocities. For by faithfully treading the dark way of horror, by weighing the modern loss of belief, humankind may begin to regain the path in the twenty-first century, and, like Dante’s persona, attain the highest summit of peace and glory.
Poetry of Ryuichi Tamura
Poetry of Ryuichi Tamura.
Vanishing.... October 12, 2000
For Japan and its writers, the modern darkness deepens during the period of military fascism and World War II. With the defeat and unconditional surrender, immense shock waves rocked the entire culture calling into question the pseudo-Shinto and Confucian values Japan had based its society on for almost a century. As writers returned from one front or another of the war, they found a Japan devastated by the Allied bombing. Maebashi, for instance, where I lived for a few years, was reduced to rubble along with its bridges. Before long, the entire country was restructured by the Occupation. Japanese writers now understood much more deeply the experience of the Western World War I generation. Better than any other postwar poet, Tamura Ryuichi (1923-) registers, since his own hometown in the suburbs of Tokyo no longer existed, the shock and disorientation of the modern Japanese psyche. Briefly a student of Hagiwara Sakutaro, Tamura had little interest in classical Japanese poetry, which emphasized the unity of man and nature, but read widely in Western literature and was especially influenced by T. S. Eliot, Steven Spender, C. Day Lewis, and W. H. Auden, whom Tamura eventually met in New York in 1971. In a literary magazine called Arechi or "wasteland," Tamura and other postwar poets gave voice to the despair and horror they felt, unequivocally stating, in an early manifesto, "The present is a wasteland." The first poem in which Tamura finds his true voice and distance from his material is the prose poem "Etching," published in 1956:
Now he sees a landscape he saw in a German etching it appears to be an aerial view of an ancient city between twilight and darkness or a realistic drawing of a modern-day cliff being taken from midnight toward dawn This man the one I began to describe killed his father when he was young that autumn his mother went beautifully insane (tr. Christopher Drake)
The critic Ikuko Atsumi has said of this poem that it aims at a universal vision of East and West, ancient and modern. The extreme nationalism of the Japanese fascists now defeated, the "he" can view the fullness or "landscape" of Western culture, specifically German, declining into "darkness" or rising as "a modern-day cliff," ominous, dehumanized, marked by loss and angst. Atsumi suggests the father "possibly refers to the emperor system in Japan, and the mother he made beautifully insane to Japan’s aesthetic consciousness." Like the West, the East too descended into a wasteland of madness and violence, the ancient now discredited and rendered nugatory. This is the "Etching" come to light, etched into Tamura’s consciousness and all postwar Japanese writers of worth. Blending together the perspective of the subjective "I" and objective "he," aware of the horror, Tamura introduces into Japanese poetry a voice of detachment, observing life outside his own personal existence with meditative restraint, seeking a deeper understanding of modern human experience.
Having known and read Tamura’s work for more than fifteen years, I have often thought of him as akin somehow to Robert Lowell. He has a memory of Japan’s past that he never idealizes, but works with and probes it, pondering always without sentimentality the modern and by-gone days. Like Lowell and so many postmodern Western poets, Tamura also goes through a time of fairly formalistic writing, but he seems to outgrow it and returns to engaging universal experience outside his own little personal consciousness. Many other Japanese poets, as in the United States, are still stuck in such solipsism. Saigyo and Basho both believed poetry must consider the transcendent and involve conceptual knowledge outside the self, not merely aesthetic formalism. As late as 1982, in what is one of his greatest poems, "Spiral Cliff," Tamura looks soberly at modern world history. After the speaker reflects on a photograph of a deer "falling off a cliff" and wonders "what’s after it," he says,
Our century ends without decadence/ after the night and fog of Nazi gas chambers/ after Soviet forced labor camps/ after two U.S. atomic bombs on Japan/ there’s no thrill left in killing,/ no fear of the soul, no crime in adultery. . . .
In "our century," the values requisite for perceiving and defining "decadence" have disappeared, "crime and evil disconnected," all restraining sense of the soul lost. As a result, unimaginable horror has been perpetrated in every region of the globe on an appalling scale affecting both the social and individual realms. Like a roller coaster, "our century ends on pure speed." Recalling the photo of the deer, he thinks,
I’m afraid of high places/ the cliff in me/ am I the hunter/ or the prey?
The "high places" are both those of earlier mentioned "boardrooms / of huge corporations," East and West, in a manner reminiscent of Kaneko Mitsuharu’s Book of Mud, and the "modern-day cliff" of confusion, now "the cliff in me." The ambiguity of the question "am I the hunter / or the prey?" acknowledges the complexity of modern life where all are somehow complicitous in human tragedy. Terrified by "blank paper," by "what dreams will live and die there," Tamura accepts the writer’s obligation to struggle for values worthy of all human beings, not just Japanese.
Next in dream half nightmare, he sees his own inner cliff protruding "between dreams / spiraling" down. Waking in the dawn, lying horizontally across the bed, he reads the morning newspaper full of massacre and civil war:
Vanishing/ cliff dream/ vertical dream/ elementally/ Gone
All the dreams have vanished as off the edge of a cliff. Vertical dreams have been replaced by the horizontal, exactly the information that fills the newspaper. Like the best of modern writers, Auden or Lowell, Tamura has the honesty and strength of intellect and spirit to recognize it is all "gone." I believe his vision of modern life and Japan is true, for it has been my own experience, lived not only in Japan but also in the United States, where "without decadence" the culture sinks to ever more dehumanized levels of violence, depravity, and social fragmentation. The importance of Tamura’s poetry has not been sufficiently recognized in the West, nor in Japan.
A Decade of Disaster. Lu Wenfu.
The Gourmet and Other Stories of Modern China. Wenfu Lu.
A Decade of Disaster.... June 25, 2000
I want to review The Gourmet and Other Stories of Modern China by focusing on one jewel of a story by Lu Wenfu (1928-), who suffered long and hard from the horrors of the communist regime and understands in his fiction, as in the writings of Fang Lizhi, Wei Jingsheng, and Harry Wu, that communism’s most egregious crime is its stifling of the human spirit. As a young man, he fought in the Red army against the Koumintang and dreamed of the "happy society" socialism would usher in. Like so many writers, in 1957, he was denounced as a Rightist, during the Hundred Flowers purge and the Great Leap Forward, and sentenced to manual labor to reform his thinking. After three years of running a machine lathe, he was deemed reformed and allowed again to write. Then, in 1965, Mao took China down the violent path of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and Lu Wenfu was once more denounced and sentenced, this time, to the life of a mechanic. He later wrote of his experience during the Cultural Revolution:
"I was ’struggled against,’ forced to confess my crimes and paraded through the streets with a placard around my neck. I was already numb to the pain, and worried about when this disaster for my country would end."
Finally, in 1969, he was sent out to the countryside where he farmed for several years. For more than a decade, Lu Wenfu wrote nothing until after the Cultural Revolution ended with Mao’s death in 1976. What little was left of the traditional culture had been trashed; the ruthless persecution of "stinking intellectuals" like Lu Wenfu had been encouraged by Mao himself; thousands of Taoist and Buddhist temples and relics had been destroyed; millions of lives ruined; perhaps as many as 400,000 individual human beings murdered.
In 1979, Lu Wenfu wrote his brilliant short story "The Man from a Peddler’s Family." Into it he poured all the sufferings of his life. The story begins with the protagonist, Mr. Gao, reflecting on Zhu Yuanda, a seller of wonton. Thirty-two years ago, Mr. Gao had heard for the first time the sound of his bamboo clapper, announcing the advance down the lane of the little kitchen stove on its carrying pole, figuratively "calling or relating something." Zhu Yuanda came from a long line of street vendors, generation after generation, reaching back into the distant dynasties. Following in the footsteps of his father, he continues the family trade. At the time, apparently 1947, Mr. Gao is out of regular work and must sit up late at night, in an unheated room, grading student notebooks for a bare existence. After the Beijing Opera let out late, Zhu Yuanda would bring him "a little warmth," a hot bowl of wonton to his "main customer." Though formerly friends, after the liberation of 1949, Mr. Gao, now a cadre, considers Zhu beneath him. Occasionally, he would still hear the clapper, "calling, saying something." Gao remembers, as the Anti-Rightist campaign and Great Leap Forward raged, "I never bought anything from him and I wouldn’t allow my wife or children to go. I believed that buying his things was aiding the spontaneous rise of capitalism." The Anti-Rightist struggles continue, disturbing Gao, until, in what may be an allusion to Buddhism, he ponders how "The world seemed out of joint." Lu Wenfu is clearly suggesting there is something more to the business of the clapper than just petty bourgeois capitalism.
Yet Mr. Gao goes through his own internal struggles and battles. For a time he attempts to correct or reform Zhu Yuanda, and later tries to ignore or forget him, hoping to save his own skin from the social upheavals. They had, though, formerly shared "a genuine affection," one that Gao cannot entirely forget despite his position within the communist order. Back and forth, he meditates on Zhu, finding him sometimes to be a capitalist, at others, one of the proletariat: "And then a thunderclap split the earth. The bugles of the Cultural Revolution were sounded, announcing the end of all capitalism." Gao himself becomes implicated in the madness and is "publicly criticized and denounced." He manages to avoid his own destruction but happens past Zhu Yuanda’s house one day to find it and him in the midst of a horde of Red Guards smashing the "Evil Den of Capitalism." Gao, himself a cadre, knows better. He knows Zhu is a simple, decent man attempting only to feed his father, mother, wife, and four children, by, as he says, "my own efforts." In brilliant words, Lu Wenfu undercuts with scathing irony the pious, radical beliefs of decades of revolutionaries like Lu Xun, when Gao thinks, of the Red Guard’s destruction of everything Zhu Yuanda owned, "How could a noble theory produce such piracy as this!" The worst offense is when the "wonton carrying-pole was dragged out," "a thing of exquisite workmanship," a thing redolent of the past, of the best of Chinese traditions, and shamelessly hacked into splinters. Zhu’s family is reduced "to picking up garbage in the streets" in order to make ends meet. Lest the reader imagine Zhu was an exception, Lu Wenfu emphasizes that the seller of wonton was only one of many on the same street who suffered when he mentions the hot water boiler, the cobbler, the barber, and the flatbread seller as all meeting the same pitiless fate.
Like hundreds of thousands of real human beings, Zhu is sent to the countryside for reeducation. Eight years go by. Gao hears nothing of Zhu. Unexpectedly one day Gao hears that Zhu’s sons are working in a local factory and later that Zhu himself is back. Before leaving, Zhu had given Gao the only thing that had somehow escaped destruction, the bamboo clapper. Gao, imagining he’ll now want to return to his old business, begins to anticipate it. In a moment of fantasy, Gao remembers how as a young man he heard the sound of the clapper coming up the lane and thinks that now people will hear again Zhu Yuanda’s approach: "Their lives, too, demand that there be others bringing them warmth and convenience. It had taken me more than twenty years to learn this elementary lesson." It had actually taken more than thirty years, and I wonder if Lu Wenfu is not hoping here that China itself has finally learnt the lesson after its "decade of disaster." I myself am not so sure. No longer interested in his clapper or selling wonton, Zhu longs only for an iron rice bowl for his children and himself. As Zhu leaves, Gao watches him walk down the street and poignantly thinks, "In these past years I and others had hurt him. We had stifled so much spirit." All the dreams and theories brought to naught by the broken stature of a ruined man. As in other modern Chinese writers, such pathos takes place against a social background intentionally drained of Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist morality and transcendence.
Silent Cry. Kenzaburo Oe.
Kenzaburo Oe
The Silent Cry: A Novel. Kenzaburo Oe.
The Global Cry.... June 24, 2000
Let me discuss "The Silent Cry" and Oe’s work in general by first sketching in a broader view of Kenzaburo Oe’s literary interests.
No other Japanese writer has seen as deeply into Mishima’s suicide and the "vacuum" of modern Japanese life as has the 1994 Nobel laureate in literature, Kenzaburo Oe:
"His death was a performance for the foreign audience, a very spectacular performance. The relationship between Mishima and the emperor system was rather dubious; the Japanese knew that. But from foreigners’ point of view--say, an American reader’s point of view--the Japanese emperor system is something inexplicable. Therefore, that final act by Mishima, tied in with the emperor system, appeared to be a kind of mystical thing. In actuality, he did it in order to entertain foreign readers."
As in this excerpt from a 1986 interview, Oe, also influenced early on by Marxism and existentialism, especially Sartre, has had the vision and strength to confront in his writing not only the nostalgia of Mishima but also the past and present implications of the emperor system for Japan. In 1971 his novella "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears," written just after Mishima’s suicide, courageously explores the nature and meaning of emperor worship. Having known Japanese students and friends who fiercely supported the emperor, loathed him, or were simply indifferent, with most falling into the last category, I believe it may be difficult for Americans to appreciate fully the scope of Oe’s achievement in this novella. Oe tried to convey the challenge of his theme when he wrote in an essay, "A man who criticises Mishima and his works must have the determination to criticise the total culture that orients itself toward the Imperial hierarchy." Far from falling short of this determination, Oe creatively confronts the Japanese fascist and wartime past in "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears" and thereby truly serves the Japanese people and, I would argue, the emperor as well.
Oe grew up in a small village on the island of Shikoku where the events of "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears" and many of his stories take place. While in a Tokyo hospital dying of cancer, the persona narrates the densely complicated events of his father’s fervent devotion to the emperor, filtered through his own consciousness as a child and a mentally unbalanced adult recalling his "happy days." His Japanese mother, who grew up in China, and whose own father was involved in the Daigaku Incident of 1910-11, an attempt to assassinate the emperor, believes her son has never been mentally stable since the age of three. Lying in his hospital bed, he recalls "hate-filled exchanges" between his mother and father about the role of his grandfather. Later in his life, she had always refused to discuss anything with her son about his father, a military official who returned from Manchuria a few years before the end of the war and who died attempting to lead an uprising in support of the emperor after his 1945 announcement of surrender on the radio. Respected by the village people, the father, suffering from cancer, secludes himself in the family storehouse. For the boy observing his father, he becomes a "kind of idol," obedient to the emperor. After his older brother deserts in Manchuria, the boy shouts in defiance at his mother, "I don’t have no traitor’s blood in my veins":
"Even now he could recall, with extreme vividness and reality . . . wanting to shout Long live the emperor! so that [his father] would acknowledge that it was his young son who was the true heir to his blood."
Oe slowly leads the reader to the realization that the young boy has grown up to repeat the obsessions of the father, destroying himself in the process. When the mother, "a simple old country woman," visits him as a thirty-five year old adult in the hospital, she struggles to no avail to get him to recognize what an absurd, cowardly figure his father actually was, while cancer literally and symbolically continues to eat him up. Near the end she says to the persona’s wife, whose own marriage and life have been ruined, "Sooner or later the Japanese are going to change their attitude about what happened, and I intend to live to see it, yessir! THIS IS THE DREAM. THIS MUST BE THE DREAM!" This is clearly the dream of Oe and many Japanese. He more than any other modern Japanese writer has had the courage to write fiction that might help Japan to accomplish it.
Also set mostly in Shikoku, The Silent Cry (1967), presents two brothers who return to their country village nestled in a valley. Although a dialectical struggle takes place between them, reminiscent of Dostoevski’s Brothers Karamazov, the older brother Mitsusaboro is the central figure of the novel, which is told from his point of view. In the opening paragraph, Mitsusaboro thinks to himself,
"Awakening in the predawn darkness, I grope among the anguished remnants of dreams that linger in my consciousness, in search of some ardent sense of expectation. Seeking in the tremulous hope of finding eager expectancy reviving in the innermost recesses of my being . . . still I find an endless nothing."
He crawls into a hole dug for a septic tank and claws at the sides with his bare fingers trying to get the walls to cave in on himself. At the end of the summer his best friend, who had been injured in front of the Diet demonstrating against the Japan-US Mutual Security Treaty, had painted his head red, stuck a raw cucumber up the anus of his naked body, and hung himself. Mitsusaboro reflects, "And I too have the seeds of that same, incurable madness. . . ." Beginning in the hole, haunted by despair, madness, and nihilism, he gropes and searches throughout the novel for something worth living for. At dawn sticking his head up "two inches above the ground," he notices,
"the backs of the dogwood leaves were a burning red... a red that reminded me of the flames in the picture of hell that I’d seen in our village temple every year on the Buddha’s Birthday. . . .
Woman in the Dunes. Kobo Abe.
Kobo Abe
The Woman in the Dunes. Kobo Abe.
The Shifting Sands of Modernity.... June 24, 2000
Shortly after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 narrative writing became heavily influenced by Western literature. Although there are many excellent early fiction writers and those who, like Junichiro Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata, tend to reflect more traditional aesthetics, or those of the "I-novel," Kobo Abe (1924-1993), a Marxist, is the first significantly modern Japanese novelist. His childhood in Manchuria helped him to look harder and more objectively than other writers at modern Japanese life, particularly in Tokyo, where Abe lived the rest of his life, while his growing up in Manchuria surely added to the sense of alienation that pervades his work. His early stories following World War II already express a profoundly existentialist angst and absurdity that has often led to his being compared to Kafka, Camus, Sartre, or Samuel Beckett. To my mind, though, it is precisely the fact that Abe is Japanese that is important and to view him as a mere imitator of the West would be a mistake. Rather than casting his experience into Kafkaesque terms, he is responding to his own experience of modern Japanese life. I believe Westerners need to think deeply about what that means for modern Japan, especially those dreamy Westerners who romantically idealize the traditional image of medieval Japan, as though it still exists.
In the short story "Magic Chalk" (1950), Abe tells the tale of "a poor artist named Argon." Flat broke and starving, Argon discovers in his shabby apartment a piece of red chalk with which he mindlessly draws pictures of food and dishes on the wall. Falling asleep, he groans, "I’ve got to eat!" Suddenly, he is awakened by the sound of food and crockery crashing to the floor: "The pictures he had chalked on the wall had vanished." Seeing food all around, he eats his fill and reflects, "the laws of the universe have changed." He then draws a bed, since he lacks one, as well as other furniture and food. The realization hits him that he can create an entirely new world and spends four weeks contemplating just how to do it. Driven to despair by the burdensome responsibility, he finally decides merely to draw a door to the new world, but upon opening it finds, "an awesome wasteland glaring in the noonday sun." He would have "to draw the world all over again" and begins with Eve, "stark naked," to whom he identifies himself as Adam and "also an artist, and a world planner." Eve, however, borrows his chalk, draws a gun, and shoots him. Other people in the building hear the gunshot: "By the time they ran in, Argon had been completely absorbed into the wall and had become a picture":
"After everyone left, there came a murmuring from the wall. ’it isn’t chalk that will remake the world . . .’ A single drop welled out of the wall. It fell from just below the eye of the pictorial Argon." (tr. Alison Kibrick)
Writing shortly after World War II, Abe understands modern Japan has lost something of immense value, and a mere artist can not replace it.
In Kobo Abe’s masterpiece The Woman in the Dune (1962), the protagonist Niki Jumpei, an amateur entomologist, travels to the seaside to collect specimens. He happens on a village built in the midst of the dunes with houses at the bottom of huge craters or cavities of sand. Peering down into one of the cavities at a small house "submerged in silence," he muses, "no matter what they did . . . there was no escaping the law of the sand." This "law" soon becomes clear when village men trick him into going sixty feet down in a cavity to spend the night at an old woman’s house. Before long, he realizes that there is probably no way to get back out. The "ceaselessly flowing sand," "this shapeless, destructive power," which "had no form" of its own, was continually pouring down on the little house threatening to destroy it and bury its occupants alive. Every night the woman shovels sand into baskets which the village men haul up by rope and carry away, just enough to prevent their suffocation. Watching her, Niki Jumpei remarks, "you’ll never finish, no matter how long you work at it." Later, the narrator explains, "the only certain factor was its movement; sand was the antithesis of all form." Despite his many appeals for help from the village men, the village benefits from the sand being fought back and they refuse to permit him to leave.
The men, however, are careful to provide the woman and man with the necessities of life as long as they continue to perform the nightly work of clearing back the everdrifting sand of reality, for the sand is manifestly symbolic. Upon his request, they even give Jumpei a newspaper. Reading the usual headlines of political, business, and domestic crimes and intrigues, Jumpei thinks,
"There wasn’t a single item of importance. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. . . . And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the center of his compass at his own home."
This "illusion" is not the illusion of Buddhism, the floating world of Genji symbolizing a world of spiritual import. It is the illusion of everyday life through which the nihilist sees "the meaningless of existence," at last confronted, the real truth of human experience. "The world," Abe has Jumpei say in a simile, "is like sand." Modern Japanese writers have found the transition easy to make from the illusion of samsara to the illusion of nihilism which is quotidian reality. Similarly, the old woman turns out not to be so old after all, and Jumpei learns social customs are merely illusions too, as he rapes her brutally and repeatedly while she at times enjoys or submits to it. When the opportunity for escape finally comes, drained of all inner meaning, strength, and purpose, he no longer has the will to leave.
In the story "Beyond the Curve" (1966), Abe writes about a man who, while climbing up a hill, comes to a halt before a curve in the road:
"For the life of me, I couldn’t visualize what lay beyond the curve. . . . I knew perfectly well that beyond the curve was the town on the hilltop where I lived. My temporary lapse of memory in no way altered the fact of its existence."
He stands there agonizing in his mind about what might or ought to be around the curve until he is overcome by anxiety, fearing "the town’s very existence would fade away and then vanish." He considers, "I myself was no longer myself, but some mysterious other." Nausea overtakes him. He manages to turn around and walk back down the hill. His "old confidence was gone." Taking refuge in a coffee shop, he wonders, no longer sure, who he is since he has forgotten his name and where he works. Frantically fumbling with the contents of his wallet and pockets, looking for clues, he realizes, "I had mislaid . . . myself." Abe expresses here not only the universally modern sense of existential void but especially the Japanese fear of the loss of traditional identity under the onslaught of modernity. Abe’s persona significantly and desperately says, "Until I found that town beyond the curve, there could be no resolution." And so it is for modern Japan. He takes a taxi up the hill, beyond the curve:
"Spatially, the town had a solid physical existence, but temporally, it was a vacuum. It existed--yet horribly, it had no existence whatever . . . the town I knew was gone."
Though seeking answers from others, he "alone was lost, uncomprehending." Physically, materially, like the West, Japan exists; in terms of social or psychological time, the "vacuum," quintessentially the same as in the West, has swallowed everything: "The town I knew was gone." What lies beyond the curve, if anything, remains to be seen.
Bitter Winds. Harry Wu.
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Harry Wu
Bitter Winds : A Memoir of My Years in China’s Gulag. Harry Wu.
Bitter Winds, Indeed.... April 20, 2000
Returning in 1994 from China as a Fulbright Scholar, I could not shake China off. It has become part of my consciousness forever. After writing an essay on classical and modern Chinese literature, with Confucius, Tu Fu, Lu Xun, Lu Wenfu, and other classical and modern writers fresh in my mind, I reread the writings of Fang Lizhi and continued to struggle to understand my experience in China. Appalled by the injustices of a political system that could imprison and destroy so many members of its own culture, from all walks of life, I then read in November of 1994 Harry Wu’s Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China’s Gulag.
Arrested in 1960 for reasons no real judicial system in the world would recognize, Harry Wu spent the next nineteen years of his life in one brutally subhuman labor camp after another until he was released in 1979 and eventually given permission to leave China for the United States. The victim of slave labor, starvation, and torture, Wu, at times broken physically and near death, endured with the hope of some day telling the world of his experience:
"My travels in 1991, when I returned to China to film [secretly] the conditions within the labor camps, fulfilled part of a consuming mission. Even though I had found safety in the United States, I had never found rest. Always I recalled the faces I had left behind. Always I worried that while I had escaped, the labor-reform system continued to operate, day by day, year by year, largely unnoticed, unchallenged, and therefore unchanged. I felt urgently the responsibility not just to disclose but to publicize the truth about the Communist Party’s mechanisms of control, whatever the risk to me, whatever the discomfort of telling my story. Each time I revisited my past, I hoped it would be the last time, but I had decided that my experiences belonged not only to me and not only to China’s history. They belonged to humanity." (285-286)
Like so many accounts of the Soviet gulag, Harry Wu’s is a voice of witness, of moral memory, compelled from within to speak the truth in the hope of finding justice before the universal court of humankind. Without relating the many tragic incidents of Wu’s book, let me just say his words sank into me and left me deeply shaken, struggling further to understand the country I had just visited, struggling further to understand what the African-American writer Ralph Ellison was fond of calling "human complexity." Fang Lizhi’s own words on Harry Wu’s 1994 book are worth quoting: "The injustices he chronicles are still going on today. His special point of view on history and politics makes it possible to understand why a democratic China is a dream that shall never die." I was once more deeply distressed when Harry Wu was arrested in June of 1995, while entering China as an American citizen and on an American passport. His ordeal confirmed for me the side of Chinese political reality that I had painfully sensed and observed while there, and which all so unfortunately still continues as attested by the suppression of the Falun Gong and others.
It was while visiting Shenzhen, the city of the new economic policy, that I noticed the assistant to the mayor pick up from the meeting room table a copy of a speech he proceeded to read to our Fulbright group. Well worn, soiled, with the pages curling from repeated reading to one collection of foreigners after another, the paper described in glowing terms the achievements of Shenzhen’s economic miracle. After handling us in apparently the usual way, when someone perceptively asked what the residency status of the three million workers in Shenzhen was, the mayor’s assistant tried to put a good face on the fact that two million were on temporary internal work papers, primarily male, since a proportionate number of women and children are excluded from the "city," and subject to dismissal at any time back to the countryside. Looking out the bus window as we drove to the train station to Hong Kong, I could not but think of the Soviet Union’s Potemkin villages.
Harry Wu’s 1995 experience further confirms that such injustices as he chronicles are continuing today. In 1994 one of the unexpected sights I saw with my own eyes, by chance, in crowded Beijing traffic, was a man handcuffed and blindfolded, sitting in the back of a jeep with two policemen, on his way somewhere he could not see. A few days later a Chinese friend who grew up in Beijing told me that only political prisoners are ever blindfolded. Far from China needing business now, and human rights later, China needs, as all countries need, human rights and democracy first and foremost and forever.
I remember reading that Eleanor Roosevelt, as chairwoman, served in 1947 on the Human Rights Commission with China’s representative, Dr. Peng-Chun Chang, as vice-chairman. Together, along with members of eighteen other nations, they helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. According to her own testimony, Dr. Chang repeatedly challenged the Western representatives, reminded them of the importance of the ideas of Confucius on human rights, and argued philosophically for their incorporation along side those of Thomas Aquinas and other Western thinkers. It is historically accurate to say the resulting document is truly representative of the best of China’s own philosophical thinking on human rights, basic human values.
I do not know whether Fang Lizhi or Harry Wu is aware of the contribution of China to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I do know I believe the following words by Fang Lizhi articulate the most profound vision of human life and experience now available to the consciousness of late twentieth-century human beings, East or West, a vision toward which we all must continue struggling to evolve:
"The values that underlie human dignity are common to all peoples. They are the universal standards of human rights that apply without regard to race, nationality, language, or creed. Symbolized by the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these principles are increasingly accepted and respected throughout the world." ("Keeping the Faith" 262)
Human Rights in China. Fang Lizhi.
Fang Lizhi
Bringing Down the Great Wall: Writings on Science, Culture, and Democracy in China. Fang Lizhi.
Fang Lizhi and Human Rights in China, April 13, 2000
Since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, Fang Lizhi has often been regarded as the foremost advocate of human rights in China. As one might well imagine, his championing of democracy and human rights has a long history going back as far as thirty years before Tiananmen Square. In 1957 he argued political ideology had nothing to contribute to scientific inquiry, which initially led the Chinese government to identify him as someone in need of correction. From time to time, several other clashes with the government took place. In 1986 the communist authorities believed he helped start the pro-democracy student demonstrations of that year. In 1987 he was dismissed as vice-president of the University of Science and Technology in Anhui province and thrown out of the Communist Party. His dismissal was clearly in retaliation for his fearless pro-democracy speeches throughout China and statements in the foreign press.
Although he did not participate in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989, the government accused him of counterrevolutionary activities and of instigating the demonstrations. When the bloody crackdown began, he realized his life was in danger and fled with his wife to the US embassy in Beijing. Forced to live in the embassy for an entire year before being allowed to leave China, he wrote four scientific papers and a number of acceptance speeches for the international awards that he increasingly began receiving in recognition of his heroic defense of democracy and human rights. Since his release, he has taught at Oxford, Princeton, and the University of Arizona, where he is now a tenured professor.
Before turning to his ideas on democracy and human rights, I believe it is important to understand why Albert Einstein is a significant influence on Fang Lizhi. As a prominent fellow scientist, one might well imagine Fang Lizhi to respect and appreciate Einstein’s scientific achievements. More surprisingly though, he finds in Einstein’s progressive social and political ideals an example of a public role for the scientist that he clearly thinks inspiring and worthy of emulation. Einstein of course had the experience of fleeing the Nazis and was always very politically involved in the struggle for a just social order. Especially during the last decade before Einstein died in 1955, he was an active spokesman for human rights and the United Nations, which he felt the Member States had nevertheless failed properly to design and support.
Fang Lizhi, then, conceives of himself, and must be seen properly in the light of, a universal struggle for human freedom and peace. In his 1992 book Bringing Down the Great Wall: Writings on Science, Culture, and Democracy in China, he often quotes Einstein not only on scientific matters but also on social and political ones as well. I quote only one reference in support of this fact: "Einstein’s concept of world citizenship was profound. . . . in the years ahead, the human race will have to come to grips with this idea as well" (249).
Let’s come to grips now with Fang Lizhi’s statements on China. He himself has criticized the tendency in China and the West to conceive of China "as totally different from any other civilization in the world" and that therefore "universal principles of human rights don’t fit China’s experience" (New Perspectives Quarterly, Winter 1992). Far from unique despite its huge population, he insists "the Chinese people want the same freedoms as everyone else." Instead of accepting and even defending what he calls a "double standard" when it comes to China, Fang emphasizes the world community should "uphold human rights as a universal standard." The suppression of Falun Gong and other dissidents continues to cry out to the world for justice.
The exemplary quality of Fang Lizhi’s appeal to the world community can be discerned in the following excerpt from "Patriotism and Global Citizenship," originally an interview taped in Beijing in February of 1989 just before the spring turmoil leading up to the Tiananmen Square massacre:
Human rights are not the property of a particular race or nationality. . . . These are fundamental freedoms, and everyone on the face of the earth should have them, regardless of what country he or she lives in. I think humanity is slowly coming to recognize this. Such ideas are fairly recent in human history; in Lincoln’s time, only a century past, it was just being acknowledged in the United States that blacks and whites should enjoy the same rights. In China we are only now confronting such an issue. (247)
Here is the voice of a Chinese intellectual we ought to remember the next time the excuse of 1.2 billion people surfaces. Here is a voice of universal human importance reminding us of our own history and responsibilities and what we ourselves at times forget in exchange for business with China. On a number of occasions, Fang Lizhi has criticized the West and particular leaders for believing that trade with China is more important than human rights. With a striking clarity of moral vision, fearing for the long-term stability of Asia, he has pointed out that fascist Germany and Japan both had productive economies that far from resulting in liberal democracy ended in widespread regional and global destruction and misery for millions of people. In the Spring 1995 issue of New Perspectives Quarterly, Fang Lizhi ominously warns that "The highest price is yet to be paid by China and the world: the eruption of widespread chaos in the wake of Deng’s demise."
Having just read Fang’s writings before leaving for China as a Fulbright Scholar in early June of 1994, I sat in a lecture room of Beijing University with his words and ideas resonating at times in my mind. The lecturers represented a variety of points of view on Chinese history and culture. Those who were obviously presenting the party line scared or appalled me with their distortions of modern Chinese history and their defense of the abuse of human rights on a scale that is almost unbelievable. For those few who managed to find the humanity to affirm the truth about China’s century-long tragedy of violence and chaos, no matter in how careful and guarded of a way, I felt the deepest respect. Here were voices of heroism, reminiscent of the noblest Confucian scholarly traditions, who had the courage to speak the truth in a country in which many were still too afraid, and for good reason. One of my lasting impressions of China is that many individuals were palpably afraid to speak freely about issues of social, political, or public importance.
I was truly shocked and deeply moved by the revelation that the lecture room in which I and thirteen other Fulbright scholars sat every day for two weeks was used as a prison cell for twenty Beijing University professors during the first two years of the Cultural Revolution. Three times a day, they were forced to bow down to Mao’s picture. Even more shocking and disturbing was to hear words, in the very same room, from some of my American colleagues, shamelessly supporting the Chinese communist revolution, as though China would be the country finally to get communism right. The Chinese setting highlighted for me the betrayal of democracy, at tax payer’s expense, among some of my own nation’s elite in an overwhelmingly devastating way. How could the words of Fang Lizhi not resonate in my mind?
We need soberly to remember the violence and oppression when we study or trade with China and remember that the moral, religious, philosophical crisis of China is fundamentally the modern one East and West share.
Church and State. Sen McGlinn.
Sen McGlinn
Church and State: A Postmodern Political Theology. Sen McGlinn. University of Leiden, 2005. 432 pages.
Reviewed 12-19-07.
In light of the Haifan Universal House of Justice having declared Sen McGlinn a “kafir,” infidel, shortly after the 2005 publication of Church and State, the book resonates with many unintended ironies and contradictions. Written in hope of “recasting,” “reformulating,” “reinterpreting,” “refocusing,” and “rethinking” the contemporary popular Baha’i understanding of Baha’u’llah’s Teachings, Sen McGlinn has been thrown into the role of heretical Bahai theologian, denounced and excommunicated, tossed out of the church he had hoped to save from its own gross ignorance, Philistinism, anti-intellectualism, and fanaticism.
It will be interesting to see if McGlinn learns from the experience or is crushed by it. No greater test can be given an intelligent soul. It either calls out of one’s being an even deeper engagement with evil and truth, a struggle for clarity and understanding, or it destroys the fragile foundations of the self, exposing the shallowness of the structure one has built on. If I am not wrong, McGlinn has resources he has only begun to call upon. Nothing could prove his thesis more than the reactionary attack of the corrupt, decadent, and fraudulent universal house of justice.
Setting aside what he himself realizes is a tedious academic literature review of Islamic and Bahai sources on the relations of church and state and blind belief in theocracy, giving the benighted sources way too much attention, McGlinn presents, as a Bahai theologian, not a historian or apologist, the first glimmer of a deeply considered vision of Baha’u’llah’s Faith in the post-modern world. Far from a simplistic fanatical rejection of Enlightenment values, McGlinn defends their worth and realizes that, on the deepest spiritual level, so did Baha’u’llah—He Himself teaches that the separation of church and state is the way things should be, is God’s Will, and not something to be overturned and supplanted with a despicable theocracy of one sort or another—Christian, Islamic, Baha’i, or whatever—worldly power and coercion should be in the hands of those pragmatists who live with two feet on the ground and are not tempted by religious visions of spiritual utopias and New Jerusalems descending upon the earth at any cost. No wonder the organization based upon a spurious will and testament has pronounced his ideas and book “takfir,” anathema. He has gone deeper into Baha’u’llah’s Teachings than they can ever hope to reach.
In a key passage of the book, McGlinn writes,
"What is needed is not simply to recast Bahai thought in contemporary terms, or to hold the theological thinking of the Bahais up for critical examination in the light of Bahai scripture . . . but rather to drag Bahai thinking bodily from one world-view into the next. We can scarcely understand, now, the extent to which the Christians of the second and third centuries saw their religion in terms set by the shape of Roman society and the Roman state. If we do focus on that, we also see the magnitude of the transition initiated by Augustine’s theology, in disentangling the Christian religion from outdated suppositions about society" (10).
The historical sweep of McGlinn’s vision is truly awe-inspiring. He alludes elsewhere to Plato and Ibn Farabi. I wish he would have discussed Ibn Khaldun, instead of merely relegating him to the bibliography, since he understood so profoundly the extent to which Islam had departed from its early beginnings and had been transformed into a separation of the practical control of the state under royal princes. Ibn Khaldun is the locus classicus of that realization about Islam. Analogously, McGlinn sets his entire discussion in a context and at a level that addresses the postmodern dilemmas that confront world civilization in our age and articulates a persuasive argument that Baha’u’llah can only be properly understood from such a vantage point, as a prophet of post-modernity, laying the foundation and rationale for a new stage of human evolution and civilization, material, political, and spiritual. Elsewhere, in his article “Baha’i Meets Globalisation,” McGlinn states it quite directly, “Baha’u’llah must be re-envisioned as the prophet of post-modernity” (14).
McGlinn’s discussion of Postmodernism is unsatisfyingly brief, perhaps a reflection of the paucity of his own knowledge and omnipresent Bahai Philistinism, but, in a sketchy way, demonstrates his understanding of the issues involved, including the literary and philosophical dimensions of the underlying spiritual and religious disruptions and upheavals. Reading a book written by a Bahai scholar, one can’t expect much when it comes to culture. I’m accustomed to and prefer Postmodernism in literary terms, its most consciously articulate and allusive form.
Part of his discussion draws from sociological studies of globalization and technology, which emphasize the “differentiation” and “individualization” of modern life, producing, in Enlightenment terms, pluralism and relativism, all of which gives a much needed fresh, intelligent context for discussions of the Bahai Teachings, and a vastly more compelling framework within which to understand “the world we live in,” of “lasting pluralism,” contrasted with the current unthinking fundamentalism of the current Haifan denomination, for whom Baha’u’llah’s writings have become a static, literal, unchanging fossil that they seek to cram into the “now empty socket where ‘religion’ belongs,” the socket of their antiquated conception of a new world order, merely imitating past dispensations, imagining their assumed “infallibility” enables them to know better than Baha’u’llah.
Nothing could prove how wrong such benighted doctrinaire fanaticism is than its treatment of such an intelligent, outstanding mind as Sen McGlinn. One only need recall the similar witch hunts and expulsions of Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, Linda and John Walbridge of Indiana University, Denis MacEoin of England, and other gifted scholars and writers. The corruption runs, though, much deeper than McGlinn even realizes. There’s a naivete to many of his comments. His courting a particularly bigoted and fanatical Bahai pseudo-scholar, a few times in the book, cannot appear as anything but ridiculously misconceived, all the more so given her subsequent hatchet job on his work, the only thing she’s capable of writing.
From such a perspective, Church and State presents a sad spectacle. He clearly is trying to reform and renew the intellectual and spiritual stagnation the Baha’i Faith has fallen into, but it is while courting Torquemada, without having the courage to confront the inquisitor and tyrant. Torquemada demonstrates no such scruples about Sen McGlinn. Many souls died on the rack. Few, like Martin Luther, understood that the unmitigated corruption revealed a disease so evil as to require a more profound engagement with the issues involved, a return to, and renewal of, its deepest principles, to truly “re-invent itself.” McGlinn has rightly understood those principles, as Baha’u’llah did, “in terms of globablisation, to offer itself as a means of giving meaning to a post-modern society.” Similarly, McGlinn realizes the theocratic interpretation is wrong and a complete departure from Baha’u’llah. Whether he will have the strength to allow himself to acknowledge that the root of the problem is the fraudulent will and testament of Abdu’l-Baha, and almost everything produced by it, remains to be seen. His many quotations of Shoghi Effendi may indicate he’ll never be able to regain an independent Bahai perspective that would allow him to search out the truth for himself and to return to the actual writings and teachings of Abdu’l-Baha and His Covenant, as well as acknowledge Abdu’l-Baha repeatedly taught, in a sense difficult to understand, that “The Bahai Movement is not an organization.”
Souls can be crushed by suffering, by coming up against challenges to their inmost beliefs and sense of being, of identity. Some cravenly kiss the hand that whipped them, the dream of every tyrant. Many, if not most, go down or walk away from such ultimate confrontations and struggles for understanding and belief. Whatever the outcome for McGlinn’s own personal spiritual battles, and whether he breaks through to new and deeper insights, he has broken new ground for Bahais who have already learned from their experiences and have moved on to truly Reform and renew Baha’u’llah’s Faith in the globalized world of post-modernity.
I agree with McGlinn’s evaluation of the ecumenical role of the Mashriqu’l-Adkar or Bahai House of Worship, in this book and his articles. Baha’u’llah and Abdu’l-Baha teach that it should be open to all people for prayer and worship, not merely Bahais, and the social, educational, medical, and economic dependencies and charities related to it are crucial to both community growth and the transformation of global society. McGlinn explains, quoting Abdu’l-Baha:
Religious and cultural pluralism is here to stay and will increase, because of mobility, individual choice, and the fact that successful modern states cannot have a religious policy. The project of the Mashriqu’l-Adhkar is to create an ecumenical devotional sphere, not bound to a particular doctrinal system, and open to a variety of popular devotion: “In brief, the purpose of places of worship . . . is simply that of unity . . . that is why His Holiness Baha’u’llah has commanded that a place be built for all the religionists of the world; that all religions and races and sects may gather together; that the Oneness of the human world may be proclaimed.”
. . . In the modern world, the progression from a sectarian role to a religion informing society and providing religious services to all society—a ‘church’ in the Weberian sense—can be achieved not by winning state patronage but by developing devotional, aesthetic and intellectual forms that sustain and are sustained by the diversity of popular religious feeling in a pluralist society (143).
Much has been damaged and lost by setting aside Abdu’l-Baha’s unifying vision for the theocratic temptation, relegating people to the paternalism of the derisive “rank and file” and “popular devotion.”
God creates both the individual and the community, and neither truly exists without the other, especially in a globalized society:
Globalisation is a dynamic package in which individualisation is the underlying drive, and functional differentiation (including the separation of church and state), feminisation, global integration, pluralism and relativism are the results. This is in effect a new world, entailing a new principle of individual identity, and the transition places great demands on individuals’ capacity to adapt (144).
The House of Worship is more than a Bahai mosque or church. A whole new conception of sacred, religious space is required to understand it. After God, the individual stands at its center, independently seeking truth, in unity with humanity, not merely other “believers.”
McGlinn rightly argues it is the role of religion, in Baha’u’llah’s postmodern conception of the relation of church and state, that carries the responsibility for inculcating morality and virtue into the individual and community. The problem of how to instill altruism to resist extremely self-serving individualism and license stems from the very beginning of the Enlightenment and modernity, with the separation of the state from the church in the late 1700s, with the philosophes, Voltaire, Rousseau, and other writers. The best social thinkers of our own time have struggled with the reverberations of that problem, Christopher Lasch, Robert Bellah, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, to name a few. Baha’u’llah preserves that separation as the Will of God, making it a religious duty to support and participate in a just government, delegating the cultivation of virtue into the “hearts of men” to his followers and to all religions. Religion and state complement one another in an unprecedented balance in human religious history, instead of a destructive contest convulsing society, though religion retains the duty to critique government, in service to virtue, humanity, and God. It is not enough for religion to say all this; it must prove it. The currently dominant interpretation of the Bahai Faith hasn’t done too well in this regard. Mirza Ahmad Sohrab realized in his courageous book Broken Silence that the Baha’i organization under Shoghi Effendi had become corrupt and destructive of the spiritual life and independence of the individual, seeking to strip the soul of the freedom of conscience and the gift of the will with which God has endowed human beings. Shades of Dostoyevsky.
McGlinn’s Church and State might have benefitted from his pondering this passage from Ibn Khaldun’s An Introduction to History, of 1377, echoing, I would say, Plato’s Republic:
All this has its origin in group feeling…. Luxury wears out royal authority and overthrows it. …Eventually, a great change takes place in the world, such as the transformation of a religion, or the disappearance of a civilization, or something else willed by the power of God. Then, royal authority is transferred from one group to another—to the one God permits to effect that change.
Such a “transformation of a religion” has been long under way for the Bahai Faith, not only postmodern society and Western civilization. The dominant “group-feeling” of the Haifans began to sink into “luxury” with the passing of Abdu’l-Baha and the imposition of the falsified will and testament, leading to many mistakes and excesses, not the least of which was the inhuman destruction of families by requiring husbands and wives and children to shun one another over doctrinal absurdities. Many tens of thousands of Bahais realize there is something extremely unloving and wrong about the naked royal emperor; many have been driven out like McGlinn, for possessing a brain and soul; many others are waiting, looking, searching for the Will of God, for the Bahai theologian who can help them understand His Will. Sen McGlinn has earned the honor of possibly being the first Bahai worthy of the role. As has often been observed, intellectual, spiritual, and cultural history is strewn with examples of scholars and writers merely laying a brick or two in the foundation of the next generation. No small achievement in itself, but not the lofty edifice.
McGlinn’s intelligent though flawed book should help seeking souls in their quest for a world beyond the postmodern, offering a way to understand Baha’u’llah’s “lasting pluralism” in a global world of multiplicity, where religion is the mirror of “individual distinctiveness, not of collective identity.”
Bahai Faith in America. William Garlington.
William Garlington
The Bahai Faith in America. William Garlington. Praeger. 2005.
The American Bahai Mixture .... July 23, 2006
After becoming a Bahai in the 1960s, William Garlington moved to Australia, where he wrote his dissertation on Bahai mass teaching in Malwa, India, eventually returning to the United States. For over twenty-five years, he taught religious studies in Australia and the US. In the 1980s he withdrew his membership in the Bahai Faith, essentially he says over doctrinal issues relating to revelation and the infallibility of Bahai institutions.
Since the majority of available books on the Bahai Faith are written by members and must be officially “reviewed” and approved by Bahai institutions, Garlington’s book is important as a rare attempt at an objective appraisal of the Bahai Faith and its actual history and practice. Life as it is lived, versus theory. The last few decades have been crucial years for revealing much that has hitherto been largely kept hidden from public knowledge. Garlington’s experience as both a believer and a scholar of religion serves him well in his often insightful treatment of the major conflicts and disagreements over theological issues.
More than any other book to date, Garlington reveals the extent to which people have been harassed and hounded out of the Bahai Faith for the slightest deviation of thought and belief, even to the extent of having to spurn their own family, with the roots of such treatment extending back into the earliest years of Bahai history in the United States. While he discusses or mentions the incidents surrounding Ruth White, Ahmad Sohrab, Mrs. Chanler, and Mason Remey, among others, I do believe he fails to adequately investigate the circumstances of their individual beliefs and basically repeats the usual official line that dismisses all of them as heretics or “covenant breakers.” For instance, Lewis Chanler was the Lieutenant Governor of the State of New York, a fact always conveniently left out of “reviewed” Bahai publications. Neither he nor his wife were fringe elements as they are so often portrayed. Ruth White has routinely been discredited as the later devotee of an Indian guru, as though nothing more need be said, playing on both Islamic and Western prejudices, which nevertheless entirely evades answering her charge that the leading British handwriting expert of the day, Charles Ainsworth Mitchell, judged Abdu’l-Baha’s will and testament a fraud. Garlington brings no new material, archival or documentary, to the understanding of such incidents of excommunication (takfir). Sohrab’s own book Broken Silence raises many profound issues that neither Garlington nor any other researcher has made sufficient effort to address or understand. Other scholars might very well want to start by independently examining what actually happened in such cases.
Of even more interest to me is Garlington’s discussion of the many incidents that have developed in connection with the rise of the Internet during the mid and late ‘90s since I participated in the long battle to create what is still the only uncensored forum for the discussion of the Bahai Faith, talk.religion.bahai on Usenet. As with China, the Bahai Faith found itself confronted for the first time with a means of communication it couldn’t entirely control and silence. Like China, the Bahai Faith has developed an apologetical cadre for monitoring, influencing and controlling discussion on the Internet. Yet the early atmosphere of the talisman mailing list, as with other online forums, was euphoric with new found liberty and freedom for Bahais to speak honestly about the Bahai Faith, setting off paroxysms of outrage and self-righteous allegations by fundamentalists that others were “tending toward covenant breaking,” “divisive,” “not Bahai,” and so on. Much of it, along with other incidents touching on religious freedom, can still be found documented on the Internet through University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole’s website, my own, www.fglaysher.com/bahaicensorship, and the Google archive for talk.religion.bahai.
Another shortcoming in Garlington’s book is that while his Conclusion acknowledges that “vocal and liberal Bahais” are becoming “an ever-decreasing minority,” he fails to examine sufficiently why that is, namely, the extreme and alarming tactics used to drive liberals out of the Bahai Faith, exemplified in the attacks on Ruth White and Ahmad Sohrab--the most vicious shunning and slandering techniques used by perhaps any religion in America today. Official Bahai sources and the Internet abound with examples. Garlington barely scratches the surface of the extent to which “hikmat,” so-called wisdom, operates in Bahai history, as do “taqlid,” blind obedience, and “takfir,” excommunication. Much more needs to be said in this regard.
The real test of any religious ethic is not the treatment of those who keep their mouths closed, never thinking or questioning anything (taqlid), but rather the treatment of those writers and scholars of capacity, deeply grounded in the intellectual history and traditions of their culture. The Bahai Faith has so thoroughly failed that test, especially during the last few decades, that no individual or country should take its claims at face value without reading and reflecting on such books as William Garlington’s. It should be noted that the December 2005 Library Journal review of Garlington’s book, by William P. Collins, a conservative apologist for Bahai orthodoxy, employs the usual Bahai tactic of discrediting and slandering any dissident opinion, while recommending books that have passed “Bahai review,” in reality, censorship. The reader might want to reflect on the fact that William P. Collins is a librarian at the Library of Congress, yet readily uses his position to defend a system of administration regularly attacking the liberal values that make a library worthy of the name possible and to discourage acquisition librarians from ordering Garlington’s book.
In his closing paragraph Garlington urges the Bahai leadership to manifest a higher degree of wisdom, echoing all too much for me the practices of “hikmat” that resulted, in the Western world, often in the most cynical manipulation of the “rank and file.” Rather, I would say, what’s required is a higher level of normal decency, humility, and respect for the individual’s freedom and liberty of conscience, along the lines of Isaiah Berlin. It doesn’t take much wisdom to realize what kind of world the present arrogant and utopian administration would create. One needs only to look at American Bahai history and the abuse of now countless individuals and families.
In addition to Garlington’s book, the serious student of Bahai history should also read Professor Juan Cole’s Modernity and the Millennium, and Peter Smith’s Babi and Bahai Religions. The few Christian polemical writers, who have bothered to write anything, can’t hold a match to those who have been burned by the shunning and slander of Bahai fundamentalism. Yet all three authors merely touch the surface of too many incidents that raise serious questions for any American concerned about preserving religious freedom and liberty. There is a very real need for fresh research and excavation of any surviving original material that might throw more light on the major conflicts of American Bahai history. While Garlington seldom moves very far beyond the received version of American Bahai history, his book is at least the first written by a scholar trying to discover essentially what Edward Gibbon called the “inevitable mixture of error and corruption” that a religion contracts “in a long residence upon earth,” versus the predictably self-serving propaganda of the converted. The publisher Praeger is to be applauded for its commitment to free speech and discussion.
Modernity and the Millennium. Juan R. I. Cole.
Juan Cole
Modernity and the Millennium : The Genesis of the Baha'i Faith in the Nineteenth-Century Middle East. Columbia University Press, 1998.
Respecting the Conscience of Man.... June 27, 2000
In his conclusion, which would never have passed the system of censorship, "Bahai review," that the UHJ imposes on all publications brought out under its tight control, Professor Cole, of the Department of History at the University of Michigan, quite accurately identifies the distortions that have been wreaked upon Baha’u’llah’s Teachings:
"Some contemporary leaders of the Baha’i Faith have given answers increasingly similar to those of fundamentalists, stressing scriptural literalism, patriarchy, theocracy, censorship, intellectual intolerance, and denying key democratic values. While the values of the nineteenth-century Baha’i movement, which was far more tolerant, continue to exist as a minority view, by the late 1990s a different set of emphases prevailed" (196).
Cole himself and many others have suffered at the hands of the fundamentalists who have taken control of the religion:
"The rise of academic Baha’i scholarship has caused tension in the community, whose present-day leadership tends to be fundamentalist and antiliberal in orientation, and this has led to pressure on a number of prominent academics to resign or dissociate themselves from the movement" (201).
These same forces of fundamentalist orthodoxy are evident on talk.religion.bahai and alt.religion.bahai on Usenet for impartial viewers to witness. They will be evident to all perceptive observers of whatever forum Bahais may be trying to control and influence. Both my and Cole’s websites provide essential documentation along these lines. It should be noted that the Universal House of Justice has actively worked through the BCCA (Bahai Computer and Communications Association) to suppress all links to websites with other than its own "comprehensive" point of view on such major portals as Yahoo.com, Excite.com, and other search engines. The UHJ has gone even further by advising Bahais to remove any link whatsoever to Professor Cole’s website.
As a Bahai since 1976, I myself have always found especially repulsive the manner in which Bahai fundamentalists attempt to manipulate the institutions and leaders of government, the United Nations, and public opinion, while pretending to values they deride in private or at Bahai-only meetings.
Ultimately, it is the Bahai Universal House of Justice that is responsible for the perversion and corruption of such clear and elevating teachings of Baha’u’llah and Abdu’l-Baha as the following:
"These are effectual and sufficient proofs that the conscience of man is sacred and to be respected; and that liberty thereof produces widening of ideas, amendment of morals, improvement of conduct, disclosure of the secrets of the contingent world" (Abdu’l-Baha, A Traveler’s Narrative, 91).
The UHJ is also in the end responsible for inciting Bahai fanatics and fundamentalists to attack other Bahais and non-Bahais merely for their views expressed on and off line in free forums of public discussion.
Professor Cole’s Modernity and the Millennium will remain, for many years to come, the most important book available on the Baha’i Faith. His discussion of its historical development within the intellectual milieu of progressive 19th Century thought is particularly brilliant and insightful.
Why I’ve decided to blog my reviews…
Why I’ve decided to blog my reviews…
July 13th, 2006
I wearied long ago of submitting to magazines and waiting for months on editors who couldn’t understand where I was coming from and whose views I didn’t share…. Amazon was for a few years a new forum and technology that seemed promising but soon proved too commercial, lacking discriminating taste and reflection. My MCRI blog has been my introduction to this new form, and so I’ll give it a try for things that really interest me….
Frederick Glaysher
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