Tzvetan Todorov: Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollak translation. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996.

 

In his account of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and the Caribbean, Todorov, a self-described moralist, deployed the instruments of ‘postmodernism’ to arraign the Spanish Crown and the Spanish Catholic Church. Upon examination, postmodernist instruments proved a weak reed. Serious moral critique needs more than ‘deconstruction’ in the service of ‘intersubjectivity.’ [1] By the time he turned to the Nazi genocide, Todorov may have reached the same conclusion, as he now engages in more straightforward moral reasoning, based on Kant—using a German against the Germans, as it were.

He begins not in Germany but in Poland, with books on the Warsaw Ghetto revolt of 1943, in which Jews attacked the Nazi occupiers, and the Warsaw Rising of 1944, when Poles attempted the same thing in an attempt to seize control of the city before the oncoming Red Army could take it. Both attempts failed, heroically.

Warsaw 1944 consists of interviews conducted by Jean-François Steiner with survivors of the Rising. “I was actually reading a reflection on heroism,” but “what exactly is heroism, I asked myself.” He associates heroism with the exercise of free will in defiance of “the status quo.” Further, the hero is an ‘idealist’ in the sense that he tends to believe that if he can dream it, he can do it. Poles fought the Nazis not for the sake of saving the people of Warsaw or Polish territory but in defense of “an abstraction called Poland” or, more accurately, an idealized person, for Poland conceived as the sister of the Blessed Virgin. More concretely, “it was not the Polish people who had to be saved but, rather, certain qualities of theirs: their will to freedom, their desire for independence, their national pride”—without which Poles would have risked, in the words of one resister, “a terrible moral collapse.” And not only Poland: the invading Russian communists threatened the West, civilization, humanity itself. Polish self-sacrifice can “stir the conscience of the world,” resisters believed. In Todorov’s estimation, “nothing less than the absolute can satisfy these heroic spirits.” 

The cardinal virtues of heroes are fidelity and courage. The hero stands alone because “family and friends, by their very existence, make him vulnerable,” threatening to make his self-sacrifice a sacrifice of others. Before going to war, he must kiss them goodbye or bid them farewell with one last drink at the bar. He may well miscalculate. In Poland, the Soviet forces held back from supporting the rebel Poles, allowing the Germans to quell the insurrection at the price of 200,000 Polish lives, the deportation of 700,000 more, and the destruction of Warsaw, later rebuilt along the lines of the squalid, Soviet-style architecture which comported with a squalid, Soviet-style regime. But “for a Pole,” one survivor declares, “it is better to die than to be a coward,” and better to be dead than Red. Todorov doubts that such heroism can extend very far, since if everyone is dead, who will remain to live for Poland? He exaggerates somewhat, however, when he claims that “to the hero, death has more value than life” because one can attain the absolute, a humanly unrealizable ideal, only by dying. Rather, most of the Poles who rebelled regarded their sacrifice as a way, under the circumstances the only way, to Polish freedom. Still, it is true that at least one fictional hero, and not a Polish one, can cry, “Prize me no prizes, for my prize is death.” [2]

Todorov prefers the more cautious and (at least many times) saner route. After all, “one can act like a hero for fear of seeming a coward,” feeling “a particular kind of fear, the fear of being afraid,” along with the fear of being shamed by the heroic ones. Critics of the insurrectionists described them as suicides, men “who sought refuge in a glorious death because they didn’t have the courage to face the difficulties of life”—life, it must be added, under Soviet tyranny. Todorov stands for prudence, although he never uses the word: “One needs to anticipate the consequences of one’s decisions while keeping in mind the actual course of events, not merely what one wishes would happen.” If you would be a hero, emulate wily Odysseus instead of raging Achilles.

Todorov distrusts the hero’s Manicheanism. “In Warsaw of 1944, it was not simply the forces of good and evil that confronted each other but the Russians and the Germans, the Home Army and the People’s Army, the government in exile and the civilian population. In circumstances this complex, reaching the best solution—in this instance, unfortunately, merely the lesser evil—requires a careful consideration of all sides rather than unswerving loyalty to an ideal. The values of life are not absolute values: life is diverse, and every situation is heterogeneous. Choices are made not out of concession or cowardly compromise but from a recognition of this multiplicity.” The weakness of such prudential thought and action is that “it does not lend itself well to stories,” by which Todorov means the stories of heroism that inspire faithful and courageous action, which is needed (one should add) if prudence is not to devolve into mere pragmatism or self-interested calculation. The ideal may unrealizable but it serves as a standard, and quite possibly not a dispensable one.

The Jewish Ghetto Rising occurred in a different set of circumstances. Here, Todorov avails himself of the account in Shielding the Flame, a conversation between survivor Marek Edelman and Hanna Krall. Although at the time Edelman thought of himself as heroic in the classic sense, he now saw that “All it was about, finally, was our not letting them slaughter us when our turn came.” The Warsaw Jews know they are going to be killed by the Nazis, so they might as well go down fighting, taking some of the enemy down with them. Todorov calls this second stance an instance of “ordinary virtue,” as distinguished from “heroic virtue.” Ordinary virtue vindicates human freedom. It is animated not so much by fidelity and courage as by a sense of “dignity,” the “capacity of the individual to remain a subject with a will,” confirming his “membership in the human race.” “For the hero, death eventually becomes a value and a goal, because it embodies the absolute better than life does. From the standpoint of the ordinary virtues, however, death is a means, not an end; it is the ultimate recourse of the individual who seeks to affirm his dignity.” Todorov thus partakes of the modern philosophy of freedom, regarding the free will rather than reason as the distinctively human characteristic. [3] The second anchor of ordinary virtue is “caring,” the attempt not only to respect oneself but to help others—not generalized or ‘abstract’ others (nation, civilization, humanity) but other individuals. Hiding the refugee, shielding the body of a child. 

Why did the Polish Home Army not reinforce the Ghetto rebels? The Jewish witnesses ascribe this not only or even primarily to Polish anti-Semitism but to “the pro-Soviet position of the Jews,” many of them socialists but almost all of them (quite understandably) hating the Jew-hating Nazis more than the bourgeois-hating Soviets. For its part, the Home Army “was just as hostile to Stalin as it was to Hitler”—also understandably, as Stalin no less than Hitler intended to destroy Polish independence and subordinate the Poles in his empire. The Soviets acted the same way during the Warsaw Uprising, knowing that it “was directed as much against them as against the Germans.” Calling this “the logic of resentment,” Todorov asserts that in both instances “ideological conviction took precedence over concern for protecting human lives.” The problem with this argument is that the ideological convictions of the persons endangered, the persons calculatedly not helped, were themselves murderous. Jewish preference for Soviet tyranny as against Nazi tyranny remains readily understandable, but was it good for Poland (Jewish and non-Jewish alike)? Polish detestation of both enemy regimes was justifiable. This may be seen in the fact Todorov cites: “the anti-Soviet forces” in 1944 did not really threaten the Soviets. But the Soviets refrained from intervening because they wanted to weaken the Poles, the better to take over Poland in order to advance their ideological cause. That “the anti-Soviet Polish forces were not really threatened by the Jewish rebels” in 1943 is much more likely true, although the Poles surely would have been threatened had the Jewish rebels sided with the Reds, opening a dangerous second front after the Nazis had been defeated. And had Polish Jews welcomed the Soviets at the expense of the Poles (whom they had little reason to trust), who is to say that the Soviets would not have turned on them, once the Poles had been brought to heel?

Todorov’s prudential reasoning rests on more solid ground when he considers the logic of Warsaw Jews in rebelling. This was indeed “a sane reaction to a policy of systematic extermination”; “every day, the Nazi occupiers of Warsaw sent a trainload of victims”—most of them Jews—to the Treblinka concentration camp, “to be killed on arrival.” Warsaw Jews chose the manner of their deaths, being sure to die, one way or another. “The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto must be respected not so such because of its display of heroic virtues but because it was the right political answer to desperate circumstances.” Exactly so.

Aristotle would recommend against examining such an extreme circumstance in order to understand ordinary virtue. Todorov insists that one can learn about such virtue precisely when it is under the most pressure. “My intent is to use the extreme as an instrument, a sort of magnifying glass that can bring into better focus certain things that in the normal course of human affairs remain blurry.” One might go farther still: the egalitarianism of democracies lends itself to moral relativism, to blurriness in principle. Democrats incline to be ruled by their desires, by neither logos nor thumos.

As “the extreme of our political life, modern tyranny or “totalitarianism” puts the now-characteristic European regime of democratic republicanism into sharper relief. Totalitarianism’s animating sentiment is terror, the sentiment modern liberalism, beginning with Hobbes, seeks to guard against. In both the totalitarian regime as a whole and its concentration camps in particular, the enforced confinement under pain of death, the reign of secrecy, the strict social hierarchy (in the name of egalitarianism), “the implication of everyone in the functioning of the machine,” the “corruption of the soul under constraint,” and the “constant presence of violence and death” all serve the intention of ruling by means of terror. 

Todorov is a moralist, but hardly a self-righteous one. On the contrary, “any reflection of mine on the subject of the extreme that did not implicate me personally and draw on my own experiences was likely to be a futile exercise.” He had himself lived in Bulgaria, under a communist regime in the Soviet empire, until his mid-twenties. This “gave me my first intimate encounter with political evil, but as something done by me, not to me.” Like the subjects of tyranny everywhere, he too had walked the walk laid out by the regime in “mute acceptance of the status quo.” “For this interpretation of the lessons of totalitarianism and the camps, I alone will be responsible.”

In the extreme circumstances within these extremist regimes—heroic in their own perverse way, aiming at the realization of such unrealizable if malignant ideals as racial purity or worldwide communalism—in the concentration camps, many victims struggled only to survive, abandoning all moral convictions. But others did not. “Matters of conscience are not at all rare in extreme situations, and their very existence attests to the possibility of choice, and thus of moral life”; the regime or way of life of the camps did not obey “only the law of the jungle,” as much as its rulers wanted it to. Free will continued to exert itself, and with it the ordinary virtues. The tyrants organized the camps in particular and their regimes in general according to “the principle that the behavior of the individual depends not on his own will but on the conditions surrounding him, that life is a war of all against all, that morality is no more than a superficial convention.” Marx and Nietzsche alike had subscribed to such moral fatalism, and even some of the survivors of the camps continued to think they were right. But on the contrary, the endurance of ordinary moral virtue in the camps proves “that moral reaction are spontaneous, omnipresent, and eradicable only with the greatest violence.” Hobbes’s state of nature is not natural but must instead be forced upon us. “Except under extreme constraint, human beings are prompted, among other things, to communicate with one another, to help one another, and to distinguish good from evil.” The ordinary virtues remain the middle ground between the desire for self-preservation at any cost and the heroic choice of death at the expense of life. It isn’t so much that “moral life was superior in the camps” but that “it was more visible and thus more telling there.” “I examine both sides of moral life—the virtues, ordinary and heroic, and the vices, ordinary and monstrous. Finally, I attempt to analyze our responses in the face of evil.”

Todorov identifies the ideal of the hero as excellence—seen in Achilles, who embodies “the model of heroic perfection,” but not so much for the purpose of the war, which is to avenge the theft of Helen by the Trojans. Physical strength, physical and moral courage, and energy comprise this ideal; glory is its reward—a name that will not die when the hero does. For Achilles, “the choice is between a life without glory and a glorious death.” In “choosing death over life,” he elevates himself above ordinary mortals, who cringe at the prospect of dying. The Christian equivalent of the hero is the saint, a person of “spiritual strength” who, “like the hero, rejects compromise.” Todorov goes too far in claiming that the saint’s love of God “leav[es] no room” in his heart “for a comparable love of his fellowman.” If Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend tells us of saints who push family members aside in order to martyr themselves, it does so because de Voragine would inspire us, too, to love both God and children; his saints set an example for their children as well as for us. Combining the heroism of the ‘ancients’ with the saintliness of the Christians, the knight of the Middle Ages lived by the code of chivalry, indeed “a very different model from that of Achilles” but still animated by “the aristocratic virtues and the concept of honor.” 

Against all of these high-toned human types we see Benjamin Franklin. “With the triumph in Europe of the ideology of individualism toward the end of the eighteenth century, the heroic model falls rapidly out of favor,” replaced by the man who “aspire[s] to personal happiness or even, quite simply, to a life of pleasure.” Less impressive examples than Franklin include such fictional characters as Julien Sorel and Emma Bovary, figures who have, as Todorov drily remarks, “little in common with Achilles and Antigone.” “For the world of the Greek heroes is the opposite of modern democracy.” 

Todorov identifies “two ideological models” which “preside over the sphere of human interactions” today: public figures will point to military careers, fine ’causes’ fought for in war or in peace—heroic virtues for the middle class; in the private sphere, the ordinary virtues—including but not restricted to what are now called ‘family values’—constitute the ordinary virtues of life lived in the quotidian. Although Todorov has deprecated the heroic virtues, he recognizes that they have their place, as when a war really is just. “From the minute it became clear that there was no other way to contain Hitler, going to war against him became the right choice,” and in such a war, “I prefer Churchill to Chamberlain, de Gaulle to Daladier.” But since “war is not the continuation of peace by other means,” and “the fact that many people believe otherwise is one of the major proofs that the history of the world does not obey the laws of progress,” “sending heroes into retirement once the war is over may be less an expression of ingratitude than a mark of lucidity.” Oddly, he gives Churchill and de Gaulle as examples of such sensible conduct: “left in power” after World War Two, “they might have become dangerous.” In fact, both returned to power after the war, Churchill not dangerous but ineffective, probably a bit too old for the job, de Gaulle not dangerous but (for the most part) beneficial, the founder of the Fifth Republic. At any rate, he prefers the heroism of Sacha Pechersky, the Odysseus-like leader of an escape from a Nazi extermination camp, and the saintliness of Father Maximilian Kolbe, who offered himself as a substitute for a man designated for death by starvation in Auschwitz. “Sometimes, heroic behavior” has been “subordinated to the welfare of real human beings.” Todorov is more comfortable with the defense of persons than with the defense of England or of France, while continuing to respect the defenders of England and France.

With respect to the ordinary virtues of dignity and caring, totalitarian regimes seek to eradicate both. “We decide how long you stay alive and when you die, and not you!” the guards shouted at the prisoners in the camps. They sought to sever the connection between the dignity of human freedom and the dignity of actions supporting freely chosen moral principles. In this sense, then, the ‘philosophy’ of modern tyranny counters the modern philosophy of freedom. Something more than freedom alone suffices to make a conviction moral, however. While it is true that the Nazi, too, may act “in accordance with his convictions,” his convictions themselves are rotten. “Moral behavior requires more than harmony between acts and ideals; it requires also that those ideals not work against the good of humanity.” 

Caring in the camps sometimes took horrifying forms, as when nurses killed newborn children to save the mothers from execution by the Nazis for the ‘crime’ of giving birth (the children would have been murdered, anyway). Women generally “survived the camps better than men did” because caring was the virtue tradition had instilled in them. “The women were more practical, more likely to help one another than were the men,” whereas “the men were more likely to deaden themselves, to become hard and indifferent, to turn on one another.” Todorov distinguishes caring from solidarity, which he associates with caring only for ‘one’s own’—family, friends, countrymen. In this way, he separates politics, the realm of solidarity, from morality, the realm of caring for human beings as such. With caring, “the choice is made according to criteria other than nationality, profession, or political persuasion; each person who is cared for is deserving in an of him- or herself.” Nor is caring charity, which cares even for those one does not know, one who can never reciprocate the gesture. Nor is caring sacrificial, as heroism or charity can be: “the giver can hope to receive benefits in return, should the roles be reversed.” Caring entails mutuality in a way that heroism and charity do not. 

Todorov knows that moral life consists of more than sentiments alone, whether heroic, saintly, or ‘ordinary.’ There is also the life of the mind, whether it aims at the search for truth, the search for the beautiful, or both. Even in a concentration camp, one might seek out the truth “not simply because it can help one survive or because it can help others fight a hateful system but because unearthing the truth is an end in itself.” In law, in philosophy, and in religion alike, there is merit in being a witness. “This is the paradox: stories of evil can create good” because “to observe, to remember, and to pass on to others what one has seen is already to take a stand against inhumanity,” “one way of remaining human and, for that reason,” to commit “an act with a moral dimension.” It is of course true that the single-minded pursuit of the life of the mind can go wrong, as in the seriocomic example of Todorov’s father, whom Todorov suspects of welcoming the Communists’ takeover of Bulgaria because, as a librarian, this would mean “the modernization of Bulgaria’s libraries.” At least the old man’s purpose wasn’t harmful in itself, as everyone is familiar with Werner von Braun’s rocket science in the service of Nazi Germany. In such extreme cases, Rousseau’s well-known complaints about the corrupting influence of the arts and letters actually make some sense. 

In considering the heroic/aristocratic, intellectual/philosophic, and democratic/’ordinary’ virtues, Todorov ranks them not according to the ‘postmodernist’ categories he once upheld, but in terms of the categorical imperative. Unlike the other virtues, “caring is by its very definition coincident with the moral stance that hold other people to be ends in themselves, whereas for the life of the mind this engagement with others is optional, and when dignity is at stake, the subject’s welfare can be an altogether extraneous issue.” He thus distinguishes “the morality of sympathy” from “the morality of principles.” A principle abstracts from the particulars, something “by definition universal,” but sympathy “is a sentiment one feels as a direct result of someone else’s experience,” whether it takes the form of compassion at the sight of suffering or of “vicarious joy” at the sight of another’s triumph. The quest for justice is a quest to act in accordance with a principle or perhaps a set of rules. The ‘social justice warrior’ may in practice rescue people or run them over with a truck. Indeed, moralism, as distinct from morality, “consists of practicing justice without virtue, of simply invoking moral principles without feeling that they apply to oneself,” of demanding justice without being just. “To say that one is in favor of morality is not a moral act; most of the time it merely signifies conformity or a desire to live at peace with one’s conscience.” Subscribing to morality is like subscribing to a magazine; it doesn’t mean that you read it. Unlike principles, “action cannot be generalized.” It always affects specific persons and things. 

And so, it’s easy “to denounce slavery” when and where it no longer exists. “There is nothing moral in speaking out against slavery today; all it proves is that I’m in step with my society’s ideology or else don’t want to find myself on the wrong side of the barricades,” and “something very similar can be said about condemnations of racism, although that would not have been the case in 1936 in Germany.” When pursuing justice, one does well to think less of one’s moral perfection, more of what is right for the others. Moral perfection in matters of justice may at most number among the side effects. 

What can happen when ordinary people, with their ordinary virtues, find themselves plunged into the extreme condition established by the extreme regime, modern tyranny—the concentration camp? “In the literature of the concentration camp, evil is the main character.” Arendt was right: the evil of the camps was indeed “banal” in one sense. The guards were mostly not sadistic or fanatical; “they followed the rules.” In the words of Vasily Grossman, “The new state did not even require servants—just clerks.” “To call this evil banal is not to trivialize it; precisely what made this evil so dangerous was that it was so easy, that no exceptional human qualities were required for it to come into being.” Its very enormity was possible only because its component parts were small, easily assembled and maintained. The ordinary virtues had been countered by ordinary vices, by what one writer calls “the cold, systematic manner of the military ‘categorical imperative.'” To explain the camps, one needs not a psychological but a political explanation, an account of the regime that established them. “The societal trait that allows such crimes to be carried out is totalitarianism, the only attribute that Nazi Germany shares with the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, and China.” The human beings within those regimes were “no different from any others; what sets them apart is the political regime under which they lived.”

The characteristics specific to that regime are: identifying ‘regime enemies’ not only in foreign countries but ‘from within,’ whether it be the race enemy of the Nazis or the class enemy of the Communists; establishing the state as “the custodian of the society’s ultimate aims”; and (consequently) establishing state rule over “the totality of the individual’s social existence.” The enemies held up by modern tyrannies are not simply critics but “absolute” enemies, “embodiment[s] of evil,” elements against whom one is said to have a moral obligation not merely to criticize but to make war against. By “making itself the sole arbiter of which ends are to be pursued,” the totalitarian regime enables its subjects to “take comfort in being relieved of personal responsibility for their decisions” while “demand[ing] that [they] restrict themselves in thought and deed to instrumentality,” treating “every action as a means to something else rather than an end in itself.” This enables ordinary people to pervert their ordinary virtues to the service of evil ends. The concentration camp guards “were not deprived of a moral sensibility but provided with a new one.” A regime change always does that, for evil or for good. Todorov recalls that in Bulgaria the exercise of ordinary virtues at home and among friend seemed an escape from “totalitarian control over at least one part of our lives,” but in doing so Bulgarians gave “the state free rein to regulate our social existence, which is to say, our lives as a whole.” “We were consolidating the power of the regime itself.” 

This explains not only why most Jews didn’t revolt against the Nazis—they were a minority trapped among Germans who were hostile or indifferent to their calamity—but also why “a billion Chinese [are] not in revolt right now.” “Once the totalitarian system is in place, the vast majority of the population—people like you and me—are at risk of becoming accomplices in its crimes,” “fall[ing] into behaviors they understand are evil.” We “prefer to forget Kolyma and Auschwitz…because we fear discovering that the evil of the camps is not alien to the human race” or, more uncomfortably, to ourselves. “Evil is not accidental; it is always there at hand, ready to manifest itself. All it needs to emerge is for us to do nothing.”

What of the persons ruling in the regime? On the lower level, “there was no guard who was wicked through and through,” as all “seemed subject to constant shifts in attitude and temperament,” cruel one moment, kind the next. This suggests no mental illness, no clinical ‘split personality,’ but rather the absence of the rule of reason—an absence itself the effect of the overall regime, founded upon pseudoscience and animated by terror. True, as everyone has noticed, a guard might torture a prisoner while listening to Bach—people “with university educations could be every bit as cruel as the illiterate”—but “a sense of morals” is hardly “something one learns at universities.” And again, famously, many of the guards were good ‘family men.’ “My impression is that these individuals needed to fragment their lives in this way so that no spontaneous feelings of pity might hinder them in their ‘work,’ and also so that their admirable private lives might serve as a counterweight, at least in their own minds, for the things that may have troubled them about their professional activities.” At the top of the regime, Todorov remarks, Lenin was the same way, a man of “sensitivity, delicacy, gentleness, courtesy” with those he did not deem his ‘class enemies.’ Even Stalin is said to have had his jovial side and Hitler loved his dog. In Germany, “it was up to the Führer to decide an objective, and for everyone else to mind his or her own area of expertise. This is the totalitarian subject’s standard way of thinking.” Each person concerned himself “with only one small link in a vast chain and seeing their task as a purely technical problem.” The bureaucratic structure of the totalitarian state gave institutional form to this way of life, reinforcing “this absence of feelings of responsibility” and the workings of conscience. James Madison emphasized exactly the critical importance of responsibility in government, holding up the American regime as reformed by the 1787 Constitutional Convention as a model of a set of institutions that enforce strict responsibility upon the persons who occupy public offices. Hitler’s regime, all of the modern tyrannies, aim at exactly the opposite effect: Give your soul to me and get on with your assigned tasks. It is easy to see why so many Nazis regarded themselves as innocent of all wrongdoing. And insofar as the republics have given themselves over to bureaucratic rule, one sees some of the same moral effects.

Chief of those effects is depersonalization. Crucify not your body for the sake of the souls of others; crucify your soul for the sake of the nation, or of communism. “Totalitarian doctrines can thus properly be called antihumanist,” anti-Kantian. Do not act as if a person be used as an end in itself, but always as a mere means. “Far more than any sadistic or primitive instincts, it is depersonalization, of the other and of oneself, that is responsible for totalitarian evil.” In this sense, the policy of stripping prisoners naked and starving them was a way not only of subordinating the prisoners but of getting the guards to treat them like animals. Similarly, give them numbers to replace their names; kill them en masse, not in small groups or individually; identify them in terms of some impersonal category (‘Jews,’ ‘kulaks’); herd them into gas chambers, so as not to see them die. Hitler wished that Germany had a religion like the Japanese “who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good,” or Islam, which “would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity.” 

I was only following orders, was the famous excuse. “Someone who only follows orders is no longer a person. The originality of totalitarian crime resides precisely in this possibility.” As the Nazi governor-general of Poland phrased it, “Act in such a way that if the Führer knew of your action he would approve it.” Hitler is your new god. On the Soviet side, Pravda means ‘truth’; if the newspaper Pravda says so, it must be true. The truth is spoken into reality, parodying the Book of Genesis. Husbands and wives believed the ‘Word’ of the ruling Party more than they believed the testimony and character of their spouses. Joined with bureaucratic compartmentalization, ideological indoctrination transformed persons so much “that they could suspend their usual responses to fellow human beings.” And although Nazis and Communists alike valorized honor and loyalty in words, “what the totalitarian regime calls loyalty is really nothing other than the ordinary vice of submission.” Courage? “Totalitarian pseudoheroes know only one form of sacrifice, that of others, while they themselves take pride in having enough fortitude to watch the ordeals of their victims without trembling!” Hitler knew it, too, “never miss[ing] an occasion” to sneer at old-fashioned Prussian rectitude and to scorn the chivalric tradition. The tyrant is no aristocrat but a ‘democrat’ in the Tocquevillian sense, one who intends to level all others beneath himself and his ruling ‘apparatus.’

If all that need be done to permit such a regime to emerge is to do nothing, what shall one do? Democratic regimes in the ordinary, non-Tocquevillian sense—democratic and commercial republics—do help. They foster “ideological pluralism,” lessening the danger of “fanatical indoctrination.” Religious conviction, too, can thwart ideology, although Todorov draws the line at Christian pacifism. He cites the example of the Dutch pacifist, Etty Hillesum, who acted under “two imperatives: forswear hatred of the enemy and fight evil in oneself rather than in others—that is, with moral, not political means.” If I see “no resemblance” between myself and my enemy, I am “destined to resemble [my] enemy.” While such “moral action can perhaps be more effective than we think” (he cites some impressive but limited examples), “there are times when taking up arms is the only appropriate responses,” as when “Hitler’s armies are streaming across borders.” “In fighting Hitler (and hence for justice) we are not imitating him: he is fighting for injustice.” Indeed, “might a position like Hillesum’s even facilitate the spread of evil”? True, Jesus tells us that His Kingdom is not of this world, that His followers will join Him in it, someday. But while we remain in this world, we need the prudence of serpents as much as the innocence of doves. “The most effective barrier to the political fact of totalitarianism is itself political: an active democracy concerned with both individual freedom and the advancement of the common good, tolerant of criticism and transformation from within but at the same time intransigent toward democracy’s real enemies.” Moral actions are indispensable for the maintenance of republics, but republic give moral intentions freedom of action.

Resistance to tyranny in combat carries moral risks. “If the only change is that those who were hunted become the hunters, then the new kingdom,” the regime that emerges after the war “will not be so new after all.” (This was precisely the problem de Gaulle addressed, successfully, and is the theme of one of Churchill’s best books, The Aftermath.) “Persecuting the persecutors does not erase the debt; the debt in fact is increased.” Here again, the very justice Todorov had said is no virtue returns, as he tells his readers, “Take a stand against evil and fight it out of a sense of justice, not hatred.” When it comes to postwar trials begin by distinguishing “between legal guilt and moral responsibilities,” between those who “actually committed the crimes and who alone are properly the concern of the judicial system” and “the passive spectators who are responsible at most for not coming to the aid of those in danger and thus who need answer not to the courts but to history or their own consciences” or, one might add, to God. True, under totalitarianism “all are involved in maintaining the status quo and thus all are responsible,” but “at the same time, all are subjugated and act under constraint.” When regime “pressures are truly great, our judgment of the individual must take them into account.” As for the criminals, the main thing is to delay judgment, whether stern or lenient, until the truth of the accused’s conduct has been fully brought out. “There is a vast difference between leniency and concealing the truth”; as the great jurist Francisco de Vitoria understood, “justice is not just a question of meting out punishment” but “also involves bringing the truth to light.” 

Those whose business it is to bring the truth to light bear a unique responsibility. Heidegger, Schmitt, Jünger, Benn: “one cannot ignore the role, and hence the responsibility, of certain currents of thought in the rise of totalitarian regimes,” such currents as “anti-universalism” (i.e., exalting one race, class, or nation above all others), “hyper-determinism” (the claim that ‘race’ or ‘class’ or ‘gender’ or, animating them all, ‘History’ determines character and conduct), and “conflictualism” (the exaltation of warfare as ‘the supreme law of life”). Todorov engages in no ‘more-virtuous-than-they’ finger-pointing, here. “If I had stayed in Bulgaria, I would have spent the next thirty years writing half-truths,” inasmuch as “one of the most striking characteristics of totalitarian regimes” is that “everyone becomes an accomplice,” everyone “both inmate and guard, victim and executioner.”

Nor should those still further removed from direct responsibility for tyrants’ crimes exonerate themselves. The peoples conquered by the Nazis during the Second World War and those conquered by the Soviets afterwards at times “show[ed] a marked complacency toward what was taking place on their soil.” The French, for example, who provided a safe haven from Communism, “ought to be grateful to Eichmann and his colleagues for having chosen Poland as their extermination ground.” Had they chosen France as the site for the camps, “we might have learned yet again that, as Napoleon said, the word impossible is not French.” Those countries that did shelter Jews (Denmark and Bulgaria) or at least did not turn them over to the Nazis (Greece, Yugoslavia) combined “the absence of deep-seated anti-Semitism in the population” with “the willingness of a few politicians to make courageous decisions and stand by them.” As for the citizens of the free countries that remained unconquered, they did very little to oppose the tyrants in the years before the world war. “News of the Nazi death camps leaked out early on,” and “there was never any lack of information” about the Soviet gulags, “even as early as the 1920s.” Shamefully, both Great Britain and the United States feared that Hitler might expel ‘his’ Jews instead of killing them, throwing them onto their own shores. And of course, one must not discount the fear of war, both in the aftermath of the First World War and in the aftermath of the Second. Too, there was no shortage of intellectual and journalistic apologists for the tyrants, especially for the Communists. Men like Albert Camus, who “dared to mention a network of concentration camps as the very foundation of a presumably Socialist system, were vilified and ostracized by their colleagues.” In all, “most onlookers, whether close or distant, let events take their course.” “They knew what was happening and could have helped but did not.”

It being “beyond human strength” to “take upon ourselves all the suffering in the world, ceasing to sleep peacefully so long as there remains somewhere in the world even the slightest trace of injustice,” we will need to confine ourselves to more modest efforts. One of these is to listen to the witnesses of modern tyranny, “so that the truth can be established,” but more than that to understand: “Our memory of the camps should become an instrument that informs our capacity to analyze the present,” to “recognize our own image in the caricature reflected back at us by the camps, regardless of how much this mirror deforms and how painful the recognition is,” a recognition that “contains lessons for us, who think we live in a completely different world.” It isn’t completely different, since human nature hasn’t changed and since tyranny is still with us, as seen in China and ‘post-Communist’ Russia. 

Does such understanding preclude just judgment? “I couldn’t disagree more. If I try to understand a murderer, it is not to absolve him but to prevent others from repeating his crime.” The law is impersonal, justice framing good laws an abstraction, but “the impersonality of the law must not lead to the depersonalization of those it condemns.” We cannot not judge. It is rather to judge without falling into the Manichean wrong of ignoring or excusing the evil in ourselves. There is telling or witnessing; there is understanding; there is judging. None of them can be sacrificed if we are to acknowledge our responsibility, which is to say our humanity morally understood. Whereas in his book on the conquistadors Todorov confined morality to ‘intersubjectivity’ and deprecated teleology, he now sees that we need both. Not only are moral judgments “not arbitrary,” they “can be argued rationally,” with reason the human guide toward “seek[ing] the good of specific individuals” in action and not only in words. “Morality cannot ‘disappear’ without a radical mutation of the human species,” one that removes its capacity to reason and to care for the good of one another. As a modern liberal, wary of statist tyranny, Todorov doubts that morality in his strict sense can be had in political life, which he confines to the establishment and increase of a just framework for moral life. Nor can philosophy make us moral, being an act of “reflection on morality, which is a search for truth more than a search for goodness” (he includes his own book in this category). Again, like politics, philosophy can lend itself to a moral way of life.

What does modern tyranny or totalitarianism, in its extremism, teach? It teaches that “a code of ordinary moral values and virtues, one commensurate with our times, can indeed be based on the recognition that it is as easy to do good as to do evil.” The “banality of evil” seen in the Nazis finds its counter in “the banality of good.” We need neither imitate saints nor fear monsters, as “both the dangers and the means with which to neutralize them are all around us.” 

 

 

Notes

1. See “Spanish Conquistadors Through a ‘Postmodernist’ Lens,” on this website.
2. As Lancelot declaims in Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King.
3. See “The Effects of the Philosophy of Freedom on Modern Tyranny” and “The Critique of Rationalism in the Philosophy of Freedom,” on this website.

 

Philip Gilbert Hamerton: The Intellectual Life.  Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1877.

 

It isn’t always easy, Socrates might conclude. The Englishman Hamerton concurs, even as he “propose[s] to consider the possibilities of a satisfactory intellectual life under various conditions of ordinary human existence,” “favorable and unfavorable,” but none so dire as those prevailing in ancient Athens, much less Sparta.  Indeed, even “if a man were so placed and endowed in every way that all his work should be made as easy as the ignorant imagine it to be, that man would find in that very facility itself a condition most unfavorable”—a paradox to which he shall return.

Difficulties notwithstanding, “all who are born with considerable intellectual faculties are urged toward the intellectual life by irresistible instinct, as waterfowl are urged to an aquatic life.” Unlike a duck, whose “life is in perfect accordance with its instincts,” the human intellect is not. It is easily distracted, “hampered by vexatious impediments of the most various and complicated kinds.” That is, the very fact of human intelligence both endows and interferes with the life of the intellect. This requires more than instinct, more than intelligence or even knowledge; it requires virtue. “It is not erudition that makes the intellectual man, but a sort of virtue which delights in vigorous and beautiful thinking, just as moral virtue delights in vigorous and beautiful conduct,” intellectual life being “not so much an accomplishment but a state or condition of mind in which it seeks earnestly for the highest and purest truth,” an “aspiration” to come “a little nearer to the Supreme Intellect whose effulgence draws us whilst it dazzles.” The intellectual quest reveals “a little more, and yet a little more, of the eternal order of the Universe, establishing us so firmly in what is known, that we acquire an unshakable confidence in the laws which govern what is not, and never can be, known.”

Hamerton divides his book into twelve parts, each in the form of a letter, suggesting that the intimate character of advice concerning one’s way of life comports best with the most intimate literary genre. Each letter is to a real (if unidentified) person, although many of them were not sent. Beginning with “the physical basis” of the intellectual life, he moves through personal morality, education or intellectual discipline, the use of time, economics (“the influences of money”), civil society (“custom and tradition”), family (“women and marriage”), politics (“aristocracy and democracy”), with concluding letters on the need for and the dangers of solitude, the importance of “intellectual hygienics,” the lure of trades and professions, and, simply but in some ways comprehensively, “surroundings.”

The life of the mind first requires bodily health, as “all intellectual labor proceeds upon a physical basis”—a “close connection…exists between intellectual production and the state of the body and the brain”—and “the excessive exercise of the mental powers is injurious to bodily health.” Exercise stands as “the best tranquilizer of the nervous system which has yet to be discovered,” the best means of “avoiding the bad effects of an entirely sedentary life.” “Literary work act simply as a strong stimulant, “innocent” and even “decidedly beneficial” in “moderate quantities, but “act[ing] like poison on the nervous system” if overindulged. While the sedentary life inclines to bad digestion, the intellectual life requires plenty of food. Exercise answers the dilemma.

Hamerton holds up the example of Immanuel Kant, who became famous among his neighbors for his daily walks and other regular habits, enabling him to maintain his health throughout a long life. “What a happy man he was to possess that first of blessings, and what a sensible man to know the value of it,” having seen that he had in some ways earned his life rather than resting in “the mere consciousness of possessing one of the unearned gifts of nature.” Kant “walked alone, but ate in company” for “good physiological reasons”—walking, he could keep his own pace—and “good intellectual reasons also”—dining, conversation brings dialectic with it. Hamerton demurs only when he considers the “excessive regularity” of Kant’s habits—rising at exactly the same minute every day, to give one example. Only a man who always stays at home, rejecting the intellectual benefits of travel, only an unmarried man “without a disturbance that would have been intolerable to him,” could have pulled it off. “Few lives can be so minutely regulated without risk of future inconvenience. ” 

Kant viewed beer with horror, but Hamerton comes to the defense of “that honest northern drink.”. While wine is good, “the pure juice of the grape sustain[ing] the force and activity of the brain,” beer “gives rest and calm” to the nervous system; “no other drink can procure [that] so safely.” Admittedly, beer drinkers are said to be slow, “a little stupid,” with an ox-like placidity not quite favorable to any brilliant intellectual display,” “but there are times when this placidity is what the laboring brain most needs.” “After the agitations of too active thinking there is safety in a tankard of ale. The wine drinkers are agile, but they are excitable; the beer drinkers are heavy, but in their heaviness there is peace.” Man being a social and political animal, it must be said that beer has salutary social and political effects, as well. “In that clear golden drink which England has brewed for more than a thousand Octobers, and will brew for a thousand more, we may find perhaps some explanation of that absence of irritability which is the safeguard of the national character which makes it faithful in its affections, easy to govern, not easy to excite to violence.” The English are the sort of people likely to leave livers of the life of the intellect in peace. 

Whatever one’s choice of libation, “not the nectar of the gods themselves were worth the dash of a wave upon the beach, and the pure cool air of the morning.” The best thing is moderate, steady exercise, not sudden exertion. Walking, for example: “nothing in the habits of Wordsworth, that model of excellent habits, can be better as an example to men of letters than his love of pedestrian excursions.” Get outdoors. “The fatal flaw of the studious temper is, that in exercise itself it must find some intellectual charm, so that we quit our books in the library only to go and read the infinite book of nature.” That infinite book very much includes bad weather, and Hamerton commends “daily exposure to the health-giving inclemencies of the weather,” of which his native British Isles have never been ungenerous. Altogether, “the physical activity of men eminent in literature has added abundance to their material and energy to their style,” “the activity of scientific men has led them to innumerable discoveries,” “the more sensitive and contemplative study of the fine arts has been carried to a higher perfection by artists who painted action in which they had had their part or natural beauty which they had traveled far to see,” and “even philosophy itself owes much to mere physical courage and endurance,” as “much that in noblest in ancient thinking may be due to the hardy health of Socrates.”

While “young men are careless of longevity,” they shouldn’t be. “How precious are added years to the fullness of the intellectual life!” “I compare the life of the intellectual to a long wedge of gold—the thin end of it begins at birth, and the depth and value of it go on indefinitely increases till at last comes Death (a personage for whom Nathaniel Hawthorne had a peculiar dislike for his unmannerly habit of interruption), who stops the auriferous processes.” Happy the “fortunate old men whose thoughts went deeper and deeper like a wall that runs out into the sea!”

Even as he celebrates vigorous good health, Hamerton warns that “the pets of Nature, who do not know what suffering is, and cannot realize it, have always a certain rawness, like foolish landsmen who laugh at the terrors of the ocean, because they have neither experience enough to know what those terrors are, nor brains enough to imagine them.” Absent the worst pain or prostration, illness may prove a portal “to regions of disinterested thought, where all personal anxieties are forgotten.” Mind and body do not “invariably fail together,” and “minds of great spiritual energy possess the wonderful faculty of indefinitely improving themselves whist the body steadily deteriorates.” The dying man of intellect may consider that “the mind of every intellectual human being is part and parcel of the great permanent mind of humanity; and even if its influence soon ceases to be traceable—if the spoken words are forgotten—if the written volume is not reprinted or even quoted, it has not worked in vain.”

Turning from the physical to the moral basis of intellectual life, Hamerton admits the claim of some moralists, that “intellectual living” gratifies “the love of pleasure.” But so does the moral life. “The two most powerful mental stimulants—since they overcome the fear of death—are unquestionably religion and patriotism.” These enable men “to bear much, to perform much which would be beyond their natural force if it were not sustained” by such stimulants. And so it is with the intellectual life. Because its labors are so severe, its pleasures are glorious. Those labors that require patience, courage, and self-discipline, all with “only the most meager and precarious pecuniary reward.” This is why “the Creator of intellectual man” has made the labor itself “intensely attractive and interesting to the few who were fitted for it by their constitution.” “A divine drunkenness was given to them for their encouragement, surpassing the gift of the grape.”

All work involves drudgery, which requires “moral courage” to face and to endure.  You can “be sure that there has been great moral strength in all who have come to intellectual greatness,” which of course is not to claim that all who have achieved intellectual greatness have been moral exemplars in every respect. “All great artists, without exception, have been distinguished for their firm faith in steady well-directed labor”; the fine arts are a ‘school of patience” and of humility,” a school Hamerton himself knew quite well. As for philosophy, Giordano Bruno’s “noble passion” for it enabled him “to endure labor and pain and exile.” The virtue at first most needed, “intellectual discipline,” finds its support in “the great pleasures of intellectual life,” “not its negation.” “The origin of discipline is the desire to do not merely our best with the degree of power and knowledge which at the time we do actually happen to possess, but with that which we might possess if we submitted to the necessary training.” The discipline itself consists in the establishment of “a strong central authority in the mind” to regulate the mind’s powers; in establishing that power, in curbing the unintellectual passions, a soul can achieve “the most essential virtue” of the intellectual life, its culminating virtue, disinterestedness. All other virtues have been practiced by men “opposed to intellectual liberty,” as “the habits of advocacy…debar them from all elevated speculation.” “Every partisan” falls into that. Thus, a doctor will “never trust” his own judgment when he feels “the approaches of disease” and even the finest lawyer isn’t allowed to be the judge in his own case. The disinterested man will “not look upon an opponent as an enemy to be repelled, but as a torch-bearer to be welcomed for any light that he may bring.” By emphasizing the importance of disinterestedness rather than wisdom, the possession of the “light” itself, Hamerton exercises the caution inculcated by the virtue of humility he has already praised. 

Such disinterestedness may even inflect erotic longings of the less intellectual sort. “A most distinguished foreign writer, of the female sex”—he is almost surely thinking of Georges Sand—has “made a succession of domestic arrangements which, if generally imitated by others, would be subversive of any conceivable system of morality; and yet it is clear in this case that the temptation was chiefly, if not entirely, intellectual,” as “the successive companions of this remarkable woman were all of them men of exceptional intellectual power, and her motive for changing them was an unbridled intellectual curiosity,” along with the unbuttoned physical one. Hamerton soberly reiterates that such conduct, while understandable, would endanger “the well-being of a community,” destroying “the sense of security on which the idea of the family is founded.” One suspects so.

As to education, Hamerton compares it to cooking: it’s not quantity but proportion that counts. With their taste for the well-measured, aristocrats are the ones who best understand that “there is a sort of intellectual chemistry which is quite as marvelous as material chemistry, and a thousand times more difficult to observe.” One must therefore avoid too much exposure to writers who write copiously but with little measure (it is of course possible to do both). He had in mind a friend who wrote with “ease and charm,” and likely would have gone on doing so, had he not “determined to study Locke’s philosophical compositions.” As a result, “my friend’s style suddenly lost its grace”; “having been in too close communication with a writer who was not a literary artist, his own art had deteriorated in consequence.” In fairness to Locke, it must be said that he was a master of the style that suited his intention of deliberate obscurity in some controversial matters; his gracelessness has a grace of its own. The point is nonetheless well taken.

One should educate oneself rather like another Hamertonian acquaintance, an old-fashioned country gentleman who “accumulated his learning as quietly as a stout lady accumulates her fat, by the daily satisfaction of his appetite.” Since “no one can retain knowledge without using it,” and life is short even if art is long, whittle down that appetite. “If you have fifteen different pursuits, ten of them, at any given time, will be lying by neglected.” “It seems like a sort of polygamy to have different pursuits. It is natural to think of them as jealous wives tormenting some Mormon prophet.” Better to learn those things for which you have an “inward want” to know; intellectual eros provides a natural discipline. Don’t waste time on hills too steep for the strength of your legs; “in vain you urge me to go in quest of sciences for which I have no natural aptitude.”

That is, listen first of all to yourself. “Whatever you study, someone will consider that particular study a foolish waste of time.” To such critics there is “one reply”: “We work for culture.” Not for fame or fortune. “More than all other men have authors reason to appreciate the indirect utilities of knowledge that is apparently irrelevant. Who can tell what knowledge will be of most use to them?” Indeed, “it seems to me, in looking back over the last thirty years, that the only time really wasted has been that spent in laborious obedience to some external authority.”

Extraneous pursuits are unfortunately encouraged by the French custom of government prizes for some of them. One should never learn or work at something one doesn’t “really care for.” This in no way precludes “miscellaneous reading”—dipping into things not immediately useful. You never know when they might become so, and, let’s face it, “if the essence of dilettantism is to be contented with imperfect attainment, I fear that all educated people must be considered dilettantes.” The same goes for learning languages. No one really knows more than three modern languages, and it takes five years’ residence in a foreign country to attain mastery.” [1] Generally, “a good literary or artistic memory is not like a post-office that takes in everything, but like a well-edited periodical which prints nothing that does not harmonize with its intellectual life.” Scholarly writing, in contrast, requires you to take notes, too. “The rational art of memory is that used in natural science. We remember anatomy and botany because, although the facts they teach are infinitely numerous, they are arranged to the constructive order of nature.”

Constructive order proves needful in the exercise of “time-thrift.” “Nothing is so favorable to sound culture as the definite fixing of limits” to time spent in study. One pursuit, “with several auxiliaries,” so long as they really are auxiliary, “is the true principle of arrangement.” “The most illusory of all the work that we propose to ourselves is reading,” an activity in which our eyes very much tend to be bigger than our stomachs. Do not underestimate the benefits of idleness. “A year of downright loitering” can be “a desirable element in a liberal education” because you will be observing people and things, not only reading books. “What the Philistines call”—he’s read his Matthew Arnold—wasted time “is often rich in the most various experience to the intelligent,” whose minds remain active even when their bodies are not. Your main enemy isn’t idleness but interruption, “the pottering details of business.” Attention isn’t an electric current, which can be turned on and off.

Attention is a thing to be concentrated. “There is great danger in apparently unlimited opportunities, and a splendid compensation for those who are confined by circumstances to a narrow but fruitful field.” Montaigne, with his five shelves of books constantly in front of him, wrote better essays than we do. And in the ancient world, when books were rare, writers were surely no less perspicuous than today. Those were the books Montaigne had, and “to supply our need, within the narrow limits of the few and transient hours that we can call our own, is enough for the wise everywhere, as it was for Montaigne in his tower.”

Money matters do matter, but wealth can be an impediment to the intellectual life, especially for the English, who so often feel compelled to manage it. Given the distracting social obligations they are expected to shoulder, the wealthy best assist culture as patrons. As for young men, they “get on better for not being too comfortably well off.” “All intellectual lives, however much they may differ in the variety of their purposes, have at least this purpose in common, that they are mainly devoted to self-education of one kind or another.” That being so, if you provide a young man “to earn more money than that which comes to him without especial care about it, you interrupt his schooling.” Kepler had “to waste his time over horoscopes in order to make money,” and the same might be said for those who pore over stock market quotes.

“The art is to use money so that it shall be the protector and not the scatterer of our time, the body-guard of the sovereign Intellect and Will.” If you are poor, concentrate your attention on one subject, a few authors. Consider yourself fortunate not to need to “satisfy public opinion,” as prosperous businessmen have done, and must do. Never envy the rich. They are likely to be distracted by the many objects “that are presented to their attention.” “But when I open a noble volume, I say to myself, ‘Now the only Croesus I envy is he who is reading a better book than this.'”

Public opinion is shaped by custom and tradition, by which Hamerton means, primarily, religion. He who essays the intellectual life had better recognize that “the penalties imposed by society for the infraction of very trifling details of custom are often, as it seems out of all proportion to the offense; but so are the penalties of nature,” as those who exercise and ‘eat healthy’ on occasion learn. Like nature, “Society will be obeyed: if you refuse obedience, you must take the consequences”; the consequence in a modern liberal society is exclusion. While “in the life of every intellectual man there comes a time when he questions custom at all points,” and while “without you, Western Europe would have been a second China,” your salutary questioning should not extend to customs regarding vice and hypocrisy. Nor should one make petty rebellion against harmless customs—against wearing a dark jacket at a formal dinner. “What is the use of wasting this beneficial power of rebellion on matters too trivial to be worth attention? Does it hurt your conscience to appear in a dress-coat?” If you will “let society arrange your dress for you (it will save you infinite trouble)” you can concentrate on resisting its attempts “to stifle the expression of your thought.”

The authority of tradition has declined. Scientific discoveries and a sort of faith in ‘the future’ have largely replaced it. “There is a break between the existence of our forefathers and that of our posterity, and it is we who have the misfortune to be situated exactly where the break occurs.” The “modern mind” looks forward, not back at tradition. And that mind is ‘democratic,’ in Tocqueville’s sense. It takes its guidance from around itself, not from above itself; “in our day the real regulator of morality is not the church but public opinion.” And finally, the modern mind orients itself by the experimental “scientific spirit,” which Hamerton takes to have been “conducive to moral health generally”—a judgement the experiences of subsequent centuries would call into question. 

Tradition includes religious beliefs. Religion is not philosophy, although there is an “intellectual morality,” and “philosophy is the religion of the intellectual” in that sense. More precisely, “the intellect gives morality, philosophy, precious things indeed, but not religion.” Athens is not Jerusalem. “The difficulty of the intellectual life is, that whilst it can never assume a position of hostility to religion”—he surely means ‘should’—which “it must always recognize as the greatest natural force for the amelioration of mankind, it is nevertheless compelled to enunciate truths which may happen to be in contradiction with dogmas received at this or that particular time.” To attempt to reconcile such truths with such dogmas endangers “intellectual integrity.” “The religious life is based upon authority, the intellectual life is based upon personal investigation,” which requires “intellectual fearlessness which accepts a proved fact without reference to its personal or its social consequences.” Hamerton does not pause to consider whether the modern faith in a future undergirded by experimental science placed at the service of the conquest of nature might deserve such fearless questioning, too. And he does not anticipate (in the 1870s it would have been difficult) the political consequences of that faith under some regimes in the next century, and beyond. When he observes that “the freedom of the intellectual life can never be secured except by treating as if they were doubtful several affirmations which large masses of mankind hold to be certainties as indisputable as the facts of science,” he has in mind the doctrines of Papal and of Scriptural infallibility. “The intellect does not recognize authority in any one,” since “our work is simply to ascertain truth by our own independent methods, alike without hostility to any persons claiming authority, and without any deference to them.”

Custom, especially religious custom, includes marriage, a topic “of which men know less than they know of any other subject of universal interest.” “People are almost always wrong in their estimates of the marriages of others, and the best proof how little we know the real tastes and needs of those with whom we are most intimate, is our unfailing surprise at the marriages they make.” (As André Maurois would put it, much more elegantly, in literature, as in love, we are astonished by what others choose.) 

A man walking the intellectual way of life has “only two courses.” He can marry an unintellectual, loving, and practical woman happy to run the household, tend to children, and “love him in a truthful spirit without jealousy of his occupations,” or marry a woman “willing to become his companion in the arduous paths of intellectual labor.” The practical sort of wife is better for the artist, the companionable sort better for writer. Above all, one must avoid some mixture of the two. A friend of Hamerton’s lamented, “She knew nothing when I married her. I tried to teach her something; it made her angry, and I gave it up.” “It is not by adding to our knowledge, but by understanding us, that women are our helpers,” Hamerton suggests; their “divine sympathy” assuages the “fearfully solitary” intellectual life.

As for Hamerton himself (both writer and artist, and so in bit of a pickle), we know from their joint autobiography-biography that his wife, Eugénie Gindriez, annoyed him somewhat as a critic of his etchings (she was right) while proving an excellent intellectual companion, wife, and mother. “The intellectual ideal seems to be that of a conversation on all the subjects you must care about, which should never lose its interest.” That they had. Social customs themselves had served them well, in this instance, as the intellectual separation of the sexes had declined since the beginning of the century: “Happily we are coming back to the old rational notion of culture independent of the question of sex.” This is fortunate, since “women are by nature more subservient to custom than we are, more than we can easily conceive,” worrying more about what the neighbors will think and, worse, say. “A woman will either take your side against the customs of the little world around, or she will take the side of custom against you.” Women are simply more ‘social’ than men, with “natural sympathy with all the observances of custom” that you, sir, incline to neglect. “Unless you win her wholly to your side, she may undertake the enterprise of curing your eccentricities and adapting you to the ideal of her taste,” that is, to the tastes of those around her. As a result of this ineluctable tension, “conversation between the sexes will always be partially insincere,” as “consideration for the feelings of women gives an agreeable tone to society, but it is fatal to the severity of truth.” Still, “as culture” distinguished from custom “becomes more general women will hear truth more frequently,” he optimistically expects. But for now, “men disguise their thoughts for women as if to venture into the feminine world were a dangerous as traveling in Arabia.”

The problem is even more acute when it comes to mothers. Hamerton writes to a “well educated” young man who found it difficult “to live agreeably with his mother, a person of somewhat authoritative disposition, but uneducated”—not unlike Hamerton’s beloved aunt, who had raised him and hoped that he would join the clergy. Your mother, Hamerton explains, expects deference from her son; deference comports ill with contradiction, which at best can be attempted with discretion; you, however, listen to her heartily asserted opinions, “irresistibly urged to set her right.” “Even before specialists your mother has an independence of opinion, and a degree of faith in her own conclusions, which would be admirable if they were founded upon right reason and a careful study of the subject.” She is, and will remain, “convinced that she knows more about disease than the physician, and more about legal business than an old attorney.” And as for theology, well, “in theology no parson can approach her; but here a woman may consider herself on her own ground, as theology is the specialty of women.” For her son to disagree, he must become didactic, that is, annoying, spoiling her temper without improving her mind. Why so? Because “she does not think simply, ‘Is that true of such a thing?’ but she thinks, ‘Does he love me or respect me?'” And there you have it. Roll with it.

Beyond the family and the customs governing it, fundamentally religious customs and teachings, there are the social classes. In Hamerton’s Victorian England and Third-Republic France, social class mattered more than it does today (which is not to say that it no longer matters). “The love and pursuit of culture lead each of us out of his class” since “class-views of any kind, whether of the aristocracy, or of the middle class, or of the people, inevitably narrow the mind and hinder it from receiving pure truth.” Intellectual love and pursuit yield something like a Platonic ascent from the Cave. The “largest and best minds” may prudently “continue to conform” to the customs of whichever class in which they were raised, but they “always emancipate themselves from it intellectually, and arrive at a sort of neutral region, where the light is colorless, and clear, and equal, like plain daylight out of doors.” Forgetting ourselves, we “become absorbed in our pursuits for their own sakes,” as “the feeling of caste drops from us.” Viewing the most eminent English writers of his century, Hamerton judges Dickens and Burns too democratic (the poet went so far as to rhyme “asses” with “Parnassus”), Trollope and Tennyson too aristocratic, too disdainful of shopkeepers (“the intensity of the prejudices of caste prevents them from seeing any possibility of true gentlemanhood in a draper or a grocer”). And “the consciousness of our contempt embitters the feeling of men of other cates, and prevents them from accepting our guidance when it might be of the greatest practical utility to them.” [2]

That is, aristocrats as customarily defined may be liberal or illiberal. The illiberal spirit “cares nothing for culture, nothing for excellence, nothing for the superiorities that make men truly great; all it cares for is to have reserved seats in the great assemblage of the world.” Hamerton prefers the Aristotelian definition, the gentleman as spoudaios, as the serious man, the man in full. “I maintain that it is right and wise in a nation to set before itself the highest attainable ideal of human life as the existence of the complete gentleman.” Amidst the ever-increasing democracy of his time, Hamerton censures enviousness, that characteristic passion of egalitarians. “Instead of rendering a service to itself,” democracy “does exactly the contrary when it cannot endure and will not tolerate the presence of high-spirited gentlemen in the state.” The “class-spirit” or prejudice “is odious in the narrow-minded, pompous, selfish, pitiless aristocrat who thinks that the sons of the people were made by Almighty God to be his lackeys and their daughters to be his mistresses; it is odious also, to the full as odious, in the narrow-minded, envious democrat who cannot bear to see any elegance of living, or grace of manner, or culture of mind above the range of his own capacity or his own purse.”

On balance, Hamerton has stronger hopes for aristocratic liberality than for democratic magnanimity. “The personages most popular in democratic countries are often remarkably deficient in dignity, and liked the better for it.” While “democratic feeling raises the lower classes and increases their self-respect, which is indeed one of the greatest imaginable benefits to a nation, it has a tendency to fix one uniform type of behavior and of thought s the sole type in conformity with what is accepted for ‘common sense.'” This leveling spirit is democracy’s worst feature. “An aristocracy can be very narrow and intolerant, but it can only exclude from its own pale, whereas when a democracy is intolerant it excludes from all human intercourse,” “driv[ing] men of culture into solitude” in the manner of France’s “noxious swarm of Communards.” “Since the year 1870 we do not speculate about the democratic temper in its intensest expression: we have seen it at work, and we know it,” having seen that “every beautiful building, every precious manuscript and treasure, has to be protected” against burning and rioting levelers. “The ultra-democratic spirit is hostile to culture, from its hatred of all delicate and romantic sentiment, form its scorn of the tenderer and finer feelings of our nature, and especially from its brutish incapacity to comprehend the needs of the higher life.” While “the intellectual spirit studies the past critically, and does not accept history as a legend as accepted by the credulous, still the intellectual spirit has deep respect for all that is noble in the past, and would preserve the record of it forever.”

For all that, “our best hopes for the liberal culture of the intellect are centered in the democratic idea” because aristocrats “think too much of persons and positions.” They lack the disinterestedness of the intellect. “From the intellectual point of view, it is a necessary virtue to forget your station to forget yourself entirely, and to think of the subject only, in a manner perfectly disinterested.” The “theoretic equality” of democracy lends itself to such disinterestedness, although it must be said, from the vantage point of a century-and-a-half of further experience of the egalitarian temper, that democrats do not hesitate to engage in character assassination any more than aristocrats do, when democrats go beyond rebellion and assume positions of rule.

What about solitude, then? Intellectual friendships are often useful and temporary, contradicting “the boyish belief in the permanence of human relations,” of ‘friends forever.’ The young often form the best sort of these friendships with the older scholars and artists, incurring a debt they cannot repay, except indirectly, by befriending the next generation. It is living in “fashionable society” that damages intellectual pursuits in the young, “the mind of a fashionable person” being “a gilded mind,” one presenting the appearance of knowledge at the expense of the real thing. “Fashion is nothing more than the temporary custom of rich and idle people who make it their principal business to study the external elegance of life.” Fashionable people attend to change but the intellectual life seeks natural, the laws of which endure. The fashionable life “appears the perfect type of that preoccupation about appearance which blinds the genteel vulgar to the true nobility of life.” Hamerton cheerfully concedes, however, that this gilded or “external deference which Society yields to culture is practically of great service” to culture, providing an audience for paintings, books, and concerts even as it flits or dozes through them. “The sort of good effect is in the intellectual sphere what the good effect of a general religious profession in the moral sphere.” True, “fashionable religion differs from the religion of Peter and Paul as fashionable science differs from that of Humboldt an Arago,” but just as “the profession is useful to Society as some restraint, at least during one day out of seven,” so too fashionable culture not only funds writers and artists but occasionally thinks about what they are writing and painting. As for the intellectual himself, he has given up “the varying spectacle of wealth, and splendor, and pleasure” of the wealthy in exchange for “but one satisfaction,” the satisfaction of “coming into contact with some great reality,” and for being recognized for having done so “by other knowers and doers.” “You will live with the realities of knowledge as one who has quitted the painted scenery of the theater to listen by the eternal ocean or gaze at the granite hills.”

As to the path of eschewing polite and impolite society altogether, “nothing can replace the conversation of living men and women; not even the richest literature can replace it.” Admittedly, “the general conversations of English society are dull; it is a national characteristic.” And the English have their reason for this, as they attempt to avoid the bitterness lively conversations may induce. All the more reason to seek “a single interested listener.” More, if such intellectual men withdraw from society, “the national intellect” deteriorates. “The low Philistinism of many a provincial town is due mainly to the shy reserve of the one or two superior men who fancy that they cannot amalgamate with the common intellect of the place.” That goes for intellectual women, too, whom Hamerton suggests might discreetly elevate conversations by introducing a change of the topic.

“Woe unto him that is alone!” and “Woe unto him that is never alone and cannot be to be alone!” “Society is to the individual what travel and commerce are to a nation,” whereas “solitude represents the home life of the nation, during which it develops its especial originality and genius.” It is “only in solitude “that “we learn our inmost nature and its needs.”  “The perfect life is like that of a ship of war which has its own place in the fleet and can share in its strength and discipline, but can also go forth alone in the solitude of the infinite sea.” 

Well-married Hamerton knew such a solitary man, his days “long and unbroken,” unostentatious, calm in his leisure. “He wore nothing but old clothes, read only a few old books, without the least regard to the opinions of the learned, and did not take in a newspaper.” He still cherished a few friendships but “felt imprisoned and impeded in his thinking” when he ventured into a town and its crowds. “He had a strong sense of the transitoriness of what is transitory, and a passionate preference for all that the human mind conceives to be relatively or absolutely permanent.” Greater minds than his benefited from such habits: Newton, Comte, Milton, Bunyan, all found themselves most productive when alone.

Do not, then, “encourage in young people the love of noble culture in the hope that it may lead them more into what is called good society. High culture always isolates, always drives men out of their class and makes it more difficult for them to share naturally and easily the common class-life around them. They seek the few companions who can understand them, and when these are not to be had within any traversable distance, they sit and work alone.” If such a man thinks thoughts at odds with those held firmly by those around him, “then he must either disguise them, which is always highly distasteful to a man of honor, or else submit to be treated as an enemy to human welfare.” [3]

Understand this: “However much pains you take to keep your culture well in the background, it always makes you rather an object of suspicion to people who have no culture.” What is the meaning of this man’s reserve? What is he thinking? Is it a threat to us decent folk? And “something of your higher philosophy will escape in an unguarded moment, and give offense because it will seem foolish or incomprehensible to your audience.” Even a mis-chosen word will raise doubts or give offense. “Unless you are gifted with a truly extraordinary power of conciliating goodwill,” you will find safety only “in a timely withdrawal.” Find “a society that is prepared to understand you,” since the solitude which is really injurious is the severance from all who are capable of understanding us.” That society, a society within the larger society, may itself need members’ discretion to guard it.

During those prudently timed periods of withdrawal, strict “intellectual hygienics” must be maintained. Be patient with yourself; don’t publish your work too soon. Melancholy being a frequent accompaniment of intellectual labor, undertake hard study at intervals, doing non-intellectual things, too, thereby “brac[ing] the fighting power of the intellect.” The obscurity of intellectual labor can be “rather trying to the moral fiber,” so take the time to share suggestions of it with your neighbors—lending articles, talking about your travels, offering public lectures (what Hamerton calls “adult education”). In these “intellectual charities, let us accustom ourselves to feel satisfied with humble results and small successes.” You won’t ‘change the world,’ much, because the world doesn’t much want to be changed. Hamerton would have demurred, had he listened to young persons with the stated ambition to become ‘public intellectuals.’ 

Do not fail to cultivate “the art of resting.” “Harness is good for an hour or two at a time, but the finest intellects have never lived in harness.” You are, after all, living an intellectual life. To a friend who never rested, Hamerton protested, “You are living a great deal too much like a star,” always shifting position in the sky, “and not enough like a human being.” Or too much like an army that’s always on campaign, suffering attrition because of that. “Rest is necessary to recruit your intellectual forces.”

Hamerton and his readers had no ‘Internet’ to distract them, but they did have newspapers, which could be bad enough. “The greatest evil of newspapers, in their effect on the intellectual life, is the enormous importance which they are obliged to attach to mere novelty.” Truth isn’t necessarily, or even often, a matter of newness. Still, one should read newspapers; by “their rough commons sense” and “direct observation” of current events, they guard intellectuals from a sort of “mysticism,” including the scientistic mysticism of one such as Auguste Comte, who invented “a religion far surpassing in unreasonableness the least rational of the creeds of tradition,’ his ‘Religion of Humanity.’ [4] Also, one should read good contemporary authors, not only the ‘greats,’ past and present (if one or two of them exist, in your generation). 

Speaking of rough common sense, if you wish to combine the intellectual life with a profession, which one should you choose? “The happiest life is that which constantly exercises and educates what is best in us.” How do the several professions contribute to that, and how do they interfere with it? Generally, “the great instruments of the world’s intellectual culture ought not be, in the ordinary sense, professions,” but some professions conduce more to such culture than others.

“The life of a clergyman is favorable to culture in many ways,” but “not wholly.” Because a clergyman knows that his profession is the one which “most decidedly and mot constantly affects the judgment of persons and opinions,” the intellectual virtue of disinterestedness may go uncultivated. “Accept[ing] truth just as it may happen to present itself, without passionately desiring that one doctrine may turn out to be strong in evidence and another unsupported” often proves difficult. We find clergy “disposed to use their intellects for the triumph of principles that are decided upon beforehand,” with an eye to the good of the flock.

The life of the lawyer, too, seldom aims at “the revelation of pure truth” but in winning the case for a client. And it is an unusually busy life, unconducive to the leisure necessary for sustained intellectual work. Still, “I think that lawyers are often superior to philosophers in their sense of what is relatively important in human affairs with reference to limited spaces of time, such as half a century. They especially know the enormous importance of custom, which the speculative mind very readily forget, and they have in the highest degree that peculiar sense which fits men for dealing with others in the affairs of ordinary life.” This also puts them ahead of clergymen, artists, and men of science. Plato, after all, wrote the Laws, an exercise in political philosophy.

Hamerton judges medicine to be the profession best suited to the intellectual life. Science, the laws of nature: these provide “a solid basis in the ascertainable,” hence good preparation for philosophy. Maimonides and Locke would likely concur. The fine arts are also favorable to that life, as one can listen and think while you paint, which is itself a thoughtful activity. A military life? No: too busy. 

What about writing as a profession? Any professional turns (or attempts to turn) knowledge and talent into “pecuniary profit.” But “the best work is not done as a regular part of professional duty.” With writing, particularly, “it does not pay to do your best“—at least, if your best is any good. Indeed, “one of the greatest privileges which an author can aspire to is to be allowed to write little, and that is a privilege which the professional writer does not enjoy.” Oddly, the one profession Hamerton does not discuss is the profession of teaching, in university or elsewhere. Teachers are not permitted many things, but not-writing isn’t one of them, except at the beginning of a university career, where academic tenure often depends upon publication. 

As to the non-intellectual professions, the most noteworthy new one, for Hamerton, is that of the industrialist. “The chief of industry and the man of letters stand today in the same relation to each other and to mankind as the baron and bishop of the Middle Ages.” Both types of man are “held to be somewhat intrusive by the representatives of a former order of things, and there is or was until very lately, a certain disposition to deny what we consider our natural rights.” No problem: “We know that our powers are not to be resisted, and we have the inward assurance that the forces of nature are with us.” However, each of these ‘new men’ tends to look down on the other. The intellectual man often dismisses the industrialist as a Philistine. Yet where does the wealth of nations, the wherewithal of modern life that pays for books, paintings, statues, universities, symphony orchestras, buildings, and scientific experiments come from? Doesn’t the cotton manufacturer reduce the cost of the paper the writer writes on?

As for the industrialists’ contempt for the intellectual class, “we are not always quite so impractical as you think we are,” as the leisure to make discoveries, which commercial people seldom do, for want of time, makes your coveted technological advances possible.  From the industrialist, the intellectual man can simply pray, “Grant us…the liberty not to make much money, and this being granted, try to look upon our intellectual superiority as a simple natural fact, just as we look upon your pecuniary superiority.” Do not charge me with impertinence in praying so impiously, for “in saying in this plain way that we are intellectually superior to you and your class, I am guilty of no more pride and vanity than you when you affirm or display your wealth.” A lot of work went into my acculturation, “just as you have great factories and estates which are the reward of your life’s patient and intelligent endeavor.” More, “not only are the natural philosophers, the writers of contemporary and past history, the discoverers in science, necessary in the strict sense to the life of such a community as the modern English community, but even the poets, the novelists, the artists are necessary to the perfection of its life.”

And finally, the man walking the intellectual way of life should recognize that “every locality is like a dyer’s vat.” You will absorb the color of what you soak in. “All sights and sounds have their influence on our temper and on our thoughts, and our inmost being is not the same in one place as in another.” True, it’s possible to abstract oneself from unfavorable surroundings, temporarily; Archimedes could think while his city was under siege. But only temporarily. Goethe prospered from the tranquility of Weimar, well away from the hurry of Berlin. And so, “for literary men there is nothing so valuable as a window with a cheerful and beautiful prospect.”

Hamerton had lived in both the Scottish Highlands and, as he wrote this book, in Rome. The Highlands offer nature at its most beautiful, but it is nature without many people. He prefers Rome. “She bears on her walls and edifices the record of sixty generations. Temple, and arch, and pyramid, all these bear witness still, and so do her ancient bulwarks, and many a stately tower. High above all, the cathedral tower is drawn dark in the morning mist, and often in the clear summer evenings it comes brightly in slanting sunshine against the step woods behind. Then the old city arrays herself in the warmest and mellowest tones, and glows as the shadows fall. She reigns over the whole width of her valley in the folds of the far blue hills. Even so ought our life be surrounded by the loveliness of nature—surrounded but not subdued.” Rome stands for the beauty of civil and religious life within nature, in balance with it. Rightly so considered, the city is the true home of intellect.

Now better known, the French Catholic writer A. G. Sertillanges also has a book titled The Intellectual Life. [5]. Praiseworthy though it is, it focuses readers’ attention on the way one ought to prepare oneself to ‘intellect’ things—organizing one’s materials, equipping one’s writing desk. It is a decidedly ‘French’ book, at once a specimen of Cartesian abstraction from most physical things and attentive to general principles. Hamerton gives those inclined to abstraction and attention to general principles a much more ‘English’ splash of cold water—concrete, specific, ‘down to earth.’ The sort of things an ‘intellectual’ type really needs.

 

Notes

1. Hamerton is fully a ‘modern’ man, no lover of the ‘ancients’ or commender of learning their languages. He endorses the Baconian view that we are the true ancients, having more experience than they who lived closer to the birth of the world. He compliments the principal of a French college for endorsing his government’s removal of the requirement to learn Greek from the public schools, judging it a waste of time because the students seldom learn it well enough actually to read Geek. But more, “the modern mind prefers to occupy itself with its own anxieties and its own speculations.” 
2. A century later, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would be deprecated as the daughter of a greengrocer—oddly, most often by socialists. In the letter here quoted, addressed “to a young English nobleman,” Hamerton contrasts “the bewilderment of multiplicity” experienced by an aristocrat, for whom the whole world seems spread out before him, with the perspective of an equally intelligent young man of the working class, thereby ‘introducing’ the aristocrat to a person to whom he would never be introduced formally. Like Tocqueville, Hamerton works for inter-class understanding rather than class conflict.
3. See Arthur Melzer: The Lost Art of Esoteric Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
4. See Daniel J. Mahoney: The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity. New York: Encounter Books, 2019.
5. A. G. Sertillanges: The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, conditions, Methods.  Mary Ryan translation. Washington: Catholic University of American Press, 1987.

 

 

John Agresto: The Death of Learning: How American Education Has Failed Our Students and What To Do About It. New York: Encounter Books, 2022.

 

In the United States, “the halcyon days of liberal education are over,” John Agresto writes, citing the facts: the business of America being business, “by far the foremost major chosen by undergraduates is business, and “almost 50 percent of all students focus on just five areas: business, education, computer science/technology, engineering, and the health professions.” In graduate schools, education and business predominate. Only five percent of U.S. institutions of higher education are small, residential, liberal arts colleges—many of them in name only, one might add, having given themselves over to pre-professional training within (for example) the English departments, where ‘business writing’ more than edges out John Milton.

Agresto has long experience in higher education, including the presidency of St. John’s College Santa Fe campus, where a ‘Great Books’ program has prevailed for decades. His first task here is to curb some of the guff surrounding the liberal arts. Contrary to those who claim that a liberal education “makes us finer people—more sensitive, more concerned, more humane”—he sees no evidence that plumbers and pipefitters are less morally fine than your average Classics professor. But if so, one must then ask, “what good the liberal arts might be.” Why bother with them, at all?

And what are they? Although derived, loosely, from the medieval trivium and quadrivium, the modern liberal arts at the college and university level consist roughly of the humanities and of those elements of the natural and social sciences which lend themselves to treatment by one or more of the humanistic disciplines—for example, topics that begin with the phrase, ‘philosophy of….’ Liberal education is “rooted in thinking rather than doing,” a thinking aimed primarily of understanding ‘Why’ questions, “search[ing] out arguments and reasons rather than rest[ing] on received opinion.” Liberal education does this by having students read books, look at paintings, listen to music, solve mathematical problems, and undertake scientific experiments that focus their minds on those questions. In doing so, they learn that many of those questions are much controverted. Doctrinaire claims do not suffice, when faced with contradiction. This makes the liberal arts, as they have been practiced in the modern period, irritating. One does not savor being contradicted, yet a liberal education introduces us, so to speak forces upon us, the annoying truth that there have been persons in this world who are much smarter than we, who disagree with our opinions.

The liberal arts therefore run against the pragmatic American grain. Agresto nonetheless insists that defenders of liberal education appreciate the worth of the American grain, American practicality. “Unless we see the virtues of other forms of education besides a liberal arts education, we’ll never quite understand what our own excellence might be nor understand how we, as liberal arts professors, might actually use the liberal arts to contribute—as these others do—to the greater good.” Correlative to this is understanding the weight of the critique of liberal education. First of all, liberal education is no less expensive than any other kind, and more expensive than many other kinds. Such an education “costs as much today as getting an engineering degree but with little of the hope of secure future recompense.” Wouldn’t it be better to attend classes at a local ‘community college’ and get trained for a career in nursing? Second, the liberal arts seem useless not only to individuals but to society. What can I learn from “cloistered and inward-looking intellectuals” that can advance the cause of social justice, or even build a better mousetrap?

In sum, “the liberal arts in this country are declining because most Americans don’t see the point of them.” 

It is easy for liberally educated persons to draw themselves up from such questions and to prate about learning for learning’s sake, or some such thing. In this, one stands against (for example) Thomas Jefferson and indeed all of the prominent Founders of the American regime, who “seemed never to look at liberal education as a stand-alone project,” but happily “combin[ed] farming and philosophy” or, in the case of that city-dweller Franklin, philosophy with printing. True, the artes liberales traditionally hold themselves apart from the artes serviles, but the distinction sounds priggish to American ears and in any event, can the arts befitting a free man who is serious really fail to appreciate the arts that a free man intends to govern? And if, in a democracy, we are all free men in many ways, can liberally educated men and women avoid thinking about the several ways of freedom and the ways in which they might be organized for better or for worse? Before learning, I need humility—to know that I do not know and to understand my ignorance as a defect better remedied than concealed. 

To remedy ignorance, to gain knowledge, one needs to know how to learn but if “skills are important,” “substance is prior.” It won’t do to tout the liberal arts as the way to learn how to learn. “If we insist on seeing or making liberal education primarily ‘preparatory,’ we have narrowed and made small the true value, the true uses, of a liberal education.” “Through your reading and study, you would watch arguments being developed and challenged; you might see the tragic results of one awful mistake or how good might lead to an even greater good,” “not simply in one field or area but in many” and while attending “to clear, persuasive, and even beautiful language.” It is that substance which once made liberal education “the entry for any number of exciting and important careers.” In doing so, a liberal education offered a counterweight to the allures of “the reigning culture” in which that career would be situated. “Today’s students get more from their peers, the chaos of internet apps, music, and popular culture than from academic instruction,” but what kind of people will write the songs the whole world sings? They, and those who sing them, will have mastery of technique, but mastery of technique, however indispensable, isn’t substance. “Our students don’t usually need to ‘think like a historian’; they need to learn about and from history compellingly presented. they want to learn from fine literature and have their eyes opened.”

The dominant catchphrases in education (and much else) in the past half-century have been ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism.’ “Nothing I can think of has transformed the nature of virtually all education more than the idea and the demand for diversity,” and “I honestly do not believe there will be any turning back, at least not anytime soon.” The movement may be said to have surfaced most strikingly in the Stanford University demonstrations against the long-time required course on Western civilization, a course which was as it were shouted down and into oblivion with the slogan, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!” Although the course was the immediate target, the civilization itself was the real one. “Those who fought against ‘Western Civ’ saw it not as central to understanding our culture but only as whiteness, sameness, and hypocrisy,” the “academic mausoleum of dead white men,” and instrument of oppression. The problem was that they didn’t really know the thing they were shouting against. 

It was then, and is now, obvious that the demonstrators derived their protest from the civilization they were attacking—neo-Marxist egalitarianism not being a major feature of any other civilization other than that of the contemporary West. Agresto doesn’t want to get to that point, immediately, being a gentler soul than some of us. [1] He begins by remarking “two things all educated people must know: First, they must first know their own. Second they must also know what is not their own.” Without knowing a substantial amount about western civilization, demonstrators were not ‘critiquing,’ they were flailing. In Agresto’s more decorous language, “What was lost with the ‘going’ of Western Civilization was the opportunity for Stanford students and then many others to start on the path to being liberally educated and to see the growth and grand sweep of the finest literature and most pivotal thinking and arguments that shaped our culture and, most importantly, shaped their own lives.” Or again, “if we fail to know our own civilization—its hopes, its principles, its reasons, and its greatness—we will not be able to make comparisons that are even worth a dime.” [2]

“If you want to trace the start of political correctness, speech codes, and identity politics in higher education, begin by looking at the rise and then degradation of ‘multiculturalism’ in colleges and universities.” The educational ‘power vacuum’ caused by the demotion of Western civilization in college and university curricula soon filled with “the empowerment of, and thus the politics, of, special interest groups,” as ‘diversity’ came to mean not the comparative study of the varieties of political regimes and world civilizations but a retreat into exclusionary academic enclaves—’black studies,’ ‘women’s studies,’ ‘queer studies,’ and so on. “What began as a movement toward openness and inclusion”—ostensibly—instead “heightened the divides and made rigid the separations” among students and faculty. Multiculturalism means the multiplication of monocultures. Of course, the real monoculturalism of multiculturalism has been its pervasive political leftism, but Agresto makes the intellectual point: “Perhaps part of the reason why a true multiculturalism failed to take hold in higher education was because, properly pursued, it could easily teach a myriad of inconvenient truths,” such as “understand[ing] American slavery in the light of Islamic slavery, African slavery, and the slavery and oppression under various other ideologies,” surely not excluding Marxism. What is more, true multiculturalism could hardly ignore religion, a topic anathematized by faux multiculturalists, who are almost invariably secularists.

“On an even deeper level, an honest multiculturalism might give our students the opportunity to ask a truly serious question. Is oppression cultural—as so many seem to believe, formed by society and social structures and ‘systemic’ to that culture—or something intrinsic to the character of humanity itself?” And if so, “what moral teachings, whether from the West or the East, have been seemingly so powerful that they have been able to modify our natures such that racial and sexual are increasingly (though hardly universally) seen as unjust and slavery is now almost everywhere understood as evil?” This may be a bit optimistic. It has been the claim of the Left that ‘systemic racism’ hasn’t declined at all, but has only intensified, sometimes overtly (police brutality! gun violence!), more often covertly (triggering! hate speech!). 

This notwithstanding, Agresto is well aware of the political character of the attacks on liberal education, devoting his central chapter to “identity politics” and its pedagogical techniques, “part of the larger issue of the politicization of higher education and the decline of liberal education today,” which includes “the movement to penalize and purge from the university any positions, books, thoughts, and arguments that run contrary to student sensitivities or current social and political orthodoxies.” One is tempted to suggest that ‘politicization’ is not only unavoidable but good if one understands politics as Aristotle understands it, as ruling and being ruled in turn. But the ‘politicization’ Agresto describes misunderstands politics as the exercise of power, simply, and that is the root of the problem.

Because they (mis)understand politics as merely the exercise of power, today’s politicizers cross the “fine line between educating our students so they soon have the wherewithal to possess their own minds and trying to possess our students’ minds themselves” in an attempt “to capture minds rather than to free them.” “For a teacher to have the passion of St. Paul is one thing; to have the aims of Paul to instruct in order to convert or capture is something else”; it is indoctrination, not education. (“Is it so far beyond comprehension that one might ask students to read something so that they might take seriously the arguments and understand what is being said?”) The problem has been most acute in the humanities, which have “always tried to understand important political and social ideas such as justice and merit, freedom and community, good and evil,” all with the understanding that “much may well hinge on whether the next generation embraces a teacher’s particular views.” For three generations now, many college and high school teachers have ‘politicized’ the humanities and social sciences (and even, increasingly, the physical sciences)—successfully, in the sense that their ‘side’ has won, but at the cost of marginalizing the liberal arts. “The broader culture, which had its doubts about the value of the liberal arts even in the best of times, has now simply walked away and left the corpse to the victors.” After all, “just as dogs know the difference between being tripped over and being kicked, students know the difference between being taught and being indoctrinated, know the difference between ideas examined and ideas thrust.” 

It must be replied, however, that the corpse is rather lively. Although fewer and fewer students ‘major’ in the liberal arts, the ideas purveyed by teachers in the humanities and social sciences exert an extraordinarily high degree of influence in the regime. American citizens may have walked away from their classes, but they have increasingly seen neo-Marxist claims accepted by school administrators, business executives, and, of course, the news and entertainment media. Agresto acknowledges this, when it comes to the schools: “pick up virtually any College of Education catalogue of any major university and take in the full compendium of courses on race, privilege, whiteness, and grievance activism being taught as part of the curriculum of our teachers.” The old ‘core’ has been replaced by a new ‘core’ promulgating doctrines of social justice, diversity, environment, globalism, and race/class/gender analysis. [3] “What began as a plea for diversity now lives on as constant sameness.”

Why does the Left attempt this? The American regime is, among other things, a commercial republic. This hasn’t always been a regime favorable to liberal education, but it has at least been tolerant of it, even a bit admiring of it. But the Left opposes nothing more than the ‘bourgeois values’ of commercial republicanism, “the common views of right and wrong held by ordinary citizens” promoted “by conventional Western religious understandings.” By staging American history “as a battle between oppressors and the oppressed,” and moreover by claiming that the American regime, including the American way of life, ‘systemically’ sides with the oppressors, the Left ignores that today, it is “the ordinary view that slavery and racism are betrayals of our founding principles of liberty and equality,” and that “merit, achievement, moral responsibility and character are all to be assessed and assigned according to our actions as individuals, not by our race , ethnicity, religion, or any other form of collective identity.” By claiming “that our shortcomings result not from our principles but from our failure to live up to our principles,” the Left “leave[s] these sentiments and beliefs not only rejected but, perhaps worse, unexamined.” This gives a new and perverse meaning to Socrates’ stricture, that the unexamined life is not worth living. The aim of the academic Left “is not simply to upend the course of collegiate studies, nor to convert conservatives to progressives, nor even to push every student to become a social justice warrior, but, beyond all those, to change the culture itself,” by which Agresto means to change the American regime itself by changing the opinions by which its citizens orient themselves as they live their lives. Unlike Socrates, who seeks to know what justice is, today’s educators suppose that they know what it is, and that their sole remaining tasks are to tell their students what it is, leaving to school administrators to make them conform to it. They attempt the Nietzschean ‘transvaluation of all values’ in a manner that Nietzsche himself would have utterly despised.

As an (old) Leftist once asked, What is to be done? “To use education as a vehicle for finding the truth about the world and about ourselves is the greatest good of liberal education.” That isn’t the same, Agresto rightly insists, as ‘learning about’—learning “about history or philosophy or art and learning from those subjects.” The main reason to learn about, for example, Descartes’ philosophic antecedents isn’t to better to understand Descartes but rather to better understand Descartes in order to see if his critique of his antecedents is valid. “Contrary to all high-blown ‘academic’ teachings, a work of literature is great not because it has a long pedigree of precursors influencing its writing, not because it reveals to us ever so much about its time and place, and not because its author is a fit study for numberless biographical or psychological musings” but because “it talks about great things,” making important claims about them. “Our first task as teachers is not to hide this truth, not to reduce it, not to minimize it,” not “to learn all about an author and shrink from learning from an author.” Agresto asks, did Nathaniel Hawthorne write The Scarlet Letter primarily in order to squabble or concur with others, or did he write primarily “about devotion and hypocrisy and fear of being found out,” about “evil and sin and loyalty,” about “community needs, community standards, and the demands of conscience,” about “the different and conflicting parts of the human soul”? And which approach to his novel do students actually care about?

Students do ask, ‘Why read old books?’ One is tempted to tell them, if you don’t want to read old books, what are you doing in my class? Agresto is too temperate man to say such a thing. First, read old books because you should “learn what is ours”; the U.S. Constitution belongs to us, and so does its finest explication, The Federalist. Study them, in order to know who you are. “To be blunt…it is simply more important—initially—for an American to Know the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address than to know the principles of Eastern mysticism.”  More, read such books to learn “views and insights different from our own,” including views and insights contained in the Constitution and The Federalist which are no longer much honored today. Constitutional law rests on certain claims about human nature, and “if human nature doesn’t change all that much over time, if it’s possible that good and evil exist independent of societal customs, if the matters and madness of the human heart seem to be as much ancient as modern, why would we willingly cut ourselves off from learning wherever we can?” That is, “by trying to grasp the minds of the finest thinkers and writers who have lived, we might, for the first time, come to possess our own minds.” Aristotle is indeed a dead, white male, but his death was an event that happened to his body. The thoughts generated by his mind are still right there for you to consider. In this sense, “we can possess the mind of perhaps the greatest genius who ever lived.”

In so possessing the thoughts of that mind, you can test them against your own thoughts and, if graced with a touch of humility, you may well learn a thing or two. In comparing and contrasting what you think you know with what Aristotle thinks, you are replacing the acceptance of the opinions of “parents, patriots, priests, peers, and professors” with the activity of finding out for yourself. Agresto thus refines his definition of the liberal arts as “a way of understanding the most important questions of human concern through reason and reflection.” Although many students prefer to accept received opinions and get on with making money, teachers who present them with the frameworks in which the things they’ll be spending time and money on will spark dissatisfaction with predigested claims. They are the students who are, or will become, “forever inquisitive, who view the world with wonder.” “In the hope of cultivating independent thought, students should question everything, ferret out every real or imagined contradiction, expose all supposed weak spots, and, perhaps above all, shame hypocrisy Isn’t this, we are told, what Socrates did?”

Agresto does not, however, confuse Socrates with Descartes. It was not fear, in the form of radical doubt, “that pushes Socrates,” but Eros, “the desire to find out what people actually did know and could defend.” We hear a lot about ‘critical thinking’ from ‘educators.’ Real critical thinking aims at “understanding an author as he understands himself”; in “seeing “the complexity of an event or era”; in comprehending “the various threads of causality”; at understanding “”human motives mixed and pure”; at seeing “in great literature the immensity of our human imaginations”; at “thinking that has some sympathy for the various problems we humans have faced and know[ing] that options are often limited”; and, “above all, thinking that tries to comprehend the reasons for this idea, this action, or this event.” Under the current educational regime, however, “all too often to read critically means to approach a text looking for biases or errors, or how little the author knew compared to us.” Teachers and students should do exactly the reverse. They should assume that they are the ones hobbled by biases and errors. Begin with wonder. “Socrates began with the knowledge of his ignorance, and from a wonder at what is and why it might be so.” If fear of God is the beginning of wisdom in a life lived in accordance with the way, the regime, of God, wonder is the beginning of wisdom “in the liberal arts.” That beginning gives students the chance “to find what they think is weak or strong and show it up for what it is.” 

With all this in mind, and returning to Agresto’s original question, of what use is liberal education? What’s it good for? 

For individuals, a liberal education serves the desire to know. In so doing, it helps the student understand himself, to understand “what he might be and do.” It guides the student in how to think and, by making him more thoughtful it teaches the virtue of moderation, even as readers who follow the quest for justice in Plato’s Republic may discover moderation, something they didn’t set out to find at all. “We live, as we all recognize, in a most immoderate age. Too much is passion, too much is commitment.” One of Agresto’s early teachers advised students to “Deny little, Affirm less, and in all cases Make Distinctions!” Agresto still goes with that, writing that moderation and self-restraint are highly conducive to liberal learning,” as they are conducive to citizenship. 

For the United States, liberally educated persons are positioned to think seriously about the “what characteristics we should want our co-rulers to have,” to distinguish between those who know what the American regime is. [4] It wasn’t Aristotle but James Madison who wrote, “What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty & Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual & surest support?” Or, in Agresto’s words, “If a barbarian is a person on whom no argument makes an impression, then one fruit of the liberal arts is to de-barbarize civil life and give it some notions of rationality and beauty.” In this, he resists the claim that ‘we egalitarians’ “cannot stand to have greatness stand above us.” If we can’t, then how will we consent to the rule of a Lincoln or a Churchill, against the enemies of democratic egalitarianism? 

Practically speaking, liberal arts college boards of trustees and administrators need to recognize that their students will likely make less money in their lives than graduates of technical and pre-professional schools will do. The policy consequence of this fact should be that liberal arts students should be charged lower tuitions. “To ask liberal arts majors to pay even close to what those in more remunerative fields pay is to beggar the poor to support the future wealthy.” Trustees and administrators and the teachers they hire also need “to show that there can actually be an American liberal education—one that helps civilize all of us by preserving the finest in our culture’s literature, art, music, and philosophy and that offers them [to] all students,” along with the already well-established offerings in science and mathematics. Such a liberal education will live up to “the Founders’ hopes.” 

 

 

Note

1. He rather reserves the point for a footnote in one of the valuable appendices to the book: “Multiculturalism may look like cultural relativism on the surface, but it is far from that in fact.”
2. One of Agresto’s best anecdotes: “I once met a professor of Latin who taught Roman literature with great misgivings. The Romans kept talking about such unmodern notions as manliness, virtue, the deepest of friendships, nobility, baseness, revenge, honor. It made him uneasy.” And rightly so, Agresto affirms, as “this unease, not vocabulary building or the chance to play in togas, is the true value of Latin and Greek.”
3. “There are even some dogmatic conservative and sectarian colleges that may think of themselves as defenders of liberal education but are as doctrinaire as the most left-leaning colleges.” Agresto names none, and it would be interesting to know if he has Hillsdale College in mind as one of these. Hillsdale is an institution with which I have some familiarity, and while it is true that many teachers there advocate certain doctrines in defense of (for example) the principles of the American Founders and of free-market economics, it is also true that they present the claims of rival principles in the terms of their advocates by assigning writings by those advocates—which is exactly what Agresto wants to see. And while it is unquestionably true that Hillsdale College ‘stands for’ the preservation of those principles, this may now be politically necessary, given the weight the ‘woke’ Left currently throws around. Putting it differently, if one compares the capacity of (for example) the two more-or-less apolitical St. John’s College programs (Annapolis, Santa Fe) with the Hillsdale College program, can there be any doubt that the Hillsdale approach has done substantially more to defend the liberal arts? As Agresto well knows, Socrates was not simply a philosopher but a political philosopher, but an urgent political-philosophic task today isn’t so much to bring philosophy down from the heavens as to bring it up from the gutter. In this sense, the debate between ‘St. John’s College’ and ‘Hillsdale College’ reprises the debate between Allan Bloom and Harry Jaffa.
4. Agresto answers with two rhetorical questions: “Do we look for neighbors who are crude, blind to the beautiful, devoted to their own daily tasks and little else? Who in the world would want to be ruled by people like that?” The answer is: people who are crude, blind to the beautiful, devoted to their own daily tasks and little else. This is a caricature of the human type cultivated by democratic regimes, but, as the arguments and actions of Plato’s Socrates show, there is an element of truth in this, as in any recognizable caricature. The further question then becomes, how does a liberally educated citizen talk with his neighbors? Socrates shows how, if you want to get yourself killed, but the benefits of martyrdom in the service of thought have their limits. Agresto himself makes an excellent start of this, in recommending that liberally educated persons learn to appreciate the smarts of ordinary citizens and to respect their common sense. And he goes on to caution that by ‘crude’ or ‘vulgar’ he doesn’t mean “the Roman sense of ‘common'” but the Greek apeirokalia, “the lack of experience with things that are beautiful.”