True and Only Heaven

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch, 532 pages

Christopher Lasch's story of progress and its critics is, as the subtitle suggests, really two stories.  The first, counterintuitively, is the tale of the nineteenth century critics of industrialization and enlightenment and their warnings about atomisation, alienation, and decadence.  The second is that of twentieth century American progressives as they came to increasingly view the masses as the object rather than the protagonist of historical processes.   Uniting these narratives is Lasch's apocalyptic understanding that the end of progress is not a realized utopia, but an insatiable demand for more of everything, resulting in a fundamental rejection of all boundaries and limitations.

The True and Only Heaven is not merely a book that should be read by anyone seeking to understand the current century and the two which preceded it.  It is a book that no one can plausibly claim to understand the world in its present moment without having read.  Lasch even profoundly explicates matters only peripheral to his central concern - the transformation of the civil rights movement from moral suasion to black power, for instance.  Indeed his analysis is so brilliant that it illuminates even areas he does not directly touch - his treatment of syndicalism, for example, reveals a previously unexpected foundation beneath Nolte's theory of fascism.  Yet another mark of Lasch's genius are the uses to which his thoughts can be put that he did not foresee and would not have sympathised with.  This is entirely fitting for a narrative the great theme of which is hope, for hope, Lasch tells us, depends upon faith in an "underlying order of things [that] cannot be flouted with impunity."

Scholia to an Implicit Text

Scholia to an Implicit Text by Nicolas Gomez-Davila, translated by Roberto Pinzon, 195 pages

Nicolas Gomez-Davila was born in Colombia, but spent much of his childhood in Paris, including two years in which he was bedridden with pneumonia.  Recovering and returning to his homeland, he set about assembling one of the largest private libraries in the country, which served him as a kind of secluded smithy in which he refined and shaped his volumes of aphorisms.  Scholia to an Implicit Text is thus far the only work of his to be published in an English translation.

A "defeated unbeliever" who turns modern skepticism back on itself, fishing "with a net of doubts", a careful crafter of sentences who insists on the importance of the sensuous and the liturgical, a romantic reactionary who knows that the past is irrecoverable but not unrepeatable, Gomez-Davila is profound and provocative and never, ever boring.  He is also not an ideologue - central to his worldview is the rejection of the distinctly modern belief that problems require solutions rather than understanding.  The values that Gomez-Davila treasures do not require defence because they are eternal and indestructible, whereas every sin is its own worst punishment, and therefore the twentieth century "will bequeath nothing but the traces of its hustle and bustle at the service of our filthiest desires."

It could be worse, of course, and will be, if Gomez-Davila is correct in his assessment that totalitarianism is the natural end of modernity, "the technification of politics."  "A totalitarian state is the structure into which societies crystallize under demographic pressures," when solitude and the inner life have been made impossible.  "The 'rational', the 'natural', the 'legitimate' are only that which is customary.  To live in compliance with an enduring political constitution, behaving according to enduring customs, surrounded by enduring objects, is the only way to believe in the legitimacy of the ruler, in the rationality of habitudes, and in the naturalness of things."  All that being rejected, the world is waiting, not for Pericles, but for another, doubtlessly very different, Pol Pot.

Freedom from Reality

Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty by DC Schindler, 363 pages

In the modern (Western) world, freedom has long been regarded as a good in itself, rather than a means by which what is good can be chosen.  Paradoxically, this elevation of freedom to the position of the highest good requires the denial of all other goods, and even goodness itself.  According to Schindler, the problem begins with metaphysics, as modern political philosophers, typified by Locke, have inverted the classical relationship between potency and act.  Rather than seeing power and possibility as always preceded by and rooted in an already existent reality, freedom has been understood to exist before, above, and independent of actuality.  It is in this inversion that he uncovers the origins of the superficially contradictory modern propensities for atomistic individualism and totalitarian government.  By rejecting the given in favor of the manufactured and valuing appearance over substance, modernity promises that each individual will be the god of his own private world, but that world is entirely solitary and, in the end, vanishingly small.

If the modern concept of freedom is, as Schindler argues, inherently diabolical, that is, predicated on division, the path to replace alienation with integration leads through a rediscovery of the symbolical, which is predicated upon unity.  He begins to explore this path in the final chapters of the present book, but a fuller discovery and recovery must wait for a promised sequel, which should be eagerly anticipated.  Freedom from Reality is as dense as it is deep, and no short summary can do justice to the scope and subtlety of its analysis.  Schindler himself is at great pains not to oversimplify the complexities of the thinkers whose thoughts he explores.  It is a rigorous, philosophical work and not a manifesto, but all the more explosive for it.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller, Jr, 334 pages

St Isaac Leibowitz was one of the scientists who made Armageddon possible, and hoped that it would never become actual.  When human folly unleashed unimaginable destruction, he took shelter from the aftermath in a secluded monastery, emerging to found a religious order dedicated to preserving whatever could be preserved.  Down through the centuries, the spiritual sons of Leibowitz dare to defy both bloodthirsty simpletons and amoral sophisticates, barbarians who believe that by erasing history they can prevent it from recurring and barbarians who believe that their command of science makes history irrelevant.

A Canticle for Leibowitz is an adaptation and expansion of a series of short stories following the history of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz in the millennia following a devastating nuclear war.  One of the classics of science fiction, the heavy use of irony conceals one of the most compassionate and genuinely humane novels of the twentieth century.

Jerusalem

Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion by William Blake, 297 pages

Madness and genius were never more closely allied than in the person of William Blake, who sought uncompromisingly

     To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the Immortal Eyes

     Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought.

A master engraver as well as a poet, Blake's illuminated books unite both talents in the exposition of his unique inner vision.  Indeed, as the introduction to the Blake Trust edition states, "Jerusalem is as epic in its range of graphic techniques as it is in its poetry", and this edition includes full color reproductions of the original's 100 pages, as well as a transcription of the text with notes and commentary, all necessary both to experience the full effect of Blake's work and to even begin to understand the uncanny processions of shadows and spectres and emanations.  The center of the epic is the giant Albion, who is simultaneously Adam and England, who, himself sickened, sickens the world.

     He hath leagued himself with robbers!  he hath studied the arts

     Of unbelief!  Envy hovers over him!  his Friends are his abhorrence!

     Those who give their lives for him are despised!

     Those who devour his soul, are taken into his bosom!

Albion's sons are simultaneously the tribes of Israel and the bishoprics of England, whom Blake portrays as descending into bestial idolatry

     Destroying by selfish affections the things that they most admire.

In Blake's mythopoeia art, science, politics, and religion combine in a delirious mixture, full of double meanings and unexpected associations.  Nineteenth century England becomes the biblical Babylon:

     The Walls of Babylon are the Souls of Men : her Gates the Groans

     of Nations : her Towers are the Miseries of once happy Families.

     Her Streets are paved with Destruction, her Houses built with Death

     Her Palaces with Hell & the Grave ; her Synagogues with Torments

     Of ever-hardening Despair squard & polishd with cruel skill

     Yet thou wast lovely as the summer cloud upon my hills

     When Jerusalem was thy heart's desire in times of youth & love.

If Blake condemns much of the modern world, he is scarcely less hostile to tradition, or any worldview which he sees as exalting reason over imagination, or law above grace.  Blake's mythic vision defines the cosmos in terms of coupled opposites, the state against the individual, matter against spirit, death against life.  And yet he always holds out hope for a reconciliation, or, at least, for conversion.

     For the Soldier who fights for Truth, calls his enemy his brother :

     They fight & contend for life, & not for eternal death!

Life Under Compulsion

Life under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child by Anthony Esolen, 212 pages

Life under Compulsion, Esolen's follow-up to Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, is a prolonged jeremiad on Western civilization's moral, spiritual, intellectual, and aesthetic decay.  Esolen describes a world where children are shuttled to drab institutions to be taught inhuman doctrines by uncaring civil servants.  Where work is subject to the schedule and the clock rather than the needs of craft.  Where reason is subordinated to appetite, and unthinking appetite is the engine of the economy.  Where everything is tolerated and nothing is forgiven.  Where vice is liberation and virtue slavery.  Where the greatest fear is of silence and solitude.  In short, the world many people live in today.  Then Esolen offers an opportunity for reformation - a real reformation, a return to form - through the pursuit of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

The book overall lacks focus - the "ten ways" correspond to the ten chapters, but there is no programmatic unity.  Esolen's arcadian yearnings for a simpler time at times resemble naive nostalgia.  Weighed against this, there are sections that are table-thumpingly good, passages where the true order of things stands nakedly exposed, where we can really see what is on the end of every fork.