On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society

by Gertrude Himmelfarb (New York: Knopf), 192 pp.
review by Marian Therese Horvat


It is not a comfortable position or a place for the fainthearted: to
stand on the edge of the abyss of postmodernism, to peer in, and to
dare to criticize the beasts of contemporary intellectual fashion.
But that is exactly what distinguished historian Gertrude Himmelfarb,
.who lacks neither intellectual integrity or 
courage, dares to do in her recent excellent and polemic collection
of essays titled <On Looking into the Abyss>.  In these seven essays,
Himmelfarb assails the postmodern culture and deals with a wide range
of subjects - history, philosophy, literature, liberalism, Marxism,
nationalism and postmodernism.

Her book is also a homage to Lionel Trilling, the author of <The
Liberal Imagination> (1950) and many other works about the culture
that had a great influence on the intellectual and postwar academia
in the US and Europe; today he is little known and read.  Trilling
was not a liberal in economics, although he was a political liberal,
by his defense of what was for him the supreme virtue of tolerance
and of the law as an instrument of justice.  He had a firm faith in
ideas as the motor of progress and a unwavering conviction that great
literary works enrich life, improve men, and sustain civilization.

For the postmodern, these beliefs are nothing but ingenuous archaisms
or supine stupidity.  Prof.  Himmelfarb shows how, despite the few
years that separate Lionel Trilling from a Derrida or a Foucault,
there is a veritable uninfrangible abyss between them.  Today's
avant-garde in literature, history, philosophy deny ("playfully" so,
mind you, since "deny" already speaks with too dogmatic a tone) that
human history has meaning, progress is a possible reality, and
literature is an activity of the imagination with roots in history
and a safeguard in morality.  Himmelfarb takes a counter-offensive,
and boldly states from the beginning that her book is dedicated "to
the proposition that there are such things as truth and reality, and
there is a connection between them, as there is also a connection
between the aesthetic sensibility and the moral imagination, between
culture and society." (p. xii) For Himmelfarb, ideas do have
consequences.

The abyss in the essay on deconstruction is the abyss of
meaninglessness.  For the generation of Lionel Trilling, literary
criticism centered on the central questions of what it is to be
human, because it saw in literature testimony for the excellence of
ideas, myths, beliefs, and dreams that make society function, as well
as the secret frustrations and stimuli that explain human behavior.
Not so today, states Himmelfarb.  In the world of deconstruction, the
interpreter takes precedence over the thing interpreted.  Its most
obvious aim is to weaken our hold on reality, since it denies there
is any reality, since it denies there is any reality for us to grasp.

When university students gaze into this literary and cultural Abyss
of postmodernity, they no longer instinctively recoil with horror at
the dread beasts within that are subversive of culture, society,
morality, conventional sexuality.  At best, they breathe, "How
interesting, how exciting!" and proceed to discuss and to legitimize
the subversive and anti-cultural with a sophist sophistication.  Even
the most tragic and repulsive acts and sentiments of humanity can
thus be made something abstract, deprived of their powerful vital
force, of their capacity to stimulate the reader to natural responses
of indignation or horror.  Professor Himmelfarb warns with melancholy
about the waters of this current, which reach the point where a Paul
de Man could come to deconstruct the Holocaust in an intellectual
operation not that far removed from revisionist historians who are
pledged to deny the extermination of millions of Jews by the Nazis.
This is to de-historicize, or de-idealize, history, and it effect is
"to mute the drama of history, to void it of moral content, to
mitigate evil and belittle greatness."

This is postmodern history at its worst, which Himmelfarb defines in
her final essay as "a far more subversive form of relativism, a
relativism so radical, so absolute, as to be antithetical to both
history and truth."

In the 18th century, Voltaire with his characteristic irreverence
called historical details "the vermin that destroy books." But the
postmodernists have taken this disdain for tedious work in the
archives to radical extremes.  It is truth itself that is denied by
postmodernism, be it in literary theory, history, philosophy,
anthropology, law, or theology.

Acting on traits inherited from its forefathers, Nietzsche and
Heidegger, and its fathers, Derrida and Foucault, postmodern history
denies the fixity of the past, of the reality of the past apart from
what the historian chooses to make of it, and thus of any objective
truth about the past.  As Himmelfarb so aptly notes, "postmodern
history recognizes no reality principle, only the pleasure principle
- history at the pleasure of the historian." (p. 133) Should it come
as any surprise that the radical potential of postmodernism has been
recognized and seized by feminist historians, who aim to rewrite all
history from a feminist perspective? And then, why shouldn't black
historians and homosexuals seize the moment to exploit their
interests as well?  As Himmelfarb points out, Multiculturalism has
the obvious effect of politicizing history.  Today's universities
celebrate feminine and homosexual history; meanwhile, we have been
liberated from the "coercive" ideas of truth and reality.

"We require a history," meta-historian Hayden White explains, "that
will educate us to discontinuity more than ever before; for
discontinuity, disruption, and chaos is our lot." (155) This is the
abyss that the mad critic of modern culture Nietzsche dared to look
into without the shield of faith.  He should have heeded the warning
he gave: "He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he
thereby become a monster.  And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the
abyss will also gaze into thee." The abyss did, indeed, gaze into him
as he was enveloped by insanity.  And the monsters of the abyss are
transforming society into the chaotic and mad world of postmodernism
where the <lumens rationis> of man becomes increasingly dim.

In <The Judgment of Nations>, Christopher Dawson makes his own
prophetic analysis of these days: The new paganism

"is the unloosing of the powers of the abyss - the dark forces that
have been chained by a thousand years of Christian civilization and
which have now been set free to conquer the world.  For the will to
power is also the will to destruction, and in the last event it
becomes the will to self-destruction." (p.9)

In the essay, <On Heroes, Villains and Valets>, Himmelfarb tries to
revitalize the idea of greatness - historical greatness, literary
greatness, moral greatness.  "No man is a hero to his valet," said
Madame de Sevigne, but Himmelfarb believes we have been reduced to
live with a valet's view of the world.  While Victorian heroes could
make no claim to greatness of soul (magalopsychia), she notes, they
nonetheless had an individuality and high-mindedness that is
disallowed in our times.  The new history eliminates the last
remnants of heroism by denying the very idea of eminence and the very
idea of individuality.  Following the egalitarian trends in culture,
literature and history have displaced all elitist figures, in order
to rescue the poor, anonymous common man.  Even epic themes, like the
Discovery of America, have been reduced and redefined as invasion, to
destroy the epic dimension of the event.

And if there can be no heroes, so also there can be no villains.  For
example, even in recent histories of the Soviet Union, there is a
tendency to deny that the tyranny imposed was the result of an
ideology that was intentionally terrorist and totalitarian.  In the
end, a world without heroes and villains is a world without virtue
and vice, without greatness of any kind, without momentous events in
history.  The most frightening feature of this gloomy specter is that
man may lose the ability, or perhaps the will, to make distinctions
between the trivial and the truly important.

In perhaps her most daring and interesting essay, <Liberty - One Very
Simple Principle>, Himmelfarb proves her jousting prowess, taking on
the giant of modern liberalism, John Stuart Mill.  She successfully
argues that his doctrine of the absolute liberalism of the individual
in society lends itself to relativism.  If truth can be relativized,
then so can morality.  This was something that Nietzsche understood
and predicted.  When modern liberalism had finally dissolved all the
bonds between religion and morality, he prophesied morality would
finally become a problem for the English.

That day has arrived.  Mill would agree that morality cannot be
legislated.  But in the name of absolute liberty, we have passed laws
that condone sexual promiscuity, undermine family values, sanction
homosexual marriages, and defend obscene and pornographic material.
Himmelfarb bemoans the essentially materialist culture she sees in
her beloved America that "prohibits insalubrious foods, but not
sadistic movies" and "prevents racial segregation but not moral
degradation." In this she sees the tendency of absolute liberty to
subvert the very liberty it seeks to preserve, because it invests
itself with the power to destroy without having to face the
consequences.

This process can be clearly seen in the religious sphere, which
Himmelfarb summarizes in the essay, From Marx to Hegel.  As Hegel
notes, liberalism made Reason sovereign of the world.  Each man could
rely on his own reason, deigning to accept as true what appeared
rational to him according to his own individual judgment.  This set
the stage for the reception of David Strauss's <Life of Jesus>, which
asserts the miracles recounted in the Gospels are not literally true,
but mythically true.  A few years later, Bruno Bauer denied even
their mythical content and reduced them to fiction.  Next, Feuerbach
represented religion as the failure of man's critical reason, failure
of man's very ability to realize himself as a man.  <Homo homini deus
est> (Man is the god of man.) When Max Stirner went one step further
and affirmed the only reality is the Ego, the self, we see the end of
the transition that he himself dares to proclaim: "I have founded my
affair on nothing."

Himmelfarb points out some excellent contradictions in Marx: his
compulsion to present his "hero," the proletariat, in an unattractive
light; the lie of the "immiseration theory of history" disproved by
history itself which clearly shows that the conditions of the working
classes were improving in the West; the essentially apocalyptic
vision burning behind his materialist interpretation of history.
However, Himmelfarb's essay, which almost reads as an epitaph of
Marx, may be somewhat optimistic.  Perhaps Marx might be "turning in
his grave" as he contemplates a new humanist Marxism that is
replacing the ideology of communism.  But Marx's view of the socially
forward nature of history led him, as the determinist, to regard with
hostility the traditional affiliations of family, community,
association, and religion.  Before we announce the snake as killed,
it might be better to analyze more closely the metamorphosis it may
be undergoing in the realm of today's cultural revolution.

Likewise, while Himmelfarb's analysis is keen and penetrating, her
resolution to the whole question of liberalism seems somewhat
artifical and optimistic.  She suggests we will find relief in this
storm by repairing to another liberal tradition, that of Montesquieu,
our Founding Fathers, Tocqueville, and a more conservative Mill, the
"other Mill." In <Christianity as the Soul of the West>, Christopher
Dawson, points to a more satisfactory answer: "The modern dilemma is
essentially a spiritual one, and every one of its main aspects,
moral, political, and scientific, brings us back to the need of a
religious solution."

He points out that strict moralists of the past were able "to clothe
atheism in the frock cost and top hat of Victorian respectability."
The answer does not lie in a return to this kind of superficial
veneer.  The answer lies in a return to Christianity not merely as a
moral ideal or set of ideas but as a concrete reality:

But if Christianity is to regain its influence, it must recover its
unity and its social activity.  The religious individualism of the
last age, with its self-centered absorption in the question of
personal salvation and private religious emotion, will not help us.
The Christianity of the future must be a social Christianity that is
embodied in a real society, not an imaginary or invisible one.  And
this society must not be merely a part of the existing social and
political order, like the established churches of the past.  It must
be an independent and universal society, not a national or local one.
The only society that fulfills these conditions is the Catholic
Church, the most ancient yet, at the same time, the most adaptable of
all existing institutions. ... It was by virtue of the Catholic ideal
of spiritual unity that the social unity of European culture emerged
from the welter of barbarism, and the modem world stands no less in
need of such an ideal if it is to realize in the future the wider
unity of world civilization." From <The Modern Dilemma>, Ch. 5.

(Editorial Note by John J. Mulloy: Somewhat disturbing in a book of
this kind, in which Professor Himmelfarb is commendably trying to
counter the spread of a hedonistic and nihilist culture, is the
dedication of the book to Lionel Trilling, at one time professor of
literature at Columbia University.  For in an article in 1961
Trilling wrote the following, which seems to negate the idea of any
restraints upon the gratification of one's instincts:

"...The end is not merely freedom from the middle class, but freedom
from society itself.  I venture to say that the idea of losing
oneself up to the point of self-destruction, of surrendering oneself
to experience without regard to self-interest or conventional
morality, of escaping wholly from societal bonds is an 'element'
somewhere in the mind of every modern person.

"But the teacher who undertakes to present modern literature to his
students may not allow that idea to remain in the <somewhere> of his
mind; he must take it from the place where it exists habitual and
unrealized and put it in the conscious forefront of his thought.  And
if he is committed to an admiration of modern literature, he must
also be committed to this chief idea of modern literature." "On the
Modern Element in Modern Literature," published in 1961, later
included in <The Idea of the Modern> ed. by Irving Howe (New York:
Horizon Press, 1967), pp. 80-81.

Whether Trilling's conception of modern literature is correct or not,
that is what he found there and what he wished to promote with his
students, using modern literature as his justification for this
wholly subversive attitude toward society.  Is it any wonder that, at
this same Columbia University, it was only three of four years later
that the SDS tore the university apart and spread its activities like
a conflagration to universities in other parts of the Country?
Trilling does not seem, therefore, a reliable guide for the
restoration of a sane and balanced judgment to our society.)

This article was taken from "The Dawson Newsletter," Spring 1995,
P.O. Box 332, Fayetteville, AR 72702, $8.00 per year.

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