Folly Chasing Death

One last note on the general lack of repentance on the part of the cultural revolutionaries of the late ‘60s, after which I plan to leave the subject alone for a while: I haven’t yet mentioned the evangelization for drug use that was as prominent in its time as the sexual revolution.

There’s been a joke going around for some time that “if you remember the ‘60s you weren’t there.” Very funny. Let me revise that, with no humorous intention whatsoever: if you believe that drugs and sex were not at the center of the late ‘60s counter-culture, you weren’t there. Of course there were many other ingredients, left-wing politics most obviously, but those were the essential common ground. If you dissented on either of these, in principle or in practice, you were at the margins of the revolution.

If you can push aside and ignore the self-congratulatory history of the movement written by those who created it or at least sympathized with it, the truth looks something like this: certain of the spoiled young people of the ‘60s made it popular and fashionable to take a wide variety of illegal and mostly quite dangerous drugs, with harmful, sometimes devastating, consequences for millions of people. The fashion spread at the expense of the physical and mental health of those drawn into it and has taken its worst toll among the poor who have fewer resources for recovering from mistakes. Going on forty years later, it has become a major and apparently permanent social problem. And yet one rarely finds, among those who still feel allegiance to the counter-culture of the late ‘60s, any sense of real regret for having initiated this phenomenon.

It is true that the counter-culture did not invent or even introduce these drugs, but it did make their use glamorous and help to push them into every nook and cranny of society. It is true that I’m generalizing about a wide assortment of drugs, not all of which are equally harmful. It is at least arguable that the laws against drugs have actually done more harm than good. Granting all that, though, it remains a fact that the counter-culture believed its drugs to be a positive and liberating good and that most of the people involved have never admitted they were terribly wrong.

If you read the history of the counter-culture as written by a sympathizer or participant, you will most likely find very little sense or acknowledgement of any connection between its embrace of drugs and the devastation that followed. You may not find open applause for drug use, but you will find it winked at as a sort of engaging naughtiness, and quite possibly given credit for freeing people from convention and so forth. You will find this same attitude in present-day treatments of rock stars and other celebrities.

Of course there is nothing now that the aging hippies can do about all this; the evil genie was out of their control as soon as it emerged from the bottle. So why am I saying these things, and what do I want? Public confession and recantation from a lot of fifty-something men with gray pony tails would be of no use now. I suppose what I’m after is, simply, a clearing of the air, something like what has been called, in reference to the crimes of Communism, the purification of memory. I want it understood and acknowledged that a kind of crime occurred, in which dangerous foolishness was set loose, to the terrible and continuing harm of many. And I have the sense that in some obscure way the moral progress of our society is inhibited by the lack of this acknowledgement.

And if these reasons are too vague, I have more immediate and concrete ones. Over the past summer two families of my acquaintance endured the death of a son from a drug overdose. I don’t know either of the families intimately but I do know they were both stable and as far as I know healthy, and that the young men were not, prior to their involvement with drugs, pathological in any apparent way. In short these were not the sort of deaths that can be explained by easy references to poverty and family breakdown.

No parent needs any prompting from me to imagine what these families are suffering. After the second of these deaths I started making a mental list of the number of people I know who have died or been seriously damaged by drugs. It grew appallingly long. I began to wonder if any family has been untouched. When I remember the way drugs were advanced in the ‘60s as part and parcel of liberation, I am sickened and angered. And I’m ashamed of the part I played in what I am beginning to think of as the Stupid Revolution. (As I related in my autobiographical essay, my involvement with drugs was pretty limited, but that was due more to a constitutional inability to enjoy them, not to any good sense on my part.)

One of the Mardi Gras societies of Mobile, the Order of Myths (no, I don’t know how they come up with these names), is traditionally the last one to parade on Mardi Gras Day. (We use this redundant term to distinguish the actual Tuesday from the weeks-long season leading up to it.) One of their floats carries a strange device which seems a bit macabre when you first see it in the middle of the festivities: a pole around which revolve two figures, a skeleton and a fool in cap and bells, with the legend Folly Chasing Death. It’s a perfect end to the silliness (and, to be honest, the occasional sin) of Mardi Gras, and a good beginning for the seriousness of Lent.

It’s also a perfect epitaph for the sex-and-drugs movement. In the end, real folly is no laughing matter.

Change, Liberal and Conservative

As if to continue and confirm the premise of my comments last week on the terrible consequences of the sexual revolution, I came across this article, The Frivolity of Evil, by Theodore Dalrymple, a name which will be recognized by anyone who reads the conservative press but is perhaps not much known outside it. Dalrymple has been for some years a physician working among the English underclass, which by his account is as hellish a culture as anything our big American cities can show. It appears that anyone whose notion of England remains conditioned by popular images of what it was between, say, 1920 and 1970 is sadly misinformed and should read the piece to correct that condition, if for no other reason.

If Dalrymple and other British Jeremiahs are correct, Anglophilia will soon refer to a species of nostalgia, not to affection for any existing thing. And much of the everyday misery encountered by Dalrymple is the direct product of the attitudes and premises of the sexual revolution, which was only the most visible element of an entire cultural movement exalting the individual’s pursuit of happiness above duty and above traditional and/or abstract principles of right and wrong . Here is a paragraph which serves as a quick summary of Dalrymple’s point:

This truly is not so much the banality as the frivolity of evil: the elevation of passing pleasure for oneself over the long-term misery of others to whom one owes a duty. What better phrase than the frivolity of evil describes the conduct of a mother who turns her own 14-year-old child out of doors because her latest boyfriend does not want him or her in the house? And what better phrase describes the attitude of those intellectuals who see in this conduct nothing but an extension of human freedom and choice, another thread in life's rich tapestry?

It may seem that the caustic language directed at intellectuals is unwarranted; after all, very few would openly advocate throwing children out in the street for the furtherance of sexual freedom. But that is partly where the frivolity lies: middle-class and upper-class intellectuals can advocate and practice an unanchored and self-indulgent way of life and be insulated by their wealth from some of its more dramatic practical consequences. Even for them, of course, serious social and psychological consequences remain: they are only more subtle and less immediately visible. The impulse which leads a poor drug-addled woman to turn her child out is pretty much the same as that which causes a middle-aged man to walk away from his wife and children. Mary Eberstadt, author of a book, Home Alone America (which I have not read), on the subject of America’s children, argues in this essay that the ferocious anger which is the most obvious characteristic of much pop music today is directly related to the insouciant divorce and abandonment practiced by the baby-boomer generation. I think she is right; I arrived independently at the same conclusion some time ago merely by listening and watching what was going on around me—and, I’m sorry to say, by having been one of the offenders. (I do not offer myself as an example of virtue, only as one who did eventually figure out the difference between right and wrong.)

To speak of overturning at least some of the premises and practices of the sexual revolution is to invite the platitude that “you can’t turn back the clock.” I wonder if it isn’t time to give up this metaphor as applied to any phenomenon other than nostalgia or regret for one’s own past actions. As a response to the question of whether something is in need of reform, it is perfectly useless. If I once was honest and am now a liar, no one would accept you can’t turn back the clock from me as justification for a refusal to change my ways. If I wreck my car and take it to the shop for repairs, the mechanic doesn’t shake his head regretfully and tell me you can’t turn back the clock. If I code an error into my employer’s software so that it no longer works properly, I don’t shrug and say well, you can’t turn back the clock, so you’ll just have to live with it.

Is this a liberal or a conservative point of view? Neither, I think; it’s simply a recognition of a problem and the desire to ameliorate it. If liberalism means a commitment to specific social developments such as unrestricted access to abortion, then it’s conservative. But if liberalism means a desire to change things for the better, it’s liberal.

Some liberals like to play a sort of “gotcha” game in which they define conservatism as a simple reluctance or refusal to embrace change, and then, when the conservative tries to overturn some liberal accomplishment, exclaim triumphantly Ha! You want to change something! You’re not a conservative at all. Well, aside from the fact that it’s puerile, this cuts both ways. I don’t know of a better example, in our current social controversies, of an absolute and adamantine refusal even to consider the possibility of considering change than that maintained by the abortion rights lobby in its insistence that any abortion, any time, anywhere, for anybody must always and forever be legal. Does that mean they are now conservative, and pro-lifers liberal? It’s a silly question; let’s set it aside and admit that in many ways (it was not all bad) the sexual liberation of the past forty years has been a change for the worse, and try to move society toward more restraint, a greater sense of duty, more respect for the sexual act and its natural consequences.

Conservatives already believe this. There is no reason in principle why liberals ought not agree, except for those who consider sexual license as simply a good in itself, and its practical consequences irrelevant, or at least an acceptable price to pay. With these it is difficult to argue, and it is this sort of conflict, where no common ground seems to exist, that gives rise to the notion of a culture war.

The Confidence of Fools

A wise man feareth, and departeth from evil; but the fool rageth, and is confident.

—Proverbs 14:16

Writing last week about the persistent sympathy for Communism expressed, by people who ought to know better, for the political program of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” I found myself thinking of a column I wrote some months ago, “Invasion of the Old Fools”. In that piece I discussed the disheartening phenomenon of people my age (mid-fifties) and older who are still pushing the destructive social and political agenda they adopted when they were the youth of the late ‘60s.

My brother John reproved me gently for my use of the word “fool”, citing Matthew 5:22: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire. I was in fact very mindful of that warning, having had an almost superstitious regard for it dating back to childhood, a regard which I think my siblings shared. It was of course the word itself that was taboo, not the sentiment. When my brother David (who was closer to my age) and I would fight we might call each other almost anything but that, and if either of us used this f-word the other took deep satisfaction in knowing that the one who spoke it was now in serious danger of being sent to hell, if not already packaged, addressed, and stamped.

And when I wrote “Invasion” I looked for a good synonym for “fool,” but couldn’t come up with one. None of the alternatives (see thesaurus entry) really captures what the word conveys to me, which is not a lack of intelligence (as in “idiot,” “moron,” and the like) but a lack of wisdom—a very substantial and probably culpable lack of wisdom, as when it is used by God himself: Thou fool, this night thy life shall be required of thee. Some of the thesaurus offerings, such as “ninny,” emphasize this lack of good sense over lack of simple intelligence, but without the gravity of “fool.” And gravity, I think, is warranted in this situation. Uncle Billy in It’s A Wonderful Life is something of a ninny; Mr. Potter is, until the last minute, a fool.

The deciding factor that kept the word “fool” in my piece was the proverb There’s no fool like an old fool. This is poetry; there is no other way to say the same thing as effectively in other words. And the proverb came inevitably to mind when I considered the stubborn attachment to Communism of which there is far too much evidence.

Communism is not the only terrible idea whose adherents can’t seem to see or admit that they were wrong. Just as misguided, if not more so, are those people of my age and beyond who were the agents of the sexual revolution and who cannot or will not acknowledge its results and its failure. By “the sexual revolution” I mean all those social developments which have at their root the idea that sexual activity is at or near the summit of human goods and ought not be restricted or inhibited in any way. The false promise of blissful and inconsequential sex seems at the heart of much of our entertainment and even of our supposedly serious art.

The devastation wreaked by the pursuit of this false promise is everywhere: aborted babies; the collapse of families; abused, neglected, or semi-orphaned children; broken hearts and crippled emotions; disease; inescapable pornography that debases women and grotesquely distorts the truth about sexuality. But rare is the person of my generation who will join me in acknowledging that the revolution was fundamentally wrong and ought to be repudiated. I certainly don’t hold myself exempt from blame, having been a part of the whole sad affair, but I am puzzled by those who don’t acknowledge that it has been a disaster, much less accept any responsibility for it, or for seeking change.

There is no “solving” a problem like this in any permanent way, and of course all the ills I just named existed before the great revolution and will never be extirpated entirely. But while there is no perfection in human society there are better and worse; there are such things as improvement and amelioration. No real improvement will happen in these areas until enough people recognize the nature of the problem. In this context I always think of the words of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who said of erroneous implementations of Vatican II (my ellipses hide only the words “of the Church”, in order to apply the Cardinal’s words more generally):

It must be clearly stated that a real reform…presupposes an unequivocal turning away from the erroneous paths whose catastrophic consequences are already incontestable.

I think or at least hope that in fact most people in the United States do recognize the problem and understand that many or most of the doctrines of the revolution are wrong and must be rejected as a first step toward improving the situation. But those who dominate the culture, both formally and informally, believe that the solution lies in a more vigorous commitment to the revolution, with faith in “education” to control its dark side, which is anyway only the work of retrograde elements resistant or not fully converted to the new ways. Like those who preserve a stubborn faith in Communism (and there is a lot of overlap between the two groups), they remain confident in the program, believing that any evils associated with it are the result of impure and incomplete implementation.

Is it not folly to continue on “an erroneous path whose catastrophic consequences are already incontestable”? And is not folly what fools do?

What kind of fool do you think he is?

Imagine No Delusions

Pop music fans may have noticed a recent bit of fanfare about Rolling Stone’s list of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, as determined by a poll of critics. (This means rock-and-roll songs, of course, the kind of music Rolling Stone covers; no Cole Porter or Johnny Mercer here.) I went off at the first opportunity to check it against my own opinions, and naturally found myself in at least as much disagreement as agreement: “Hmm, yes, that deserves its ranking, but how did that get in there, much less near the top?” This is all a sort of parlor game, of course; it’s fun, and not to be taken too seriously. (I must add: how serious can such a project be if it includes Foreigner but not Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, or Tom Waits? If the answer is that the work of these artists is not rock and roll, one is entitled to ask why Joni Mitchell is on the list—three times.)

So it would be silly, except insofar as one finds it entertaining, to argue with the selection and the rankings. But there is one entry on it that really caught my eye: John Lennon’s “Imagine” is at Number Three.

Over the years I’ve noticed that this song seems to have a significance for some people that it never has for me, but I hadn’t given it much thought till now. I remember thinking when I heard it on the radio for the first time that it was a pretty tune with a silly lyric. I didn’t pay much attention to it, having decided that low expectations were in order as regards the former Beatles in their new careers as separate artists; in fact I think I had some such thought as “not bad for an ex-Beatle.” I was already moving away from my collegiate leftism, but I think that even at my most radical I would have thought the words of the song ridiculous as a political manifesto. (Of course I was never really on board with the serious socialist ideal in the first place, being more a sort of mystical nihilist than a utopian.)

All right, then, it’s a nice song, but: the third-greatest ever? I could probably pick a song at random from almost any Beatles album and rank it higher than “Imagine.” I know there’s no accounting for tastes, but mine are not so eccentric as all that; there’s something else going on here. And that something, as the unattributed Rolling Stone comment on the song, makes clear, is the utopian lyric:

Imagine there’s no heaven…
Imagine there’s no countries…
And no religion, too…[this grammatical fingernail-on-chalkboard has always bothered me]
Imagine no possessions…

Lennon was honest in describing this as “virtually the Communist Manifesto.” And the Rolling Stone commentator, quoting Lennon, does not seem to see it as a problem; noting explicitly that the song envisions “an absolute equality created by the dissolution of governments, borders, organized religion and economic class,” he or she nevertheless goes on to describe it as “an enduring hymn of solace and promise.” The question presents itself: does anyone actually pay much attention to these words? William Ruhlmann, reviewing the song for the All Music Guide, thinks not: he describes the song as having “…a sugarcoating. That coating seems to be what people have always heard, rather than the song's radical intent.” That’s probably true for most people. I asked my sixteen-year-old daughter about it while I was writing this, and her answer made it clear that she takes it only as a wish for a perfect world, and hasn’t taken seriously the implications of “no countries,” “no religion,” “no possessions.”

I have to suppose that the Rolling Stone voters are more attentive than this, and that they know exactly what the song is talking about. The commentator certainly does. So I’m left to assume that after all the horrors of the 20th century they still believe Communism is a good thing, flawed perhaps in the implementations that have actually been attempted, but still in essence the proper and correct aspiration for people of good will.

Now, I read enough left-wing commentary that I ought not be surprised at this, but I am. Has the Rolling Stone writer and others like him actually read the Communist Manifesto? No one today could read a call for “racial purity” without thinking at once of the Holocaust and viewing the author as at least hovering around the moral territory of its perpetrators. Can the Rolling Stone writer read proposals such as “abolition of private property” and “centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State” without thinking of the millions dead in Stalin’s terror, in the Gulag, in Mao’s Cultural Revolution? Can he or she read “Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture” followed by “gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country” without thinking of Cambodia’s killing fields?

Either the people who take seriously the message of this song and view it as “an enduring hymn of solace and promise,” of “faith in the power of a world, united in imagination and purpose, to repair and change itself” are culpably—and I think it would be fair to say willingly, in that a certain conscious aversion of the gaze is required—soft-headed, or they are well aware of its implications. If the first is true, it constitutes grounds for not taking them very seriously on the subject of politics. If the second, then they must be taken all too seriously, as being people for whom the necessity of murder on a grand scale is held to be no serious impediment to the realization of their cherished fantasy.

I believe and hope it’s the first. I’m obliged to suppose that there is a large number of people who believe the “dissolution” to which the Rolling Stone commentator refers can (or will?) be achieved voluntarily, by what they would no doubt call evolution. At any rate I know how foolish a “five-star jury of singers, musicians, producers, industry figures, critics and, of course, songwriters” assembled by one of the flagship publications of the cultural left can be—to say nothing of ex-Beatles.

Whether the utopia proposed by the song is even desirable is another question altogether.

Sunday Night Journal — January 9, 2005

NOTE: EXPLICIT CONSERVATIVE CONTENT — I include this warning for the sake of certain friends and relatives unhappy with some of my conservative views.

Pop music fans may have noticed a recent bit of fanfare about Rolling Stone’s list of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, as determined by a poll of critics. (This means rock-and-roll songs, of course, the kind of music Rolling Stone covers; no Cole Porter or Johnny Mercer here.) I went off at the first opportunity to check it against my own opinions, and naturally found myself in at least as much disagreement as agreement: “Hmm, yes, that deserves its ranking, but how did that get in there, much less near the top?” This is all a sort of parlor game, of course; it’s fun, and not to be taken too seriously. (I must add: how serious can such a project be if it includes Foreigner but not Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, or Tom Waits? If the answer is that the work of these artists is not rock and roll, one is entitled to ask why Joni Mitchell is on the list—three times.)

So it would be silly, except insofar as one finds it entertaining, to argue with the selection and the rankings. But there is one entry on it that really caught my eye: John Lennon’s “Imagine” is at Number Three.

Over the years I’ve noticed that this song seems to have a significance for some people that it never has for me, but I hadn’t given it much thought till now. I remember thinking when I heard it on the radio for the first time that it was a pretty tune with a silly lyric. I didn’t pay much attention to it, having decided that low expectations were in order as regards the former Beatles in their new careers as separate artists; in fact I think I had some such thought as “not bad for an ex-Beatle.” I was already moving away from my collegiate leftism, but I think that even at my most radical I would have thought the words of the song ridiculous as a political manifesto. (Of course I was never really on board with the serious socialist ideal in the first place, being more a sort of mystical nihilist than a utopian.)

All right, then, it’s a nice song, but: the third-greatest ever? I could probably pick a song at random from almost any Beatles album and rank it higher than “Imagine.” I know there’s no accounting for tastes, but mine are not so eccentric as all that; there’s something else going on here. And that something, as the unattributed Rolling Stone comment on the song, makes clear, is the utopian lyric:

Imagine there’s no heaven…
Imagine there’s no countries…
And no religion, too…[this grammatical fingernail-on-chalkboard has always bothered me]
Imagine no possessions…

Lennon was honest in describing this as “virtually the Communist Manifesto.” And the Rolling Stone commentator, quoting Lennon, does not seem to see it as a problem; noting explicitly that the song envisions “an absolute equality created by the dissolution of governments, borders, organized religion and economic class,” he or she nevertheless goes on to describe it as “an enduring hymn of solace and promise.” The question presents itself: does anyone actually pay much attention to these words? William Ruhlmann, reviewing the song for the All Music Guide, thinks not: he describes the song as having “…a sugarcoating. That coating seems to be what people have always heard, rather than the song's radical intent.” That’s probably true for most people. I asked my sixteen-year-old daughter about it while I was writing this, and her answer made it clear that she takes it only as a wish for a perfect world, and hasn’t taken seriously the implications of “no countries,” “no religion,” “no possessions.”

I have to suppose that the Rolling Stone voters are more attentive than this, and that they know exactly what the song is talking about. The commentator certainly does. So I’m left to assume that after all the horrors of the 20th century they still believe Communism is a good thing, flawed perhaps in the implementations that have actually been attempted, but still in essence the proper and correct aspiration for people of good will.

Now, I read enough left-wing commentary that I ought not be surprised at this, but I am. Has the Rolling Stone writer and others like him actually read the Communist Manifesto? No one today could read a call for “racial purity” without thinking at once of the Holocaust and viewing the author as at least hovering around the moral territory of its perpetrators. Can the Rolling Stone writer read proposals such as “abolition of private property” and “centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State” without thinking of the millions dead in Stalin’s terror, in the Gulag, in Mao’s Cultural Revolution? Can he or she read “Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture” followed by “gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country” without thinking of Cambodia’s killing fields?

Either the people who take seriously the message of this song and view it as “an enduring hymn of solace and promise,” of “faith in the power of a world, united in imagination and purpose, to repair and change itself” are culpably—and I think it would be fair to say willingly, in that a certain conscious aversion of the gaze is required—soft-headed, or they are well aware of its implications. If the first is true, it constitutes grounds for not taking them very seriously on the subject of politics. If the second, then they must be taken all too seriously, as being people for whom the necessity of murder on a grand scale is held to be no serious impediment to the realization of their cherished fantasy.

I believe and hope it’s the first. I’m obliged to suppose that there is a large number of people who believe the “dissolution” to which the Rolling Stone commentator refers can (or will?) be achieved voluntarily, by what they would no doubt call evolution. At any rate I know how foolish a “five-star jury of singers, musicians, producers, industry figures, critics and, of course, songwriters” assembled by one of the flagship publications of the cultural left can be—to say nothing of ex-Beatles.

Whether the utopia proposed by the song is even desirable is another question altogether.

UPDATE, June 11, 2010: reading this again, I'm inclined to be somewhat less harsh on the young and naive. They're not entirely responsible for the fact that they've absorbed a widespread climate of indifference to and excuses for the savagery of communism. 

Announcing: A Caelum et Terra Blog

I've spent the last couple of days making the decision about, and doing the initial setup for, a blog continuing the dialogue carried on in the magazine Caelum et Terra. (see link to the left for further info, or go straight to the blog). This site is not going away, but I have not had time to write about the subject that had been on my mind last week.