The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (53 page)
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Authors: Anthony Esolen
BOOK: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides)
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So the novel fell on rough times, but for a while the film took its place, serving some of the old functions of popular art. In its early days, and in its golden age from 1935 to 1955, film directors, writers and actors could tap a rich popular tradition of ritual celebrations (consider the Fourth of July oration, wherein a local grandee might play Daniel Webster), local theater, vaudeville, and the small opera house. For the most part, the men and women who made and acted in these movies did not come from the academy, and did want to make money. More than that, they came from the people about whom they wrote. They too had struggled through war and depression. They had carried a bayonet alongside their countrymen, baled hay, chopped wood, fought in alleys, played baseball, sang hymns on Sunday, got drunk on Saturday, and crouched by the radio to hear news from the Pacific.
A Movie You’re Not Supposed to WatchOn the Waterfront
, directed by Elia Kazan, starring Marlon Brando
Their work often enough showed the hypocrisy of people who called themselves religious, as for instance the sour church council in John Ford’s
How Green Was My Valley
; but then, the honest preacher was the hero in that film. The faith and patriotism of such directors as Ford, Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, and William Wyler were not blemishes upon their genius. Sometimes they indulged in sentimentality; most popular art does. But without the subtle pressure of a religious faith that believes that man and woman marry until death, there is no drama in Ford’s
Rio Grande
, and without the oddly pre-modern conviction that holiness and duty outweigh all utilitarian calculations, the wrongly accused priest in Hitchcock’s
I Confess
would shrug and give up the murderer. We would not have the near-tragic self-sacrifice of George Bailey in Capra’s
It’s a Wonderful Life
, ending with a celebration of the babe born in a manger. Nor, in Kazan’s
On the Waterfront
, Marlon Brando’s staggering walk along a dingy Via Dolorosa, his priest and his beloved watching each step of agony, as he defeats, with Christlike humility, the wickedness of the union machine. Without the wellsprings of popular piety, patriotism, and tradition to assist the director, actor, and audience in the subtle examinations of what it means to be human and how we can build a community in a world rife with our own wickedness, there could be no
Friendly Persuasion
, or
High Noon
, or
In the Heat of the Night.
Even when the directors were not filming Biblical or national epic, the strains of old hymns were not too distant for them to hear.
How Green Was My Valley
; but then, the honest preacher was the hero in that film. The faith and patriotism of such directors as Ford, Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, and William Wyler were not blemishes upon their genius. Sometimes they indulged in sentimentality; most popular art does. But without the subtle pressure of a religious faith that believes that man and woman marry until death, there is no drama in Ford’s
Rio Grande
, and without the oddly pre-modern conviction that holiness and duty outweigh all utilitarian calculations, the wrongly accused priest in Hitchcock’s
I Confess
would shrug and give up the murderer. We would not have the near-tragic self-sacrifice of George Bailey in Capra’s
It’s a Wonderful Life
, ending with a celebration of the babe born in a manger. Nor, in Kazan’s
On the Waterfront
, Marlon Brando’s staggering walk along a dingy Via Dolorosa, his priest and his beloved watching each step of agony, as he defeats, with Christlike humility, the wickedness of the union machine. Without the wellsprings of popular piety, patriotism, and tradition to assist the director, actor, and audience in the subtle examinations of what it means to be human and how we can build a community in a world rife with our own wickedness, there could be no
Friendly Persuasion
, or
High Noon
, or
In the Heat of the Night.
Even when the directors were not filming Biblical or national epic, the strains of old hymns were not too distant for them to hear.
But there were anthems in the twentieth century that threatened to drown out those hymns. One such is still with us, though tattered and tarnished. It could be heard from all kinds of choristers. Kinsey sang it, when he told the world that, according to his scientific research, 10 percent of the male population was homosexual.
17
Margaret Mead, more honest than Kinsey (which is not saying much), sang it when the teenagers of Samoa hoodwinked her, and she reported, scientifically, that free love reigned in the South Pacific, and all the youth were happy.
18
The Marxists sang it to the strains of a military march, when they “proved,” with scientific accuracy, that the world was inevitably going to evolve into the great and final Communist State, when the State itself would wither away, and every tear should be wiped from the eyes of man. You hear it in a particularly silly form in a bad movie called
The Day the Earth Stood Still
: we were going to be “saved” from our sins not by God but by a superior race of aliens come down to help us and bring us peace and prosperity. (The State, social workers, aliens, what’s the difference?) You hear it in
Inherit the Wind
, the dishonest but artful play about the Scopes “monkey trial,” when a schoolteacher in Tennessee had been arrested for teaching evolution. In the play, the atheist and bigot Clarence Darrow is portrayed as the true respecter of Holy Writ, and the populist liberal William Jennings Bryan is portrayed as a blathering fool. The song is the Ode to Science, and it is the fight song of political correctness, regardless of how unscientific and foolish those prejudices are.
17
Margaret Mead, more honest than Kinsey (which is not saying much), sang it when the teenagers of Samoa hoodwinked her, and she reported, scientifically, that free love reigned in the South Pacific, and all the youth were happy.
18
The Marxists sang it to the strains of a military march, when they “proved,” with scientific accuracy, that the world was inevitably going to evolve into the great and final Communist State, when the State itself would wither away, and every tear should be wiped from the eyes of man. You hear it in a particularly silly form in a bad movie called
The Day the Earth Stood Still
: we were going to be “saved” from our sins not by God but by a superior race of aliens come down to help us and bring us peace and prosperity. (The State, social workers, aliens, what’s the difference?) You hear it in
Inherit the Wind
, the dishonest but artful play about the Scopes “monkey trial,” when a schoolteacher in Tennessee had been arrested for teaching evolution. In the play, the atheist and bigot Clarence Darrow is portrayed as the true respecter of Holy Writ, and the populist liberal William Jennings Bryan is portrayed as a blathering fool. The song is the Ode to Science, and it is the fight song of political correctness, regardless of how unscientific and foolish those prejudices are.
A Book You’re Not Supposed to ReadThe Abolition of Man
C. S. Lewis; New York: HarperCollins, 1974.You will hear from your PC teachers that to make judgments about what is beautiful and ugly, or good and evil, is to shut your mind or to offend those who feel otherwise. Lewis shows instead that when we teach young children that these terms have no meaning in themselves, we rob their young minds of something essential to their humanity. We pretend to be overcoming nature when we destroy the notion that there is a natural law for us to obey and natural ideals of beauty for us to aspire to. But all we do is to
abolish man
. We make what Lewis calls “men without chests,” people who can no longer feel the power of a deed nobly done. His verdict against modern education might as well be a verdict against the welfare state, or against religion turned into therapy for weaklings:We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful. (26)
Earlier ages had understood “science” as “knowledge,” and had distinguished natural science or the knowledge of nature from other forms of science. In the twentieth century, natural science claimed victory over all others: it alone constituted genuine knowledge. To be sure, natural science is a useful thing. It has revealed to us the glories of quasars and the bending of light and the elongation of objects as they approach the speed of light. If you are interested in the arrangement and composition and decomposition and movement of matter over time, natural science is your ticket. The trouble is that natural science, limited by its method and subject, cannot tell you about the human heart. It cannot tell you about the good and the beautiful. It cannot tell you about justice, temperance, prudence, and fortitude. It can sometimes reduce its subjects to mathematical expression, but it cannot even prove the validity of mathematics. More than that, as the greatest mathematician of the century, Kurt Gödel, showed, mathematics itself is necessarily “incomplete.” Every mathematics of more than elementary simplicity will embrace non-axiomatic statements which are true, but which cannot be proved to be true. Gödel thought that his work went a long way toward demonstrating the necessary existence of God.
19
19
But we were all to be saved from ourselves by science, and when science helped us destroy tens of thousands of people in a minute, and dump so much toxic waste into our streams that Lake Erie nearly died, and the Cuyahoga River actually caught fire,
20
some people turned against science with a ferocity as irrational as was the initial blind faith in it. So the century presents us with a strange irony. It begins with the popularizers of science, like H. G. Wells, predicting a world of free love and governments managed by the intellectual elites.
21
Or it begins with every field of knowledge trying desperately to be as precise and mathematical as physics: even philosophy, with men such as A. J. Ayer, is cramped and reduced to the analysis of language.
22
But when the cracks in this modern faith begin to show—in the German concentration camps, or in the slums of “scientific” urban planning, such as at the ugly Pruitt-Igoe development in Saint Louis
23
—then “postmodern” man announces the death of reason. Students are taught that there is no absolute truth; feminists will go so far as to assert that mathematical logic is a masculine tool of oppression.
20
some people turned against science with a ferocity as irrational as was the initial blind faith in it. So the century presents us with a strange irony. It begins with the popularizers of science, like H. G. Wells, predicting a world of free love and governments managed by the intellectual elites.
21
Or it begins with every field of knowledge trying desperately to be as precise and mathematical as physics: even philosophy, with men such as A. J. Ayer, is cramped and reduced to the analysis of language.
22
But when the cracks in this modern faith begin to show—in the German concentration camps, or in the slums of “scientific” urban planning, such as at the ugly Pruitt-Igoe development in Saint Louis
23
—then “postmodern” man announces the death of reason. Students are taught that there is no absolute truth; feminists will go so far as to assert that mathematical logic is a masculine tool of oppression.
Political correctness, in its essence, is about transforming a radical notion into dogma. An idea one day is radical, but liberal tolerance forbids us to shun it. As the Clarence Darrow character says in
Inherit the Wind
, we all have “the right to be wrong.”
24
But before long it’s a dogma that only a bigot or a fool would question. The most insidious successes of political correctness are those that even we self-styled conservatives don’t realize we’ve bought into. One such near-total victory by the forces of political correctness might fairly be reckoned as the critical push that has sent our civilization reeling.
Inherit the Wind
, we all have “the right to be wrong.”
24
But before long it’s a dogma that only a bigot or a fool would question. The most insidious successes of political correctness are those that even we self-styled conservatives don’t realize we’ve bought into. One such near-total victory by the forces of political correctness might fairly be reckoned as the critical push that has sent our civilization reeling.
As often happens, the pivot in a civilization’s decline is reached with hardly anyone noticing. In 1930, at the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Church managed to combine three of the destructive trends of the early century: a foolish trust in technological innovation as always and inevitably good, and in the predictions of technocrats as always and inevitably true; a foolish rejection not only of traditional morality but of nineteen centuries of church teaching; and a foolish acceptance of the primacy of individual desire. The council members voted to approve artificial contraception, now so widely accepted that the reader must smile at my belief that the event was so important. Pope Pius XI quickly responded with
Casti Conubii
, a treatise on the natural law and its implications for marriage and sexual morality; Aldous Huxley, an atheist, responded with
Brave New World
, a satirical prophecy of a world of cloned men, a eugenically engineered society whose people are drugged up with plenty of food, easy sex, and the mind-blearing soma.
Casti Conubii
, a treatise on the natural law and its implications for marriage and sexual morality; Aldous Huxley, an atheist, responded with
Brave New World
, a satirical prophecy of a world of cloned men, a eugenically engineered society whose people are drugged up with plenty of food, easy sex, and the mind-blearing soma.
The Depression and the second World War delayed the onset, but Lambeth, and then the invention of the Pill, made the full sexual revolution possible. And it is that revolution, not the television, perhaps not even the computer, that most cleanly severed Western civilization from its past. In 1940, Frances Perkins, the first female cabinet member in the United States, was dismayed to learn that welfare payments to unwed mothers might be having the perverse effect of preventing marriage, and thus perpetuating moral and material poverty.
25
By 2000, the suggestion that one should be married before one has a child would be decried as bigoted, and one third of all American children would be born out of wedlock.
25
By 2000, the suggestion that one should be married before one has a child would be decried as bigoted, and one third of all American children would be born out of wedlock.
Centrally Planned Non-ParenthoodThe “pro-choice” movement in America today makes more sense when considered in its intellectual context. We should be thankful for the forthrightness of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood:When we realize that each feeble-minded person is a potential source of endless progeny of defect, we prefer the policy of immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble-minded.Margaret Sanger
,
The Pivot of CivilizationPro-choice: and the choice is in the hands of the elites.
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