THE SKEWING OF THE WEST
The key point I have tried to make in a series of essays is that the sickness of Western Civilization, now approaching a total crisis of survival, goes back to our ancient “wrong turn” of the psyche visible in highly suggestive pages of Hebrews, Genesis and the prophets, and Greek Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, Euripides, and Thucydides.
The healthy balance of the primary spiritual dimension—transcendent and beautiful morality, inspired art—with the secondary dimension of imminent existence (time-oriented, rational, constructive), became progressively (though intermittently) skewed to the horizontal, the sideways branches of the Tree of Life.
Various expressions refer to this evasive distortion: “the horizontal Babel,” “obesity in all its forms replaces conception,” the familiar “rat race”… Modernism has obviously accelerated the pathology; the varied “obesity” is increasingly evident; the plethora of gadgets—Internet, cell phones, I-Pods, myriad channels of TV, endless entertainment to satisfy every whim of taste… Parents, in surveys, are rightly worried.
Here, I note down some results of the skewing in well-known writers:
But first: Abraham (piety traversed by survival of his “seed”); Jesus as in “The Lord’s Prayer” (deep deliverance traversed by “daily bread”); Aquinas: faith, reason, (and faith/praxis, faith/tolerance/ faith/humor, and other such Western branchings; not Islamic); Descartes’ cross of axes; Pascal’s similar calculus (and “spirit of finesse” traversed by “spirit of geometry”); Mallarmé’s “symphonic equation proper to the seasons”; Einstein’s space/time… These were ideally unskewed.
Our Founders were beautifully balanced in that way: sacred-oriented and pragmatic. That didn’t last…
Our American thinkers almost all went off the ideal “higher balance” (Camus, in “Helen’s Exile”) in varying ways:
Emerson and Thoreau deemphasized the sacred in favor of intellectuality, rugged individualism. German Kant and Schiller had gone off similarly, toward rational “subjectivism” linked (in Kant) to the anti-Hebraic and, indeed, violent Jew-hatred, in the wake of Luther (“The Jews and Their Lies”). Kant tried to prove Jesus was Greek.
Sinclair Lewis was deeply insightful, enough to warn us against Western-skewing, heartless historicists’ dynamism of fascism—Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, Huey Long’s, eventually Stalin’s—but his protagonist, Doremus Jessup, in It Can’t Happen Here, is skittish about heart-based faith, (as Lewis understandably was in Elmer Gantry) and resorts, like his models Emerson and Thoreau, to flat reason, sensibleness, humanism; he underestimated the power of the pathology and the need for the counter-force of “transcendent morality, essentially Judeo-Christian .
Camus too faltered in that crucial way, in The Rebel. Only later did he sheepishly acknowledge the deep need for the sacred (secretly in the beauty of Helen in his essay), in a series of interviews.
But Allen Bloom leaned to the Greeks, especially Plato, (partly out of his homosexual bent), though his buddy Bellow, especially in Ravenstein, leaned to the Hebraic; Harold Bloom, his cousin, gave too much to the critical, independent spirit of Emerson and Nietzsche, as well as kindred Gnosticism, in his Where Shall Wisdom be Found?
But practically every writer in their time was worse in their regard, except Wilbur, Updike, Mallarmé, Potok, and a few other believers. Philip Roth, for example, is sadly twisted, negative. And all those renegade Catholics! Europe, on the whole, is practically gone because of it, with no heart to counter the radical Islamic takeover—only clever multicultural ideologies which totally muffs the need to distinguish between Judeo-Christian general tolerance and the almost total lack of it in radical Islam. They, the Muslims, of course, are skewed in the perpendicularly opposite way, toward fanaticized belief with none of the merciful cross of full humanity, (except in “seed”). We are rapidly getting to Europe’s dead-end, on our campuses and in the derivative media, our premier historian, Robert Conquest’s “pink fascism” is spreading like kudzu.