The Moral Obligation To Be Intelligent
Valiunas, Algis
The Strenuous Life The Moral Obligation To Be Intelligent: Selected Essays Lionel Trilling Edited by Leon Wieseltier Farrar, Straus & Giroux 572 pages/ $35 REVIEWED BY Algis Valiunas L ionel...
...Dead of consumption at 26, but not before he had produced some of the most marvelous poems and most fascinating letters ever written, Keats came to a profound understanding of his place in the world, and lived with an intensity at once defiant and accepting- defiant of the powers that threatened to break his spirit along with his body, accepting of the sorrowful, but by no means uniquely sorrowful, fate that was his in this "vale of soul-making...
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...Against the nasty romance of the abstraction, Orwell set the unpalatable truth of the Communist treachery that undermined popular uprising...
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...He was sworn to fight to the end, to conduct a brave rear-guard action against the advancing forces of untruth, vulgarity, and viciousness...
...Twenty-four years later, all the egalitarian chickens have come home to roost, transformed into buzzards of exceptional size and voracity...
...236 0102 The American Spectator February 2001 71...
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...He is very much a modem man and a democrat, but the democracy he most esteems is that of its nineteenth-century youth, when the belief in a newly widespread nobility produced an art, above all in the novel, that was animated by "the passionate-the 'revolutionary' -interest in what man should be...
...Equality perfected is a runaway steamroller that leaves every human complication in its path, every bemusing protuberance of character, flattened like an empty beer can...
...speare was Keats's...
...for others, the ultimate authority of the market-but the doctrinaire egalitarianism of the liberals is not to be outdone for stultifying simplicity...
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...To abandon "traditional standards of training and achievement" in the face of criticism that such standards are designed specifically to keep certain people out is moral and intellectual cowardice...
...Isaac Babel was a Russian Jew who rode with mounted Soviet troops in Poland, and who was appalled by much of what he and his Cossack comrades did in the name of revolutionary justice...
...The Poet as Hero: Keats in His Letters" is the best essay in this remarkable collection, a model of criticism at its most subtle and serious, looking deep into the mind and heart of a great writer, discerning what made him the man he was, explaining why he matters so...
...That vigor persisted despite the temptation to lie down and take a long nap, as it became increasingly evident that the culture Trilling championed was a lost cause...
...T hings really started to go wrong in the late nineteenth century, Trilling believes, as evidenced by William Morris's News From Nowhere, a blithe Utopian fantasy that envisions a society of perfect equality and blissful torpor...
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...intellectual probity dissolves in the acids of resentment, eaten away by "the ideological trend which rejects and seeks to discredit the very concept of mind...
...Variousness the way liberals see it these days refers almost exclusively to skin color or sexual taste, and all those of a particular color or sexual taste are expected to think the thoughts and feel the feelings prescribed for their caste...
...above all, they share "a certain insouciant acquiescence in the anomalies of the moral order of the universe, a respectful indifference to, or graceful surrender before, the mysteries of the moral relation of God to man...
...still, it seems clear that when Trilling, like Babel, asks himself the questions, How far is justice possible in this world?, and Which is the most just of possible societies?, he does incline more toward one answer than the other...
...To Trilling's mind, the principal moral failure of modern intelligence is the brazen arrogance that refuses to acknowledge reasonable bounds to human empire...
...She is, in short, the very embodiment of the modern will which masks itself in virtue, making itself appear harmless, the will that hates itself and finds its manifestations guilty and is able to exist only if it operates in the name of virtue, that despises the variety and modulations of the human story and longs for an absolute humanity, which is but another way of saying a nothingness...
...So one is grateful to Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of the New Republic, for undertaking a Trilling revival with a selection of some thirty of his essays dating from 1938 to 1975, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent...
...The tragic view of life is not always joyous, but even at its most dour it possesses an honest clarity that makes it far preferable to the millennialist fantasies that have been the bane of modernity...
...if only the things that are pretty good were entirely good and we were not put to the everlasting necessity of qualifying and discriminating...
...His work has met a fate befitting its excellence: Nearly all of it is out of print, and Trilling's critical influence has been effectively defunct for years...
...Although his penchant is for thinking his way into the most complicated moral questions rather than out of them, he does not shy away from clarity about what he admires and what he can't stand...
...Trilling seems here to divine that the democratic clamor for all but limitless freedom has at its root an obsession with equality: men are permitted freedom only so long as its exercise does not violate any egalitarian precepts...
...In Trilling's words, "If only life were not so tangible, so concrete, so made up of facts that are at variance with each other...
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...Affirmative action is a natural outgrowth of this belief, and to its "general and ideal good...
...and whatever does not accord with that idea they dismiss, for they are "committed not to the fact but to the abstraction," as Trilling puts it in his essay on George Orwell's memoir of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia...
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...The man capable of such a feat knows the fullness of life better than any other, and Trilling holds him up as the exemplar of understanding and vitality to be revered...
...To safeguard the innocence of this stress-free zone, Morris proscribes philosophy, science, and serious art, which breed anxiety and competition and authoritarian tendencies...
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...Still, the way is not lost for everyone...
...The most perilous unwisdom lies in this inability to accept life as it is...
...The Strenuous Life The Moral Obligation To Be Intelligent: Selected Essays Lionel Trilling Edited by Leon Wieseltier Farrar, Straus & Giroux 572 pages/ $35 REVIEWED BY Algis Valiunas L ionel Trilling (1905-1975) was as fine a literary critic as one will ever find among the professoriate -he spent his entire academic life at Columbia University-and incomparably finer than any of the oh-so-bright boys and girls dispensing post-modernist multicultural juju today...
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...Anyone who understands the essential matter thus knows that his life is going to be a long fight...
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...It hinted that one might live in doubt, that one might live by means of a question...
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...Most important, virtually no one who currently calls himself liberal can abide the notion that a liberal education ought to introduce one to "the best that has been known and thought in the world," in the most famous phrase of Matthew Arnold, who was the subject of Trillings doctoral dissertation and first book...
...Failing to speak up in its own defense, mind abdicates its place in the academy...
...I'm a REAL menace to society...
...The American motto of try-anything-oncc is to be found in the 1950s New York poet Frank O'Hara's "In Memory of My Feelings": "Grace/ To be born and live as variously as possible...
...The virtues of such an education are the deepened aware70 February 2001 The American Spectator Classifieds ness of human variety that can come only by reading old books-an appreciation for thoughts and sentiments alien to those prevalent in modern democratic America-and the discernment to choose among the ways of life that pour forth so invitingly from this moral cornucopia...
...Politicized intellectuals band together in the name of a single idea, which happens to be a bad idea...
...The only hitch Morris sees is that, as Trilling writes, some of his happy tribe "might be expected to feel...
...Literature, like politics, is the art of the possible, and that remains true even though the richest possibilities grow ever less likely to be realized...
...Those who profess the loftiest, most disinterested love of mankind do not scruple at doing away with millions of their fellow men whose incorrigible nature gets in the way of an imagined perfection...
...Trilling is essentially a variety man, but of a rarely discerning sort...
...Pool...
...In the preface to The Liberal Imagination (1950), he avers, "In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition...
...Creatures who fancy they know a thing or two that eluded their Creator, intellectuals have taken it upon themselves to make the world over again and do a better job of it than God managed in the first place...
...Trilling sees it as his duty- an unfashionable word, whose meaning he elucidated and cherished - to give literature a fighting chance, for without its bracing effect liberal democracy threatens to go spiraling down into moral vacuousness and hyper-egalitarian tyranny: "[L] itera-ture [has] a bearing upon political conduct because literature, especially the novel, is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of vari-ousness, complexity, difficulty - and posALGIS VALIUNAS is a writer living in Florida...
...Now that everyone can talk of nothing but diversity, the actual variety of living thought with which college students become acquainted grows ever more pinched and impoverished...
...Endurance such as his gives birth to something greater, and in defining this something Trilling refers by way of contrast to T.S...
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...Such joy might be most potent in those who have been savaged by life, and who are not far removed from death...
...Politically authorized thought can be worse than no thought at all...
...It was, that is, a moral interest, and the world had a sense of a future moral revolution...
...That's why I'm firing you now...
...Trilling's sad prescience foresees the ruin of the universities, which no longer have a place for a man like him...
...Trilling is the product of a type of education now almost universally derided and all but impossible to come by: a Great Books education...
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...In the Jefferson Lecture for 1972, "Mind in the Modern World," Trilling turns his mind to the condition of higher education, and once again confronts the virtuous democrat's dilemma between quality and equality, discrimination and indiscriminateness...
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...if only the things that people say are good things were really good...
...Byron's flamboyant defiance of a caiel God had a telling influence on the spiritual attitudes of the modern intellectual, with their staginess and nose-thumbing...
...all others are free to do most anything they please, except where money is concerned, for the freedom of the wealthy to keep the money they have made and to pass it all on to their rightful heirs would offend against equality...
...Read the truth about the fall of Russia in a story of fifteen-year-old blonde Russalka transformed from a civilized girl into a deadly commando, the British pilot who loves her, and a hot-tempered Bolshevik commissar fighting for his new world order, in the conservative and historically accurate adventure novel Rage of the Bear by Bert Byfield...
...As Trilling states in the 1941 essay "T.S...
...All the lux et veritas business aside, the view prevails that college is intended above all "to enable as many people as possible to pass from a lower to a higher position in society...
...In the splendid 1947 essay "Manners, Morals, and the Novel," Trilling warns of "the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes...
...68 February 2001 The American Spectator The Kinsey presupposition, which Trilling finds distinctively American, is that there can be no legitimate restrictions on most human behavior, no determination as to what might be best or worst, decent or indecent, for anything one chooses to do is as good as anything else...
...It is to prevent this corruption, the most ironic and tragic that man knows, that we stand in need of the moral realism which is the product of the free play of the moral imagination...
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...Eliot's characteristically modern taste for "the violence of extremity...
...In Plato's Republic, Socrates observes that democratic men have a taste for trying first some of this and then a little of that, and that they find it difficult ever to settle on any one thing...
...Eliot's Politics," "At the bottom of at least popular Marxism there has always been a kind of disgust with humanity as it is and a perfect faith in humanity as it is to be...
...Henry James's Princess Casamassima exemplifies the need for moral reality that is so urgent it falls for the nearest available simulacrum...
...Leon Wieseltier, in his elegant introduction to Trilling's essays, points out that the phrase "The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent" was the title of an essay by Trilling's teacher John Erskine, who was the founder of the General Honors course at Columbia, "the immersion in great books that eventually transformed undergraduate education in America...
...In the collection of stories Red Cavalry, Babel negotiates the perilous moral terrain between "two ways of being, the way of violence and the way of peace " Babel's tragic ambivalence toward the Revolution did not sit well with Soviet authorities, and he met the end customary for his kind...
...Trilling's writings point the direction that education can still take, at least for those few who are unembarrassed by their defiant singularity...
...that being a person is not interesting in the way that novelists had shown it to be in the old unregenerate time...
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...Trilling honors the possibility that the question may be decisive while any answer is inadequate...
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...In his youth he achieved the wisdom of age, and of the ages: "This wisdom is the proud, bitter, and joyful acceptance of tragic life which we associate pre-eminently with Shakespeare...
...John Keats is Trilling's hero, as ShakeNew Titles Published Each Month...
...but we do not imagine being-we do not imagine that it can be a joy...
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...Those with minds to use had better learn somehow to use them wisely, and Trilling's mind serves as an exemplum of the sort you're not likely to come across at the college of your choice...
...We imagine, with nothing in between, the dull not-being of life, the intense not-being of death...
...Perfect faith translates into perfect foolishness, but it is not the fools who pay the dearest price for their doomed project...
...In the story "Gedali" the question is posed most emphatically, as a Jewish shopkeeper offers cogent reflections "on the impossibility of a revolution made in blood, on the International that is never to be realized, the International of the good...
...The theory class, Trilling writes, found the real thing too much for them, and Orwell found no audience for what he had to say...
...I broke a rule...
...Even so apparently disinterested a document as the 1948 Kinsey Report on human sexuality cleaves to a fundamental premise about the nature of true democracy in which one can recognize the stirrings of political correctness: "We might say that those who most explicitly assert and wish to practice the democratic virtues have taken it as their assumption that all social facts- with the exception of exclusion and economic hardship-must be accepted, not merely in the scientific sense but also in the social sense, in the sense, that is, that no judgment must be passed on them, that any conclusion drawn from them which perceives values and consequences will turn out to be 'undemocratic.'" This contentious sentence caps a passage to do with homosexuality in which Trilling makes the obligatory liberal obeisance to "acceptance and liberation...
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...His favored intellectual haunts are "the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet," and one knows only too well what usually happens there: Literature gets blind-sided, coldcocked, and thrashed within an inch of its sorry life...
...T rilling is a self-described liberal writing to other liberals about the virtues of liberalism -"a political position that affirmed the value of individual existence in all its variousness, complexity, and difficulty...
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...The logical consequences of Trilling's observation would seem to land him among the conservatives, although it is not clear that he would be willing to go quite that far...
...but he is too astute not to recognize that in due course we will have to accept the utterly abhorrent and liberate forces that ought to be kept prudently on a strong leash...
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...To presume to distinguish between the best and the rest violates what is pretty well the only tenet of post-modern intellectual decorum: Nothing is better than anything else, with the proviso that the ideas and creations civilized people think superior are actually inferior, and vice versa...
...As the outcry grows ever more strident that American colleges and universities do not do enough for the cause of equality, "their equalizing function is being made fully explicit and the tendency grows ever stronger to say that they must be wholly defined by the function in which they are now said to fail...
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...ashamed of the title and the fortune for which she has sold herself, the Princess imagines herself the noble benefactress of the poor and humble, as she takes up with a violent anarchist cabal...
...UNBOUGHT AND UNBOSSED...
...The seedy remnants of these majestic visions move Trilling to a melancholy but still vigorous scorn...
...To have reason for despair and yet to wrest from one's suffering a heroic measure of joy constitutes perhaps the most estimable human triumph, to Trilling's mind...
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...As Trilling writes, Babel's subversive forth Tightness "implied that there was more than one way of being...
...But then Trilling dissents from this sunniness and self-congratulation...
...Freedom does not apply where it results in exclusion or economic inequality...
...Wordsworth's calm endurance has not had so striking an effect, but it is the superior courage...
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...Fifty years on, things have changed, and it is chiefly conservatives who possess the liberal imagination as Trilling understood it...
...Trilling speaks for the old imperfect world, which he would not do without, and the best men he can think of are those who have come to terms with life at its coldest and hardest...
...the inhabitants of Nowhere will work, or more precisely amuse themselves, only with their hands, and will let their minds enjoy complete rest...
...The sterling essay "Wordsworth and the Rabbis" notes the essential similarity between the teaching of the Pirke Aboth, a second-century trove of rabbinical wisdom, and that of the nobly humble Romantic poet...
...Citing the Victorian sage Matthew Arnold on the difference between Wordsworth and Lord Byron, Trilling declares that a significant part of Wordsworth's value lies in "his indifference to 'man's fiery might,' to the Byron-ic courage in fronting human destiny...
...As for complexity and difficulty, American intellectuals of all persuasions like their stories to be both simple and fantastic- for some, queer theory and post-colonialism and trigger-locks...
...To the American soul, variety has a greater appeal than discernment...
...Sleeps 14...
Vol. 34 • February 2001 • No. 1
