VOX POPULI The upside of fatalism: Why Santayana went home
Worth, Robert
Robert Worth In 1911 George Santayana quit his professorship in the Harvard Philosophy Department and left the United States for Europe, where he lived for the remaining forty-two years of his...
...And this cult is a lineal descendant of liberal Protestantism's guarantee that the individual's encounter with God determines everything, regardless of health, circumstances, family, politics, or any other constraint...
...It gave him an ethical context that liberalism lacked, and it allowed him to talk about fate in a way that Americans seldom did...
...The genteel tradition represented the heritage of the older, Protestant America, but it was a heritage that would not fade away quickly or easily...
...Sooner or later the world economy will start to persuade Americans that freedom has its limits, and that life gains more than it loses from the burden of community and tradition...
...Santayana did not believe in God, but the church remained his model for the possibility of harmonious relations between art and the lives of ordinary people...
...In a famous letter to his friend and colleague William James, he complained: "I wonder if you realize the years of suppressed irritation which I have passed in the midst of an unintelligible, sanctimonious and often disingenuous Protestantism, which is thoroughly alien and repulsive to me...
...Contemporary Catholics may feel a similar bafflement and distaste for Madonna, Camille Paglia, and any of the other popular figures who desecrate church doctrine while claiming to draw all their inspiration from it...
...Yet in significant ways this is less true now than it ever has been, even for those "whitemales" who supposedly run the show...
...If anything characterizes current American pop culture, it is the cult of self-help...
...Santayana believed that American culture was divided between a dull, censorious, and Protestant "genteel tradition" among the cultural elite-such as he had seen at Harvard-and a vigorously practical spirit among the masses...
...Like Santayana, they are reacting against liberalism's failure to uphold resources of character, fate, or tradition...
...As a Catholic, he claimed to prefer the latter, though they "may ignore or even insult all that I most prize, but they please me nevertheless for their honest enthusiasm and vitality...
...You can be anything you want to be," American mothers still tell their children...
...There are indications that something of this kind has already begun to happen...
...TV washes Americans in a daily bath of self-renewal, telling them no problem is so real that the right lawyer or the right therapy cannot "redefine" it back into the comfort zone...
...Catholicism became a code-word for living culture, for a community where art and ideas could flourish outside of museums, classrooms, and textbooks...
...He left because what he called his "Catholic sympathies" were at odds with the intellectual atmosphere at Harvard...
...Some of the pop culture that grows out of today's working class-the songs of Bruce Springsteen come to mind-speaks more to the need for community and a shared faith than to a merely reckless hedonism...
...Even in the 1920s and '30s, when countless artists and intellectuals were united in a bohemian rebellion against gentility, Santayana argued that a cold Protestant individualism continued to exert its curse on the upper echelons of American society...
...Robert Worth In 1911 George Santayana quit his professorship in the Harvard Philosophy Department and left the United States for Europe, where he lived for the remaining forty-two years of his life...
...But the Catholic church is very old, and TV and rock 'n' roll are very young...
...Of course, much of the noise that throbs from our TVs and boomboxes is hostile to any religious tradition...
...The church, of course, could not welcome the embraces of an atheist like Santayana...
...Yet the lingering allegiance of these apostates is instructive...
...and he rarely did so without invoking the Catholicism of his boyhood in Spain...
...Robert Worth, a frequent Commonweal contributor, is a graduate student in English at Princeton University...
...As the myth of national and personal omnipotence gradually fades into history, Americans may begin asking for a dose of the healthy fatalism that is so desperately lacking in the rest of their lives...
...He continued to side with popular culture, the America of "football, kindness, and jazz bands," against the highbrows...
Vol. 122 • September 1995 • No. 16
