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The Depth of Derbyshire
12/31/2003
Today's (rather, yesterday's) column from John Derbyshire was probably his best diary (or blog) type piece yet. It ranges across various topics and depths of brow. I'm in particular agreement that the "19th century was the greatest of all centuries for the human race, and the 20th simply didn't compare":
This is one of those things that is obvious once you have been told it, even if it never occurred to you before. Just look at The Nutcracker, first staged 1892. What can our generation offer to compare with it? And look at the bourgeois values that radiate from the stage in the opening scenes: the stern Papas and stately Mamas, the kids on joyful vacation from their Latin verbs and piano lessons, the servants in their livery and pinafores, the hierarchy and order and confidence. Sure, there was another side to that world — my own ancestors were digging coal for a dollar a day while Tchaikovsky was writing out his score. In the matter of great accomplishment, though, Murray has got it right: We just don't measure up. Going down into the Chancellery bunker near the end of WWII, Joseph Goebbels took a look around at the burning wreckage of Berlin and exulted to his diary: "These flames are consuming the last of 19th-century bourgeois civilization!" He got that right; and look at what was left when the flames had done their work.
It must be acknowledged that some magnificent technologies (whether gadgets or procedures) were forged in those flames, but it has seemed to me, since I made the beginnings of an intellectual inquiry into it, that various huge trends in Western culture came together during the 1800s — from music to literature to intellectualism to science. Unfortunately, to borrow from the Grail Knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, we chose poorly. Society walked a line throughout most of the 1800s between intellect and emotion, between individualism and morality, and thereafter began to stagger about.
Anyway, most of the other topics covered by Derb in his December Diary are similarly interesting and enlightening.
Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:24 AM EST
10 comments
Justin, Justin, Justin--The idea of a fallen species having a great century is so bonkers that it is almost endearing.
Misery abounds always and everywhere. Failure is the rule. Geez, even when we manage some triumph, "Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism", as a great 20th century poet wrote.
Nah, "the greatest century" is a category for cocktail party chatter.
Derbyshire's disdainful lament is sho nuff English, at least 20th century English. They are all a bunch of Philip Larkins, hehehehe, whether or not they have his talent.
But, Geez, even Larkin found something to go wild over in the 20th century--jazz. Music in the 2oth century just broke out in new forms, used new instruments, etc. but it sure had its triumphs--Appalachian Spring, An American in Paris, etc. The Grateful Dead's "Ripple" can stand with any song of any century. the 20th century produced astonishingly talented musicians. The list of great violinists alone would grow tedious to read. Or think of the contribution of Wanda Landowska, both as performer and as re-discoverer. Egads, Vivaldi owes his fame to the 20th century.
No poetry he says, forgetting "The Four Quartets." I will bet ya he has never heard of Yvor Winters, much less of Helen Pinkerton, probably the greatest Christian devotional poet since George Herbert.
No art radiating bourgeois values? Richard Wilbur's whole career radiates bourgeois values, and he is one Hell of an artist. Geez, Wilbur's done a better job of catching bourgeois values than Flaubert ever did. He even went further and defended them in a bourgeois way, as in "Cottage Street, 1953."
Robert Bolt's "A Man For All Seasons" puts any stage play after John Webster in the shade, say 350 years.
The TransAmerica building in San Francisco is great.
D. W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein Alfred Hitchcock, they all had their moments, and that is not even counting Frenchies.
Derbyshire, in this piece, doesn't seem thoughtful or even aware enough of what has been done to make a case, really build an argument.
Instead he gives readers a glum reverie. And let me tell you, 20th century Englishmen produced some of the finest glum reveries in all human history, hehehehehe...
George Lee @ 12/31/2003 11:37 AM EST
I have another response other than to glorify that art in this century.
If you want to go back to the good ol' days ? You can go. I mean there are many examples of countries and cultures that would fit your criteria. As an example, Cuba. Where homosexuals are imprisoned, abortion is illegal and pornagraphy is also illegal. It's your Nirvana. You and Derbyshire and Coulter can vacation there and just breathe in the simplistic moral righteousness.
No bourgeois values there. Just a culture walking that 'fine'line between intellect and emotion, between individualism and, of course --- morality.
When things we so much better than they are now ...
Mark Miller @ 12/31/2003 03:31 PM EST
George,
Of course, as one with artistic pretentions myself, I'd agree that the individual talent wasn't necessarily greater in the 1800s, but it seems to me that the relative prominence of people of comparable talent across the centuries is a key aspect of the debate. And I would concede that the best of popular music rises to the heights of the previous century (I'm a Beatles and Pink Floyd guy, myself). However, as a general trend (and it is largely cocktail party talk in the big picture), I think the 1800s had the 1900s beat.
Much of this is a matter of taste. To use classical music as an example: the 1800s were a century that saw the idea of meaning being explored within forms and aesthetic demands. After the Romantic era, composers began too heavily to manipulate the forms and aesthetic for the sake of meaning, ultimately devolving to the point at which the manipulation was the meaning. I think much the same thing happened in literature.
Of course, it was inevitably a temporary balance, but I assess that it was strongest during that century. All of the isms (Darwinism, Marxism, Industrialism... I'm being broad here) that grew out of the thinking of those times thrust the next century into political and cultural turmoil. Now, that can make for great art, but I feel that most of the art had lost an underlying ethos and subtlety that I, personalize, see as related to the essence of art and, as I'll elaborate in my response to Mark, the essence of a proper approach to life.
Justin Katz @ 12/31/2003 04:38 PM EST
Mark,
I resent your characterization of my "Nirvana." Greatly.
The fact is that the same social balance between individual liberty and common morality doesn't exist in Cuba (or any other backwards modern nation) that existed in Western Europe and the United States during the 1800s. This isn't to say that even the most-free nations were perfect in the 1800s, just that we discarded something valuable thereafter, in my opinion.
Nathaniel Hawthorne illustrates this well, particularly at the end of The Scarlet Letter. I'm too behind in my work to go in search of the passage at the end of the book, right now, but essentially, Hester opted not to be a revolutionary. Rather, she accepted the turns that her life had taken and spoke of a sort of female messiah, who would help women to achieve equality through the fullness of their own natures as women. This could be a huge topic, but I'm only interested, for now, in noting the frequent statement, in Hawthorne and in others of the better writers of his time, that while change is good we shouldn't be reckless in what we discard in our rush to achieve it.
This may, ultimately, be a fundamental difference in our worldviews, but it can be so without your jumping on me as if I'm some sort of damn reactionary simpleton.
Justin Katz @ 12/31/2003 04:52 PM EST
Justin--Derbyshire sighs and groans over the intellectually impoverished 20th century, and I guarantee you he has never even read a page of Eric Voegelin. He may not have heard of him. I doubt he has even a passing acquaintance with any great 20th century scholars.
Back to poetry. Consider the achivements of Yeats and Eliot. They are, ahem, substantial. Hehehe, they are really quite substantial...
Short stories? Joyce's Dubliners. Flannery O'Connor. Hemingway. Too many first rate Americans to mention here.
The novel? Faulkner, Waugh, Greene, Percy, Solzhenitzin, Cormac McCarthy...Whatever else they were they were major artists, and there were many just below their rank.
Constantin Brancusi's sculptures may be shy of Bernini, Michelangelo, and Canova, but people are going to be marvelling at them for many centuries to come. But only if they know about them, which Derbyshire doesn't.
Is there a French artistic study of evil in any century superior to the bookend films, Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources? Or of goodness (in its bourgeois manifestation that Derbyshire says art has forgotten) that is superior to the bookends La Gloire De Mon Pere and Le Chateau de ma Mere?
People from any century, if they could view such films, would nod in recognition of wonderful achievement. As they would of a creditable amount of 20th century art. But not if they didn't have the foggiest idea that it existed.
My point here is that when evaluating human beings and their achievements we ought to remember what the old catechisms said about the effects of original sin. We are left with intellects, dimmed but not utterly darkened, with wills weakened, but not extinguished altogether, and with inclinations towards self-exhaltation, but the incline is not so steep as to preclude our striving against it and achieving all sorts of magnificence.
That is what we are working with and against in all centuries. The 20th century was certainly the bloodiest but not the cruellest. We are so cruel in every century that there ain't much point in a parlor game about ranking them. And the 20th century saw extraordinary achievements in mercy. We fly kids from Cambodia to Boston for cleft palate operations. We separate conjoined twins and tell em to pay us when they get the money. If they can't make the trip, we fly to them. The 20th century gave us Mother Teresa who insisted on providing spiritual mercy before anything else. She is and will be an example for ages to come.
Dante got it right in depiciting us filling Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.
We are one mixed bag and so are all our centuries.
Happy New Year to you and yours. May 2004 be a year we will all look back on and savor for the blessings it brought us....
George Lee @ 12/31/2003 09:44 PM EST
Justin,
I sincerely apologize for offending you. After re-reading my response, I understand why you felt that way.
Please allow me to explain:
My reaction had more to do with the reference (and your approval) of the writings of John Derbyshire. Although I am a conservative, I find much of his commentary intellectually offensive. To me, he's sort of a well-read Archie Bunker-type - always referring to the good ol' days very often in reference to blacks, jews and of course gays. Andrew Sullivan has an award named after him referring to his 'right-wing hyperbole' and while I don't agree with everything he says (far from it) I feel his opinion with regard to the writing of Derbyshire.
Having said that, I still disagree about how society in the 1800's was superior to today. I don't believe that human nature has changed over time. Of course, the culture and surrounding environment has changed in many ways since then - technologically, financially and also socially (mostly in the way of social restraint and reserved behavior). Yet I believe that pain, suffering, injustice, rage, arrogance, depression, immorality and even evil existed at least as much then as it does now. Those in addition to behaviors such as homosexuality, rape, adultery, abortion and pre-marital sex and The main difference is that then it was not socially acceptable to acknowledge the existence of those, even within the confines of ones home but especially in public. And there wasn't 24 hour news channels and the internet to publicize and everyone's well, ..... life.
You wrote: "Society walked a fine line throughout most of the 1800's between intellect and emotion, between individualism and morality, and thereafter began to stagger about."
I respectfully disagree. I don't think society as a whole began to "stagger about". We still walk the same fine. The difference is that those who walk on the outer edges of those lines are far louder and have an abundance of megaphones - metaphorically speaking.
Again, please accept my apology.
Mark
Mark Miller @ 01/02/2004 12:36 PM EST
I'll tell ya guys: I didn't expect this to be such a hot-button issue. As we established early on, this is largely a silly argument. For my own preferences, there was a mixture of progress and tradition in the art and philosophy of the 1800s that was conducive to art that was to my tastes. This is a mushy area, of course, with the Whateveritis carrying over centuries. In music, the era that I find most potent began before the 1800s. In literature, what I would consider to be the same trend continued well into the 1900s (e.g., with Faulkner). And of course there will be spots of light outside of the trend.
I guess what it comes down to is that there are a number of ways to evaluate eras and a number of ways to align eras with centuries. I find the artwork of the Romantic era, during which form was still important, but was reaching its limits, to have been particularly compelling. Thereafter, form was often just discarded.
I don't think there are many people who, with consideration, would prefer to be transported back to that era permanently, which is to say that there has been tremendous progress for the better. What I lament is the loss of a number of principles that have fallen by the wayside as Progress has kicked and pulled away from Tradition. A more reasonable view of the Establishment Clause, for example.
Justin Katz @ 01/02/2004 04:05 PM EST
Mark,
This is an honest, as opposed to leading, question: Have you read much Derbyshire, or only in the context of jibes from Sullivan? It may not matter, because if what I consider my own argument-redeeming subtleties don't often persuade you, then I'm sure Derbyshire, who treads a little less carefully, would jar on you more.
As for Sullivan, I find him unreadable. His homosexuality dominates his thinking to such a degree that he casts clear, deliberate, honest thinking out the window when it comes up. You may not agree with that, but I find it obvious, and that quality in Sullivan has done much to push me further into socially conservative turf with respect to homosexuality.
As for the centuries, I think I may be speaking a tad more toward the cultural side of the ledger, while you're a bit more toward the social side. There's a Something that changed, generally speaking, in a way that I find detrimental to art and detrimental to society. You see it in music, in literature, in painting, in academia, and so on.
I picked line versus stagger metaphor deliberately. In essence, I think the varying forces in human nature have kept us from keeping to the most healthy, most balanced, and most moral path through history, and I think that, in cultural (particularly artistic) terms, we held the path for a bit more of an extended time in the Romantic Era.
Of course, this is all very vague, and I'm not interested, at this time, in delving into the specifics of evidence. Maybe if I hadn't been blackballed from the post-bachelor community...
Justin Katz @ 01/02/2004 04:14 PM EST
Oh. And apology accepted. Thank you for offering it, and I hope I'm staying on the reasonable side of offense, myself.
Justin Katz @ 01/02/2004 04:19 PM EST
Justin,
I'm not an avid reader of Derbyshire and will admit I became aware of him through Sullivan but I do read the National Review Online so I have read some of his work. He is witty and I've even enjoyed and agreed with him as in his recent piece mocking Al Sharpton - but come on, it's Al Sharpton - lots of material there. In any case, he comes across to me as the old-fashioned (traditional, if you may) cranky guy. I guess if you agree with his ideology you can find him charming and witty. Or if not, he's just ignorant. More often than not, I find him the latter.
As you'd probably guess, I don't find Sullivan 'unreadable'. The only pundits I find unreadable are Coulter on the conservative side and some others on the liberal side like O'Dowd, Krugman, Eleanor Clift and Eric Alterman.
I don't agree with Sullivan all the time but in general I admire him and is writing. I don't think his homosexuality dominates his writing or writes about gay issues all that often. He is a conservative assuming you think it possible that an openly gay man could be 'conservative'. He does attack at the Catholic hierarchy often during the scandal but no more than writers like yourself and other 'social conservatives' (I hate using that term) attacked the Episcopalian leadership during its scandal.
As for the centuries, I was speaking (actually 'defending') more about the social issues than the cultural-artistic side. I agree that Something has changed in ways that are detrimental to society which is shown in today's music, literature, academia, and so on - but I beleive that change is much more recent than in the last century. To me, the negative change began in the late 1980's.
But that's just my 'artistic' opinion.
Mark
Mark Miller @ 01/02/2004 09:55 PM EST