Thinking of George Steiner and what survives

Today is a sobering day for me. When you live in California, you have to decide for yourself when Autumn has arrived. And it did today, for me, in a very bad year.And the only verbal vehicle I could ride was a sentence I remembered from George Steiner's "In Bluebeard's Castle" (1971):

"In locating Hell above ground, we have passed out of the major order and symmetries of Western civilization."

I don't exactly remember how I came into possession of that book--my guess is that it was used in a class my brainiac stepbrother took at Notre Dame, and was part of my habitual stealing of books from my own home.

The above quote from that book, of course reminds me of our responsibility in creating Iraq as it is today, though the author is referencing the Holocaust. If you accept his premise, it has been some time since we passed out of the order etc. of Western civilization.

I want to hijack his idea and say that, in Iraq, we took America down, too. We were attacked, and somehow decided to finish ourselves off.

Thanks to those internet tubes, I was able to re-read the Steiner piece instead of having to dig through boxes of 6 years unpacked books.And this is what stood out to me:

--
"The wide-scale reversion to torture and mass murder, the ubiquitous use of hunger and imprisonment as political means -mark not only a crisis of culture but, quite conceivably, an abandonment of the rational order of man. It may well be that it is a mere fatuity, an indecency to debate of the definition of culture in the age of the gas oven, of the arctic camps, of napalm. The topic may belong solely to the past history of hope. But we should not take this contingency to be a natural fact of life, a platitude. We must keep in sharp focus its hideous novelty or renovation. We must keep vital in ourselves a sense of scandal so overwhelming that it affects every significant aspect of our position in history and society. We have, as Emily Dickinson would have said, to keep the soul terribly surprised. I cannot stress this enough. To Voltaire and Diderot the bestial climate of our national and social conflicts would have seemed a lunatic return to barbarism. To most intelligent men and women of the nineteenth century a prediction that torture and massacre were soon to be endemic again in "civilized" Europe would have seemed a nightmarish joke. There is nothing natural about our present condition. There is no self-evident logic or dignity in our current knowledge that "anything is possible." In fact, such knowledge corrupts and lowers the threshold of outrage (only Kierkegaard foresaw both the inchoate possibility and the corruption). The numb prodigality of our acquaintance with horror is a radical human defeat."

•  Oooh, post a tip jar!

  I love "In Bluebeard's Castle"!  :-)

  Your diary is right on the money.

  by BleedingKnuckleLiberal on Sat Oct 28, 2006 at 12:27:52 PM PDT

  •  enthusiastically rec'd ........n/t

    by grassrootsbloggerdtcom on Sat Oct 28, 2006 at 01:46:34 PM PDT

•  whoops

  forgot `the `Steiner `for `free:

  http://www.anti-rev.org/...

  by Miss Devore on Sat Oct 28, 2006 at 12:32:35 PM PDT

  •  The whole passage is germane:

    "The concentration and death camps of the twentieth century, wherever they exist, under whatever regime, are Hell made immanent. They are the transference of Hell from below the earth to its surface. They are the deliberate enactment of a long, precise imagining ... In the camps the millenary pornography of fear and vengeance cultivated in the Western mind by Christian doctrines of damnation was realized.

    Two centuries after Voltaire, and at a time when these doctrines had all but vanished into picturesque formality? This is the point. Much has been said of man's bewilderment and solitude after the disappearance of Heaven from active belief. We know of the neutral emptiness of the skies and of the terrors it has brought. But it may be that the loss of Hell is the more severe dislocation. It may be that the mutation of Hell into metaphor left a formidable gap in the coordinates of location, of psychological recognition in the Western mind. The absence of the familiar damned opened a vortex which the modern totalitarian state filled. To have neither Heaven nor Hell is to be intolerably deprived and alone in a world gone flat. Of the two, Hell proved the easier to re-create. (The pictures had always been more detailed.)

    In our current barbarism an extinct theology is at work, a body of transcendent reference whose slow, incomplete death has produced surrogate, parodistic forms. The epilogue to belief, the passage of religious belief into hollow convention, seems to be a more dangerous process than the philosophes anticipated. The structures of decay are toxic. Needing Hell, we have learned how to build and run it on earth. A few miles from Goethe's Weimar or on the isles of Greece. No skill holds greater menace. Because we have it and are using it on ourselves, we are now in a postculture. In locating Hell above ground, we have passed out of the major order and symmetries of Western civilization."

    by Bob Love on Sat Oct 28, 2006 at 12:44:19 PM PDT

•  Nostalgia is a longing for a past...

  ...that never existed. Or something like that.

  I suppose it could be said that Western civilization has pretty much always found ways to locate its fabricated hells above-ground.

  To most intelligent men and women of the nineteenth century a prediction that torture and massacre were soon to be endemic again in "civilized" Europe would have seemed a nightmarish joke.

  Please. Torture and massacre were part and parcel of the colonial culture of 19th century Europe.

  I agree that there is nothing natural about our present condition or its previous manifestations, and that our acquaintance with horror is a radical human defeat. Still, to allege that there was a time when this was not so...seems unreasonably nostalgic.

  by luckydog on Sat Oct 28, 2006 at 12:45:19 PM PDT

  •  True, to the extent that

    many of us, especially academics who read the past through the lens of its greatest minds, think of the era of Voltaire, Mozart, Jefferson, et al. as the Age of Reason, whereas the mire of economics, history and ordinary human life tells a very different tale.

    But the leading western nations were once predominantly led by well-educated people, and it's to this governing class of "intelligent men and women of the nineteenth century" that Steiner refers.

    In the past century, however, the perils of democracy have too often outsripped its promise, and given us totalitarianisms of right and left.

    So I think the issue is not which elements of society lag behind its ideals, but which elements of society control the levers of power - and how are they using this power.  To be "led" by a self-educated ignoramus proud of his ignorance and arrogant to his intellectual and moral betters is a blatant horror when the nation he "leads" is the world's only superpower.  

    Under Reagan I was ashamed for America.  Under Bush I constantly question whether remaining a US citizen makes me complicit in fascism and all its terrible consequences.

    by Bob Love on Sat Oct 28, 2006 at 01:13:46 PM PDT

    •  So

      Under Reagan I was ashamed for America.  Under Bush I constantly question whether remaining a US citizen makes me complicit in fascism and all its terrible consequences.

      work for change, and quit yer damn cryin'.
      Do the best you can, keep your karma on the point, and don't give up.
      But the day you decide to no longer be a US citizen, email me at the addy in my profile, and I will personally pay your airfare to anywhere in the world you want to go.
      Love America?
      Fix her.
      Hate America?
      Get the FUCK OUT.

      by kestrel9000 on Sat Oct 28, 2006 at 01:17:04 PM PDT

    •  you seem to offer another dose...

      ...of nostalgia.

      ...the leading western nations were once predominantly led by well-educated people, and it's to this governing class of "intelligent men and women of the nineteenth century" that Steiner refers.

      Such "well-educated" and "intelligent" leaders were the folks who devised, implemented, and expanded the European colonial systems.

      by luckydog on Sat Oct 28, 2006 at 01:31:56 PM PDT

•  disaster

  keys

  died.

  adios,kos.

  heh.

  by Miss Devore on Sat Oct 28, 2006 at 01:44:39 PM PDT