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Puddleglum & The Savage

This column is why we rejoice that The New York Times employs Ross Douthat.  He explores the relevance of C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley, who both perished within hours of JFK’s death — both to the present day, and to the JFK myth itself. Excerpt: In effect, both Huxley and Lewis looked at a utilitarian’s paradise […]

This column is why we rejoice that The New York Times employs Ross Douthat.  He explores the relevance of C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley, who both perished within hours of JFK’s death — both to the present day, and to the JFK myth itself. Excerpt:

In effect, both Huxley and Lewis looked at a utilitarian’s paradise — a world where all material needs are met, pleasure is maximized and pain eliminated — and pointed out what we might be giving up to get there: the entire vertical dimension in human life, the quest for the sublime and the transcendent, for romance and honor, beauty and truth.

Two passages from their work illustrate this point — that comfort purchased by sacrificing transcendence might not be worth the cost. The first comes from Lewis’s Narnia novel “The Silver Chair,” in which a character named Puddleglum confronts a queen who has confined the heroes in an underground kingdom, and lulled them with the insistence that the underground world is all there is — that ideas like the sun and sky are dangerous wishful thinking, undermining their immediate contentment.

“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things,” Puddleglum replies — “trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones … We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow.”

His next example is the character of the Savage in Brave New World, who rejects the world of controlled comfort and pleasure, and “everything that’s been purged in the name of pleasure and order — historical memory, art and literature, religion and philosophy, the tragic sense.” I won’t quote that passage here because that’s taking too much from the Douthat column, but do read the whole thing, and note what Huxley and Lewis have to do with our need to hero-worship JFK.

This column struck me acutely tonight because I’m reading right now a deeply enjoyable popular history called The Cave And The Light, by Arthur Herman. It’s about how the whole of Western intellectual history can be summed up as a dialectic between Plato and Aristotle. In short, Plato is the idealist, and Aristotle the realist. Plato is the secular saint of poets, mystics, revolutionaries, and communitarians; Aristotle is the secular saint of scientists, scholars, and individualists. Though Herman is pretty clearly on the side of Aristotle, he does a good job of showing how we need both insights. Here’s an excerpt:

Politics on Plato’s terms becomes prescriptive, a series of formulae for shaping man and society into what they should be rather than accepting things as they are. Politics on Aristotle’s terms will be largely descriptive, in which the more we discover about human nature, the more we recognize our powerlessness to effect real change.

… Since World War II, political theorists have been all too aware of the dangers of Plato’s approach to politics, of reaching too high and too fast to make our utopian hopes a reality. The Philosopher Ruler can turn out to be Cambodia’s Pol Pot or the Ayatollah Khomeini.

But there are dangers inherent in Aristotle’s approach as well. They involve an acceptance of the status quo that can shade into timidity, and rationalizing injustices with a casual shrug of “that’s the way things are.” Aristotle’s philosophy emphasizes the necessity of change, even progress. Yet paradoxically, his insistence on being the detached observer, on analyzing rather than influencing events, winds up providing the excuse for institutional inertia and apathy. This is what happened when his influence grew too strong in the universities of medieval Europe and when scholars turned to Aristotle to justify appalling episodes like the slave trade and the conquest of the New World.

Herman says elsewhere that the Platonists are forever looking backward into the past for the better world that was, and Aristotelians are forever looking forward into the future for the better world that would be. Reading this discussion of their politics, I found myself trying to figure out which of the two philosophers was more likely to be favored by American conservatives, and which by American liberals. It turns out that neither side can fully claim them.

As a religious believer and traditionalist conservative, I’m more Platonic by nature, but Aristotle resonates with my conservative distrust of progressivist ideals, which seem to me to be utopian in their disregard for what we know of human nature from long experience. But a secular liberal could easily invert this claim, extolling Aristotle for his focus on experience as a guide to truth, but also claiming a part of Plato’s idealism when it suits his purposes.

Look at the same-sex marriage debate. A conservative like me, driven by religious ideals, in turn idealizes the traditional family, and is deeply skeptical of the project to revolutionize marriage, in part because it strikes me as hubristic and utopian, and a foolish move to overturn a status quo that serves human nature. A pro-SSM liberal is no less driven by idealism, though drawing from a different source, and also takes an Aristotelian line about how same-sex marriage does not violate human nature, but is actually more accommodating of how people actually live today than the traditionalist conception of marriage.

This brings to mind the visionary Russian sociologist Pitirim Sorokin‘s concept of three kinds of culture: Ideational (reality is spiritual), Sensate (reality is material), and Idealistic (a combination of the two). Obviously the first is Platonic, the second Aristotelian, and the third a balance. We are, in Sorokin’s view, deeply into a Sensate phase, and have been since the High Middle Ages (Idealistic) gave way to the Renaissance. We are overdue for a rebalancing, Sorokin said. The leftist thinker Morris Berman is onto Sorokin.  But I digress. Anyway, Arthur Herman has written a smart, fun book.

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