The End of Humanism

Clive James is a cultural historian; this title alone makes him a rare bird. Clive in the everyday is known as a commentator, critic and television presenter. He relishes his public persona because it gives him an excuse to travel and the time to keep his head buried in books. The title of his masterwork, forty years in the making is, Cultural Amnesia, Necessary Memories From History and the Arts. I tend to think of it as a remembrance of culture gone missing.

What was once known as Western Humanism abruptly ended with the Nazi putsch of 1938. Lenin and Stalin advanced the end of liberal thought long before Hitler took up the truncheon. Communism was just as repressive as the National Socialism of the Nazis. Both attacked liberal thought, the Nazis were more racially directed but the Commies were in a way scarier because any misdirected thought might end a citizen in the gulag. For forty years every Russian waited for the knock on the door. In Germany if you were a Jew you knew you were screwed. This enabled some of the better minds with quick reflexes an opportunity to bolt away from the forward march of the storm troopers. This Diaspora had the effect of diluting the culture. Artists, engineers, philosophers and free thinkers were interred, executed or cast to the four winds. Culture was buried in the war effort.

Remember, Humanism emerged as an answer to the unfettered Nationalism that caused the conflagration known as the WWI. It was too intelligent, sublime and benign to survive the political realities of fascism.

After the war Secular Consumerism replaced Western Humanism. With Hitler out of the way western society was able to concentrate on the bottom line and focus it's sights on the evils of Communism. As a result all liberal thought became suspect. Even today, candidates are reluctant to use the 'L' word. The mere mention of socialization of any public policy is tantamount to political suicide. The public trust is extended to unfeeling corporations; corrupt legislators and power hungry executives. We operate under false assumptions, suffer misdirection, squander faith and endure hopelessness. The fleeting dazzle of pop culture and the worship of material things insures mediocrity and the dull patina of misplaced ethos.

Pope Benedict rails against secular humanism only because the church is such a profitable entity, to attack consumerism would be to place his bottom line in peril. Modern religiosity is becoming more fanatical; evangelical fundamentalism and radical Islam are far more similar than discordant.

Without the hope of substantive culture, intelligent discourse and meaningful appreciation of art, history and plural wisdom we are doomed to the comfortable sludge of an overheated society that melts along with the failing physical world.

Ken Burns who now is about to air his history of WWII remarked that he interviewed many high school students after screenings and the majority were under the impression that the U.S. fought along side the Nazis against the Russian horde. Talk about missing the bus, someone tell George Bush all the kids have been left behind.

My favorite character from the annals of Viennese café society was a Jewish lay about named Peter Altenberg. Peter was a mooch, a womanizer and a convivial café drunk. Among all the bluster, argument and intelligent discourse of salon society Peter had the gift of being succinct. Peter could sum up, paraphrase or catch the drift of complicated premises and render a dead on analysis in a poetic sentence or two. Like everyone else of the time Peter wrote but he rarely put more than a paragraph or two on a page. That was all he needed. Peter Altenberg was the father of the one liner.

Ten bad assumptions that cripple society and bury culture, and there are more:

Laissez faire capitalism is beneficial
More is better
Technology is good in and of itself
God is
God is a white guy
Specialization is better than generalization
Sex, race or ethnicity matters
Art is optional
Man may subjugate nature
Trust politics

"There are only two things that can destroy a healthy man: love trouble, ambition and financial catastrophe. And that's already three things, and there are more"
- Peter Altenberg -