69. Watching Students Riot While Teaching Christian Authors

That was a painful sight, bad students throwing bricks and good students smiling on them as they screwed up their revolution. Few of us could explain it — or much else connected with the riots.

Old-time Christians could explain it, of course.  They had a scheme into which the rioting students fit perfectly. Human beings rioted because since Adam's fall they were born to do evil. If they weren't reborn in Christ, they'd keep doing it.

The name "Yahoo" brought in the whole Christian scheme. It was the name Jonathan Swift, an Anglican priest, used in Gulliver's Travels for the unregenerate man. Those university people who couldn't bring in the Christian scheme (out of scientific scruple, say) or didn't know it (out of curricular neglect of the humanities, say) were left in doubt.

I wasn't in doubt long because I was teaching a lot of Christian authors at the time. One of them, John Milton, gave me not only the scheme but the warning to political humanity that went with it. It's so apt and so well put that I'm going to quote it here in full. The archangel Michael is speaking to Adam, who has just recoiled from a vision of Nimrod, the first tyrant.

Justly thou abhorr'st

That Son, who on the quiet state of men

Such trouble brought, affecting to subdue

Rational Liberty; yet know withal,

Since thy original lapse, true Liberty

Is lost, which always with right Reason dwells

Twinn'd, and from her has no dividual being:

Reason in man obscured, or not obeyed,

Immediately inordinate desires

And upstart Passions catch the Government

From reason and to servitude reduce

Man till then free. Therefore since he permits

Within himself unworthy Powers to reign

Over free Reason, God in judgment just

Subjects him from without to violent Lords,

Who oft as undeservedly enthral

His outward freedom. Tyranny must be,

Though to the tyrant thereby no excuse.

Paradise Lost, XII, 79-96

Teaching Milton to a class with revolutionaries of the sixties in it was thrilling. Milton's revolutionary credentials were impeccable, and so easily dramatized. He had come hurrying back from Italy as soon as he heard of his friends getting engaged in Parliament's stand against the king, he had joined the movement, he had risen, he had become propaganda minister in Cromwell's revolutionary government, he had defended the killing of the king before a Europe full of threatening monarchies. And all the while he was writing those essays on divorce and freedom of the press whose progressive ideas would resound for centuries. You couldn't ask for a better revolutionary.

And here he was coming out for the old internal hierarchy, where reason's place over the passions was firmly fixed. It was Plato, it was Dante, it was Shakespeare, it was medieval, renaissance, and, yes, even enlightenment. It was pretty much the whole Western intellectual establishment, up to the romantic period.

There were a lot of other authors, just in my undergraduate courses, ready to put sixties behavior in perspective for us. Herman Melville, in "The House-Top" (printed out, below) showed us why we were so slow at recognizing the Yahoo, or the Yahoo in ourselves: we were a romantic nation. T. E. Hulme, in an essay in our criticism anthology, made romanticism clear. It taught that "man was by nature good," and that "it was only bad laws and customs that had suppressed him." Its opposite, classicism, taught that man was "an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal," but that he could be "disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent." (You can read the whole essay, "Romanticism and Classicism," at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/238694)

Not everybody will say that that is moral clarity but I'm going to say it. I didn't know what I was seeing in my students and T.E. Hulme cleared away the fog. There were the students, there were my authors, and there was my country, all clearly placed. My seeing that may not count for much in the larger scheme but this is about personal morality — the person being me.

Like many moral clarifications this one was satisfying because I was in the picture, and standing in a very good light. Professors of the humanities, especially English professors, taught the tradition by which "something fairly decent" could be got out of this creature. I was particularly privileged because I, through Milton, taught the revolutionary tradition, the discipline and order in it.

Reading Hulme in preparation for a class, reading him anew with images of the OU riots crowding in, was the curtain-parting moment of insight. It deserved to be called an epiphany.

Well, if "epiphany" is the word, I'll use it for the moral of the story: don't trust epiphanies. They don't dispel the fog for long. T. E. Hulme, it turns out, was a fascist. Or, in 1908. a fascist precursor. He ran around with the crowd at Action Fancaise, whose founder was the anti-semite Charles Maurras.

But that wasn't the only thing obscuring the moral picture. Other clouds were coming over, as I'll show in the next post.

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The House-Top

Note: When the Union began drafting soldiers to fight the Civil War affected New Yorkers rioted for four days, attacking mainly blacks — the cause of the war — and hanging scores from lampposts in the city. Arson was directed mainly at black institutions. The mobs went on to general destruction and grew until they overpowered the police. The riots ended only when a regiment marched up from Washington (under the command of a colonel referred to below as "wise Draco") and in effect re-conquered the city.

No sleep. The sultriness pervades the air
And blinds the brain—a dense oppression, such
As tawny tigers feel in matted shades,
Vexing their blood and making apt for ravage.
Beneath the stars the roofy desert spreads
Vacant as Libya. All is hushed near by.
Yet fitfully from far breaks a mixed surf
Of muffled sound, the Atheist roar of riot.
Yonder, where parching Sirius set in drought,
Balefully glares red Arson—there—and there.
The town is taken by its rats—ship-rats
And rats of the wharves. All civil charms
And priestly spells which late held hearts in awe—
Fear-bound, subjected to a better sway
Than sway of self; these like a dream dissolve
And man rebounds whole aeons back in nature.
Hail to the low dull rumble, dull and dead,
And ponderous drag that jars the wall.
Wise Draco comes, deep in the midnight roll
Of black artillery; he comes, though late;
In code corroborating Calvin's creed
And cynic tyrannies of honest kings;
He comes, nor parlies; and the Town, redeemed,
Gives thanks devout; nor, being thankful, heeds
The grimy slur on the Republic's faith implied,
Which holds that man is naturally good,
And—more—is Nature's Roman, never to be scourged.

48. What if not?

 

What if there had been no bailout and no stimulus? What if China had not instituted the one-child policy? What if, each time I criticized Barack Obama or Deng Xiaoping for their part in those actions, I were required to imagine the consequences of their not being done, or to say what I would have done at the time?

Yesterday I heard, probably on CNBC, the 553rd Republican complain that the bailout or the stimulus had failed and on the same day read in the Economist (7-23-11) that the one-child policy had had oh-so-many bad effects. The politician did not say what, in his mind, would constitute success, or how he, at the time, would have put us on the road to it. The journalist said nothing about the bad effect, over-population, that the one-child policy was designed to counter, and did not consider what a multi-child China might now look like.

Reviewing world events is like reading a novel: we can do it sharply or dully. Dull readers of Billy Budd see Billy hanged and say, "Oh this is unbearable! This good man! These cruel men!" Sharp readers see Captain Vere hanging Billy and say, "This is unbearable! This good man! This world where choice is so limited and good men have to be so cruel!"

Captain Vere hangs Billy in order to prevent a mutiny. It's a choice that can be justified only by the closest attention to Melville's world, a world in which England's victory over Napoleonic France depends on such choices, however multiple. Sharp readers ask, "What if Billy had not been hanged?" They answer, "England would be defeated." They visualize that defeat and don't want it. They sympathize with Vere. Dull readers deplore Vere's actions and go no further.

We're all potentially sharp readers of novels and observers of world events. What dulls us? Distance from the action, according to Melville. "Little ween the snug cardplayers in the cabin of the responsibilities of the sleepless man on the bridge."  Physical distance can do it, but so can imaginative distance. Abstractions dull us, as reformed Marxists well know.  Passionate adherence to one cause, one value, dulls us, as debt-limit Republicans should know.  Anything that keeps us from putting ourselves into a scene and feeling it, feeling the forces operating there, feeling all the forces, will dull us.