More on a North Korean at Columbia University
After I’d posted my previous post, I was mulling over other possible causes of the pervasive hostility to Western civilization of tenured radicals in our universities, and came across this choice quotation from the German novelist Thomas Mann:
Deep in our hearts we felt that the world, our world, could no longer go on as it had. We were familiar with this world of peace and frivolous manners……..A ghastly world that will no longer exist - or will not exist once the storm has passed! Wasn’t it swarming with vermin of the spirit like maggots? Didn’t it seethe and stink of civilization’s decay?
Mann wrote these words in 1914 in an article called ‘Thoughts in Wartime’ in which to the surprise of most of his admirers he declared himself a fervent German nationalist and militarist. Just in case anyone thought this to be a momentary aberration, Mann went on to make his belligerent position even more explicit in Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918).
My attention was drawn to the quotation by Mark Lilla’s essay about Mann in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books (1). I was struck by how Mann’s celebration of the cleansing destructiveness of war chimes with the more extreme ‘Wokeist’ tirades against ‘Western civilization.’ Although the circumstances are very different, there is a link between now and then in the underlying contempt for liberal humanist culture, and the atavistic urge to destroy that seems to pervade radicalism so that something better can rise from the ashes.
As Lilla points out, Mann succumbed to the clichéd opposition between decadent ‘civilization’ and authentic ‘culture,’ defending the virile latter, which is in danger of being destroyed by the ‘effeminate’ pretensions of the former. These old tropes are no longer credible but a new kind of distinction is being made today, which seems to line up both Western ‘civilization’ and ‘culture’ against the same wall ready for the firing squad of identity politics..
All roads lead back to Friedrich Nietzsche. It was Nietzsche who most famously celebrated ‘creative destruction’ for its regenerative energies. The new morality must stand on the ruins of the old. In Thus sake Zarthustra, Nietzsche declared; ‘Whoever must be a creator always annihilates’. It seems certain that, like so many young men in Europe, Mann breathed the heady perfume of the Nietzschean celebration of war that pervades Zarathustra, lapping up in phrases like this: ‘Your enemy you shall seek, your war you shall wage – for your thoughts. And if your thoughts be vanquished, then your honesty should still find cause for triumph in that. You should love peace as a means to new wars – and the short peace more than the long.’
Now, I’m of course not saying that those protesting against the inequities of Western civilization and culture today are baying for war. What I mean is that they too have inherited a powerful strain of the Nietzschean virus. In other words, they recognize the degeneration of the West is such that nothing less than a cultural earthquake will bring about change for the better. Nietzsche was demanding shock therapy because he believed that a better world was possible. His stance was not so much negation for its own sake as an affirmation of what could be. Things as they are must be assailed relentlessly. For Nietzsche, this was partly because he believed challenge and opposition were valuable in their own right as they foster strength. But more importantly, it was because he believed that through destruction the new will be brought into being. In the same way, the advocates of diversity, inclusivity, and equity see affirmation as necessarily requiring negation. The problem is that, just as was the case with Nietzsche, ‘Wokeism’ seems much more eloquent, versatile and persuasive in relation to the task of tearing down than it does in designing the architecture for a better society. Destruction eclipses creation.
For Nietzsche, as for Mann, part of the problem was that the artist had become too politically engaged, and had forgotten the true calling of art, which stands apart from the realities to which politics draws attention. Today, the reign of the politics of identity within the arts has collapsed any faith in their capacity to have value and meaning in themselves apart from in relation to issues of social diversity, inclusivity and equity. It isn’t just that the rarefied ideas of ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ or formalism have been abandoned, it’s that as a set of social practices the arts are no longer considered to have cultural significance on any other level than that of identity politics.
Notes:
Mark Lilla, ‘The Writer Apart’, NYRB, May 13, 2021.