Is it just a symbol?

For the majority, one suspects, of ‘practising’ Christians — and what does ‘practising’ entail in this context? — the Crucifixion remains an unexamined inheritance, a symbolic marker, of familiar but vestigial recognitions. This marker is revered and invoked in conventional idiom and gestures. Its concrete status, the enormity of suffering and injustice it incarnates, would appear to have faded from felt immediacy.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 381

Drink the hemlock

Every time a community attempts, by censorship, ostracism or killing to silence a moral-intellectual outsider within its walls, to gag or efface his intolerable queries, it lives a Socratic hour. But concomitantly, the thinker, the scientist, the artist, the ironist or satirist who presses in extremis his deconstructive doubts, who sets his addiction to what he takes to be the truth above the inherited beliefs and compromises essential to the continuance of the city, repeats the Socratic provocation. Consciously or not, whether on a secular level (that of a Karl Kraus) or on a religious-philosophic level (that of a Simone Weil), the ‘No-sayer’ to injustice, to human greed and stupidity, is not only risking but soliciting a Socratic destiny.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 378

A higher loyalty

The ‘patriotism’ of the truth—seeker is antithetical to Rousseau’s civic option. The sole citizenship of the cleric is that of a critical humanism. He knows not only that nationalism is a sort of madness, a virulent infection edging the species towards mutual massacre. He knows that it signifies an abstention from free and clear thought and from the disinterested pursuit of justice. The man or woman at home in the text is, by definition, a conscientious objector to the vulgar mystique of the flag and the anthem, to the sleep of reason which proclaims ‘my country, right or wrong’, to the pathos and eloquence of collective mendacities on which the nation- state - be it a mass-consumer mercantile technocracy or a totalitarian oligarchy — builds its power and aggressions. The locus of truth is always extraterritorial; its diffusion is made clandestine by the barbed wire and watch-towers of national dogma.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 322

Moribund

The choice is not a comfortable one. But perhaps the concept of choice is itself a fallacy. As I have implied throughout, the intellectual, the inebriate of thought is, like the artist or philosopher, though to a lesser degree, born and not made (nascitur non fit, as every schoolboy used to know). He has no choice except to be himself or to betray himself. If ‘happiness’ in the definitions central to the theory and practice of ‘the American way of life’ seems to him the greater good, if he does not suspect ‘happiness’ in almost any guise of being the despotism of the ordinary, he is in the wrong business. They order these matters better in the world of the despot, Artists, thinkers, writers receive the unwavering tribute of political scrutiny and repression. The KGB and the serious writer are in total accord when both know, when both act on the knowledge that a sonnet (Pasternak simply citing the first line of a Shakespeare sonnet in the venomous presence of Zhdanov), a novel, a scene from a play can be the power-house of human affairs, that there is nothing more charged with the detonators of dreams and action than the word, particularly the word known by heart. (It is striking and perfectly consequent that America, the final archive, should also be the land whose schooling has all but eradicated memorization. In the microfiche, the poem lies embalmed; recited inwardly, it is terribly alive.) The scholar in the Soviet Union understands precisely what the KGB censor is after when he seizes and minutely scans his article on Hegel. It is in such articles, in the debates they unleash, that lie the motor forces of social crisis.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 302

Our national myth

The American Adam is not an innocent — far from it. But he is a corrector of errors. He has, after its brief and creative role in the New England temper, all but abandoned even the metaphor of original sin. The notion that the human condition is, ontologically, one of ‘dis-grace’, that cruelty and social injustice are not mechanical defects but ‘primaries’ or ‘elementals’ in history, will seem to him defeatist mysticism. No less so the hunch that there are between tragic historicism, between the concept of ‘fallen man’ and the generation of the unageing monuments of intellect and of art, instrumental affinities. It may be that these monuments, born of autistic vision, are counterstatements to a world felt, known to be ‘fallen’. There is in eminent art and thought a manichaean rebellion. ‘A truth,’ taught Alain, the French maitre de pensée (itself a phrase significantly untranslatable), ‘is the refusal of a body.’ There can be no didactic sophistry more un-American, no ideal more alien to the pragmatic immanence of ‘the pursuit of happiness’.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 298

Is the price too high?

Civilization, in the elevated and formal sense, does not guarantee civility, does not inhibit social violence and waste. No mob, no storm-troop has ever hesitated to come down the Rue Descartes. It is from exquisite Renaissance loggias that totalitarian hooligans proclaim their will. Great metaphysicians can become rectors of ancient universities in, at least, the early days of the Reich. Indeed, the relations between evaluative appreciation of serious music, the fine arts, serious literature on the one hand and political behaviour on the other are so oblique that they invite the suspicion that high culture, far from arresting barbarism, can give to barbarism a peculiar zest and veneer. American thinkers on the theory and practice of culture have long sensed this paradox. The price which the Athenian oligarchy, the Florentine city-regime, the France of Louis XIV or the Germany of Heidegger and Furtwangler have paid for their aesthetic-intellectual brilliance is too steep. The sacrifice of social justice, of distributive equity of sheer decency of political usage implicit in this price is simply too great. If a choice must be made, let humane mediocrity prevail. Feeling the manifest force of this line of insight, having articulated this force within its own expressive means, the American cultural establishment is sceptical of itself and apologetic towards the community at large. This self-doubt and defensiveness have produced a subtle range of attitudes all the way from mandarin withdrawal to public penitence.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 295–96

Pseudo-literacy and the U.S. school

One cannot, beyond a severely limited and superficial degree, inject sensibility and intellectual rigour into the mass of society. One can, instead, trivialize, water down, package mundanely, the cultural values and products towards which the common man is being directed. The specific result is the disaster of pseudo-literacy and pseudo-numeracy in the American high school and in much of what passes for so-called ‘higher education’. The scale and reach of this disaster have become a commonplace of desperate or resigned commentary. The predigested trivia, the prolix and pompous didacticism, the sheer dishonesty of presentation which characterize the curriculum, the teaching, the administrative politics of daily life in the high school, in the junior college, in the open—admission ‘university’ (how drastically America has devalued this proud term), constitute the fundamental scandal in American culture. A fair measure of what is taught, be it in mathematics, be it in history, be it in foreign languages, indeed with regard to native speech, is, in the words of the President of Johns Hopkins, ‘worse than nothing’. It has produced what he calls ‘America’s international illiteracy’ or what Quentin Anderson entitles ‘the awful state of intellectual affairs in this country’.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 293–94

Living a lie

The adoption, on a continental scale, of an eschatology of monetary-material success represents a radical cut in regard to the Periclean—Florentine typology of social meaning. The central and categorical imperative that to make money is not only the customary and socially most useful way in which a man can spend his earthly life — an imperative for which there is, certainly, precedent in the European mercantile and pre—capitalist ethos — is one thing. The eloquent conviction that to make money is also the most interesting thing he can do, is quite another. And it is precisely this conviction which is singularly American (the only culture, correlatively, in which the beggar carries no aura of sanctity or prophecy). The consequences are, literally, incommensurable. The ascription of monetary worth defines and democratizes every aspect of professional status. The lower-paid — the teacher, the artist out of the limelight, the scholar — are the object of subtle courtesies of condescension not, or not primarily, because of their failure to earn well, but because this failure makes them less interesting to the body politic. They are more or less massively, more or less consciously patronized, because the ‘claims of the ideal’ (Ibsen’s expression) are, in the American grain, those of material progress and recompense. Fortuna is fortune. That there should be Halls of Fame for baseball-players but few complete editions of classic American authors; that an American university of accredited standing should, very recently, have dismissed thirty tenured teachers on the grounds of utmost fiscal crisis while flying its football squads to Hawaii for a single game; that the athlete and the broker, the plumber and the pop-star, should earn far more than the pedagogue — these are facts of life for which we can cite parallels in other societies, even in Pericleian Athens or the Florence of Galileo. What we cannot parallel is the American resolve to proclaim and to institutionalize the valuations which underlie such facts. It is the sovereign candour of American philistinism which numbs a European sensibility; it is the frank and sometimes sophisticated articulation of a fundamentally, of an ontologically immanent economy of human purpose. That just this ‘immanence’ and ravenous appetite for material reward is inherent in the vast majority of the human species; that we are a poor beast compounded of banality and greed; that it is not the spiky fruits of the spirit but creature comforts we lunge for — all this looks more than likely. The current ‘Americanization’ of much of the globe, the modulation from the sacramental to the cargo-cult whether it be in the jungles of New Guinea or the hamburger—joints, laundromats and supermarkets of Europe, points to this conclusion. It may be that America has quite simply been more truthful about human nature than any previous society. If this is so, it will have been the evasion of such truth, the imposition of arbitrary dreams and ideals from above, which has made possible the high places and moments of civilization. Civilization will have endured after Pericles by virtue, to quote Ibsen again, of a ‘life-lie’. Russian or European power relations and institutions have laboured to enforce this ‘lie’. America has exposed it or, pragmatically, passed it by. The difference is profound.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 289–90

Is there such a thing as American culture?

This, then, is my surmise: the dominant apparatus of American high culture is that of custody. The institutions of learning and of the arts constitute the great archive, inventory, catalogue, storehouse, rummage-room of western civilization. American curators purchase, restore, exhibit the arts of Europe. American editors and bibliographers annotate, emend, collate, the European classics and the moderns. American musicians perform, Often incomparably, the music which has poured out of Europe from Guillaume de Machaut to Mahler and Stravinsky. Together, curators, restorers, librarians, thesis writers, performing artists in America underwrite, reinsure the imperiled products of the ancient Mediterranean and the European spirit. America is, on a scale of unprecedented energy and munificence, the Alexandria, the Byzantium of the ‘middle kingdom’ (that proud Chinese term) of thought and of art which was Europe, and which may be Europe still.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 281–82

<idle musing>
Fascinating idea—and probably true. I can't think of a single original (nontechnology) idea that has sprung from the United States.
</idle musing>

The U.S. and self-perception

In short: the Puritan programme of a break with the ‘corrupt ancientness’ and hereditary taint of European history, the great hunger of successive waves of immigrants for a new dispensation free of the terrors and injustice which had marked their communal past, have played a central role in the American imagination and in the rhetoric of American identity. But they do not afford the actual products of American culture a calendar of Arcadian youth, a time of special grace. On the contrary. American culture has stood, from its outset, on giant shoulders. Behind Puritan style lay the sinew of English Tudor, Elizabethan and Jacobean prose. Behind the foundation of American universities lay the experience of Oxford and Cambridge, Aristotelian logic and the mathematics of Galileo and Newton. British empiricism and the world of the philosophes underwrite the Jeffersonian vision of an American enlightenment. Goethe stands behind Emerson as Shakespeare and Milton do behind Melville. It may be, as D. H. Lawrence found, that American culture is ‘very old’ precisely because it has been heir to so much. The New England divines would concur. By the early eighteenth century, William Cowper testified to ‘God’s withdrawal’ from a new world whose conditions of spirit and civil practice were no better than in the old. The idiom of his testimony was that of Jeremiah and the Cataline orations, of Juvenal and the Aesopian satirists of the European reformation.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 270

The source of the law

If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code. It is the modulation from one to the other, as commentary and commentary on commentary seek to hammer it out, which is one of the centres of The Trial (kabbalistic geometries know of ordered constructs with several centres). Set beside Kafka’s readings of Kafka, ours are, unavoidably, feeble.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 241

Live as guests

To be a guest among other men is a possibility. All of us, I firmly believe are guests of the planet, of its ecology. We did not make our world, we were thrown into it. We are born without knowing why. We haven’t planned it. We are trustees of a dwindling space for survival. We had better learn very quickly that we are guests, or there will be not much left to live in.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 237

Textuality

Those who have produced canonic texts and textualities by which they organize their politics — be they the Koran, the Scriptures, the Kapital — are not everywhere. And there are many cultures that have, until now, refused textuality, and which are now paying a bitter price for what may be a perfectly natural condition of their being.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 236

It ain't easy!

It would be fantastically arrogant to suppose that we know that we have evolved into a kind of creature that likes living with those that smell different, look different, sound different. Sit in a railway carriage or bus in a land where you don’t speak a single word of the language. Have you ever noticed the panic that starts growing in your civilized soul, the sense that something is hideously wrong, that your very identity may soon be torn apart? It could be that autonomy is the natural form of the social unit, and that those who would thrust others together may be doing so in the name of a transcendent vision of justice, hope, human fairness, but that they may also be hurrying something very complicated. We don’t know. Human beings do tend to be with their own. Not all. Not the exceptional. But most human beings.

We’re speaking across a statistical mean, but it is a very massive one. Environment is heredity, and heredity is environment. That which you are born into — the privileges, the luck or the misfortune — is both heredity and environment. They cannot be separated. Cautionary rhetoric occludes this complicated recognition of interaction. The dialectic, the osmotic, which relate the mutations conceivable or feasible in this interaction, are radically beyond our understanding.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 235

And Freud comes crashing down

First published in 1966, Das Dritte Reich des Traums is a neglected classic. In it, Charlotte Beradt summarizes her analyses of some three hundred dreams recounted to her in Berlin 1933–34, That the images, symbols, fantasms which crowd these dreams should so obviously mirror the political changes taking place in Berlin at the time, is not surprising. What is of the very first importance, however, is the degree of depth to which external history penetrates into the subconscious and unconscious. It does not take long to discover that patients dreaming of the loss of limbs or of the atrophy of arms or legs are not displaying symptoms of a Freudian castration—complex but, more simply and terribly, revealing the terrors inflicted on them by the new rules demanding the Hitler-salute in public, professional and even familial usage.

Am I mistaken in feeling that this finding, even by itself, presents a fundamental challenge to the psychoanalytic model of dreams and their interpretation?—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 222–23

On Dreams

Our knowledge of dreams and of dreaming, the material which constitutes the history of human dreams, are wholly inseparable from the linguistic medium. (I leave to one side the epistemologically teasing possibility that a mute or deaf-mute dreamer can somehow provide a pictorial or gestural mimesis of his dreams.) Dreams are told, recorded, interpreted in language. The phenomenology of dreaming is imbedded in the evolution and structures of language. A theory of dreams is also a linguistics or, at the very least, a poetics. No account of any human dream, whether provided by the dreamer himself, by a secondary source or by the dream-interpreter, is linguistically innocent or value-free. The account of the dream, which is the sum total of our evidence, will be subject to exactly the same constraints and historical determinants in respect of style, narrative convention, idiom, syntax, connotation, as any other speech act in the relevant language, historical epoch and milieu. Dreams were no less splintered at Babel than were the tongues of men.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 217

Do you?

It is a confident guess that despite the Enlightenment and positivism, that despite modern agnosticism and Freud, a great majority of mankind—even in so-called ‘advanced’ and technological societies—continues to attach prophetic, oracular values to its dreams.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 214

A change in dream interpretation

In psychoanalysis, on the contrary, dreams feed not on prophecy but on remembrance. The semiological vector points not to the future but to the past. The dynamics of opacity are not those of the unknown but of the suppressed.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 214

Tread carefully!

Any poetic, philosophic, rhetorical pronouncement worth taking seriously will compact its executive means and meanings. It will resist, it will frustrate to the greatest possible degree, the dissociative, the deconstructive agencies of paraphrase and translation. A major text exposes pitilessly the necessary innocence and arbitrariness of the translator’s assumption that meaning is some sort of ‘packageable content’ and not an energy irreducible to any other medium. Language is, therefore, the adversary of translation. Thus there is more than cautionary allegory in the prohibition which numerous cultures have set against the translation of their sacred texts.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 195

A matter of perspective

The extinction of a language however remote, however immune to historical-material success or diffusion, is the death of a unique world—view, of a genre of remembrance, of present being and of futurity. A truly dead language is irreplaceable. It closes that which Kierkegaard bade us keep open if our humanity was to evolve: ‘the wounds of possibility’. Such closure may, for late twentieth-century mass-media and mass-market technocracy, be a triumph. It may facilitate the imperium of the fast-food chain and the news-satellite. For the lessening chances of the human spirit, it is destructive.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 150–51