LOVE AND CULTURE

by W. B. Macomber

Chapter Eight) WHERE L.B.J. AND NIXON WENT WRONG

What rhymes with "truth"?; talking to other people; living and really living—giving life;  theology, philosophy and poetry; the "higher life" in Luther and Shakespeare; John 3:23  right in there with Socrates and Anacreon; why professors must fall in love with their students (and vice-versa); Socrates' annoying "Why?"; how a culture's statuary reflects its values—metaphysics at the surface; the modesty of theory; how you can understand your entire culture; a Patriotism Quiz, and its usefulness; Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon as the apotheosis of western history—so far. Let us begin!

. . . and besides I'm very inefficient. You'll find out about my inefficiency if you look in the Theatetus 172-177—Plato discusses the inefficiency of the philosopher. He is not too good at the first order. His mind floats in a world of words. He's the great idea man; his forte is conception—but realization is a bore, a drag—that's for practical men. I like having the idea!

Culture Associates is putting its second presentation before you this morning, a thing I did a couple of years ago which I called "Bringing It All Back Home." It's an attempt to indicate very briefly my BPs. BPs are basic propositions or postulates. The English speak of BPs. There's a famous postcard of Bertrand Russell's where a friend of his said, "The Bishop would like to know your BPs," and he wrote back, "Tell the BP (BIP) my BPs are the same as his." Well, we're putting before you this thing called "Bringing It All Back Home." You'll see how my mind worked three years ago. It's an attempt to indicate very briefly some of the most important questions of 20th century philosophy. That's going on sale for 25¢ by Culture Associates.

Yes, sir, boy. When I was in therapy, I was told that paying was part of the therapy. $250 a month, which was better than half my salary for two years, and that was part of the therapy. Because it meant that I really wanted it, I really wanted change—I was prepared to put my money on the line.

It would be ideal, I think, if students dropped some form of emolument in the till when they came to class. In my ideal arrangement, the professor should have security, so that we don't have to pander to your whims. If I didn't have security, I would be talking the language of the East, I think. Because that's what you want to hear, and if it came down to any sort of economic dependence, I'd be right there beside Maharishi, Meher Baba, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Those would be the things I would be most interested in if I didn't have economic security. So in my ideal conception I'd like professors to be secure. We should be able to survive, even with your contempt. We should survive, but I would want all my luxuries, goodies, special things to depend on my pleasing you. I maintain that this is the Platonic criterion of truth, as when Socrates, at the end of his  speech in the Phaedrus, prays to the god to "make me even more beloved than I already am of the beautiful."

Marvelous: "even more beloved than I already am of the beautiful." He means of youth, of course. He means of the future. There's no objective, transcendent yardstick of truth for the Greeks, as there is for Christians. The Greek knows nothing of all those eternal mysteries of life of which the Christian is quite certain and knowledgeable. The Greek has no transcendent yardstick of truth, so what's "true"? What's true is what survives (like "true friendship"). And who decides what survives? Youth. Youth is therefore the final canon. That's why the lyric poet Anacreon writes,

All that they approve is sweet

And all is truth that they repeat.

It is up to the older generation, the mature generation to convey to the younger as much as they can of everything they hold important and significant in life, of all the greatness, interest, enjoyment, pleasure they have gotten out of life. It's a contest to convey this to youth. All that will survive of all that I have worked for and believe in will depend on you. And so with everyone my age—your parents, the President of Bank of America.

What are we living for? First we're living for our own lives, to get something out of life. And when you begin getting something out of life, you begin giving something to it—it's a metabolistic sort of thing. The point of life is to get something out of it and then to give something to it, and there is a metabolistic, ecological connection between those two which breaks down in the typical religious view of life. That's why I am critical of it.

Remember that truth in Greek is aletheia, a waking up, a coming to life out of forgetfulness, out of the lethe of routine and ritual. In the Phaedrus we will see thinking begin to go, and Plato will describe it as the growing of wings, the first sprouting of wings on which we take flight. In a marvelously sensual, almost sexual, description he talks of the beginning of thinking, of mind taking flight. It takes two to fly, to break through routine and habit to a fresh sense of wonder at things.

Truth is between us, as the goal of communication. Opinion is what we each have for ourselves; truth is crucial to our attempt to relate to others. Wittgenstein is trying to get us to see this. There is so little communication nowadays—men and their wives, parents and their children, professors and students. They've all got their truth, and no communication. We're not watching one another's facial expressions, to see if they're with us. Largely we don't even care. We have our truth, and the other can take it or leave it. And all we're doing is just missing life, missing our parents (and children), missing our professors (and students), missing so much of the life that's all around us, because we each hold onto our own transcendent yardstick of truth and don't really listen. A canon of truth lies in the facial expressions of others. I take it this is the message of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who claims that there is no transcendent yardstick of truth we can consult, that we only know what is intelligible, sensible, rational, because it works in our actual lived discourse. It's from Wittgenstein I have the suggestion that metaphysics is on the surface, the criterion of meaning and on the facial expressions of others.

Wittgenstein talks of how we learn the word "slab," and what the word conveys. Spoken by a mason to his apprentice, it is a direction; the word "Slab!" means, in effect, "Bring the slab." Does the apprentice understand? One must look at his conduct to see whether he understands—not at his mind, which we cannot see. If he brings the slab when the word is pronounced, he understands. This is exhibiting understanding in behavior, and a lot of talk moves in this direction—all practical discourse. If we understand, we behave differently. If you understand my approach to love, you will behave differently in love-affairs. But not all discourse can be exhibited in conduct, including most purely theoretical discourse. And whether you've understood discourse which can't be manifested in your conduct you reveal to me in your facial expressions. We can see when people have understood, are with us, if we would only look (and care).

In my pursuit of learning—of knowledge—I've always attended to the facial expressions of others, and the ideas and tastes of others. I've always stayed in what I call the Five-foot Shelf, the "classics"; I've always dealt almost all of the time with men who are recognized as towering geniuses, and can be collected on a five-foot shelf. Are those men any better than the men who aren't included in the Five-foot Shelf? I don't know. How could one know?  I've followed the majority taste, learned the things my society said were great, interesting, marvelous, important. And then I turned around and tried to convey these things to students, tried to make insights I had been wrestling with in my own great books available to kids who were just getting into reading, who'd only been reading seriously for several years. That's the way my mind has unfolded, not  pursuing any transcendent yardstick of truth on my own—not interested in my own truth—but pursuing what the majority of people call true (or life-giving), and attempting to make it available to actual  concrete people—the students right around me, who desperately need and desire to know these things.

Do you desperately need and desire to know things? Yes and no. One has to see it. I didn't see it at first. When I first began teaching, I didn't think I was giving the class things they all desperately needed and desired to know. I thought I was giving them things which were interesting to me, and which I hoped would be interesting to them. But now I see it differently. Now I think I have things to tell you which you desperately need and desire to know.

Well, that's the deification of youth in ancient Greece I've been talking about. The basis of it is this: youth sits in judgment of all that the older generation venerates. No matter how valid, how true, how fantastic the things we believe in, they vanish from the earth without a trace unless we can get them across to you. Consequently you are the judges of our lives.

Now there is a sense in which there is no judge of any life, no point to life and no judge of it: no point, no judge, no yardstick. The barefoot kid with a fishing rod is an ideal of mine, and I will defend him against anyone who claims there is anything he ought to do with his life or has to do with his life—he can do anything he likes with his life. He's one of my ideals. There's a sense in which life can't be judged; you have it whole and entire and I have it whole and entire. But insofar as life has a point—which means insofar as we  want it to have a point, insist on it having a point—the point must be what we can contribute to the future, to the real future of men.

We see how this is possible when we look at great men like Copernicus and Galileo and Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant and William Shakespeare. They have tangibly affected the course of history, or man's life on this earth. Their power is obvious if they're scientists who discover things which transform the world. If they're poets, their influence on the world is not so manifest, but with their thrilling, delightful, marvelous words they bring life to people. And the thrilling, fantastic words of the poets go on-bringing life for all time to come, et in saecula saeculorum, Amen.

Where whenas death shall all the world subdue, 

Our love shall live and later life renew.

"When death shall all the world subdue"—when is that? It's right now! Suburbia—the forgetfulness into which we've fallen by the millions, so that the question whether and to what extent we are still alive might fruitfully be asked. "Living and partly living," as T.S.  Eliot puts it. Justifying Nietzsche's question, Wahrlich lebe ich noch? That is either "Do I yet live?" or "Am I still alive?” It's the question of Hamlet, which Harry Levin finds in the first line: "Who's there?"

"Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,/ Our love shall live and later life renew." That's Edmund Spenser in the 17th century. It's an amusing poem because he's telling a girl that he will immortalize her name—"My verse your vertues rare shall eternize./ And in the heavens wryte your glorious name"—and we never hear her name.

Now what does one live for? One lives for life and then to give life. One lives first for life—that's the barefoot boy with the fishing rod. And then to give life—that's the athlete, the artist, the thinker, people who are prepared to give up everything to have an impact on other people, to blow people's minds. Not to control life—that's the preacher and theologian—but simply to communicate it, to celebrate it, to lift us up. Socrates apparently feels that he's doing a good job when he prays, at the end of his speech in the Phaedrus, "Grant me that I may be even more beloved than I am now of the beautiful." A poet achieves this by writing thrilling words which bring people to life for centuries.

The life the artist brings people is not a life he talks about. I don't know anything about Spenser's relationship to the unnamed girl for whom he wrote his immortal poem. I don't know anything about the reality of that relationship; the life I'm talking about is life right there in the poem. This is the contrast I draw between poetry and theology. The "higher life" poetry celebrates is right before your eyes, in those thrilling words—if you can see it, feel it, experience it, know it. The "higher life" theologians speak of is not in the words. The words themselves are rather grey and drab and boring. It's with grey, drab, boring words that theologians talk of another life higher than you can imagine.

I don't talk of a higher life than you can imagine. I'm very distrustful of the notions of "levels of consciousness." Sometimes there are seven and sometimes eleven—I distrust any enumeration that goes beyond three. It's not very sensible to enumerate beyond three. This is why primitive peoples often have number systems which stop at two or three.

There are not higher levels of consciousness that I'm tuned into and you're not. My life is like your life, in a sense exactly like your life. The only difference between my life and your life is one involving words. Whenever anyone talks to you of levels of consciousness, he means that he's sitting on a higher one than you—and don't you let him get away with it! Force him to explain, to make it clear even to your humble level of consciousness. He's trying to get away without explaining; he's claiming a superiority to you which he's not backing up. This is what I call religious superiority, and I want to drive it to the wall, force it to back itself up with something. Imagine someone trying to get away with that with Socrates. The difference between theologians and poets is that poets put the higher life right in front of you, so there's no question of the greatness of Donne or Shakespeare. The life they talk of is right in front of our eyes. 

But as between Aquinas and Luther and Calvin and Bunyan and Knox here we have drab words which talk to us of the marvel of life, so that there's an inference involved from the words to the truth they're  about, and we make different inferences. One group of people say: Ah, Thomas Aquinas, the man who wrote the most thrilling words the world has ever heard! And another group: Oh no, Thomas Aquinas is profoundly mistaken, hung up, dreadful. Martin Luther is the greatest man who ever lived, the man who wrote the most thrilling, life-giving words the world will ever hear! Among the people who value that sort of language at all, or seem to understand something from it, we get this radical division—the sort of thing you don't get in literature between Shakespearians and Donnites. There is a consensus about greatness in the world of literature, as there is no consensus in theology, even (or especially) among those who take it seriously.

I take theology seriously, as you have probably guessed. It's the language in which our spirit unfolded for 1700 years. But I have to translate theology into language utterly unlike anything I can imagine going on in the theologian's mind when he wrote it. This is what I say of poetry, theology, and philosophy. Theology I have to translate into a new language game quite foreign to the man who wrote it. Philosophy I have to do a lot of translating, so it makes sense, so it becomes graphic, so you can appreciate what's going on and what's at stake. I have to be able to translate nous and thumos, casuality, the ontological argument, performatives, inner states and private language into terms which  make sense to you. So theology requires a total translation; philosophy requires considerable translation; poetry requires no translation at all. No matter what I say in exegesis of it, I always want to come back to those exact words and say: Could that be said any better than those brilliant words say it? No translation at all, only exegesis.

When the Nexus had a special article on the Jesus people, I was struck down by the quotation with which the article began. The quotation was from John 3:23, and read, "Yea verily, unless a man believes in the Son and is obedient to the Son, life abides not in him, but the wrath of God is upon him." Now what does that quotation from John 3:23 mean? There is a meaning which everyone would ascribe to it immediately—the immediate, self-evident meaning of the quotation and that is: Unless you subscribe to the teachings of Christ and the Bible (interpreted for one group, by the Pope and Cardinals and Bishops and for another, by your own conscience), your lost: your life will never make sense or be a  joy to you. That would be the obvious reading.

But I say: Look, there's another meaning—if you look very closely, you can find a secret, inner meaning to that text. It could mean that the older generation must be in some ultimate sense beholden to the younger; it could mean that professors must fall in love with their students and parents with their children. Notice that I say "fall in love with" and not "love." I didn't say professors must love their students or parents their children.  Because the way that word is ordinarily used, they already do! The way we ordinarily use the word "love," your parents do love you; professors do love you. We love one another, all over the place in the way we presently use the word. They care and they're prepared to give. But that doesn't get to the heart of love. I'm thinking of something more imaginative, more exciting, something even more sensual (!), which is conveyed by the notion of “falling in love.”

Wasn't Socrates in love with the youth of Athens? Isn't to be in love with the youth of Athens to be in love with the future of Athens and Greek culture? And isn't being in love with the future of Athens and Greek culture, for a Greek, being in love with mankind, and the possible Greek contribution to it? That's why the Greeks deified their youth and built them into the statuary of their gods and goddesses. How clever! Our gods are instantiated in the statues of youth. The rippling athlete in bronze is the god incarnate, the word become the flesh. And the older generation, with the power, the knowledge, the money, the property, the  prestige (the jack boots)—we all get down on our knees, if you will, and pray to you, pray to the future.

Socrates goes along to the great men of Athens and says, What are you doing there? What are you up to? Why are you doing that?  The question, Why? Why are you doing what you're doing? Why are you living the way you're living? Remember there need be no negative connotation to the question.

"Why aren't you burning your draft card?" I will likely ask one kid, and "Why are you burning your draft card?" another. I don't use that one very often, actually (laughter). But the question is: What are people up to? What do you want out of life? What are you trying to do in life—what are you trying to get out of it and give to it? Explain to me very briefly. When Socrates puts this type of question to his fellow Greeks, within five minutes we're reduced to things which are quite banal and absurd—Baltimore Catechism stuff. The men who are running the society don't know what they're up to, and are not prepared to think about it simply and clearly. And they're Greeks!

The Greek certainly knows what he's up to far more than the Christian, or the average non-believing member of a Christian society—which I take most of us to be. He hasn't built meaningless mumbo jumbo into the very center of his whole approach to life, so that  the answer must come down to "For God's sake—for some noble  reason which has nothing to do whatever with me" or "For my sake—because I just want to," neither of which makes any sense at all. So that you’re either damned or saved, virtuous or vicious, selfless or ruthless, and the answer to the “why?” question must be either bragging or confessing, as Sartre elaborates at great length in Being and Nothingness. Instead of simply explaining, making ourselves plausible.

The Greek is much clearer about things than the Christian, and we see this in his statuary. His philosophy is like his statuary—open, clear, naked values which anyone can see and appreciate and understand. In the Christian era our thinking, like our statuary, goes beneath robes—hidden, concealed, mysterious. No one knows quite what our ideals mean. And this is to be finally formulated in the philosophy of Kant as noumenon. Noumenon is the secret,  hidden, mysterious point to life, the value of all things which has only to be inferred or believed in, lived for in a spirlt of powerful conviction, but which you will never experience directly—see, hear, know, appreciate tangibly. Noumenon is what was in the tabernacle for 1600 years.

The Greek believed in life not as a responsibility or obligation. Responsibility was not the meaning of life, as in the moral philosophy of Kant. That's the point of Kant's second great critique, The Critique of Practical Reason: that all life is ultimately responsibility and obligation. For the Greek, never! Life was not an obligation or responsibility; it was an opportunity, a unique, marvelous opportunity to get in on the spectacle I quoted Joseph Conrad talking of, when he said, "I suspect the aim of creation is not ethical at all."

I came across a parallel quotation in Sir Kenneth Clark, by the way, from J.B.S. Haldane, "It is my suspicion that the world is not only a great deal queerer than we think, it is a great deal queerer than we can think." When I encountered that parallel text, I was struck with the similarity in their openings: "I suspect," "It is my suspicion that . . ." I got a new thought, which arose in the way empirical philosophers (Francis Bacon and  John Locke) describe knowledge arising, through similarity: "I  suspect," "It is my suspicion that . . ." It reminded me how modest, self-critical, cautious men of learning are in their statements.

No theologian ever said, "I suspect . . ." They knew—and their followers know. They may call this belief, but it comes down to the same thing: unshakeable conviction. If you know, you can't be wrong—according to the time-honored belief which Prof. Austin challenges. If you believe, you can't admit you're wrong, any more than Euclid could admit a figure as a triangle with interior angles equal to 179°. Belief simply means betting, banking with your whole being—so that no combination of "mere words" and no  concrete instance which we might point to, could conceivably shake you.

You're all familiar with this attitude from your experience with everyone you know, starting with your parents and professors, but exemplified best by our churchmen and politicians. Who ever heard of a parent, professor, priest or politician admit that he (or, in the first, she) was wrong? Did you ever hear a professor who, in response to a criticism or objection, was not all the more convinced that his initial statement was profoundly and unqualifiedly right? Or a parent? This is essentially the religious mentality, where one is banking one's entire being that what one thinks and does is right, meaning not only for oneself (a matter of taste) but for the person to whom it is said.

In general the religious mentality is more concerned with other people—the parent with the child, the professor with the student—than with itself. I have never seen a professor or parent exhibit anything which could be reasonably interpreted as self-criticism. It's all just what you're banking on—a commitment to Marx or Freud, St. Thomas or John Austin, linguistic analysis or phenomenology—just as we learned for centuries that everything depended on Christ, and an absurd commitment we might make to Him, or the spirit he represented. Credo quia absurdum: I believe because it is absurd—too sublime (confused) to attempt to put into words.

We have always worshipped simply conviction—never words, or the ability to make ourselves plausible to another human being. And so, even after we've thrown Christianity overboard, our leading spokesmen still tell us that the best way to make a decision (at  least a crucial decision) is to put on a blindfold and leap—or rather to realize that every decision is a blind leap, anyway, whatever we may tell ourselves, lying to ourselves (sic) as we ordinarily do. So we don't believe in the university, and behave here like Christians, defending the things we "believe"—whatever that means, beyond our unwillingness to change a stand.

J.B.S. Haldane and Joseph Conrad give us the notion that we do not know, the limited perspective on life, the baseless fabric of this vision, so that our little lives are bounded by a sleep, not by a belief or theology or ethic of self-justification. I don't know anything about life. I was talking to a Chicano girl the other day, who laid out the problems she wrestles with in her life, and it blew my mind. What did I have to say? A bit of advice; try this, try that, try the other thing. I try to give her perspectives in which to see these situations. But her life is immensely more difficult than mine. I don't know what to tell her! Basically, I don't know anything about life; I know a helluva lot about literature, about a tiny little bit of literature.

Remember I haven't read nearly as much as a professor is supposed to have read. When I left the university four years ago, that was one of the dominant considerations. I had read only 30 or 40 books, in any meaningful sense, so that I could talk about them for five minutes. My list was limited at that time, as it is now, to about 30 or 40 books, and that wasn't enough. I thought I was supposed to have read hundreds, thousands of books! But I found, if you know 30 books, you get a picture of the whole history of our culture, from its beginning to the present time.

After he had been in my class for about two weeks, Mark Castleton asked me one day after class, "Are you trying to say that we can understand our whole culture?" And I said “Yes, that's right! That's what I mean. You can understand your whole culture.” In a way I think you can never really understand the whole physical world. That would involve getting deeply into a lot of sciences that take an immense amount of time and concentration and devotion to master. But you can understand your culture by understanding 30 books, in my own case. Not that your 30 books have to be the same as mine, either. I have never gotten into Baudelaire, but I know that Baudelaire says as many fantastic things as I found in Friedrich Nietzsche. Well anyway, the relativity of the man of learning to what it is that he is inquiring into, so that, after completing the Principia Mathematica (which most men took as a definitive explanation of the world), Sir Isaac Newton  writes, "It was as if I stood on the shore of the vast ocean of all I did not understand." We men of theory understand how much we do not understand. We are loath to suffer or die or put anything on the line for what we believe—we're all cowards without a shred of integrity in the normal sense—but also we typically lack the conviction to ask any other man to suffer or die for what he believes (or we believe). Thus epistemology, and not conscience, doth make cowards of us all. Conscience, and the existential leap, leads to Vietnam, and Hamlet, Act. V. I am terrified that we have not learned to believe in anything more than this. It's still what I call the Armageddon Syndrome, pressing to confrontation.

Socrates made this inescapably evident right from the beginning. His principle claim was that he knew nothing. The only thing he knew was that he did not know. Living in a community of men, where man lived dogmatically, and all claimed to know a whole lot of things. But of course nobody does know. It would be very difficult for me to ask you to suffer or die for anything. That's because I don't know. It's easy for men like Lyndon B. Johnson or Richard Nixon because they believe powerfully, and it's not difficult to ask 50,000 men, American men—I keep forgetting the people on the other side—to die for transcendent ideals that one understands through and through.

I have a Patriotism Quiz. You see, I'm often thought to be unpatriotic, and so I devised one night what I call my Patriotism Quiz, and I'd like to give it to you; I'll have it mimeographed. The Patriotism Quiz asks questions like, “What's the most distinguished American architecture of the 18th, l9th, and 20th centuries?” Then we begin to reflect on American architecture. The 18th century? Monticello, surely, and the University of Virginia.  Thomas Jefferson is one of the foremost American architects—if not the foremost. It wasn't uncommon for great men to design their homes in those days. Imagine Nixon designing a home with the style of Monticello! In the l9th century I didn't know what to say. I was taking this test, as I was making it up, and in the 19th century I didn't know what to say—except that my friend Nick Kuhn, who's an architect, told me that Chicago is the most interesting city in the world for l9th century architecture. Imagine, Chicago of all places! Chicago is a history of l9th century architecture, and I knew that, from an English friend of mine.

Well, there would be another question like, “Name four of the greatest American thinkers, and indicate briefly what each of them had to contribute to the greatness of American thinking.” Who is the greatest? I would say the greatest is C.S. Pierce, because colleagues of mine who are interested in American philosophy—Joe Ransdall and Helen Heise—have both talked to me at length of Pierce and given me the notion that he's the greatest of American philosophers. The other three I had in mind are James, and Dewey and—who's the fourth? Macomber, maybe (laughter). There was a fourth, but I forget at the moment. It could be Josiah Royce or George Santayana or Clarence Darrow or Oliver Wendell Holmes or Mark Twain. There's considerable latitude in these questions. That's why one is interested in a man's answers, unlike 2 + 2. How well one scored on that Patriotism Quiz would mean for me how close one is to the greatness of America, to what America is all about, to the sort of thing for which one could under circumstances ask someone to die. I would like to give that Patriotism Quiz to every good upstanding, righteous American who holds me to be a pervert and a felon (laughter). I'd particularly like to give it to Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard  Nixon, and see what they know about the greatness of America—see how well they'd score. How well do you think they'd score? Do you think Johnson has ever heard of C.S. Pierce? Do you think he's ever read James or Dewey, or Melville or Poe or Faulkner or Hemingway or Fitzgerald? He must find Reader's Digest heavy reading! I maintain Johnson couldn't tell Romanesque from Gothic, ash from elm (laughter), or pate de foi gras from liverwurst (laughter). That's why Wittgenstein takes his motto from Macbeth: "I will teach you differences."

It's not that we have had incompetent leaders sitting in the White House in the last two administrations; it's that we've had uncouth bumpkins. Uncouth, u, n, c, o, u, t, h (laughter), uncouth bumpkins! People with whom no English gentleman would dine. We saw this in our own society, although we're not aristocratic in the English tradition. It was difficult for Johnson to be present at parties of the Kennedys—it was embarrassing. Always calling for the ketchup bottle (laughter). There were quite a lot of jokes scored off on him by the New Frontiersmen, the young Georgetown snobs. And finally Johnson was never invited to parties where the Kennedys were expected; it was just a drag.

It's this sort of criticism I want to point at the White House of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon. One can agree or disagree with certain of their policies, but they’re such contemptible human beings! (Laughter.)  I want to show a new concern. I'm not concerned only with questions of justice and injustice, morality and immorality—those questions that have been going on for thousands of years, and have succeeded in their rigid religious formulations in producing modern American suburbia. American society may have its injustices—that's what we hear so much today—but every society in history has been unjust, and more unjust by a mile than our present society. Goya's haunting paintings. Look at the history of art—it's all recorded there, unforgettably, and for all time.

It's not only injustice I'm worried about but the lack of taste which characterizes modern society, in comparison with previous societies, and particularly the almost complete lack of taste at the top. It's the cut of Mr. Johnson's suits which fills me with despair—one imagines they must glow in the dark. Everything about the man is cheap and tatty, and a disgrace to the United States of America. He's a different breed of man altogether from Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, James Monroe—or from Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and F.D.R.

Most men stamp their initials on luggage and cigarette-lighters, and that's tasteful enough—a bit of personalizing. But Johnson stamps his initials on his wife and children and pets and ranch and the school of government which bears his name. Wherever he looks “L. B. J.” beams back at him reassuringly. It is all such dreadfully bad taste—really embarrassing. It's a disgrace we all share in, like Genesis.

All this is not simply invective and personal diatribe. I say "not simply" because it is that too. I want to pay Mr. Johnson out, in some small way, for the disgrace he has inflicted on my life with the war which was to insure his place in history—and will. But I want to show you how thinking does not preclude the  peaceful feelings we call "prejudices," how one can philosophize off the peak of one's rage, as well as the whole gamut of human feelings. I don't pretend to be neutral in the momentous events which are taking place all around us. That is not the function of the thinker. Otherwise we would never come to take stands on any significant issue.

But after the emotional outburst comes the cool analysis. I am talking of a concern for taste as well as for morality. I argue that taste is in trouble in this century, and that we must pay more attention to it. I want to encourage you to pay more attention to it in your lives. I argue that America is becoming a tasteless society. I say "becoming" because, up until the Second World War, one could be genuinely proud of American taste—as I discovered when I made up my Patriotism Quiz and reflected on the greatness of America. This is a concern I share with Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry Adams, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Martin Heidegger, William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Earlier societies, as unjust as they were, had elegance at the top and lustiness at the bottom—silk and broadcloth, as Marty Cantrell says. Now everything is being leveled off to an indiscriminate "inbetween," like rayon and nylon and all the rest. As Henri Frederic Amiel puts it in his Intimate Journal, before the end of the last century:

The era of mediocrity in all things is beginning, and mediocrity freezes desire. Equality engenders uniformity, and evil is got rid of by sacrificing all that is excellent, remarkable, extraordinary.  Everything becomes less coarse, but more vulgar. The age of individualism is in danger of having no real individuals. Things are certainly progressing, but souls decline. The epoch of great men is passing away; the epoch of the ant-hill is upon us.

My personal invective is meant to put a fine edge on this, and make the point more graphic, bring it home. Johnson and Nixon are ideal subjects. Neither Charles Dickens nor William Faulkner could have created them out of whole cloth—although I believe they have come closest, closer than Sinclair Lewis or F. Scott Fitzgerald or Arthur Miller. Johnson cheating at dominoes with subordinates—the scene which opens his brother Sam's biography; Nixon's attempt to give the White House "tone," after returning from Paris, with uniforms right out of The Merry Widow. There is really nothing to equal that in literature.

Would anyone maintain that this is what we want future generations of men to aspire after? It's no good blaming America, for America is the direction of western history. But in the face of the present crumbling of values, I want to direct attention away from rigid morality and uncultivated taste. Our proper name, as Nietzsche reminds us, is not animal rationale but homo sapiens, and homo sapiens is literally the "man of taste."

Well, so we didn't get into the material again (laughter). But I am addressing myself to the question of what Greece is all about.

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