At first glance our two authors could hardly be more unlike. Judging from his new book Beauty, Roger Scruton’s idea of a pleasing view would probably be the Wiltshire countryside circa 1750 — a scene like that on his website banner, with perhaps some red-coated riders, left, and a fox, courant, hurrying into a copse. Turning next to Denis Dutton’s Darwinian The Art Instinct, and in sharp contrast, a congenially paintable vista for that author might be Ethiopia’s Omo Valley, circa 1,000,000 BC, with Stone Age hunters chasing antelope over Africa’s green hills.

Yet for all this I expect that across a wide range of cultural artefacts and activities their tastes would chime. They each believe in the best that has been written, painted, or composed, and they know what it is. Both of them grieve to see entire traditions of thought and work being dishonored and trashed. “A determination to shock or puzzle has sent much recent art down a wrong path,” Dutton writes in his Introduction. “A Darwinian aesthetics can restore the vital place of beauty, skill, and pleasure as high artistic values.” High artistic values are exactly what Scruton would also like to see restored and it’s encouraging to see two such thoughtful books about art appear within weeks of each other.

Though perhaps this conjunction is not so surprising after all, because the place of the arts in society, and the general condition of the arts, have long been seen as a gauge of civilised morale. Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy pioneered this critical tradition in the 19th century — but we’ve come a long way since then. Once confined to the bohemian margins, artists and their adversarial values have in the last century moved steadily closer to the center, while increasing their political clout, a development that drew the worried attention of such distinguished commentators as Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, and Jacques Barzun.

In The Use and Abuse of Art Barzun observed that the “invidious, resentful relation of art to life has become general and unremitting.” Characterizing “the sensibility of the sixties” and its typical creative works Daniel Bell wrote of its “violence and cruelty” and of “an anti-cognitive and anti-intellectual mood” that has hardly diminished since, something that also concerns Scruton and Dutton today. When Irving Kristol wrote that abandoning the constraints of the Protestant ethic caused “virtue to lose her loveliness”, who would have thought that “loveliness” (by which we mean the entire ethically ambiguous realm of the aesthetic) would soon assume the virtue that virtue itself had lost? Sceptics wondered whether the triumph of the aesthetic represented the moral defeat of the bourgeoisie.

That is doubtless an exaggeration — but we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Both the books in question have more positive and elevating themes and purposes. About our ideas on beauty, and why we like what we like, they are primarily philosophical, and seek to explain and defend the place of cultural refinement in a life well lived — and Dutton might say in any life worth living. His Darwinian argument is that music and literature and much else are deeply rooted in human nature itself. This in turn raises questions about sources and origins. Where do we find the earliest signs of aesthetic sensibility? Is it in a primordial appreciation of nature? Can Africa’s Omo Valley be really where it all began?

Landscape and universals

Yorkshire Dales, photo: Geoff Lund

You don’t travel far with either author before the question is raised whether trees and rivers and hills are universally appealing. For most ordinary men and women (though varying with levels of articulacy) this could range from a hushed “look at that!” to my own excited reaction not long ago. Driving one morning around a curve in a country road I saw a sunlit view — rolling hills, low light, willows by a stream — and “God that’s beautiful!” burst unbidden from my lips. There may have been sheep and cows too. Not a very original expostulation you will say, but the question is this: was it as spontaneously unmeditated as it seemed to me at the time? While the words “instant” and “instinct” sound similar, do they here mean much the same thing?

Dutton would unequivocally answer “yes” and give his reasons. Evolutionary psychology (or EP) suggests that landscape preferences are deeply ancient and originated in Palaeolithic times, and that critical judgements about suitable real estate started way back then. However “disinterested” the appreciation of beauty either is or should be, according to Immanuel Kant, a beautiful Pleistocene landscape was always a matter of lively ancestral concern, and it was valued for straightforward down-to-earth reasons: available water, fertility, and abundant game. According to The Art Instinct the deep source of my excitement as those sunlit hills came into view was a primordial pattern of instinctive response. What’s surprising, however, is that with rather more equivocation Roger Scruton seems to agree.

According to the author of Beauty, Immanuel Kant also thought our response to nature was spontaneous and unstudied, and it’s not hard to see what he meant. Standing on the lip of the Grand Canyon you are at once struck dumb with wonder. Views of nature please us immediately and without concepts said Kant — and speaking for myself I’d have to say that’s how I felt on that morning drive. Unaware what was coming, and attending to nothing but a winding road, I was immediately riveted by the view, and my reaction was as unconceptualized as only passive visual sensation on the threshold of attention can be. Kant also maintained that “the primary exercise of judgement is in the appreciation of nature”, a statement glossed by Scruton when he adds that “a faculty that is directed towards natural beauty therefore has a real chance of being common to all human beings, issuing judgements with a universal force.”

Now unless I’m mistaken this tells us that a sense of “natural beauty” is “universal” and shared by “all human beings” — pretty much a matter of human nature you’d think, or what Kant himself called a sensus communis. In the course of his discussion Scruton twice refers to “our species”, and when mankind as a species is invoked can the universalities of origins, sources, evolution, genes, homo sapiens, Darwin, the lot, be far behind? Our mastery over nature converted the primaeval world “into a safe and common home for our species” Scruton writes on page 61. Then on page 65, elaborating on the contrast between the ‘free’ beauties of nature and the ‘dependent’ beauties of art, he tells us that “there is something plausible in the idea that the contemplation of nature is both distinctive of our species and common to its members…”

If the contemplative appreciation of nature is distinctive of our species perhaps it is also instinctive in our species: doesn’t this take us close to the evolutionary view? Dutton and Scruton start out from very different premises, to be sure, yet aren’t they talking about much the same thing?

The failings of EP

But no — Scruton won’t have any of that. Agreeing with an Australian philosopher, the late David Stove, he dismisses evolutionary psychology as “Darwinian fairytales”. As for The Art Instinct, although it receives bibliographical mention at the back of Scruton’s book, neither the work nor its argument is engaged directly (both titles appeared in 2009, The Art Instinct a little before Beauty). Instead, two other proponents of evolutionary psychology, Ellen Dissanayake and Geoffrey Miller (whose contributions are described in Dutton’s book) are made to represent evolutionary aesthetics overall.

Both thinkers however are too idiosyncratic to fill this role, and might be seen as easy game. In Homo Aestheticus and elsewhere Dissanayake had proposed that art arises from the human need to decoratively “make special” our ceremonies and religious rites. Making special by means of ornamental art supposedly encourages group cohesion, thereby conferring a collective advantage. Scruton allows that the theory has something to be said for it, but says it “falls critically short of explaining what is distinctive of the aesthetic”. Again, in The Mating Mind Geoffrey Miller pushes Darwinian fitness theory further perhaps than is entirely safe: like the peacock’s tail, both beauty and art itself are lumped in with all the other phenomena of sexual selection and reproduction. Not unreasonably, Scruton comments that “Even if the peacock’s tail and the Art of Fugue have a common ancestry, the appreciation elicited by the one is of a completely different kind from the appreciation directed at the other.”(p37)

Whatever evolutionary psychology may say, or evolutionists like Denis Dutton might think (so Roger Scruton argues), it is man’s good fortune to have been divinely touched with rationality, for “it is the very capacity for reasoning that distinguishes us from the rest of nature.” Reasoning about things we know and have experienced enables us to make the fine discriminations required in aesthetic judgement; reasoning allows us to enter into the mind of the artist and understand his intentions — what the poet was driving at, what the painter meant. After which on page 38 Scruton sweeps the whole Darwinian argument aside:

“As things stand, the evolutionary psychology of beauty offers a picture of the human being and human society with the aesthetic element deprived of its specific intentionality, and dissolved in vague generalities that overlook the peculiar place of aesthetic judgement in the life of the rational agent.”

The evolutionist’s response

So that’s that. But is it also “how things stand” with Denis Dutton? Within his Darwinian scheme of explanation, does a painter or poet know what he’s doing, mean what he says, and can we understand his intentions ourselves? The Art Instinct has in fact a lot to say about intention and intentionality, and it is neither vaporous nor vague.

Bison, Chauvet Cave

Fitness theory — the signs of vigor and male prowess that brilliant tail feathers and menacing antlers and fighting ability show — is important in Dutton’s argument, and it places conscious intention and visibly displayed individual achievement at the center of evolutionary aesthetics. Whoever drew the highly distinctive images of bears, bison, rhinoceros and lions at Chauvet Cave about 32,000 years ago knew exactly what he was doing, and must have been greatly admired for his skill. Moreover, Dutton’s thinking about Palaeolithic origins in the past is informed by research among tribes-people in the present. Evidence of self-conscious artistic intention is something he encountered doing fieldwork in New Guinea villages, where “the work of individual dancers, poets, and carvers is a focus of fascinated attention”.

From Scruton’s comment above you might think that evolutionary psychology had as one of its aims (or anyway one of its effects) an anthropological “abandonment of the author function”, a denial of individual agency, a view of abstract historical process without individual influence or meaning, of predetermining forces that supervene and displace the writer’s mind. Not so says Dutton — quite the reverse. It is in novels, poetry, and drama that individual demonstrations of superior skill, style, and imaginative intelligence provide some of evolution’s most persuasive indicators:

We admire clarity, accuracy, and relevance in realistic, descriptive uses of language and regard these qualities as showing that a speaker possesses desirable intellectual qualities. Fictional creations — stories, jokes, and ornamented speech, such as poetry — are similarly judged.

Behind every act of speaking, descriptive or artistic, looms the idea of the fitness test. Human beings are continuously judging their fellows in terms of the cleverness or banality of their language use.

Skilled employment of a large vocabulary, complicated grammatical constructions, wit, surprise, stylishness, coherence, and lucidity all have bearing on how we assess other human beings. Intentionally artistic uses of language are particularly liable to assessment in terms of what they reveal about the character of a speaker or writer.

Listing twelve “signal characteristics of art considered as a universal, cross-cultural category,” Dutton emphasizes the universal admiration for individual skill and virtuosity; the way relatively static traditional styles are the measure against which individual innovations are tested, registered, and adopted for mainstream performance; the role of novelty and creativity as “the locus of individuality or genius in art, referring to that aspect of art that is not governed by rules or routines”; and the potential for “expressive individuality” wherever tired conventions produce boring work for weary audiences.

Rhinos, Chauvet Cave

As for the common argument that artistic individuality is a “Western construct” (a post-modern claim, and certainly not Scruton’s), drawing again on his field experience Dutton declares this to be false: “individual talent and expressive personality is respected in New Guinea as elsewhere.” So standing back a little we can see that the supposedly contradictory propositions about universality and individuality are not so incompatible after all. Yes: on the one hand a universal “art instinct” is the biological foundation of music, painting, and literature. Yes: on the other hand, the particularity of individual genius is indispensable for climbing art’s highest peaks. What’s not to like?

Sex and beauty according to Scruton

No account of beauty would be complete without the effect of sexual attraction upon our judgement of personal appearance, and since Roger Scruton has already written much on this matter it was to be expected that he would also have something to say in his latest book. Kantian ethics demand that individuals be treated as ends, not means: in his discussion of feminine beauty it becomes important for Scruton to explain how a disinterested aesthetic admiration for the nude can be distinguished from mere lubricity.

One view of sex suggests that the machinery of reproduction is a divine joke, sent by God to perplex us when we should be just getting on with our lives. This is the comic view. Another and more tragic understanding is that the theatre of sexual desire exists for the enactment of spiritually uplifting moral drama — a serious matter that should be discussed by philosophers (some of them bachelors like Kant) suffering all the pains of restraint. Sometimes they are trying to restrain homosexual impulses, like Socrates. Sometimes their impulses are heterosexual, like Saint Augustine’s. One way or the other it’s no laughing matter.

Venus of Urbino, Uffizi Gallery

In Sexual Desire Roger Scruton devotes over 400 pages to this topic. In Beauty it receives 41 pages out of 197, over a fifth of the whole, where he tells us how to adopt a suitably contemplative attitude toward naked women in art and life. It is not clear to me how useful this is. He tells us that the Venus of Urbino — “that most provocative of Titian’s female nudes” — is to be sharply distinguished from Manet’s Olympia, the author’s judgement being that “the hand on the thigh of Manet’s Olympia is not the hand that Titian paints, schooled in innocent caresses and resting with a fairy touch: it is a raw, tough hand that deals in money, that grips far more readily than it strokes…”  As Scruton strains to distinguish the kind of work he approves as reflecting “conjugal passion” (Titian) from what he disapproves as incipiently pornographic (Manet), drawing on the bachelor sage of 18th century Königsberg to adjudicate (Immanuel Kant), we enter the philosophical zone of subjects that are not objects, objects that would prefer to be subjects, and subjects that are not really objects despite being treated as if they were — like Manet’s model for Olympia. But this is more for adepts and cognoscenti.

Scruton also regards the historic distinction between “fantasy” and “imagination” as important. “True art appeals to the imagination,” he writes, “whereas effects elicit fantasy. Imaginary things are pondered, fantasies are acted out. Both fantasy and imagination concern unrealities; but while the unrealities of fantasy penetrate and pollute our world, those of the imagination exist in a world of their own, in which we wander freely and in a condition of sympathetic detachment.” This is all very well — and not unpersuasive — until one looks at the author’s humorless discussion of Titian’s Venus of Urbino. In contrast to Botticelli’s Venus, Scruton observes, with Titian’s Venus we are no longer in heaven but in a down-to-earth realm of

“domestic safety and conjugal passion… She reclines among her drapes in full confidence of her personal right to them, immersed in a life that is larger, deeper, more inscrutable than the moment alone. Her body is revealed to us, but she does not show it to us — she is not as a rule conscious of being watched, save perhaps by a dog or a cupid whose calm unembarrassability merely emphasizes the fact that voyeurs cannot trouble her peace of mind, which is also a peace of body. She is not in a state of excitement…

Myrina Aphrodite, Pergamon Museum

What is this? Fantasy or imagination? Who knows? Though it does bring to mind Mrs Patrick Campbell’s thrust at her unmanageably loquacious vegetarian friend Bernard Shaw: “some day you’ll eat a pork chop Georgie, and then God help all women.”

No doubt some useful distinction between the healthily erotic and a sick lubricity can be made, as Scruton tries to do — the contemporary curse of pornography is real enough. And no doubt Kant’s distinction between means and ends helps us understand what has happened. I do feel however that if all this is of such grave moral concern to Scruton, then one would like to see him turn his attention away from the temptations of reclining nudes. The serene dignity of partially draped standing figures, exemplified by the Hellenistic Venus de Milo and the Myrina Aphrodite, remind us that antiquity did some things rather better.

Sex and beauty, the evolutionary view

The ordinary reader might easily feel there is little to be said here. Whatever the humorist James Thurber may have been thinking of when he asked plaintively “Is Sex Necessary?”, sex is certainly needed for evolution. After all, evolution is about reproduction, reproduction is about sex, and Darwin’s thoughts about sexual selection by mate choice are the starting point for any consideration of why some features of human anatomy and some shapes are preferred to others. Here the peacock’s tail returns in all its glory: any specimen strong enough to provide the walking squawking platform for such an extravagant display proclaims its biological fitness to peahens for miles around. And it has been confirmed experimentally that the better peacocks with the better tails have the better genes.

Natural selection is slow, passive, and excludes the unfit. Sexual selection is by comparison fast, active, and both includes and unites the fit. For anyone interested in what human fitness looks like there are well-known studies of waist-to-hip ratios showing what is required for female attractiveness. “Healthy premenopausal women will have a ratio of .67 to .80” writes Dutton, “hardly an hourglass, but possibly a Coke bottle; this body shape is regarded as “feminine’ and attractive by men.” We are told that there are sound statistical reasons for regarding this ratio as biologically adaptive, “as women who display a waist-to-hip ratio on the .7 or .8 range are significantly more fertile than women closer to the healthy male ratio of around .9.”

Yet the curious thing about modern evolutionary aesthetics is that this attention to physique is only the start. One could almost argue that it takes off from the point where Roger Scruton falters — perplexed by moral issues, and whether he should allow Olympia, clothed or unclothed, into his living room. Instead, evolutionary aesthetics concentrates on the remarkable creative attributes of artists and the dazzling achievements of conscious artistry. Not Olympia, but Manet the artist, is the focus of concern; and not the real-life Victorine Meurent, who modelled for Manet’s painting, but the innovative skills of painters who have historically portrayed at least as many women with their clothes on as off. That, I feel fairly sure, is true of Manet.

While anatomical excellence is fundamental, human mental development and the emergence of language brought a whole new range of attractive intellectual features, all convertible into art. Minds were expanding, and artistic virtuosity not only gave access to our minds, it enhanced our attractiveness too. Gorgeous paintings gradually came to supplement gorgeous anatomy; sharp wit and sharp dialog supplemented physical prowess. Muscly warrior castes may have thought such developments effete, distracting, and incomprehensible, but in evolutionary terms they were no less effective in determining mate choice.

Dutton writes: “Grammar, syntax, word choice, appropriateness, coherence, relevance, speed of response, wit, rhythm, ability to toy with words, and originality all play a part. Taken together, these skills and qualities of mind constitute eloquence, and the admiration of eloquence is solidly on the list of human universals.” So it is that from a foundation of words, and intelligence, and with the operation of sexual selection, the manifold glories of story telling and literary enchantment eventually grew — from tribal tales about hunting bears to the Odyssey, to Shakespeare, to Tolstoy and Thomas Mann.

Minimal beauty and the sense of order

A photograph in Beauty shows a place setting at a dinner table. A folded napkin, tied neatly with a bow, sits on a plate alongside a knife and fork, with wine glasses ready nearby and lighted candles in the background. A suspicion that this heralds a chapter on etiquette soon proves mistaken (though I look forward to neat little bows on our domestic napkins in future). The accompanying discussion is among the more interesting features of Scruton’s book, and it underlines two things. First, that an elementary sense of visual order lies at the foundation of the pictorial arts; second, that when the author writes of civilization providing “a safe and common home for our species”, this is the sort of home he has in mind. His species is cultural rather than zoological, and much of it can be found within a leisurely day’s ride of what Englishmen call the Home Counties, not too far from London.

“There is an aesthetic minimalism exemplified by laying the table, tidying your room, designing a web-site” Scruton writes, and however remote in scale and significance these are from the maximalism of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or Beethoven’s Ninth, in each case we want things to “look right”. Perhaps it is unnecessary to be reminded of this amidst the welter of magazines dealing with house and home and the plethora of newspaper supplements about “design”, especially when more and more people call themselves “designers”. But because he feels that the more mundane features of modern life also belong in a general theory of beauty, Scruton usefully reminds us that “a nice pair of shoes or a tasteful piece of wrapping paper” are more important to many people’s daily lives than the great works of art that may, if we are lucky, fill our leisure hours. They both confirm and express “our desire for harmony, fittingness and civility.” (p12)

His ability to say helpful things about shoes and wrapping paper shows the practical turn of mind that is one of Scruton’s assets. His chapter on “Everyday Beauty” also treats gardens, distinguishing their aesthetic enjoyment from the open spaces of landscape. Kant had argued that unlike works of art landscapes “owe their appeal not to symmetry, unity, and form, but to an openness, grandeur and world-like expansiveness, in which it is we and not they that are contained.” In contrast, writes Scruton, gardens are extensions of the human world that mediate “between the built environment and the world of nature.” Gardens have been made and enjoyed for human purposes in every civilization. Does this make them also aesthetic universals?  Perhaps there’s a case for such a view:

This attempt to match our surroundings to ourselves and ourselves to our surroundings is arguably a human universal. And it suggests that the judgement of beauty is not just an optional addition to the repertoire of human judgements, but the unavoidable consequence of taking life seriously, and becoming truly conscious of our affairs. (p82)

But what is true of politics and economics is also true of aesthetics. A tension exists between the claims of the collective and the claims of the individual; between the communal requirements of cultural tradition and the personal ambitions of artists. A small town with an established architectural style that has grown and matured over centuries may not appreciate the egoistic audacities of Frank Gehry or Sir Norman Foster. The residential community may want something that fits in, that does not stand out; something where age-old patterns are honoured, not violated; a design in which the humble harmonies that make a house a home should be preserved. In brief, it may not want a big glass-walled egg in the town square.

The aesthetics of everyday life lead ineluctably to the place of consensus and tradition. Scruton places a high value on collective agreement whenever settled understandings of hearth and home are threatened by a spirit of “tear down and start again” — regardless of whose hearths and homes are pulverised. He argues the conservative case for a civilized life that consists, fundamentally, in providing congenial homes for people of taste in a social order “that does nothing to disturb our perceptions but which radiates a simple message of calm sociability.”(p92) His eloquence on behalf of this ideal is moving, but seems perhaps a mite too bland. It needs a dash of bitters — the sort of thing provided by Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. Whatever it does for the modern economy, and it plainly does a great deal, conspicuous consumption also “disturbs our perceptions” and does nothing at all for “calm sociability”. Some awareness of this is perhaps implied by the following contrast:

Our discussion implies that aesthetic judgement can be exercised in two contrasting ways: to fit in and to stand out.

Fitting in or standing out (and in the arts is there now a more popular way of standing out than being outrageous?), passively conforming or seeking attention, unconsciously accepting conventions or actively “making special”, these psychological alternatives have all sorts of implications — or they do for a Darwinian approach to art. Although he might be loath to admit it, Scruton’s thoughts on such matters as novelty vs. tradition relate to cognitive evolution, and to our organized understanding of the world around us. This begins with the perception of patterns, and their interpretation, and the way living organisms respond to regularity and order.

Cognitive evolution

It is over thirty years since E. H. Gombrich’s book The Sense of Order: a Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, where he advocated “an evolutionist view of the mind”. Such a view, he wrote, “has become inescapable since the days of Darwin”, adding that it is “thanks to the researches of ethologists during the last few decades that more is known about inborn reactions for which animals are undoubtedly ‘programmed’ than even Darwin could have surmised.” His particular interest was how perceived regularities in the natural world (of light, sound, heat and cold, pressure, physical resistance) enable ‘cognitive maps’ to be built up — systems of “coordinates on which meaningful objects can be plotted.” Such maps were essential to survival; they enabled living things to orient themselves in space; and he set out to connect the resulting “sense of order” with a theory of decorative design.

What did this order consist of? Amidst the blooming buzzing confusion of the sensory flux organisms detect patterns — patterns in time and intensity, in duration and force. The simple association of mere pleasure and pain might lead to valuing one pattern over another — but how did primitive organisms think? You might say the amoeba “developed a hypothesis” about the danger of approaching too close to something hot. Or you might say it “told itself a story” about the danger of hot things. Anyway the neurological rudiments of thought have been there, along with elementary representations, for millions of years. As James Hurford writes in his 2007 The Origins of Meaning, a natural evolutionary approach means “that mental representations of things and events in the world came before any corresponding expressions in language; the mental representations were phylogenetically prior to words and sentences.”

When referential language eventually came along, words and concepts multiplied to manage the patterns (Gombrich drew on information theory to explicate avian behavior: the signal to noise ratio of the peacock’s tail enabled it to cut through the surrounding redundancy). With pattern recognition came an embryonic aesthetic sense: “In both space and time, in sight and sound,” writes Brian Boyd, “we sense beauty in ‘the rule of order over randomness, of pattern over chaos’.” Before long Homo sapiens got the idea that playfully imaginative story-telling was even more fun than description, and you could have horses with wings (Greece), serpents with feathery plumes (Mexico), or priapic heroes that travelled underground (Australia). After that the arts really took off. On page fifteen of Boyd’s 2009 On the Origin of Stories he writes that “We can define art as cognitive play with pattern.” This is universal among the higher mammals, he says, adding that play itself

evolved through the advantages of flexibility; the amount of play in a species correlates with its flexibility of action. Behaviors like escape and pursuit, attack and defense, and social give-and-take can make life-or death differences.

But it is “attention” and the incessant demand for attention by art and artists that Boyd emphasizes perhaps most of all. “Art dies without attention”, he writes, adding twenty pages later that “attention provides the selective mechanism of art. If a work of art fails to earn attention, it dies.” All of us seek attention, we are told, as a mark of acceptance, respect, and status; primatological studies show that “the more dominant a primate, the more attention others direct toward him or her”; and he then pursues this topic through an analysis of one of the most famous epic narratives of all time, the Odyssey. Asking rhetorically what Homer’s work can offer us after two thousand five hundred years, he answers that “it can stress the importance of attention itself… a sine qua non of all art. Art can affect minds over time because it so compulsively engages out attention.”

Art’s importunity appears to Boyd unproblematic, perhaps because he sees it in such heartily positive terms. Something else he approves are communal benefits both at human and pre-human levels. We learn that chimpanzees celebrate community through excited cries or matching movements and “derive a rich emotional response from harmonizing attention among themselves through pattern and rhythm, chant and dance,” while historian William McNeill “recalls the ‘sense of pervasive well-being’ that he experienced in the army drill yard in 1941 — ‘a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.’” The implication being that a thorough-going incorporation into collective life is essential for everyone, that attention-getting is a social necessity in life as in art, and that ever-expanding creativity of every kind is desirable. As he writes on page 123, “For us, artistic creativity offers a good in itself.”

From making special to making vile

While walking today I saw a sticker saying “Art makes me feel unsafe.” I wonder who wrote it and why? Can it be that some art today is indeed unsafe and has a genuinely menacing purpose and character? In which case does evolutionary aesthetics throw light on the matter? As we saw at the beginning, although they differ in various ways both Roger Scruton and Denis Dutton are equally dismayed by the contemporary trashing of high culture. In his Introduction Dutton complains that “a determination to shock or puzzle has sent much art down a wrong path”, and he plainly feels uncomfortable with some modern trends. Scruton’s misgivings go deeper, and as an example of what he fears he describes a Berlin production by Calixto Bieito of Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio (Die Entführung aus dem Serail) set in a Berlin brothel…

with Selim as pimp, and Konstanze one of the prostitutes. Even during the most tender music, the stage was littered with couples copulating, and every excuse for violence, with or without a sexual climax, was taken. At one point a prostitute is gratuitously tortured, and her nipples bloodily and realistically severed before she is killed. The words and the music speak of love and compassion, but their message is drowned out by the loudly orchestrated scenes of murder and narcissistic sex that litter the stage.

As Scruton adds, this “flight from beauty” into sordid sadistic ugliness can be found in many aspects of contemporary culture. There is a self-conscious “desire to spoil beauty in acts of aesthetic iconoclasm.” Desecration is his word for it, and he argues that for a certain kind of nihilistic mind “desecration is a kind of defence against the sacred, an attempt to destroy its claims. In the presence of sacred things our lives are judged and in order to escape that judgement we destroy the thing that seems to accuse us.”

While I am not religious I tend to agree. And I regret to say that evolutionary aesthetics appears to offer little defence against such nihilism. As the inquiries of critics like Irving Kristol and Jacques Barzun suggested years ago, the purely egoistic activities of attention seeking and making special, and the hyper-individualistic drive for supreme distinction, increasingly take place in a moral void. Ellen Dissanayake writes (Homo Aestheticus, page 59) that “specialness may be strangeness, outrageousness, or extravagance” (my emphasis). So it seems that however outrageous it is, it’s still art, and the sacralizing of making special is fully compatible with the desecration of making vile. Having implied that attention-getting creativity is a good in itself (virtually the summum bonum) Brian Boyd adds correctly that “Evolution does not aim at creativity. It aims at nothing.”

For his part Denis Dutton looks critically at modernism and says its assumption that “culture can give us a taste for just anything at all” is false. In other words, we have a kind of built-in moral resistance to the runaway pathologies now visible in the arts. I am very glad to hear this, and I hope it is true, because if it’s not, then Calixto Bieito and the film director Lars Von Trier represent the future — the Showbiz incarnation of that sick outrageousness that infects the entertainment industry today. And if that happens I suspect art will make us feel unsafer still. It needn’t, and it shouldn’t, but it may.

Note: Although the argument remains the same, the text presented here is slightly longer than that appearing in The American last October.

The African peoples now being pillaged and destroyed have names like Zaghawa, Fur, and Massalit, and they live in the extensive region of Western Sudan called Darfur. The Arab horsemen of the apocalypse laying waste the land are called janjaweed, and they are acting for familiar reasons: an unswerving sense of racial destiny, a demand for Lebensraum, and a fierce belief that only one form of divine justice shall prevail.

In Darfur itself—a mainly Islamic district, unlike the Sudanese areas running southward toward the Upper Nile where the part-Christian Dinka and Nuer live—religion happens not to be the issue. In Darfur the invaders want water and grazing land. That is why Arab Muslims have been bombing and shooting African Muslims: the Arab nomad with his cattle and horses wants the African farmer’s fields—while raping his wife and burning his house down too. With the Sahara inching southward and the continual degradation of the parched Sahel, and after years of pressure from burning heat and drought, the Arabs are driving the Africans out of the more fertile country and seizing the wells to water their cattle. In the capital city of Khartoum, the government smiles broadly and looks away.

Of course Khartoum denies it is doing any such thing, and President Omar al-Bashir has regularly claimed that everything possible has been done to restrain the murderous bandits. But the slaughter goes on. A recent “Sudan Situation Report” prepared for the United Nations reads as follows:

On 12 October IDPs from Uma Kasara reported that their village was burned down by unidentified gunmen on 2 October, displacing approximately 650 families from their village, and from two adjacent villages of Gendoul and Goz. Three policemen were reported as killed, and property looted. According to the same source, ten people are missing from the village and the rest have moved to the newly established camp in Nyala town, El Sereif.

Yes, approximately 650 families—and four more villages are mentioned later in the same report. Can it be that the word from Khartoum is somehow not getting through to the troops?

The stricken and the doomed

But what is an IDP? One answer might be that it is a way of using the vocabulary of social work to neutralize the horror of what is happening and the fate of the people concerned. An IDP is an Internally Displaced Person—as if we were dealing with someone mildly disoriented and needing help to get home. There is also a collective term issuing from the UN and its agencies that similarly needs glossing. In the aggregate, tens of thousands of IDPs become “conflict-affected populations.” That is no doubt true; but English provides better ways of describing those in Sudan whose villages have been burned, whose crops and animals have been destroyed, whose children have been massacred, and whose men and women have been savaged and slain. Let us call them the stricken and the doomed.

According to the UN, the number of the stricken and the doomed in Sudan runs to about 2.2 million. Harrowing accounts by victims appeared in the October 4 issue of Time, and readers with an appetite for this sort of thing can learn more at various websites. One such site tells about the work of the Atrocities Documentation Team assembled by the U.S. State Department’s bureau of democracy, human rights, and labor in conjunction with the Coalition for International Justice.

This group, which conducted 1,165 interviews with survivors, reports “a consistent pattern of atrocities, suggesting close coordination between governmental forces and Arab militia elements, commonly known as the janjaweed.” The site also provides a brief history of the crisis in Darfur, and along the way explains some of the puzzling acronyms worn by the local resistance movements that, by defending their land and patrimony, have been challenging the ambitions of one Khartoum government after another for 50 years.

On the side of those fighting the janjaweed today there is a double-fisted organization, the Sudan Liberation Army/Movement, with both a military and a political wing. Its 4,000 members, along with a smaller outfit called the Justice and Equality Movement, are the ones carrying the fight to the Sudanese government. As is only to be expected, in the course of many years’ bitter fighting there have been injustices and atrocities committed by the rebels too. This fact is exploited to the full by a government seeking to obfuscate its own responsibility for the present catastrophe.

On July 30, 2004 the UN adopted Security Council Resolution 1556 demanding that the Sudanese government act to disarm the janjaweed militias and  bring their leaders to justice. The demand has been ignored. Nor has Jan Pronk, the man appointed by Kofi Annan to handle these issues, been helpful in stemming the drift of events.

Genocide?

That hardly comes as a surprise. A member of the Dutch Labor Party, Pronk was well known in the past for his strong interest in African liberation movements and his support for Cuba; he is even better known today for his role in the Dutch peace mission in the former Yugoslavia that ended with the murder of thousands of citizens of Srebenica—after which he resigned from ministerial office. Now he is the UN’s peacekeeper in Sudan. “Atrocities, very bad things, killings, rape, burning of villages have taken place,” her told a press conference in Khartoum in late September, although he had found nothing that he thought fit to describe as genocide.

In American diplomacy, the “G” word has taken a somewhat different path. The Bush administration was the first to air the charge, which was then seconded by Congress in a unanimous declaration. But the administration subsequently backed off a bit, perhaps to let the UN and the African Union try to sort things out. In any event, to raise the issue of genocide is to ask whether there is a racial component in the violence, as there has been in other longstanding criminal practices in Sudan.

When the janjaweed attack, they do unmistakably hurl racial abuse at their victims, alleging in particular that Africans are born to be slaves: “Slaves, run! Leave the country. You don’t belong; why are you not leaving this area for the Arab cattle to graze?” It is not impossible that similar taunts were heard in Pharaonic times, since slavery seems to have been around in the Nile Valley for thousands of years. In the 1990s, indeed, before the present crisis, Sudan was notorious for its flourishing slave trade. The victims in that case were not Muslims but mostly African Christians.

That this practice should have been allowed to continue unabated into the late 20^th century is a story in itself. In thinking about it, and about its relevance to the role played by sympathetic outsiders in the current crisis, it might be helpful to have a brief look backward.

British efforts to stamp out slavery

In the 19^th century, a series of notable Englishmen were appointed by the Khedive, the viceroy of the Turkish sultan in Egypt, to stamp out the slave trade in neighboring Sudan. In their various capacities as provincial governors or governors-general, Sir Samuel Baker, General Charles George Gordon, and Sir Reginald Wingate all tried to do so. Yet they did not completely succeed. As late as 1933, Sir James Robertson, then a district commissioner in Kordofan, found something odd in the hollow tree behind his house. It seems that his Sudanese cook, when short of cash, had embarked on “a profitable line of trade beyond his normal duties”:

When on tour with his master he would from time to time acquire a small Nuba or Dinka child whom he brought back with him and hid in this hollow tree until he found a purchaser for him. In the end his illicit trade was brought to light and he paid for it with a long term of imprisonment.

The memoirist goes on to talk amiably about the rather brackish water in the well and other mild vexations, with the story of the child in the tree being smoothly worked into a broader narrative of the kind that members of the British colonial administration often wrote in retirement in leafy Wiltshire. The anecdote is quaint and humorous, and although not moralistic it is in the end quietly edifying: the slave trader goes to jail.

It is the attitude revealed that is most interesting. What we are shown in this glimpse of the administrative mind is a relatively relaxed accommodation of ineradicable Sudanese ways. In 1933, this corresponded to a widely shared English upper-class conception of civilized colonial rule: live and let live, ensure that economic activity is more or less unhindered, and allow as much latitude as you can to existing authorities and existing conduct. More than this, the anecdote also embodies the kind of relativism that is the humane side of aristocratic management: culturally speaking, the lower orders are what they are: trying too hard to change them is a mistake; ultimately the African world is too deeply mysterious to grasp—and noblesse oblige.

A second, contrasting approach to Sudan may be found in the life and personality of General Gordon, who did not return to write his memoirs. (on January 26, 1885, the forces of the Mahdi, the Islamic fanatic of the day, attacked the besieged city of Khartoum, overcame all resistance, and within two hours killed and beheaded Gordon himself.) Unlike the Oxford-educated Robertson, General Gordon took most of his intellectual guidance from the pocket Bible he carried everywhere, and most of his inspiration from God. There was in him an exalted piety, an unrelaxed evangelical fervor, and a sense that not only slavery but evil itself should be extirpated wherever it was found—all of which contributed to his astonishing successes, and also to his doom.

A Sudanese view

A third view of Sudan slavery and the Sudanese situation can be had from the boy in the tree—not the boy himself, of course, but a distinguished present-day representative of the same Dinka people to whom the boy belonged, and who are now one of the tribes most cruelly oppressed. I have in mind War and Slavery in the Sudan, a 2001 book by Jok Madut Jok, a Sudanese historian at Loyola Marymount University. Writing with pained dignity, muffled grief, and remarkable moral poise, Jok offers a moving testament to the suffering of his people; his book is recommended reading for anyone tempted to rush impetuously into the mélée.

Although he sketches the historical background, Jok’s main subject is the current wave of slavery in Sudan. As I have noted, this began earlier than the recent developments in Darfur; it involved the districts of Equatoria and Bahr el-Ghazal and Upper Nile, bordering a number of countries in central Africa. Starting about 1983 with the renewal of an endemic and essentially racial conflict, the Sudanese government undertook to exploit traditional animosities to fight a war on the cheap:

Cattle-herding Arab tribesmen, known as the Baggara, were recruited as a low-cost counter-insurgency militia and deployed against the southern opposition force…

Soon the Baggara discovered a very effective method of suppressing the rebellion in the south: destroying civilian villages and frightening the population into deserting their homes. But… the Baggara received only meager government assistance. It was more lucrative to capture large numbers of women, children, and any able-bodied men they could subdue, and take them into slavery in their northern provinces of Darfur and Kordofan.

There was nothing new about the terrorist style of assault described by Jok. When the Nile explorer Sir Samuel Baker was in the region in 1862, he “observed that a slave trader would sail to the south from Khartoum in the dry season with armed men and find a convenient village. The slavers would surround the village in the night, then just before dawn fall upon the village, burning the huts and shooting to frighten the people.” Then they rounded up the women and children, looted the village of all cattle, grain, and ivory, and burned and destroyed everything else.

Reinforcing the racial pattern, at least in the south, is religious enmity. Islamic law (shari’a), officially imposed in 1983, expresses the government’s belief that Arabism, the Arabic language, and Islamic culture in general should prevail over the mixture of Christian and animistic beliefs among southern Sudanese. During the half-century preceding Sudan’s independence in 1956, the British had actively opposed any such project, deliberately shielding the non-Islamic cultures of the south. For thus interrupting the march of Islam through Africa they were bitterly resented by northerners. “This is why,” Jok writes, “the policies of assimilation and Arabization in the south have been so vigorous and bloody, turning south Sudan into a graveyard over the years.”

All this is clear enough. But what should be done? Here an understandable ambivalence enters into what Jok has to say. Despite describing scenes of barbaric savagery arguably worse than those witnessed by such 19^th-century anti-slavery men as Sir Samuel Baker, General Gordon, and David Livingstone himself, he plainly feels a little uncomfortable about the efforts of the numerous aid agencies that have come to help. Some gestures have been welcome—“Operation Lifeline Sudan has been greatly appreciated”—but there are too many policy disputes, too much distracting argument about possible dependency effects, too many “affluent representatives of a different world who make the gap between the haves and the have-nots only too glaring”. And whose arrogance and insensitivity are hard to bear.

The humanitarian agencies

This portrait would hurt many of the frontline aid workers in the field. They are not naturally arrogant. They want to help. But they must often find themselves completely out of their depth. They do not know the language, they are surrounded by hundreds of dead and dying, by heat and dust and flies and smells. Is it any wonder that they sometimes end up impatiently pushing and shoving and even abusing the miserable victims they have come to save?

More generally, however, and especially in light of the multitude of summer missionaries now spread around the world digging wells and repairing roofs and painting walls, it seems reasonable to ask a different question. Has all this benevolent endeavor helped the peoples it is designed to help, the Africans pre-eminently among them?

One typical listing on the web, the World Guide to Humanitarian and Development Volunteering, advertises “over 180 projects worldwide, from two weeks to two years or more, how to spend either a holiday-with-a-difference or a longer period—for students, professionals, retirees, and those with and without work experience, plus information on finding thousands more opportunities on the Internet.” It asks for doctors, accountants, agronomists, surveyors, and teachers ready for work in Africa and elsewhere.

On one sidebar there is even an item about “Singles in Sudan”. The most poignant feature on the page, which could easily go unnoticed, shows a young African girl, aged about twelve and colourfully attired in local costume, embracing an aid worker of indeterminate sex. The African girl looks sideways and down and seems either puzzled or embarrassed or both. The aid worker looks upward to the heavens with the expression of a desperately seeking loner who has at last found love.

Some of these humanitarian workers describe themselves, or have been described by others, as secular missionaries. But Christian missionaries had a defined and terminable assignment. They converted the Fijians or Samoans, suggested helpful alternatives to eating taro and making war, put women into clothes, got everyone singing hymns—and then went home. But contrast, no matter what happens to their exotic charges, big and aggressively redistributive charities like Oxfam have no intention whatsoever of going home. Their purpose is to share Western wealth with whoever seems a worthy recipient, and their zealous staffs will go on doing this as long as anyone in the West is wealthy and anyone elsewhere present an outstretched hand.

The higher mendicancy and its expectations

Others are more inclined to see the humanitarian NGOs as a kind of mendicant order in which the monastic virtues of poverty, chastity, and humility have been reinvented in forms more compatible with the vast sums they control, the living opportunities they offer, and the personal aggrandizement available within their bureaucracies. There are 8,770 employees in the World Food Program, over 600 in Rome alone. About 70 different organizations are active in three distinct regions of Darfur (north, south, and west), including Action Contre la Faim, the German Red Cross, Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, Care International, the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, and so on. A complete list can be found in the UN document “Darfur Humanitarian Profile No. 6.”

The first thing to be said about the new medicant orders is that the stricken and the doomed could not do without them. It is upon the activities of such organizations that the survival of millions in Sudan and elsewhere depends, and they are a vital part of the contemporary philanthropic scene. But this must not blind us to the peculiar ideology their leaders promote. As one rises up the hierarchical ladder that leads from the hard-pressed frontline troops to the people in the directorial chairs at the top—from the dust of deserts to the air-conditioned bureaucracy where men like the Dutchman Jan Pronk have made their careers—serious contradictions emerge.

At one UN website we are teasingly invited to “Tell a friend about Global Policy Forum.” And indeed—why not? At the GPF site we find page after page revealing the conflict between the wealth the Global Policv Forum seeks to appropriate, channel, and disburse, and the hostility of the professional disbursers toward those who produce that wealth. We find, in short, a commitment to the project of global redistribution—combined with the unexamined assumption that showers of cash will continue for as long as the mendicant orders require.

Thus, there is a page telling us how to resist and regulate globalization. It asserts that free-trade agreements like NAFTA “make trade ‘free’ for northern exports, without prohibiting the rich countries’ protectionist measures”; that multinational corporations menace health and labor standards everywhere; that the World Trade Organization has been rightly criticized for its “opaque, undemocratic operating procedures and neo-liberal ideology” (using “neo-liberal” as a pejorative synonym for “free-market”); and that the “neo-liberal reforms of the IMF” only “exacerbate poverty”. Last but not least, the Forum promotes the golden prospect of global taxation, in order “to fund the UN, its agencies, and other programs for worldwide human security and development.”

In fact, these pages leave the abiding impression that their authors could hardly run a corner deli. Yet that does not prevent them issuing a stream of global economic edicts, political fatwas, and social anathemas.

Nor is that the end of contradictions. Is it possible that humanitarian projects in Africa are being painstakingly devised for a world that does not really exist? Might it be the case that some projects cannot be carried out, because the improvements contemplated can no longer be made? That they are intended for beneficiaries whose lives have already been largely destroyed by violence and mayhem? And that, for reasons of institutional inertia, such projects—on which hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent—keep rolling along even though their goals are absurd?

Impossible projects

A page welcoming us to the executive board of the World Food Program shows an enormous oval conference table in an even more enormous room, and helpfully gives access to all the available executive-board documents dating back to 1996. For our purposes, we may concentrate on agenda items four and eight of the Third Regular Session for 2004. The first of these bears the title “Expanded School Feeding and Health Program: New Partnerships in Uganda.” Describing a five-year program that is to cost $332 million “in its first phase”, the item begins with a seemingly unexceptionable claim: “The central development challenge confronting African countries today is the reduction of poverty, particularly among the rural poor.”

Now, as economists like the late P.T. Bauer have shown, it is a striking fact that most of the African countries now receiving aid for “poverty” once had self-supporting farmers who grew crops successfully and fed their families and often had a surplus for sale. What has changed? Is poverty “the central development challenge,” or is it rather the complete collapse of the security needed for a peasant farmer to get on with his life, grow his crops, and feed and educate his children?

If the latter is the case, then a principal cause of poverty is the violence and killing that make productive farming difficult, and that will certainly make educational routines nearly impossible. Might it then be true that the causes of poverty and of educational backwardness cannot be dealt with by aid at all—that both of them depend on first solving the unending civil disorders of the region?

The $332 million, we are told, will be managed by the Ugandan “Ministry of Education and Sport working with sectoral support from line ministries,” and funds are to be specially directed to “conflict-affected areas.” In these areas, the Ugandan ministry declares, “the number of both primary and secondary beneficiaries will expand during implementation of the program,” these beneficiaries being “schoolchildren in day schools, teachers, and cooks.”

The Lord’s Resistance Army

The significance of this becomes clear when we get to the second text, agenda item eight: “Targeted Food Assistance for Relief and Recovery of Refugees, Displaced Persons, and Vulnerable Groups in Uganda.” The budget for this three-year project has undergone no fewer than four revisions upward since its initial approval in 2002, and now stands at $249,266,641. But it turns out that in precisely those “conflict-affected areas” where schoolchildren, teachers, and cooks are supposedly going about their educational tasks, there has been a violent insurgency by an Afro-Christian cult called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

“In February 2004,” we read, “over 200 people were massacred by LRA rebels in a single attack… Major humanitarian corridors… remain extremely insecure; many camps are inaccessible without military escort.” As for the children, “40,000 seek overnight shelter in churches, hospital compounds, and NGO night shelters… for fear of being abducted.”

Thanks to the Lord’s Resistance Army, it emerges, most of the stricken and the doomed in northern Uganda, exactly as in Sudan in West Darfur, are forced “to remain in camps; they have limited access to their fields and few possibilities of obtaining food and income”. And the LRS continues to attack those camps, “burning, looting, raping and killing, and abducting children. They have disrupted travel by ambushing vehicles on most of the main roads… Social and cultural structures are breaking down: men are leaving their families, there are frequent teenage pregnancies, vulnerable groups lack care, and HIV/AIDS incidence and risks are increasing.”

With the best will in the world, it is difficult to see how the allocated school funds can be used as planned. Is it out of order to ask what happens to those hundreds of millions when they cannot be spent?

The UN commission

After a flurry of interest and visits to Khartoum by important persons, and calls for Western military intervention in Sudan, Washington, at least, seems to have grown cool to the idea of forceful action. Although the State Department is exerting what it calls “calibrated pressure” on Khartoum, the calibration has seemed much too fine to have any effect. In the meantime, Kofi Annan has appointed an international commission, consisting of a panel of international jurists, “to determine whether acts of genocide have occurred in the Darfur region of Sudan.”

The panel appears to have at least one member of judicial distinction, Antonio Cassese, president of the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. It also includes four rather less distinguished members, including one from Ghana whose judicial utterances are seemingly not on record and another, Dumisa Ntsebeza of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, who has waxed indignant about “the self-styled policeperson of the world, the U.S.” and has invidiously compared American policy on reparations to Jewish victims of Nazism with the American position on reparation claims for black slavery.

Of course, what the panel decides is largely academic. What matters is what America and the West decide. On my own reading of the evidence, influenced both by contemporary documents and by War and Slavery in Sudan, there can be no question that genocide or something very like it is taking place. The question is what the West can conceivably do about cultural patterns that provide no way of reconciling differences or resolving disputes, that in country after country across the sub-Saharan region repeatedly escalate into massacres and pogroms, and that in Sudan are driven by a regime determined to dominate, subject, convert, and if necessary murder its opponents.

To send in the troops of the African Union, as some have suggested, is not just temporising—it’s a joke. A recent Rwandan unit found itself without most of the supporting equipment it required, and might just as well have been on guard duty back in Kigali. A few years ago, a Nigerian force, in a fit of pique, shot about 100 or of its hosts.

Military intervention

If piecemeal action were possible—biting off a western chunk of this vast territory and making a refuge with a defensible perimeter—perhaps it might be considered. But taking responsibility for a million or two million people and positioning an army to defend them might have awful collateral consequences, like the vengeful murder in reprisal of defenceless millions still under the control of a ruthless government. Is it worth taking the risk?

Also to be borne in mind is what happens in the longer term to people who become wards of occupying powers. Humanitarian organizations will undoubtedly see it as their duty to help such men and women leave Sudan for other countries. If I were a Sudanese, I would most certainly try to escape, and I would do everything I could to enter either Europe or the U.S. Indeed, I believe this is the natural, right, and proper thing for any Sudanese who cares about his life and his family to try to do. But how many refugees can, or should—or would—either Europe or America take in? There is an implicit custodial contract for the safekeeping of the stricken and the doomed, and this is something any occupying power would need to think about not just sympathetically but long and hard.

As for armed intervention by Western forces, the spirit quakes. It might be useful to visualize Sudan not as a quagmire but as a La Brea tar pit the size of Lake Superior, infinitely hospitable to bones, with endless uncontrollable frontiers alongside Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, Chad, Libya, Egypt, Eritrea, not to mention a useful stretch of the Red Sea coast directly opposite Mecca.

An Italian who spent 30 years in the south wrote in his journals in 1877 that “it must be borne in mind that the Egyptian Sudan is vast in extent and, if the government of a region wanted to keep watch on all the roads, an army of 100,000 troops would not be enough.” Strategists might also consider the fate of Colonel Hicks and his 10,000 men, sent off to destroy the Mahdi in 1883 and slaughtered almost to the last man in an ambush. A modern army differs in many ways from a body of reluctantly dragooned Egyptian troops in 1883, but the picture is worth contemplating.

Humanitarian realism

In thinking about humanitarian action, two ethical touchstones are relevant: pity, which was Rousseau’s criterion in the 18^th century, and the argument by Hugo Grotius a century earlier that force is justified to stop the maltreatment by a state of its own nationals when that conduct is so brutal and large-scale as to shock the conscience of the community of nations.

Tragically, however, despite what Jok Madut Jok tells us about the ruin of his people, and despite what we read in the newspapers every day, it must be seriously questioned whether an ideal and transcendental concept of justice can be allowed to determine the issue. What must be equally weighed in the end is what foreign soldiers can practically do, and foreign states can reasonably pay for.

The West, including especially Europe, has been deeply implicated in the modern disorders of the Muslim Middle East. By contrast, the West did not cause this African catastrophe; the West is not responsible for it; and it is most unlikely that the West can fix it. In Sudan its roots are both domestic and endemic, go back hundreds of years, and lie at the deepest levels of a pathologically racist ethnic psyche.

In the meantime, despite the dubious policy choices and the even more dubious pronouncements of the elites who guide them, the front-line workers of the humanitarian agencies must of course be helped to do all in their immediate power for the stricken and the doomed—relieve distress, minister to the sick, displaced, and dying, and save those it is possible to save.

(Quadrant, December 2001; revised 2003)

The art of guerrilla war

Now that sporadic sniping in Baghdad looks set to escalate into more serious guerrilla activity this might be the time to take another look at Colonel Lawrence. He had lots of experience at this sort of thing and was an able theorist. His political meddling had much to do with the pattern of the Arab states today. His military thinking on behalf of Arab nationalism and guerrilla war was of course designed to overthrow the Ottoman Empire, almost one hundred years ago, but it fits the case of the US occupation of Iraq as well—perhaps more so, given the cautious western disinclination for murderous reprisals when attacked.

Anyway his account of how his Arab cutthroats would beat the Turks (and cutthroats is what his mates were) makes chilling reading today. He asked himself how a handful of fierce zealots whose main activities had been pilfering, ambush, and brigandage, could possibly bring the Ottoman Empire to its knees. Orthodox military tactics wouldn’t work: it could never be done by punching toe to toe with Turkish artillery.

“But suppose” (he wrote in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom) “suppose we were an influence, an idea, a thing invulnerable, intangible, without front or back, drifting about like a gas?” Conventional armies were large and immobile, and conventional generals equally so. Instead, “we might be a vapour, blowing where it listed. Our kingdoms lay in each man’s mind, and as we wanted nothing material to live on, so perhaps we offered nothing material to the killing.”

Like much else that he wrote this was eerily prescient. Today the heavenly kingdom of Islam’s more fanatical devotees, to be achieved by ridding the world of unbelievers, is indeed half in the mind and half in the hereafter. Groups like al Qaeda have of course plenty of material things like men and weapons too. But far more important than these is the way they have become throughout the Arab world, as in Lawrence’s vision, an influence, a toxic idea of universal revenge, an intangible thing without front or back or visibility, drifting about the globe like poison gas and striking unannounced and at will.

And if most readers think that Lawrence’s use of the word ‘gas’ synonymously with ‘vapour’ has no special significance, they’re probably wrong. He was writing around 1920, when mustard gas on the Western Front was the first thing every reader thought of when the word was mentioned. I suspect that Lawrence knew exactly what he was doing. It was in his nature to be unhealthily excited by gore, and killing, and nihilistic oblivion, and it was more than likely that when he wrote of “gas” he did so fully intending to convey its sinister menace, and happy enough to identify the mayhem it created with his own designs.

There are other interesting things too in what he says, especially for anyone hoping to occupy and hold a Middle Eastern country like Iraq for any length of time today—for example, the much-discussed asymmetry of forces. How many men would the Arabs need, and how many men would the Turks need, for either of them to succeed against the other? According to Lawrence the equation favoured his own guerilla-terrorists:

The Turks would have need of a fortified post every four square miles, and a post could not be less than twenty men. If so, they would need six hundred thousand men to meet the illwills of all the Arab peoples, combined with the active hostility of a few zealots.

With Iraq’s occupation now entering a critical phase much the same argument applies. Outside the Kurdish areas it is impossible to say how many of the general population support the effort to drag their country into the modern world, and how many remain sullenly acquiescent, waiting to see how things pan out and whether Saddam tries to stage a comeback. In the latter case, how many US troops will be needed in urban areas, distributed in what numbers and where and at how many fortified posts, to secure a regime installed by the USA against the sullen illwill of much of the Iraqi population, “combined with the active hostility of a few zealots”? We shall see.

The high romance of it all

I have had a copy of T. E. Lawrence’s The Desert Revolt (the abridgement of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom) for many years. It bears a 1927 inscription from a great-aunt who served as a nurse during the First World War in France, and who gave the book to my New Zealand father; and beneath this there is a later inscription from my father to me. Like other Britishers of their colonial generation they honoured Lawrence as a spectacular war hero, and they regarded his book as a literary treasure. It was indeed a handsome production. Printed on deckle-edged paper, it had the most glamorous imaginable charcoal drawing of Lawrence by Augustus John at the start, opposite a title page bearing “The Desert Revolt” in blood-red lettering.

Even as late as the mid-1950s the Lawrence cult was still going strong. I recall the wife of a prominent poet, her eyes moist with emotion, asking me if I had seen the Eric Kennington portraits in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom: they were, she said, quite superb. And indeed they were—whether crayon or line drawings—quite superb.

Emir Abdulla, Abu Tayi, Felsal, all of them superior beings far above your plain, boring, bespectacled, job-holding townsman in the West. On the one hand Mr Sinclair Lewis’s representative of the deplorable boorboisie, Mr Babbitt; and on the other hand . . .  What incomparable hawk-like profiles and piercing eyes! What haunting images and striking dress! What memorable glimpses of eastern tribal glory are there displayed! E.M. Forster described the Arabian campaign during World War One as  “the last of the picturesque wars”, and at the level of theatrical costuming the portraits strikingly confirm this view.

But as for what Lawrence’s books tell us about the clash of tribal primitivism on the one hand, with Western civilization on the other, not to mention which of the two engaged his deepest loyalty—that is something else again. In my own view, much influenced by the writings of Elie Kedourie, the whole episode shows a politically naive romantic aesthete tipping the scales of history in a disastrous way. That Winston Churchill in 1921 participated in this weighting of the scales, intervening in support of Lawrence to help place Feisal on the throne in Baghdad, reveals more about Churchill’s own romanticism than anything else.

As for Churchill’s hope that “around the ancient capital of Baghdad . . .  there will arise an Arab State which can revive and embody the old culture and glories of the Arab race”, this represented a sad misuse of his customary rhetoric. The glories of the Arab race which preoccupied the author of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom were on an altogether lower plane. They reflected what has been called “the peculiar affinity of the English ruling class with Islam”, an affinity based on the fact that

Muslims shared many of the deep-seated characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon elite—an intuitive resentment of culture, an amicable contempt for women, a proclivity for riding about on horses, a pleasure in discipline, and a covert homophilia.

While hundreds of observers have noticed the general phenomenon, the useful short list above was set down some time ago by the journalist James Cameron in a book about India, and for convenience we may call it the Cameron Complex. Barring resentment of high culture—both musical and literary matters were in fact things Lawrence was very self-conscious about—most of the Cameron Complex fits the Lawrence Complex (and indeed the British Foreign Office Complex) very well.

Given the number of British writers who have been attracted to the camels and tents and desolation of Arab tribal life it is tempting to reduce it to an infatuation with the noble savage. But this is misleading. As Ernest Gellner points out in Muslim Society, it was more often the aristocratic ranking of a feudal order that appealed to those drawn to the Arab world:

The European discovery and exploration of Muslim tribal society occurred in the main after the French Revolution, and was often carried out by men—long before T.E.Lawrence—who were possessed by a nostalgia for a Europe as it was prior to the diffusion of the egalitarian ideal … They sought, not the noble savage, but the savage noble.

That’s an interesting twist. Savage nobles aplenty can be found waving their swords and daggers throughout The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a work some regard as one of the important books of the twentieth century. Certainly Lawrence himself saw it in this light. Jeffrey Meyers in his study The Wounded Spirit tells us that literary achievement was what its author “valued above everything else”, and the subordination of military history to the demands of imaginative writing was something Lawrence freely acknowledged at various times and places.

To Robert Graves he wrote that “Artists excite and attract me. I’ve wished all my life to have the power of creating something imaginative”, while to others he announced that “a man never amounts to anything in this world unless he be an artist. I hope to be appraised rather as a man of letters than as a man of action.”

After completing his manuscript Lawrence listed three “titanic” books which were his models: The Brothers Karamazov, Zarathustra and Moby Dick:  “My ambition was to make an English fourth.” Of these works Jeffrey Meyers says that The Seven Pillars of Wisdom “shares their epic and idealistic vision and portrays Melville’s exalted quest for the absolute with Dostoyevsky’s recondite and infernal soul-states”. That could be so. But other reckonings too suggest themselves, including the possibility that in important respects Lawrence’s book is little more than an upmarket old-time adventure story for boys. A highly pretentious, artificial, and self-glorifying adventure story, to be sure—but that’s what it’s like all the same.

The greatest boys’ story in the world

In the sort of tale I’m thinking of we find a plucky young chap (in order to bring things up to date let us call him Harry) who visits an exotic feudal kingdom ruled by a princely leader of his people. With a bit of luck the prince will be wearing a long white robe, his aquiline features will be those of a natural aristocrat, he will be famous for his skill at martial arts (a silver-handled dagger is stuck in his belt), while awed visitors instantly recognise his inborn air of command. It is noticeable that there are no girls or women anywhere. And it is fair to mention another curious feature too: the prince is often attended by slaves who are invariably handsome, silent and strong.

Let us now turn to Harry Lawrence’s own words as he describes his first meeting with Prince Feisal. A slave carrying a silver-hilted sword

led me to an inner court, on whose further side, framed between the uprights of a black doorway, stood a white figure waiting tensely for me. I felt at first glance that this was the man I had come to Arabia to seek-the leader who would bring the Arab Revolt to full glory. Feisal looked very tall and pillar-like, very slender, in his long white silk robes and his brown head-cloth bound with a brilliant scarlet and gold cord. His eyelids were dropped; and his black beard and colorless face were like a mask against the strange, still watchfulness of his body. His hands were crossed in front of him on his dagger.

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom contains pages and pages of this adjectivally overwrought gush. Elsewhere and afterwards, enraptured by what he has seen, Lawrence tells us that he

sat and half-listened and saw visions, while the twilight deepened, and the night; until a line of slaves with lamps came down the winding paths between the palm trunks, and we walked back through the gardens to the little house, with its courts still full of waiting people, and there we sat down together to the smoking bowl of rice and meat set upon the food-carpet for our supper by the slaves.

Fanned by slaves our hero tucks into his supper—and while he is feeding we might usefully take a closer look at this social milieu, a milieu in which Lawrence completely immersed himself, with whose fortunes he identified, and for which he was committed to securing Middle Eastern paramountcy at the end of the war. It has splendid princes at one end of the social spectrum and slaves at the other: that much we know. We have seen his warm regard for the silk-robed set—but what about the slaves? In the first place he seems to have been altogether unmoved by the plight of the harem women, or the fact that the sexual captivity of Somali and other African girls by Arabs had gone on for centuries. What interested him were the men.

The gardens were entrusted to slaves, negroes like the grown lads who brought in the tray of dates to us, and whose thick limbs and plump shining bodies looked curiously out of place among the bird-like Arabs.

The author explains that these plump and shining blacks were originally from Africa, and had been brought as children to Arabia by their fathers on pilgrimage to Mecca, where they were afterwards sold. “When grown strong they were worth from fifty to eighty pounds apiece, and were looked after carefully as befitted their price.” Some of them became servants, Lawrence tells us,

“but the majority were sent out to the palm villages … whose climate was too bad for Arab labour, but where they flourished and built themselves solid houses, and mated with women slaves, and did all the manual work of the holding.”

The “mating” of this labouring livestock with women slaves is a nice touch, and entirely typical. Anyway, like many plantation visitors to the Old South, Lawrence finds nothing to object to in their condition. Everyone is perfectly happy— “They formed a society of their own, and lived much at their pleasure “—while those he saw “declared themselves contented”. This was not written in 1720 or 1820, though It might well have been. It was written by a cultivated Englishman in 1920.

The adoration of feudal society

What our admiring English emissary to the emirs shows is a complete acquiescence in the rules and customs of a feudal society where slavery is a fixed institutional feature, and where the breeding of slaves for garden work in the palm groves is considered normal, since its purpose is to support an idle, fierce and touchy Arab leisure class permanently insulated from manual labour.

Need one add that it remains today as insulated against manual labour as it was then? Or that the accidental windfall wealth of oil revenues allows it now to import an entire service caste from the remotest corners of the globe to avoid having to cook or dust or mop? But the author of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom found nothing wrong with such arrangements then, and would find nothing wrong with their perpetuation today. It’s the way things were meant to be.

Peculiarly enough, as Elie Kedourie points out in Islam in the Modern World, Lawrence combined this complacent attitude towards traditional slave-owning Bedouin society with views commonly described as “radical” or “anti-imperialist”. Thus, in the introductory chapter of Seven Pillars, he declares that British soldiers, “young, clean, delightful fellows” were sent “to the worst of deaths, not to win the war, but that the corn and rice and oil of Mesopotamia might be ours”. This, observes Kedourie, is nothing more than the Hobsonian-Leninist version of Marxist doctrine which holds that it is always “capitalism” which causes war.

Yet this seeming radicalism was entirely superficial. At war’s end Lawrence would work to have his friend Feisal installed as a king in Damascus, and when that failed, and Feisal was expelled by the French, he used his influence with Churchill to have him installed as a king in Baghdad. Kings are the thing, especially in the Mysterious East where they get to wear picturesque headwear and splendid silken robes. There is also talk in Lawrence’s book about nationalism and a “nationalist revolt”, as well as the claim that this was the underlying motive of his Bedouin friends; and along with this goes the frank enjoyment of his role as a charismatic outsider leading their movement.

But as for understanding where it all might ultimately be leading, and whether or not a collection of despotic quasi-feudal Arab states would be a desirable outcome at the end of a “war to save civilisation”—or might instead evolve into a destructive adversary of that civilisation —things like this never seem to have entered Lawrence’s head. His grasp of all such matters appears no deeper than his grasp of Marxism. His political philosophy was entirely secondary, something to be subsumed under a romantic infatuation with the savage nobility of Abu this and Emir that, who have daggers in their belts, and ride hard all night, testing themselves against the Arabian wastes.

Is it unfair to describe The Seven Pillars of Wisdom parodistically as an over-ambitious boy’s adventure story? Perhaps it is. The book contains many fine descriptions, several penetrating character sketches, and is close enough to the action to at least read like a plausible literary transfiguration of events—however strained, artificial and hyperbolic the prose.

At the same time it is hardly coincidental that the book lends itself so readily to shorter versions for the juvenile market. One of these, The Boys’ Life of Colonel Lawrence, was written by his American admirer Lowell Thomas (“Capture of a Turkish Stronghold”, “The White King of the Arabs”, “The Wonders of the Lost City” are typical chapter headings). This however was understandable, since Lowell Thomas was the lecturer-publicist who single-handedly created the glamorous public image of Lawrence in the immediate postwar years, and a “boys’ life” of his hero would obviously have been a nice little supplementary earner.

More surprising, among the 1300 entries in Jeffrey Meyers’ bibliography in The Wounded Spirit, is Lawrence of Arabia by Phillip Knightley. This is strictly the kind of  thing found in that pre-World War Two magazine for British schoolboys, the Boys’ Own Paper, with chapters like “Blowing up Trains” and “Ned and Darkey Turn Spies”. Somewhat incredibly, the publication date appears to be 1976. It should be explained that Knightley co-authored with Colin Simpson The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia (1970), in which the world learnt that from 1923 to 1935 Lawrence employed a young Scotsman to give him periodic beatings. Accounts of the curious theatrical arrangements associated with the whipping rituals are to be found in Jeffrey Meyers’ book, and also in a searching essay on Lawrence by Elie Kedourie in Islam in the Modern World. Understandably, perhaps, there is no mention of it in Phillip Knightley’s book for boys.

The Cameron complex

The Cameron Complex includes horse-riding. Suitably adjusted for the preferred type of mount under desert conditions—the camel rather than the horse—hard riding is a feature of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom on page after page. Sometimes camels are being kissed on the lips; sometimes a worn-out beast is killed and eaten. But that Lawrence’s companions were decidedly more attached to their four-footed friends than to their wives or concubines is clear, while Lawrence himself once proudly declared that “the only females in the desert revolt were the mares”. Cameron himself delicately refers to what he calls “covert homophilia”, but there was nothing at all covert about Lawrence of Arabia. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom must be the only serious military history to be preceded by a dedicatory love poem to a donkey boy, or to display intertwined male bodies, supposedly “slaking” something or other, on its second page.

But it is with that “amicable contempt for women” described by Cameron  that the exotic universe of Lawrence’s social and political values in distant Arabia violently connects with our own world. For here our attention turns to Mohammed Atta. It was Mr Atta who flew the first plane into the World Trade Center. According to his father, the young Atta was reluctant even to shake hands with women. Although he evidently spent eight years at Hamburg’s Technical University, he shied away from anything female throughout this time, and studiously avoided the inhabitants of St Pauli. He left instructions that women were to be barred from his funeral—pregnant women being especially tabooed from any contact or association with his corpse.

What are called “unclean people” are also to be kept away, unclean being a word usually applied to women who may be menstruating, or whose bodies are in anyway affected by their sexual timetable or generative functions . The deep neurosis evident in all this is also extended by Atta to whatever men are employed to wash and dress his corpse. In the report in the Times, if his privates are bathed “he who washes around my genitals should wear gloves so that I am not touched there”.

What is one to make of all this? At the deepest level of human psychology it has to do with the woman problem. Ever since Eve, all thinking men have known that a world without women would be a much more virtuous place. To a certain cast of puritanical male mind this is too obvious to argue about—and I certainly won’t argue with it here. At the same time it is equally obvious that such a world would be short-lived: room must somehow be made for reproduction.

Mature religions have usually found a way round the woman problem—by regulating reproduction; by offering havens for the celibate; and by the humane forgiveness of sin. But immature and primitive forms of religious belief have never handled the woman problem very well: numerous cultures have expressed their fear of women by chopping off bits and pieces of genitalia, by haltering women, by hobbling them, and by forms of ferocious social oppression including suttee—the burning of widows alive in India.

That mainstream Islam has accommodated certain mutilatory practices is well known, and an identical woman-hating and life-denying tendency is found among the mad sects to which Islam every so often gives rise. Ruled by mullahs who never grow up, and who may even be sexually psychopathic, they allow the woman problem and its itch to become a frantic obsession. Not of course that this matters to full-blown ascetic nihilists like Mohammed Atta. “Let purity reign though the heavens fall” is their slogan, whether suiciding in a burning skyscraper or despising everything female in social life.

Women as faceless tents

The result is not a pretty sight. As assorted fanatical sectaries struggle fearfully to deal with fleshly matters they have been driven further and further towards insanity. Among the Taliban, who understand that after the Tree of Knowledge came the Fall, women were first denied an education; second, beautification as an aid to femininity was accounted a dreadful sin; third, it was thought desirable to keep women as far as possible in physical confinement for their own good. But this still doesn’t always work, because the unaided lubricity of the male imagination is a powerful force in its own right.

The short-term solution adopted was therefore to pull a kind of horse-cover over the entire female body, concealing everything that might conceivably inflame male desires, and converting what was once a human being into a faceless tent. Then, when all else failed, there was the Final Solution. Afghani women who triumph over all the obstacles the mullahs have placed in their path, who succeed in retaining the attributes of Eve and allow themselves to commit some act which has been sternly Talibanned, and who stand condemned by the officers of the Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue, were led into a Kabul football stadium where they were shot in the head to the sound of cheering—the cheering of turbanned madmen in the stands.

It is a curious and disturbing fact that T.E. Lawrence shared much of this sick and nihilistic view of women—certainly as regards the horrors of biology and the repellent nature of physical procreation. Jeffrey Meyers’ chapter on Lawrence’s sexual pathology in The Wounded Spirit may be consulted for the full story. Here an outline will have to suffice. Meyers writes that

Much of Lawrence’s life was an unsuccessful attempt to subjugate his body, and he tried to escape the humiliation of the physical (“Everything bodily is now hateful to me”) through starvation, asceticism, masochism and flagellation.

He points to the similarity with Hamlet: both

react to the guilt-ridden, irregular marriage of their mothers, to whom they are unusually close, with a violent sexual revulsion. Hamlet’s nauseated condemnation of living “ln the rank sweat of an enseamed bed / Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty” is an accurate portrayal of Lawrence’s sexual morbidity.

Normal heterosexual union was “dirty”: it disgusted and horrified Lawrence, as did birth itself. To clean oneself all fleshly bonds had to be cut, and the body scourged. Swords and daggers appear again and again both as metaphor and reality throughout The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and Meyers says the epigraph stamped on the cover of one edition—“’the sword also means cleanness and death’—reinforces Lawrence’s connection of cleanness with death, rather than life”. Here we are not too far removed from Osama bin Laden’s claim that his followers love death as Americans love life”; and what it finally leads to is the humanity-hating nihilism expressed by Lawrence in a letter to a friend:

What is needed is a new master species—birth control for us, to end the human race in fifty years—and then a clear field for some cleaner mammal. I suppose it must be mammal.

As for the Arabs and Lawrence’s relation to them as set out in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Meyers notes that his attitude changes from that to be found “in the beginning of the book, [where] the successful guerilla raids of the Hejaz war are described in terms of schoolboy larks”, to something altogether darker at the end. This change is simultaneously a move from idealism to nihilism. No longer are the Arabs portrayed as either savage nobles or noble savages.

No longer is there mention of nationalism or high ideals or nation-building. Instead the Bedouin were

petty incarnate Semites [who] attained heights and depths beyond our reach, though not beyond our sight. They realised our absolute in their unrestrained capacity for good and evil; and for two years I had profitably shammed to be their companion!

Self-delusion is followed by the bitterness of disenchantment, and this in turn by his own psychological collapse. But was this merely a souring of the original ideal, or a final awakening from his romantic fantasies and a belated coming to terms with reality?

War with the West

Today Islam is at war with the West. Many deny it, and even the leaders of Muslim countries say it isn’t true—although they don’t say so very loudly. Every political leader with a grain of diplomatic sense and a large domestic Muslim constituency like France, is bound to say that Islam is not at war with the West—not a bit of it—our present troubles are caused only by a fanatical, anachronistic, and unrepresentative minority of the millions of peace-loving Muslims around the world.

We must all hope they are right. But most of us know in our hearts that it is only half-true at best, because what has happened is so remarkable and unanticipated that we still haven’t fully digested the fact yet. This is that the new ideology of radical Islamism directs and concentrates and inspires the deep resentment of the Arab world towards the West as nothing has been able to do before. The Marxists with their North-South class dichotomy once tried to do this. But the clash between the secular and the religious view of the situation largely disabled communist movements within the Islamic countries in the past. There’s a contradiction in asking the troops of a purely secular and materialistic movement to commit suicide for the cause. For them it just doesn’t make sense.

But today there is no contradiction. Under the regime of jihad suicide makes perfect sense. And the consequence of romanticising the cultural and religious antagonism between East and West has finally become clear at last—a deeply corrupted public understanding of what is at stake. As I have argued in The Culture Cult, the sentimental embrace of old-time pre-modern cultures as alternatives to our latterday commercial civilisation is unqualified folly. Politically, socially and economically, the two things are irreconcilable.

Radical Islam knows this and has drawn the logical conclusion—the conclusion Marxist radicalism was not allowed to draw. This being that the triumph of the backward and barbaric requires the destruction of the progressive and advanced by whatever means it has at its command. In the name of an imagined and terrible simplicity, modern civilisation must be destroyed.

As for the contribution made by both Lawrence and an entire era of British diplomacy which supported Arabism in one form or another, Elie Kedourie wrote that it was always absurdly romantic to see Arab nationalism as a civilising force:

The cause of Arab nationalism which he embraced was not more virtuous or worthy than any similar cause. Why a foreigner should so fervently embrace it, and what it has contributed to civilization, are both quite obscure.

Lawrence, on the other hand, promoted a pernicious confusion between public and private, he looked to politics for a spiritual satisfaction which it cannot possibly provide, and he invested it with an impossibly transcendental significance.

In doing so, he pandered to some of the most dangerous elements to be found in the modern Western mentality. His influence and his cult, here at their most extensive and enduring, we may judge to be not civilizing, but destructive.

Quadrant, January-February 2007

Where are the sheiks of yesteryear, riding romantically over the dunes? Not in Australia. Here a burly Egyptian with an ugly turn of phrase recently set new records for ungallantry. Scantily clad Australian women, complained Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly, go around like “exposed meat” inviting rape.

Of course we all made a huge uproar. Unbelievable! Who asked his opinion anyway? The sheik calls himself a Mufti and thinks he represents Islam Down Under. But the man’s a brute who plainly hates western culture, who may have channelled funds to Hezbollah, and on top this he’s a security risk too. Go home sheik, go home!

To be honest, it seems to me that what the sheik was complaining about is a process that has gone on so long, and has now gone so far, that it has become the water we swim in and the air we breathe: a sexually heightened moral environment far removed from most normal human cultures in the past, where once forbidden instincts, thoughts, and desires, along with grossly exhibitionistic behaviour, are now increasingly treated as routine.

What has happened? Has a moral tsunami left our middle classes in ruins? What has been the corrupting role we ourselves have played in this state of affairs—every one of us that is, from the trash merchants at the bottom, to our most celebrated writers and artists at the top? Last December Kay Hymowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal how when “Britney Spears jauntily revealed her waxed nether-regions to waiting photographers as she exited her limo,” this made her “the Internet smash of the season.” Hymowitz then underlined the naivete of the exhibitionism involved—the taken-for-granted security of the celebrity world where Britney Spears and Paris Hilton live:

They underestimate the magnetic force field created by intimate sexual information and violate the logic of privacy that should be all the more compelling in a media-driven age.”

The sheik and his followers live within that force field—as do we all. Recently too the papers have been filled with scandalised reports of paedophilia in a surprising variety of milieus, sometimes at high political levels. A cultural complaisance regarding men who like boys is not uncommon in the Middle East, particularly among the Bedouin, a fact that is doubtless well known to the sheik. But our subject today is not the comparatively innocent behavior of desert tribesmen; it is the more knowing depravity of modern decadence. What has made us this way?

Art and innocence

A hundred years ago the German author Thomas Mann made an interesting comment. Thinking about morality and its relation to the world of art, he wrote in his novella Tonio Kröger that “as the kingdom of art increases, that of health and innocence declines.” Many artists are estranged from life, he said, pursue goals hostile to life, and work continually to destroy the bourgeois world.

Destroying the bourgeoisie was on many people’s minds at the time. Thoughts of bloody revolution were in the air. Mann however suggested that this would be wasted effort. Given time, and left to itself, capitalism would be more easily debauched than overthrown—destroyed by the values of the artistic bohemia it admired.

Artists were exciting. Artists were sexually free. Above all art redeemed the bourgeoisie from the greedy sin of acquisitiveness. As Jacques Barzun has argued, it wasn’t long before art became a new religion, writers were revered as prophets, and as part of this understanding the bourgeoisie came to believe that the creators of fine literature and beautiful music also had beautiful souls.

This was nonsense. The so-called artist’s ‘gift’, wrote Thomas Mann in 1903, has dark roots in a poisoned psyche. “It is a very dubious affair and rests upon extremely sinister foundations.” The world should know that most artists today are sick in mind and spirit, a danger to decent people and heedless of the damage they cause. Plumbers and carpenters and other tradesmen are reliable friends. But artists are not. And because he understood this so clearly, the eponymous Tonio Kröger (the character of a writer in the book who speaks for Mann himself) was embarrassed to find complete strangers sending him letters of praise:

…I positively blush at the thought of how these good people would freeze up if they were to get a look behind the scenes. What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes…”

Literature is not a calling, it is a curse, believe me! It begins by your feeling yourself set apart, in a curious sort of opposition to the nice, regular people; there is a gulf of ironic sensibility, of knowledge, scepticism, disagreement, between you and the others; it grows deeper and deeper, you realize that you are alone; and from then on any rapprochement is simply hopeless! What a fate!

The rise of the paederaesthetic

If art increases as innocence declines, is it a matter of cause and effect? In that case Mann would seem to be supporting Rousseau’s view in the First Discourse that literature and the arts are actually making the world worse. It certainly sounds like that. In Mann’s view the writer stands in permanent moral opposition, sceptical and ironic and relentlessly gnawing away. Worse still: having found a role in Art he may have lost a useful role in Life. The sense of being set apart in an alien moral universe is overwhelming:

You can disguise yourself, you can dress up like an attaché or a lieutenant; you hardly need to give a glance or speak a word before everyone knows you are not a human being, but something else: something queer, different, inimical.

Sexually inimical too—or sexually perhaps most of all. “Is an artist a male, anyhow? Ask the females! It seems to me we artists are all of us something like those unsexed papal singers. We sing like angels; but…” Here Kröger/Mann breaks off. Perhaps from weariness or boredom. Perhaps also because the angelic songs of yearning can hardly be named for what they are. Readers of Death in Venice will however take his meaning. In that story the ageing writer Aschenbach lusts after the youth Tadzio, and the ironic sensibility so ably described, the scepticism, the irony, the extreme narcissism, is combined with the mysterious obsessions of the paedophile—such obsessions being those of the author himself.

Planck had requested a personal interview with Hitler regarding anti-Semitic dismissals of professors. He was subjected to a three-quarter-hour harangue, after which he returned home completely crushed.

He said it was like listening to an old peasant woman gabbling on about mathematics, the man’s low-level, ill-educated reliance on obsessive ideas; more hopeless than anything the illustrious scientist and thinker had ever heard in his entire life.

Two worlds coming together as the result of the one’s rise to power: a man from the world of knowledge, erudition, and disciplined thought is forced to listen to the arrogant, dogmatic expectorations of a revolting dilettante, after which he can only bow and take his leave.

Stephen Spender wrote of the diaries that “Thomas Mann is a monumental figure of our time. Reading these journals one feels that this monument is made of very hard, resistant, almost cruel material: but under the surface there is a human being who, together with Freud, was the greatest human being this century.”

Under the surface, too, unmentioned by Spender, was a pederastic interest that pervades his work and accurately reflects his inclinations. There is far more to his stories than that, and we should also note that he appears to have spent most of his life in chaste frustration. But with their adored ‘Hermes’ (and their slighted and ridiculous women) the tales he spun probably helped to disinhibit, to condone, and to legitimise predatory behaviour that mothers with children can only regard with dread.

Still, there it is, an unbudgeable fact of literary history: two of the most distinguished writers of the 20^th century, the most relentlessly cerebral and self-conscious writers, and the most academically admired and studied writers with whole shelves of earnest research devoted to their books, gave what I shall call “paederaesthetics”—the world of belief and feeling embodied in erotically idealised juveniles frankly treated as sexual prey—an important place. A widely used Simon & Schuster reader’s guide for college students from 1995 tells us that

Lolita, with its murder, paedophilia, sadism, masochism, and even hint of incest, clearly struck a nerve in our society by violating a number of its strongest taboos.

I’d have thought that any healthy society very reasonably should have taboos against murder, paedophilia, sadism, and incest. I am neither a prude nor a killjoy, yet rules against these things seem sensible to me. But the author of this student guide to Lolita apparently feels otherwise, suggesting, in accord with his antinomian principles, that the proper function of literature is to overcome such taboos. And perhaps in the case of paedophilia it has succeeded.

Yet to know this literary fact was not enough. After every extenuating aesthetic argument had been considered, it remained the case that Lolita “makes a prolonged assault on one of our unquestioned and unquestionably sexual prohibitions, the sexual inviolability of girls of a certain age (and compounds the impiousness with what amounts to incest).” It might be true, he writes, that Juliet was fourteen when she gave herself to Romeo, and that we all now regard ourselves as sensibly clear-eyed about sex after the enlightenment of Coming of Age in Samoa.

But let an adult male seriously think about the girl as a sexual object and all our sensibility is revolted. The response is not reasoned but visceral. Within the range of possible heterosexual conduct, this is one of the few prohibitions which still seem to us to be confirmed by nature itself.

The sexualizing of everyday life

Not any more—or not in certain circles. Trilling’s is plainly a voice from the past. Today the debate is more likely to concern the acceptability of public copulation or pubic display. If it’s okay for Paris Hilton to make a video of herself having sex and to share it about in cyberspace, why shouldn’t Susie and Jim make one too? A glance at any newspaper shows how each libertine advance ratchets up another without anyone knowing where to stop.

A mass-market color supplement to Sydney’s Sun-Herald for October 29 2006 has the Hilton sisters on the cover, while inch-high yellow lettering shouts “Hedonism is Back, How to Party Celebrity Style”. The following 30 pages promote celebtrashery as a way of life.

Spectrum, a literary supplement of the Sydney Morning Herald edited and written largely by women, moves up a cultural notch and features a story about the female author “of a best-selling erotic novel”. This cites “a man who wishes women would make more noise in bed, and a divorcee in her 50s finding sex on the internet.” Reviews follow, a scene from the film Suburban Mayhem showing a chesty chick in thigh-high leather who, we are told, is “mistress of the SMS, and the local boys are her Praetorian Guard.” Reviewer Sandra Hall reports that “Wanna Fuck? is their call to arms” and that the young woman in question “usually obliges.”

Some relief from this brazen brutishness is provided by the writer Elizabeth Farrelly. Her essay “In search of a cure for paradise syndrome” questions the concept of illimitable human desires, and quotes Raymond Tallis’s thoughts on this subject. But only pages later there’s a full-color cartoon of a pole dancer getting her rocks off—if that’s the expression I need.

Not wanting to unfairly target a single Sydney newspaper I looked at The Weekend Australian Magazine for November 11-12. The cover is a bold come-on for an article asking if it is right or wrong for women teachers to seduce male pupils. No particular moral stance is adopted, and a number of court cases are examined. Yet by only the second paragraph we are treated to a vivid description of a 37-year-old woman who “wound up in the front seat of her car giving one of her boys oral sex… His friends thought he was ‘a bit of a legend’. He let them in on juicier details, like her glasses fogging up.”

Civility and common sense

Now then. Let us stop for a moment and consider. Put yourself in the position of conventionally respectable immigrants from some traditional culture—Sri Lankan Buddhists, Colombian Catholics, Eastern Orthodox from the Ukraine—who are used to certain standards of dress and appearance, who go to buy a weekend newspaper, and who are confronted with this sort of thing. We might also mention the good Rabbi and the pious Lubavitchers over my back fence, whose views of female decorum are in all important respects indistinguishable from the sheik’s.

What conclusion can they possibly draw from the daughters of billionaires fornicating on the web, cries for more noise in bed, shouts of “Wanna Fuck?” from movie stars, a female pole dancer engaged in public masturbation, and Australian women teachers who seduce their pupils and provide them with oral sex? Sheik al-Hilaly is a boor and a pest. He undeniably has a wider political agenda. But if these are not examples of white western women calling for action, what exactly are they?

Thomas Mann’s premonitions have come about. With the expansion of media mimesis in every direction the numbers of those who write and film and act and transform reality in a thousand more-or-less artistic ways has steadily expanded, the boundary between life and theatre has blurred, and what were once the values of a picturesque social fringe have taken over. Many of the people in our Theatrical Industrial Complex are very sick people indeed.

He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little or too much;
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused or disabused…

For Europe’s educated classes the situation in the 18^th century may have been as near as we are likely to come to a secular world where mind and body, thought and passion, were in some kind of balance—the various worlds of Hume and Rousseau, of Gibbon and Voltaire, of the Baronne de Warens and Madame du Chatelet—a world where both the conventional Johnson and the promiscuous Boswell could separately thrive and flourish.

That’s where we seem to have gone wrong. An abandonment of the common sense rules to be found in hundreds of traditional cultures, and a foolish refusal to confine the sexual world to where it belongs, has led to its being indiscriminately mingled with everything else, 24/7. A burly Middle Eastern peasant in a nightshirt may seem an improbable source of moral guidance, yet in a way that’s what the outspoken sheik is—and he’s calling the shots as he sees them. But shooting the messenger is hardly the answer. Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilaly and his followers are what they are. We are what we have fatefully become.

It’s a shame really. Paris Hilton could easily give sluttishness a bad name. I don’t mean just the video that’s available—I mean the chilling vacuity: it’s enough to give Casanova the wilts.

But that’s by the way. My darker purpose here is to see how the ethical world of Grant Wood’s 1930 painting American Gothic, with its moral Puritanism and devotion to hard work, could be adapted and parodied for TV trash starring rich party girls and poor dumb animals in the year 2003.

Can we read something about the direction of modern America in this transmogrification? The original painting (below) shows a man, a woman, a fork, and a house. The woman looks aversively away. The man stares out with primitive religious force, and one might easily think that as long as the beliefs behind his eyes endure, as long as he has moral convictions, America will endure.

One might also think that when those beliefs are replaced by a bland and directionless amorality, by the world of a Bill Clinton on the one hand or a Paris Hilton on the other—by decadent hedonism pure and simple—in brief, when the fire behind those eyes goes out and all religious belief is lost… But here conjecture falters and for the time being had best stay mute.

Genesis

The basic facts about the painting are straightforward. In 1930, in the town of Eldon, Iowa, Grant Wood painted his sister Nan and his dentist Byron McKeeby standing in front of a wooden house with a Gothic window. McKeeby was asked to hold a three-tined hayfork in his hand.

Wood had wondered who to use as the woman in the painting (Nan’s face was too fat, he thought at first, before deciding to slim her features down), and he had trouble persuading the dentist to pose (McKeeby finally agreed to stand in his dental rooms while the artist painted), but when it was done he entered the work in the 1930 Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture held at the Art Institute of Chicago. It won him a bronze medal and $300.

In Steven Biel’s wonderfully detailed history of the painting and its place in the American psyche (American Gothic: a Life of America’s Most Famous Painting, Norton 2005) he tells how it was originally rejected. But an Art Institute trustee found it on the discard pile and insisted that it be included in the Exhibition. Thus it was, as Biel writes, that “an image familiar to almost everyone might have been seen by almost nobody. A painting that became a national icon nearly got sent back, barely noticed, to Iowa.”

Three years later, in 1933-34, the Chicago World’s Fair celebrated “A Century of Progress” with its own art exhibition. One and a half million people trooped in to see the show. The strongest attraction seems to have been “Whistler’s Mother”, but American Gothic ran it close, and prints of Wood’s painting outsold everything else. By then it was becoming known nationwide, and the Des Moines Register later joined various art critics in decreeing American Gothic the most popular canvas on exhibit at the World’s Fair.

Caricature?

Which isn’t to say everyone liked it—Iowa’s farmwives assuredly did not. They thought they were being caricatured. The couple were too “grim-visaged”, too sad and serious. Mrs Inez Keck of Washta said they looked “inordinately solemncholy” and might have been to a funeral. Mrs Earl Robinson, from the Iowa town of Collins, declared that being true to life wasn’t good enough and that next time around the painter should “choose something wholesome to look at and not such oddities. I advise him to hang this portrait in one of our fine Iowa cheese factories. That woman’s face would sour milk.”

This however is the normal verdict of people who find that artists don’t always see them as they see themselves. Like the rest of us they are distressed by an unflattering portrait. More embarrassing than this reaction—and more to the point of our discussion—was its initial succès d’estime with critics—the enthusiastic embrace of all those who wanted to see mid-western Puritanism and philistinism (if not religion itself) both ridiculed and destroyed.

“No less an authority on modern art than Gertrude Stein”, writes Steven Biel, “whose opinions the American Press eagerly reported in the 1930s, praised Wood as ‘the foremost American painter’ and declared, ‘We should fear Grant Wood. Every artist and every school of artists should be afraid of him, for his devastating satire.”

The critic Walter Prichard Eaton was also sure of Wood’s satirical intentions, and though he admittedly knew nothing about the artist or his history, wrote in 1930 that when he looked at the couple in American Gothic

We cannot help believing that as a youth he suffered tortures from these people, who could not understand the joy of art within him and tried to crush his soul with their sheet iron brand of salvation. They are rather terrible. The longer you look at them, the more you realize they might come from many parts of this country—but from no other.

The notorious hostility between Art and Main Street led Saturday Review of Literature critic Christopher Morley in 1931 to speculate about the couple’s “sad yet fanatical faces”—faces revealing a deep animosity toward creativity and culture. Some fifteen years later H. W. Janson, later to become known as author of the widely used History of Art (1962), would write that American Gothic “had been intended as a satire on small-town American life”; another critic would claim in 1974 that its figures “exude a generalized, barely repressed animosity that borders on venom” and symbolize “the malevolent spirits that inhabited this region”; while in 1997 Robert Hughes announced that it was both satirical and nervously oblique. Biel writes that according to Hughes

“Wood was a timid and deeply closeted homosexual”, and American Gothic, rather than offering up a forceful, unambiguous, straight, or uncloseted satire, was “an exercise in sly camp, the expression of a gay sensibility so cautious that it can hardly bring itself to mock its objects openly.”

Open and unambiguous mockery of philistinism and Puritanism in the manner of Mencken—for whom Puritans and philistines were the “twin blights of American civilization”—being needed if the world were to be set to rights.

Wood’s intentions

Yet the notion that a painting of two ordinary Iowa citizens must either celebrate them or damn them doesn’t make much sense. Wood’s intentions must have been a good deal more complicated than either his hometown critics or his bohemian admirers understood. But they are not obscure. They are in fact perfectly clear to anyone who comes from a conventionally respectable home; who takes up art, travels abroad, and explores bohemia; and who then returns sadder and wiser to the world he knows. Such an artist sees more deeply, and his affection is refracted through experiences that partly distance and disenchant—but he respects what he knows and sees and does not plan to destroy it.

This seems to have been the case with Grant Wood. He was born in Iowa, in 1891, in Jones County near Anamosa. Steven Biel tells us his people were Quakers, and when a neighbor lent them Grimm’s Fairy Tales his father returned it unopened because, he said, “We Quakers can read only true things.” In 1901 his father died and the family moved to Cedar Rapids. There “he milked neighborhood cows, sold vegetables from his mother’s garden, and delivered drinking water to help support the family.” At school he developed an interest in arts and crafts, and drew for the yearbook and the school magazine.

There was an artist’s colony in Cedar Rapids—Wood himself is said to have once described it as “the Greenwich Village of the Corn Belt… the only truly Bohemian atmosphere west of Hoboken”—and after joining it for a while he made a number of visits to Europe in the 1920s. Biel says that in France in 1923 and 1926 he produced a lot of “derivative Impressionist paintings that sold poorly at an exhibition at the Galerie Carmine”, and that about the only thing that endured from “his exposure to late nineteenth-century French painting was the influence of Georges Seurat’s pointillism.”

But a 1928 encounter with Weimar and its “disgust, cynicism, and social criticism” was too much. “I’m going home for good,” he told William Shirer, another sometime resident of Cedar Rapids who was living in Paris at the time, “and I’m going to paint those damn cows and barns and barnyards and cornfields and little red school-houses and all those pinched faces and the women in their aprons and the men in the overalls and store suits and the look of a field or a street in the heat of summer or when it’s ten below and the snow piled six feet high. Damn it, isn’t that what Sinclair Lewis has done in his writing—in Main Street andBabbitt? Damn it, you can do it in painting too!”

That anyway is what Shirer remembered in his book 20^th Century Journey. But deep down Wood respected the very things Sinclair Lewis and Mencken before him had held up to scorn. The artist had come to resent the fact that “Mencken belaboured my people as ‘corn-fed boobs and peasants’ in the Smart Set and the American Mercury.” A magazine article profiling Wood around 1935 quotes him saying that after his third trip to France he returned home “to see, like a revelation, my neighbours in Cedar Rapids, their clothes, their homes, the patterns on their tablecloths and curtains, the tools they use. I suddenly saw all this commonplace stuff as material for art. Wonderful material!”

As for the painting that made him famous, here are two responses he gave to speculation as to whether it was a caricature, and whether the couple were to be seen as man and wife, or father and daughter, or farmers or just small-town folks:

These are types of people I have known all my life. I tried to characterize them truthfully—to make them more like themselves than they were in actual life. They had their bad points, and I did not paint these under, but to me they were basically good and solid people. I had no intention of holding them up to ridicule.

All of this criticism would be good fun if it was made from some other angle. I do not claim the two people painted are farmers. All that I attempted to do was to paint a picture of a Gothic house and to depict the kind of people I fancied should live in that house. I hate to be misunderstood as I am a loyal Iowan and love my native state.

Rejecting bohemia

Wood was in good company when he said that to characterize his good and solid people he wanted to make them “more like themselves than they were in actual life”. Aristotle himself said something similar long ago. Greek drama was truer than written history, he claimed, because it represented general truths about history and humanity in a crystallized and clarified form. And it was exactly this condensed and crystallized presentation of general truths that soon made American Gothic a national icon.

But what was the art establishment to make of it all? Of a man who in 1935 defiantly produced a work with the title “Return from Bohemia” to emphasize his break with that squalid world? Not an alienated artist seeking to overthrow the family gods—and Puritanism especially—but a happy craftsman seeking to honor his ancestors. Not a revolutionary hoping to subvert “the system” but a man generally satisfied with the way things were. Not someone keen to spew political bile in all directions, but a man who loved his state and its people and the life he knew.

And all this at a time when every artist worth his salt was supposed to be moved more strongly by the emotion of hate than of love, to be driven by a compulsion to destroy the bourgeoisie and capitalism together, to overturn all settled values, and—not unreasonably on the eve of World War II—to show political militancy in the looming fight against fascism.

Unsurprisingly, the benignly populist character of Wood’s work in the 1930s (Biel describes some 1932 panels in a Cedar Rapids hotel as featuring “extraordinarily robust farmers, cows, chickens, pigs, geese, corn, melons” etc) drew fire from the Left for being inspired by the suspect sentiments of patriotism, nativism, and chauvinism. In 1935 Lewis Mumford detected in the work of Wood’s friend and regionalist ally Thomas Hart Benton “a reactionary aesthetics and politics that veered dangerously close to fascism”. Biel then writes that

However unfair his judgment of Wood’s work, Mumford astutely observed that in standing ‘for the corn-fed Middle West against the anemic East’ Wood had ‘become a National Symbol for the patrioteers.’ His regionalism, Mumford charged, posed no genuine alternative to nationalism, provincialism, and corporate capitalism.

But why on earth should it? Mumford’s list of evils included much that Wood admired, respected, and believed in—his native land, his home state of Iowa, and the thousands of farmers and small businessmen who despite the hardships of the Depression were battling on. In contrast, Mumford’s was a hate list of things to be destroyed by ideologically driven intellectuals who had lost belief.

The subjects Wood painted after he turned his back on Bohemia were the social types and traditions he most revered. The conflict between the destructive goals of a radicalised art establishment and the life-enhancing ideals of the artist was deep, and it may not be inappropriate to quote here from Jacques Barzun’s chapter “Art in the Vacuum of Belief” from his 1974 The Use and Abuse of Art. His text was originally a lecture given at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

We who make up the contemporary world are not lively—at times, one is tempted to say: not life-like. We are certainly not in love with life. We do not think life can be noble or even good. We take human life and our present view of mankind as equivalents and are not pleased.

When we speak of the human condition we mean something execrable, a prison sentence we must endure. We seldom find among men individuals to revere, and we have nothing but scorn for social types, which we now call roles, as if to emphasize their falseness.

The very word reverence has come to connote a benighted, ‘unrealistic’ frame of mind. The hero has disappeared from fiction, from history, and from life. Art is largely devoted to showing the contemptibility of the human animal or, by pointedly neglecting him, his irrelevance and superfluity.

From parody to nihilism

The contemptibility of a particular human animal—or if that’s too strong, then the comic irrelevance and superfluity of the rube, the bumpkin, the overalled workmen and pinafored farmwives of the “corn-fed Middle West”—would be universally assumed in the cultural role played by Wood’s painting after 1960. From that time on it would be continually exploited for both comic and commercial effect: one way or another the man with the fork and the sideways looking woman would be parodied to advertise food products and publicise television shows—most notably the Beverley Hillbillies—and it is this parodistic use we find once more in Fox Broadcasting’s 2005 poster for The Simple Life.

No doubt we shouldn’t be too solemn about it. Perhaps parody is the fate of all national icons. And no doubt the real-life persons who posed for Wood—his sister Nan and his dentist Byron McKeeby—should have learned to let go and not worry about the use or abuse of their personal images in his painting. Nor should we fail to recognise the ambiguity often displayed. Biel writes that “Instead of disparaging the ‘original’, American Gothic parodies frequently use it as a standard for evaluating contemporary society and politics. Sometimes the contemporary doesn’t measure up to what TV Guide called the ‘American Gothic hard core’ of national character.”

Yet there’s a remorseless destructiveness about the parodistic impulse that never knows when to stop. The more innocuous spoofs showed a couple like Bill and Hillary Clinton. But soon a libertine ‘let’s make it naked’ motive took over as the crux of the joke; nihilism beckoned; and after that it was downhill all the way. In 1966 Playboy grafted playmate Dolly Read’s shapely equipment onto a composite with Nan’s head. In 1967 a Johnny Carson routine showed Nan Wood stripped down with barely covered sagging breasts. Nan sued Carson and Look and Playboy magazines for nine million dollars, but got only a small settlement in the end. What she might have thought of a parody which replaced her with the image of a rich party girl best known for a video of herself copulating with a friend is anyone’s guess.

Nan Wood died in 1990. Steven Biel concludes his discussion of parody, and of the “desecration” of American Gothic in the poster for The Simple Life, with an observation that seems to me too complacent by half. After suggesting that in 2005 “Nan might have taken comfort in learning that fans of her brother’s painting again complained that the ads debased it”, he says that however wild or obscene they might be, “parodies fortify the ‘original’ as the embodiment of traditional American values. If it can be profaned, it must be sacred.”

If only! Professor Biel directs the History and Literature Program at Harvard and this statement smacks all too obviously of the ivory tower. His argument parallels Rochefoucauld’s observation that “hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue”, Biel’s variation being that “parody is the homage vice pays to moral conduct and sincere belief.” But when virtue loses all her loveliness and sincere belief is thin on the ground, what then?

Is it really so trivial a matter, so meaningless, when Priapic Bill and Porno Paris are chosen to replace the austere quasi-religious iconic images of Nan Wood and Byron McKeeby? Or should we see in this displacement a symptom of more general trends, of a pervasive moral shift echoing Jacques Barzun’s gloomy assessment of how we live now—the scorn for traditional social types, the inclination to see reverence as a benighted and ‘unrealistic’ frame of mind, the ridicule of the heroic in a world given over to showing the contemptibility of the human animal?

Nemesis

If the human animal is contemptible then of course anything may be done to it—violation, mutilation, torture. In New York Magazine the film critic David Edelstein was meditating recently about some of the movies on show at the local multiplex. He described “not a bad little thriller” called Hostel “which spent a week as America’s top moneymaker.” According to Edelstein it shows a Slovakian village “where life appears to be a non-stop naked sauna party” and where the main thrills come from scenes showing an old man being eviscerated without anaesthetic.

A connoisseur of hack-‘em-ups who describes himself as a “horror maven”, Edelstein glances at Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects (in which a woman is run down by a semi and turned into heaps of innards), Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek (where a serial killer severs the heroine’s spinal cord and tells her “Now you’re just a head on a stick”), and closes with Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible. In this last film—which Edelstein tells us “many critics regard as deeply moral”—a pregnant woman is subjected to nine minutes of anal rape.

But the intriguing thing to me, in addition to the fact that all the victims are women, is that a New York reviewer for a well-known cultural publication should not only seek out this kind of show but enjoy it. At the end he confesses his own complicity, and signs off with what he regards as a joke: “I’ve described all this freak-show sensationalism with relish, enjoying—like these filmmakers—the prospect of titillating and shocking. Was it good for you too?”

By then the war against Puritan morals that had preoccupied American artists and writers and intellectuals from 1900 until 1960 was well and truly won. Playboy’s role was not insignificant: in the decades after 1960, the Hefnerization of much of middle America would be carried to a point where Las Vegas, not Cedar Rapids or Gopher Prairie, decisively sets the nation’s moral tone.

But anyone who may have thought that the war against Puritanism itself was over should now be having second thoughts. It was only the long and protracted internal conflict that had ended—the domestic war for the moral soul of America. Outside America, Puritanism—which might be better described as the whole religious universe of ethical conduct involving taboos, proscriptions, sexual scruples, and constraints on our more animal nature—was and is arming itself for a long and bitter fight.

The people in this outside world—including the Middle East—have seen and considered what the West has to offer, and they are unimpressed by a civilization that talks big about freedom, democracy, and living standards, but puts close-ups of Paris Hilton’s vagina on their children’s computers, and would like to put movies showing sadistic episodes of anal rape in their cinemas.

There is of course much more to be said about American Gothic, about the destruction of the moral world it represents, about the moral condition of western elites, and about the various motives driving Islamic fundamentalism. But until these simple facts about our own civilization’s dire moral condition are faced up to, it is pointless to imagine that Islam—or any other self-respecting religious culture—will be embracing “western values” any time soon.

The Roosevelt Indian Reservation in the Amazon rain forest is not a happy place. Last year the Cinta Larga Indians slaughtered 29 miners there, and in October the Brazilian who was trying to mediate the conflict was murdered at a cash machine. Neither of these events represented anything new. The reserve, located 2,100 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro, and named for Theodore Roosevelt when he visited Brazil in 1913, is also where a notorious massacre of Cinta Larga by rubber tappers took place in 1963; only one child in the village survived.

The immediate cause of the recent violence is not rubber but diamonds. The Roosevelt Indian Reservation may be sitting on one of the world’s largest deposits, and no one wants to leave it in the ground—neither the Indians, nor the itinerant diggers (garimpeiros), nor the government. But under present Brazilian law no one is free to begin digging. And this brings us to the deeper cause of murder and mayhem in the region.

Under Brazil’s constitution the country’s Indians are not full citizens. Instead they are legal minors, with the status of a protected species. This has one singular benefit for the Indians: the twelve Cinta Larga responsible for last year’s killing of 29 wildcat prospectors may enjoy immunity from prosecution and never face jail. But there is also a down side. As wards of the state, the Indians are denied the right to mine their own land.

As for outsiders, they must apply for permits to dig, and face endless bureaucratic delays that more often than not lead nowhere. The outcome is predictable. Frustrated in their own wishes, and hard-pressed by the impatient diggers, Indians make private deals, which then go sour—and the shooting starts.

At issue here is not just the law; the law is itself the product of an idea, or a set of ideas, that form its underlying assumptions. What should be done about endangered enclave societies situated in the midst of a modern nation? Can they, or their land, or their minerals be cut off and preserved, frozen in time, pristine and inviolate, forever? Or should they be?

The Figueiredo report

The massacre of the Cinta Larga in 1963 gave rise to a Brazilian state inquiry that became known as the Figueiredo Report (after the official in charge of the investigation). The inquiry was meant to find out about the shockingly grave deficiencies and abuses that were then being tolerated by the Indian Protection Service, including the use of individual Indians as slaves. Once it was completed, the old agency was closed down, and a new one created to replace it.

There the matter might have rested had not the London Sunday Times caught a whiff of scandal. The paper dispatched the travel writer Norman Lewis to Brazil; though he did not meet any Indians, he found all he needed in the Figueiredo Report. “By the descriptions of all who had seen them,” Lewis reported, “there were no more inoffensive and charming human beings on the planet than the forest Indians of Brazil.”

Having established a scene of primal innocence, Lewis proceeded to tell of the atrocities against the Cinta Larga, warning that they were being pushed to the brink of extinction and that there might not be a single Indian left by 1980. He concluded: “What a tragedy, what a reproach it will be for the human race if this is allowed to happen!” Reprinted all over the globe, his sensational article had profound and lasting effects.

The first of these effects was to enshrine a form of extreme protectionism, not only as a temporary means to an end–the human and cultural survival of the indigenous peoples of Brazil–but as an end in itself. Soon, all those working for Indian interests were of a single opinion: the only way to protect these tribal peoples was to create inviolable sanctuaries where they would “live their own lives preserving their own culture on their own land.”

The second effect was to galvanize a number of English explorers, writers, and anthropologists into setting up a permanent international lobby. The name of this flourishing body is Survival, self-described as “the world’s leading organization supporting tribal peoples.” Two men who have been associated with it from the outset are John Hemming and Robin Hanbury-Tenison.

Hemming, who served for two decades as the director of the Royal Geographical Society, has written a number of books about South America, among them an indispensable three-volume history of the impact of civilization on Brazil’s indigenous peoples–Red Gold, Amazon Frontier, and Die If You Must, the last installment of which appeared in 2003. Hanbury-Tenison, Hemming’s long-time friend, was also a founder of Survival and is today its president. Less well-known but also important is the documentary filmmaker Adrian Cowell, who has spoken up on behalf of the Amazonian Indians for nearly 50 years.

According to a recent article by Hemming in the British monthly Prospect, the campaign to ensure the survival of the Amazonian peoples appears to have succeeded. This is also the gist of the final chapter of Die If You Must, where he wrote:

The Indians will survive physically. Their populations have grown steadily since a nadir of near-extinction in the mid-20th century. Having fallen to little more than 100,000 in the 1950’s, they have more than tripled to some 350,000 and are generally rising fast.

The health of the Indians is basically good, Hemming reported in Die If You Must. The killers of yesteryear–measles, TB, pneumonia, cholera, and smallpox–are rare. Their land is also secure: “a remarkable 11 percent of the land-mass of Brazil is now reserved for Indians. The 587 indigenous areas total almost 105 million hectares–an area greater than France, Germany, and Benelux combined.” Environmentalist ideals and indigenous interests have apparently been reconciled: “From the air, [one reservation] now stands out as an immense rectangle of verdant vegetation framed by the dismal brown of arid ranch-lands.”

Explorers up the Amazon

It was in the 1950’s and 60’s that Hemming, Hanbury-Tenison, and Cowell, three young men from Oxford and Cambridge, launched themselves on the world. They were talented and energetic, they had good connections, and above all they shared a boyish taste for adventure. At Eton they probably read about Lawrence of Arabia; at Oxford, where Hemming and Hanbury-Tenison roomed together, they already knew that “exploring” was what they wanted to do most. They regarded the rain forests of Brazil as a natural field for their endeavors, and in no time they were paddling up the Amazon in canoes.

Adrian Cowell was a Cambridge man, and his precocity as an explorer makes an impressive tale in itself. As a student in 1954 he joined a university Trans-Africa Expedition. The following year he was in Asia. Then, as he relates in The Heart of the Forest (1961), “the Oxford and Cambridge Expedition to South America . . . brought me to the Amazon forest.” Thereafter he joined the Brazilian Centro Expedition, an enterprise associated with the creation of the new national capital of Brasilia. Its purpose was “to canoe down the Xingu River and burn an airstrip at the exact geographical center of Brazil.”

It was all tremendous fun and very romantic–a word that occurs spontaneously in the books of Hanbury-Tenison, who has written voluminously about his explorations and today runs a booking agency for exotic locations. Here, from his website, is a typical passage about adventuring in Afghanistan:

A sound like distant thunder made me look up at the rich blue cloudless sky before I turned to see twenty wild horsemen in turbans and flowing robes bearing down on me. They carried long-barreled rifles and had daggers in their belts. Beside their spirited horses loped large, hairy hounds. With their Genghis Khan moustaches and fine, aquiline noses they were almost caricatures of the bandits we had been warned about. I should have been frightened, but all I could think was that if I had to go I could not have found a more romantic end.

This tells us quite a bit about the attitude of all three men toward indigenous cultures. In light of it, Hanbury-Tenison must have been somewhat taken aback when, in 1971, he called on the anthropologist Margaret Mead at the Museum of Natural History in New York to tell her about Survival International (as Survival was then called), and she gave him a piece of her mind. Mead at the age of seventy was a very different person from the idealistic young woman who had visited Samoa in 1926. By 1971, she was fiercely unromantic, and the spectacle of yet another young Oxford “explorer” embarking on yet another “expedition up the Amazon” must have set her teeth on edge. With sturdy good sense she tried to talk him out of his fantasies.

In his 1973 book A Question of Survival, Hanbury-Tenison describes this “small, beady-eyed dumpling of a lady who sailed into the attack as I came through the door”:

The main point that annoyed [Mead] was the concept, unstated by me, that primitive peoples were any better off as they were. She said she was “maddened by antibiotic-ridden idealists who wouldn’t stand three weeks in the jungle” . . . and the whole “noble savage” concept almost made her foam at the mouth. “All primitive peoples,” she said, “lead miserable, unhappy, cruel lives, most of which are spent trying to kill each other.” The reason they lived in the unpleasant places they did, like the middle of the Brazilian jungle, was that nobody else would.

There was much talk in those days of the pharmaceutical benefits of rain forests, and Hanbury-Tenison and his friends were sure that the Amazon was about to make a huge contribution to the world’s health. (This was a little before the discovery of the supposed wonders of jojoba oil.) But Mead was having none of it:

She said that to protect [the Indians] on the grounds that they could be useful to us or contribute anything was nonsense. “No primitive person has ever contributed anything, or ever will,” she said. She had no time for suggestions of medical knowledge or the value of jungle lore.

The only grounds on which Mead relented were broadly humanitarian. For one thing, the Indians’ “art, culture, dancing, music, etc. was pleasant and attractive and their grandchildren might thank us for trying to preserve or at best record it now that we have the proper technical means–tape and film–for doing so.” For another thing, “it was bad for the world to let these people die, and the effort to prevent their extermination was good for mankind even if it failed.”

For the rest, however, Mead vehemently denied that the Indians

had any special reasons for being protected, as she denied any advantage of one race over another. She also claimed emphatically that they all wanted one thing only, and that was to have as many material possessions and comforts as possible. Those still running away in the jungle were the ones who had encountered the most unpleasant savagery from Europeans, and even though they might be having no contact now, if they could possibly get hold of any aluminum pots they would use them.

A history of atrocity

Although faithfully recorded by Hanbury-Tenison, Mead’s argument was as lost on him in 1971 as it is lost on legions of like-minded people today who mouth the slogans of multiculturalism. What Mead herself failed to grasp was that, naive though he may have sounded, Hanbury-Tenison and his friends had been radicalized, and they were never going to accept her bleak view of the tribal world. It was not that they had been reading Marx; instead, they had been reading Norman Lewis’s digest of the worst parts of the Figuereido Report, including Figuereido’s judgment that “the Indians [had] suffered tortures similar to those of Treblinka and Dachau.”

Torture, indeed, was too tame a word for what had taken place. In 1963 there had been massacres of the Cinta Larga tribe in Rondonia. One gunman’s taped testimony describes how an employee of a rubber company named Chico Luis

gave the chief a burst with his tommy gun to make sure, and after that he let the rest of them have it. . . . [A]ll the other guys had to do was finish off anyone still showing signs of life. . . . [T]here was a young Indian girl they didn’t shoot, with a kid of about five in one hand, yelling his head off. . . . Chico shot the kid through the head with his .45 and then grabbed hold of the woman–who by the way was very pretty. “Be reasonable,” I said, “why do you have to kill her?” In my view it was a waste. “What’s wrong with giving her to the boys? They haven’t set eyes on a woman for six weeks. Or we could give her as a present to de Brito. [their boss]”

But Chico would not listen:

He tied the Indian girl up and hung her head downward from a tree, legs apart, and chopped her in half right down the middle with his machete. Almost with a single chop I’d say. The village was like a slaughterhouse. He calmed down after he’d cut the woman up, and told us to burn down all the huts and throw the bodies into the river

This is unbearable: but it is not essentially different from what had happened to many Indians in Latin America after 1492. The lawless frontier was for centuries a refuge for loners, criminals, and violent psychopaths who had nothing to lose and could act with impunity. Those who went searching for El Dorado in the 1540’s behaved like packs of ravening wolves, seizing food from the same Indian villagers whom they then enslaved as porters, and who were tortured or killed when they failed to cooperate. As one soon learns from Hemming’s three-volume work, this sort of thing has had a very long history indeed.

Colonial nations fashion their heroes from the timber at hand, much of it twisted and full of knots. Australia, for example, invites its citizens to admire an unappealing Irish bandit named Ned Kelly. But the Kellys smell sweet alongside Brazil’s much romanticized bandeirantes. What are often referred to as expeditions of “pathfinders” from Sao Paulo into the interior in the first half of the 17th century were mostly slave raids aimed at catching, chaining, and marching back to the coast as many Indians as a group of well-armed and ruthless men could seize.

To be sure, there was sometimes a genuinely exploratory aspect to such forays. In Red Gold, Hemming offers a balanced account of this phase of Brazilian expansion inland, and fairly describes the ordeals of the bandeirantes themselves. Since slave-raiding was a central feature of traditional Indian culture, too, the journeys engaged whites, Indians, and those of mixed ancestry (mamelucos) in a common enterprise:

The Indians contributed their forest skills and geographical knowledge. They soon grasped the purpose of the mission and became expert enslavers of other natives. Although brutalized and worked hard by the captains of the bandeiras, the Indians probably enjoyed service on them. It was quite normal for Tupi warriors to make long marches through the forests to attack enemy tribes.

In the course of his own periodic visits to Brazil, Adrian Cowell seems to have come rather closer to the realities of Amazonian Indian life than either Hanbury-Tenison or Hemming. Although aware of the horrors long endured by Indians at the hands of slavers, settlers, and frontier psychopaths, he was also more prepared to face up to the grimmer aspects of the native cultures themselves, and to the horrors Indians had long inflicted on each other.

In The Heart of the Forest (1961), Cowell writes in idyllic prose of the partnership he formed with an Indian hunter, carrying his friend’s gun and studying his craft, teaching himself to decoy wildfowl by imitating their calls. But he also reports how, in 1958 on the Xingu River, there were continual killings of itinerant Brazilian rubber tappers (seringueiros) by Indians, and of Indians by seringueiros. A Juruna Indian told him how

first we lived lower down the Xingu and worked for the seringueiros, but they killed many [Indians] with rifles. So we came up here past the great rapids and lived till the seringueiros say they are friends and gave us rifles. So we went downriver again and worked for the seringueiros till they killed more Juruna. Then we killed many seringueiros and came back here and killed Trumai and Kamayura Indians. Then the Txukahamae tribe came and killed almost all of us so that we are only twelve now.

The Villas-Boas brothers

That is the way things were and always had been. And this, too, was a seemingly ineradicable aspect of the culture that Cowell thought worthy of being saved. Back in 1967, he had joined the brothers Claudio and Orlando Villas-Boas in an attempt to contact and “pacify” the elusive Kreen-Akrore. But violence in the camp was making it hard to manage a community where different tribal groups had been brought together for their own safety. The captions on a page of photographs in Cowell’s 1973 book, The Tribe that Hides from Man, read like the list of casualties on some exotic war memorial: “Above. Javaritu, a Trumai killed by Tapiokap. Above. Pionim, a Kayabi, killed Tapiokap to avenge his brother-in-law.” And so on.

Much has been written about the endeavor of the Villas-Boas brothers to establish the Xingu Indian refuge and entice the tribal remnants of the Kayabi or Txikao or Suya to join it. A passage from The Tribe that Hides from Man offers a glimpse into the thought processes of Claudio, a “Marxist philosopher” in the Latin American manner:

Look around this camp and you will see Indians are more loving than we are. But the expression of their love is confined to the limits of this society. They cut a hole in the wilderness to contain their family, but outside this camp is the jungle where they kill meat for food, kill bamboo for arrows, kill bushes for leaves for their beds. Killing is the essence of forest existence, and if you stopped it, the forest and the Indian would die. Within the Indian mind there is a complete division between the duties within the group and the absence of duty in the land of killing outside.

At one time, Claudio suggested that Indians should feel free to kill white seringueiros or any other uninvited marauders who came into the Xingu Park. While warning them of the inevitable costs of this practice as a permanent way of life, he understood that, according to the tribal code, revenge killing was natural, habitual, and inevitable.

Nor was this the only aspect of Amazonian Indian culture that was hard to reconcile with modern life. Strict rules of seclusion were found among all the upper-Xingu tribes. Women were subjected to draconian punishments for violations of taboo. In a British television documentary from the 1970’s, a young Mehinacu woman was asked what would happen if she were to glimpse, even accidentally, the sacred flutes played by the men. She would be gang-raped, she replied, smiling sadly as if in recognition that in the genteel world of her white interviewer, such sexual punishments—culturally authorized, approved, indeed mandatory—were unthinkable.

Horrors that had to go

Hemming’s account of Amazonian life is hard on the efforts of Christian missionaries, and especially hard on the Jesuits (“fanatical missionaries intent on replacing native society and beliefs with their own Christian model”). One line of grudging appreciation will be followed by the word “but” and ten lines of disparagement. As his impressive study proceeds from volume to volume, he becomes ever more severe, his language becomes more tendentious, and an austere secularism dictates his judgment of religious matters. In his recent article in Prospect, he approves only of the politically radical priests who began to appear in the 1960’s–“trained anthropologists who did not try to undermine indigenous beliefs and ceased to be aggressive proselytizers”–but his view of Catholic missionary activity before that point is mainly negative.

But what exactly were the religious authorities to do when they first arrived from Portugal and had to deal, for example, with the Tupinamba? Did they not have a clear obligation both to undermine and to prohibit certain indigenous beliefs? In modern times, we have seen the rise of whole political cultures gripped by pathology, with hideous consequences; so, too, sick ethnic cultures evolved historically in the tribal world. Few quite so sick as the Tupinamba have been recorded before or since.

They loved human flesh. Prestige and power centered on the ritual slaughtering of prisoners. In an account prepared by Alfred Métraux for the Smithsonian’s Handbook of South American Indians (1948), we read that the killing and eating of these prisoners (who were fattened for the purpose) “were joyful events which provided these Indians with the opportunity for merrymaking, aesthetic displays, and other emotional outlets.” Métraux then describes what took place at a cannibal feast after the victim’s skull was shattered:

Old women rushed to drink the warm blood, and children were invited to dip their hands in it. Mothers would smear their nipples with blood so that even babies could have a taste of it. The body, cut into quarters, was roasted on a barbecue, and the old women, who were the most eager for human flesh, licked the grease running along the sticks. Some portions, reputed to be delicacies or sacred, such as the fingers of the grease around the liver or heart, were allotted to distinguished guests.

That Portuguese settlers in the 16th century did not cope very well with this aspect of the Indian tribal world is probably true. That the missionaries who came after them did not handle the situation as they might have done is also likely. But if they had been around at the time, would John Hemming, or Robin Hanbury-Tenison, or Adrian Cowell, or the entire staff of Survival have done much better? Would any of us?

“All primitive peoples,” Margaret Mead had said to her young Oxford visitor, “lead miserable, unhappy, cruel lives, most of which are spent trying to kill each other.” She was overdoing it, but she had a point–a point largely lost sight of in today’s systematic sentimentalizing of the Stone Age.

The Indian prospect

Of course, as we have seen, Mead also acknowledged that certain aspects of Indian culture—“their art, culture, dancing, music, etc.”—deserved to survive, for the enjoyment of the people themselves and for the admiration of humanity as a whole. That, indeed, is more or less what has happened today in the Xingu Park and places like it elsewhere. On display in such places is a pacified, defanged, and somewhat feminized version of Amazonian culture, of the kind that middle-class travellers from the West like to see: a theatrical world where dressing-up in feathered regalia, and ritual ceremonies, and communal dancing never stop.

Hemming, who welcomes the prospect of self-determination, claims that “modern indigenous policy seeks to empower tribes to manage their own affairs.” Yet both self-determination and empowerment imply literacy and modern education; and here the picture is less clear. Officially, the children are learning to read and write, and in the last chapter of Die If You Must—a chapter with the title “Present and Future”—Hemming makes three rather perfunctory references to schooling. But at the same time, he strongly implies that in his vision of the future it does not matter whether the children learn to read and write or not, because others will be there to do things for them.

Who are these others? According to Hemming, the external political affairs of the Indians on the Xingu reserve are “supported by a remarkable contingent of 33 non-government organizations, a tireless band of missionaries, anthropologists, well-wishers, journalists, doctors, and lawyers, both in Brazil and abroad.” As for their internal welfare, that is served by a “resident tribe of whites, composed of social scientists, doctors, teachers, nurses, biologists, and agronomists from all parts of Brazil.” With friends like these, who needs self-determination?

What Hemming is describing is the fruit of the inviolable-sanctuary approach to cultural survival. This rests on what might be called fortress theory, and has two cardinal principles: that “culture” and “people” and “land” should be seen as indivisible, and that they can be kept this way forever in a suitably constructed territorial redoubt. Whatever is happening in the world around them, ethnic cultures should as far as possible be preserved unchanged. With the help of an army of administrative personnel, custodially responsible for seeing to it that they go on wanting the same things they have always wanted, their cultural heritage will be kept alive. Social change is bad—at least as it affects these picturesque tribal peoples—and should be stopped.

Among the Xingu Park Indians, it is in fact safe to say that the older generation remains strongly attached to its remote lands, and intends to go on living there, hunting animals and gathering fruits. But what do younger Indians want to do with their lives? If there is one thing we have learned from modern history, it is that individuals often outgrow their ethnic cultures, find life in a fortress claustrophobic, and choose to move on. In contrast to museum exhibits, real human beings have a way of developing ideas and ambitions and desires–including for aluminum pots–beyond the ken of conservators. Fortress theory, multicultural “essentialism,” and the enduring cult of the noble savage are the enemies of those ambitions and human desires.

In the final paragraph of Die If You Must, Hemming wonders uneasily whether the pessimists might have the last laugh after all–whether the Amazon’s “beautiful, ancient, and intricate cultures will be maintained only artificially as curiosities for tourists, researchers, or politically correct enthusiasts.” That is quite possible. But it is not the only undesirable eventuality.

Preserving ancient cultural patterns is laudable, but it is not enough. No society in history has ever stood still, and however beautiful, and ancient, and intricate ancient cultures may be, it is wrong to lock people up inside them and throw away the key. Uprooting the dishonest and patronizing cult of the noble savage is the work of generations; but as far as today’s Amazonian Indians are concerned, the main priority must surely be to ensure that those among them who do not want to play the obliging role of historical curiosities, endlessly dressing up for visitors whose expectations they feel bound to fulfil, are able to find something else to do in the modern world–on the reservation or off it. In that quest we can only wish them well.

We know how it ended. But what was Sir Francis Galton thinking of when eugenics began? What led from the quiet book-lined study of a Victorian scientific worthy, loved by his family and admired by his peers, to the charnel houses of the Nazi era? Did he in fact have a crack-up, and did this lead inexorably step by step to the mother of all cultural crack-ups in Germany?

He had that rarest of all things human, an original mind—and it developed early. By age six he had learned the Iliad and the Odyssey well enough to correct his elders. When his father’s friend Leonard Horner visited one day and tiresomely quizzed the child on their fine points, Galton replied: “Pray, Mr. Horner, look at the last line in the Twelfth Book of the Odyssey,” and scampered off. This translates as “But why rehearse all this again? For even yesterday I told it to them and thy noble wife in thy house: and it liketh me not twice to tell a plain-told tale.”

But there were early signs of mental fragility too. An erratic school career led eventually to Trinity College, Cambridge, but the strain of the Mathematics Tripos proved too much. Affected by dizziness and other symptoms of mental stress when trying to concentrate, he settled for a pass degree, and for six years dropped out of academic and intellectual life almost entirely. The time from 1844 to 1850 was spent adventuring in Africa and the Middle East and socialising with the hunting set back home.

Darwin and the ‘hereditary bent’

When The Origin of Species appeared in 1859 it was a turning point. Charles Darwin was a cousin. Coming at a critical stage of both his scientific career and his domestic life, Darwin’s book shattered Galton’s religious beliefs and turned him towards biological research. He always had what he called “a hereditary bent of mind”, and from 1859 he proceeded to investigate, he said later, matters “clustered round the central topics of Heredity and the possible improvement of the Human Race.”

But the two topics—heredity and racial improvement—are not inseparable. Why was it that the human race needed to be improved? How was it that for Galton the “central topic” of heredity became indissolubly associated with the biological improvement of human kind, a worthy enough project in the abstract, but ethically hazardous in the extreme?

Doubtless there was more than one cause, but my argument here is that it mainly originated in the private grief of childlessness. Although his cousin Charles Darwin fathered several children, Galton’s marriage was infertile, and as each year passed without issue he developed a growing obsession with heredity, fertility, procreation, and the need for a controlled and managed caste system that would ensure the reproduction of people like himself.

African exploration

Between the idle years after university from 1844 to 1850, and the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, Galton built a considerable reputation as an explorer, geographer, and travel writer. David Livingstone had reached Lake Ngami from the south and east, and in 1850 Galton proposed to approach it from the west through today’s Namibia, a route of some 550 miles from Walvis Bay. With African experience in the Sudan behind him, he had the support of the Royal Geographical Society, and took the precaution of visiting Drury Lane for theatrical supplies before he left. There he bought beads and belts for trade-goods, along with a nice little crown.

This came in handy in Ovamboland. There, King Nangoro expected Galton to stand still while he (the king) spat well-gargled water all over his guest’s face. This was to discourage any lurking evil spirits—and no doubt it did. When Galton declined to submit to this ritual, however, the king retaliated by refusing to let the expedition continue. There matters stood for some time until Nangoro hospitably offered his daughter Princess Chipanga as a temporary wife. Galton found her installed in his tent largely naked except for a covering of

red ochre and butter, and as capable of leaving a mark on anything she touched as a well-inked printer’s roller. I was dressed in my one well-preserved suit of white linen, so I had her ejected with scant ceremony.

This added insult to injury, and only when Nangoro was crowned with the fetching little item from Drury Lane was the king sufficiently appeased to let Galton go. Anyway, once his work in southern Africa was finally completed he hurried home to England where he expeditiously married the daughter of the Dean of Peterborough. In Francis Galton, The Life and Work of a Victorian Genius (1974), D. W. Forrest notes thoughtfully that

His attachment to Louisa Butler does not appear to have been a romantic or sexual one. She was evidently plain, and he was more handsome as a man than she beautiful as a woman.

A photograph confirms this judgment. One wouldn’t wish to make too much of it except that for anyone hoping for children, as Galton did, the combined absence of any romantic motive or sexual attraction may have handicapped the union from the start. In his old age he wrote in his autobiography emphasizing that the most important thing was not the sentiments of bride and groom, but “the wider effect of an alliance between each of them and a new family.”

But if there were no new family? What then?

The crack-up

He married Louisa Butler on returning from Africa in 1852. Now he plunged into a busy life of travel writing, Tropical South Africa being followed by Hints for Travellers and The Art of Travel, and the first 10 years of Galton’s married life apparently went well. He played a prominent role at the Royal Geographical Society during the heated controversy over the source of the Nile, and in 1864 Galton was one of the notables on stage in a theatre in Bath at the public humiliation of John Speke by Richard Burton, when Speke—his face “full of sorrow, yearning, and perplexity”—escaped from the lecture hall and was not seen alive again.

Nothing quite so serious happened to Galton. But in 1866, scheduled to read a paper about charts for sailing ships at a meeting of the British Association, he felt ill, excused himself, arranged to have the paper read for him by another, and hurried away. It would be not until 1869 that he was once more entirely right in the head. He wrote later:

Those who have not suffered from mental breakdown can hardly realise the incapacity it causes, or, when the worst is past, the closeness of analogy between a sprained brain and a sprained joint. In both cases, after recovery seems to others to be complete, there remains for a long time an impossibility of performing certain minor actions without pain and serious mischief, mental in the one and bodily in the other.

Galton and the unconscious

Galton says nothing about the precise nature of “the incapacity”, or what “the worst” was like. Yet no-one at the time was better qualified to cast light on the pathologies of the mind. In the course of his “inquiries into human faculty” (the title of some essays gathered in book form in 1883) he had looked more deeply into the mysterious operations of the unconscious than any other Englishman alive—Carl Gustav Jung both followed and acknowledged Galton’s pioneering research. The full story can be read in Henri F. Ellenberger’s 1970 The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. Much experimental research on word association was involved, Galton summarizing it as follows:

Perhaps the strongest impression left by these experiments regards the multifariousness of the work done by the mind in a state of half-unconsciousness, and the valid reason they afford for believing in the existence of still deeper strata of mental operations, sunk wholly below the level of consciousness, which may account for such mental phenomena as cannot otherwise be explained.” (My emphasis, RS)

Mental phenomena such as what? One would like to know. But although by 1877 he had a mass of information drawn from the margins of his own unconscious, he drew back from printing more than a selection of the alarming things he had found. One’s private associations were too personal to have much scientific value, he said, excusing himself from publication:

It would be too absurd to print one’s own associations singly. They lay bare the foundations of a man’s thoughts with curious distinctness, and exhibit his mental anatomy with more vividness and truth than he would probably care to publish to the world.

Hereditarian obsessions

Modern biographies are sometimes loaded with bedroom gore, and most of the time we want less of it. Regarding Galton we would like to have more. In 1974 D. W. Forrest pointed to a possible connection between his “obsessional characteristics”, his mounting anxiety about having children, his mental breakdown between 1866 and 1869, and his turn from geographical research to unrelentingly focus on heredity, fertility, and the need for the intellectual classes to keep breeding:

His growing interest in heredity dates from about the time when it was evident that his marriage was likely to prove infertile. There is no reason to suppose that the marriage was not consummated. It is more likely that the infertility was genetic: neither of his brothers had children and none of Louisa’s sisters.

Poor Louisa! There are numerous photographs of Galton himself but few showing his wife. One that may date from around 1870 shows a face resigned and dolorous—she must have been under extreme strain. If they were childless, thought Galton, there must be an obvious reason (and it couldn’t be him). In the next few years a stream of articles and books dealt with matters of descent and fertility in a way that implicated his wife.

Examining peerages that became extinct he satisfied himself that sterile women were the cause. Poor peers, especially those of middling circumstance raised to the peerage, married rich heiresses. What they got was money, not children, for an heiress “who is the sole issue of a marriage, would not be so fertile as a woman who has many brothers and sisters… Marriage to an heiress, while financially advantageous, brought with it the potential incubus of a barren union…”—a union like his own. In his conclusion he wrote emphatically that

Although many men of eminent ability… have not left descendants behind them, it is not because they are sterile, but because they are apt to marry sterile women…

Louisa was no heiress. But she otherwise appeared to fit the pattern, and would have to be punished. So would her late, frail, father. And so would Galton’s older and partially disabled sister Adele, who had taught him The Odyssey and single-handedly nurtured his gifted mind.

A difficult personality

Karl Pearson, Galton’s disciple, who wrote a four-volume biography published between 1914 and 1930, spoke benevolently of Galton’s character and personality: he describes him as “affectionate” and “modest”. The testimony of several family members supports this and is entirely along the same lines. Yet the evidence suggests her husband also had a cruel streak.

When a field assistant who had helped him in Africa appealed for help in return, Galton, a rich man, turned him down with a miserly rebuke. Upon his death he willed his servant of forty years the merest pittance. He pursued the American journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley, of Stanley and Livingstone fame, with a vindictiveness inspired by little but the man’s desire to conceal his illegitimacy, a hidden fact Galton determined to expose. Galton’s critics underline these tendencies. Clements Markham of the Royal Geographical Society acknowledged that Galton was perfectly straight in all his dealings, but added that “he was essentially a doctrinaire not endowed with much sympathy. He was not adapted to lead or influence men. He could make no allowance for the failings of others and had no tact.”

But more than a lack of tact—an unmanageable fixation—was involved in the scientific writing he now produced. His wife’s father, Dean of Peterborough, had died of heart disease just before Galton married Louisa. In Hereditary Genius (1869) Galton wrote that Divines like his father-in-law were weak and unprolific men who bred weak and unprolific children. They “usually have wretched constitutions”; those of high moral character are usually unstable; and while a pious disposition was not uncommon, “there are also frequent cases of sons of pious parents who turned out badly.” In addition to this, a Voltairean piece mocking the inefficacy of prayer seemingly went out of its way to wound his wife.

Personally I have no doubt that much he said was true. There may well be a placebo effect, yet I’m reasonably confident that prayers are not empirically efficacious. But what was the point Galton was making? Wasn’t infertility, broadly speaking and within the understanding of the conventionally religious Louisa, a form of “sickness”? Didn’t he regard Louisa as suffering from it, and wasn’t it extremely likely that she was praying nightly to be healed? He was publicly ridiculing her only consolation.

The case of his older sister Adele is equally disturbing. With a spinal curvature “that frequently forced her to lie on her back on a board”, she represented congenital disability within his own family. As a child his nursery was in her room. “Delly” was the woman who first fostered his talents, who set him to memorising Homer. Her reward was an essay declaring that “Our human civilised stock is far more weakly through congenital imperfection than that of any other species of animals, whether wild or domestic.” Something from the haunts of the unconscious appears to be at work here—something deeply disagreeable. “The proportion of weakly and misshapen individuals”, he went on, “is not to be estimated by those whom we meet in the streets; the worst cases are out of sight.”

Eugenics

So what should be done? People like Delly must be prevented from breeding: only the genetically perfect should be allowed to reproduce. In his 1873 essay “Hereditary Improvement” he insists that those of feeble constitution must embrace celibacy “lest they should bring beings into existence whose race is predoomed to destruction by the laws of nature.” They won’t actually be forcefully eliminated. But it is the bounden duty of those in power to “breed out feeble constitutions, and petty and ignoble instincts, and to breed in those which are vigorous and noble and social.” And just as his own sister Adele would be forced into celibacy under such a regime, there were also races that were “predoomed”—Princess Chipanga’s among them.

Whenever a low race is preserved under conditions of life that exact a high level of efficiency, it must be subjected to rigorous selection. The few best specimens of that race can alone be allowed to become parents, and not many of their descendants can be allowed to live.

Caste sentiment should be deliberately cultivated. England would be scoured for the names and addresses of gifted people who would be urged to intermarry. The intellectual aristocracy would receive special benefits; “untouchables” would receive nothing at all; and endowments would maintain a privileged Brahmin caste in healthy circumstances enabling it to multiply in comfort. Nothing more strikingly reveals Galton’s political naivete than his conclusion; and nothing more clearly exposes the workings of the perfectionist mind:

I do not see why any insolence of caste should prevent the gifted class, when they had the power, from treating their compatriots with all kindness, so long as they maintained celibacy. But if these continued to procreate children, inferior in moral, intellectual and physical qualities, it is easy to believe the time may come when such persons would be considered as enemies to the State, and to have forfeited all claims to kindness.

The new religion and state power

When Galton wrote, late in life, that the effect of Darwinism was “to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science”, a radical antinomian spirit was unleashed; and when he declared that eugenics “must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion,” adding that “it has indeed strong claims to become an orthodox religious tenet of the future,” a kind of displaced religious zeal was put at the service of political compulsion: allied to German nationalism, it is unsurprising that it led, step by step, to policies of racial exclusion and finally annihilation.

Like many others today he showed a curious inability to distinguish the undoubted value of Christianity’s ethical teachings from its more dubious theological claims, or to understand that by aggressively knocking the props out from under the latter he could bring the whole civilizational structure down in ruins. But then he had no philosophical insight whatever. And no sense of institutional care. At present western civilization is like an aircraft on auto-pilot, its moral course fixed in the Christian era, with nobody understanding where the navigational settings came from or how to adjust them, and fast running out of fuel. Despite his valuable scientific contributions, Galton’s blindness to the needs of both political and moral order surely contributed to this unhappy state of affairs.

(A longer version of this article was published in the March 2007 issue of Quadrant, and will also be appearing in the American journal Social Science and Modern Society.)

Bibliographic note

Karl Pearson’s four-volume The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, 1914-1930, is the foundation of all subsequent biographies. Among recent works, D. W. Forrest’s 1974 Francis Galton: the Life and Work of a Victorian Genius, is the most readable. Nicholas Wright Gillham’s 2001 A life of Sir Francis Galton is the most comprehensive. Michael Bulmer’s 2003 Francis Galton: Pioneer of Heredity and Biometry is the most suitable for scientific readers, with systematic treatments of Galton’s work on the mechanism of heredity, evolutionary problems, statistics, and biometry. It should also be mentioned that the website www.galton.org claims to have all Galton’s published works, plus Karl Pearson’s biography, in its files.

[This article first appeared in the Autumn 2007 issue of The American Interest with the title “Over There, Then: John Gunther’s Inside Europe”]

The War had started and Churchill had lots on his mind. But even in September 1939 he still had time for John Gunther. The much-travelled American journalist was one of the few outsiders who had been in Moscow on August 24th, the very day the Nazi-Soviet pact was announced, and Churchill wanted to hear how this stunning maneuver was received on Moscow’s streets.

What exactly Gunther told Churchill is unrecorded, but the words of the British leader were something Gunther remembered for years. “Russia,” Churchill murmured, brooding aloud about the Soviet Union, and rehearsing lines that would become famous in a more polished form, “was a mystery in a mystery in a mystery.”

* * *

The wartime meeting with Churchill was no fluke. During the 1930s and 1940s John Gunther’s Inside Europe had made him the most famous American newsman of them all. A friend of both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, Gunther threw parties at his home in New York for the likes of John Steinbeck, Salvador Dali, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor—Inside Russia was dedicated to his good friend Greta Garbo.

He spent perhaps more time than was sensible with Walter Winchell and Elsa Maxwell in places like the Stork Club and Toots Shor’s and 21. But his books anatomising different continents—Inside Latin America, Inside Asia, Inside Africa, Inside Russia—were translated into ninety languages and sold millions of copies around the world.

Yet nothing else was as successful as his 1936 Inside Europe. It foreshadowed what the Nazis had in store. Much as Robert D. Kaplan today has been a Cassandra warning of the descent of entire Third World regions into anarchy, Gunther warned of the European forces leading inexorably to World War II.

Inside Europe

Inside Europe wasn’t a paperback. At the cheaper end of the British market in the 1930s books were selling for sixpence, but this was a whopping 500-page hardback retailing at 30 shillings, or sixty times that price.

That didn’t slow sales one bit. In its first year, 1936, Inside Europe sold 65,000 copies at about 1,000 copies a week, and continued to sell through 1937 at the same rate. By 1939 it had sold nearly 120,000 copies and continued to turn over through the Second World War. John Gunther was later told he was the best-selling American author of non-fiction in Britain since Mark Twain.

There were three reasons for this success, and the first was timing. Appearing first in January 1936 in London published by Hamish Hamilton, and later by Harper’s in the USA, Inside Europe provided a close literary echo, scene by scene and act by fateful act, of the international drama of the times. Running steadily through numerous updated impressions and editions, it climaxed in the “Peace Edition” of October 1938—the month when German troops marched into Czechoslovakia.

In the words of historian John Lukacs “1938 was Hitler’s year”. It saw the annexation of Austria, Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich, and the occupation of Czechoslovakia. Readers of Inside Europe’s October 1938 edition were able to follow these developments almost as they happened.

Not only were they given brilliant thumb-nail sketches of the Nazis in Germany (and a matchless photograph of Goering at a reception, an enormous bull draped with braid and medals confronting a frail and exquisite lady from Japan) but there were also incisive studies of the whole tragi-comic gallery in Austria, in Czechoslovakia, in France, in Spain, in Italy, in the Balkans, in East Europe. Gunther also dealt ably with the United Kingdom itself, where, through May 1940, the struggle between Churchill and his domestic opponents had yet to play out.

As a portrait gallery the photographs are outstanding—with one striking exception. The shot of Stalin is a typical blurry Soviet retouch job, where the crude hand of some studio helot can be seen brushing the hair, brightening the eyes, and putting a smile on the despot’s face. All too lamentably, this pictorial failing also extends to the text in the last chapters about Stalin and the USSR—something we shall come to in due course.

The second reason for the book’s success was depth. Though Gunther’s later work was often based on visits of only days or weeks, Inside Europe drew on twelve years’ research and reporting from every European capital; on personally investigating Hitler’s Austrian background and personally witnessing events like the Reichstag fire trial; on continually sharing information with journalistic colleagues Dorothy Thompson, Vincent Sheean, H. R. Knickerbocker and William Shirer, and with literary acquaintances Sinclair Lewis and Rebecca West.

The high cost of Nazi hoodlums

The third reason for the book’s success was its style and tone. Gunther grew up in Chicago, cut his journalistic teeth at the Chicago Daily News before going to Europe, and enjoyed colorful muckraking journalism. During a trip back to the Chicago at the end of the 1920s he collaborated on a News article titled “The High Cost of Hoodlums” that appeared in the October 1929 issue of Harper’s Magazine. It told how you could have an enemy “bumped off” for as little as $50, though the rate for a newspaper man like himself might be as high a $1000. In Inside: the Biography of John Gunther (1992) Ken Cuthbertson wrote that:

Despite the fact that “The High Cost of Hoodlums” was written sixty years ago, it retains its vitality as a superb historical snapshot of the Chicago of 1929… It provided a highly readable behind-the-scenes look at how 600 hoodlums had succeeded in terrorizing Chicago’s three million citizens.

One way of looking at Inside Europe is to see it as “a highly readable behind-the-scenes look” about the even larger number of hoodlums who were already terrorizing Germany and would soon menace the continent. BBC producer Brian Miller described in 2001 how the “racy mixture of politics and Capitol Hill gossip” put together by Drew Pearson and Robert Allen in 1931, Washington Merry Go Round, successfully pioneered muckraking book journalism in the US.

Cass Canfield, president of Harper & Brothers in New York, thought the same approach might be tried on Europe’s dictators. He chose Gunther to write the book, and Gunther’s powerful style ensured that Inside Europe broke through the suffocating climate of active censorship and intimidation (“this fog of untruth, or else of censorship, which was really a kind of self-censorship”) that was depriving British readers of the facts about Hitler and the drift to war.

In Vienna since 1930, Gunther had several things going for him. First, he was fast and could meet deadlines. Second, according to Brian Miller, “he was not subject to conservative proprietorial censorship because both his publishers were liberally minded and inclined to let him write whatever he liked, provided it ‘took the lid off’ something.” Third, “he was not subject to censorship and intimidation by dictators themselves because he made quick raids into their territories and only wrote when safely back in England or the USA.”

Inside Europe was a huge commercial success that sold half a million copies and gave him political entrée everywhere. Not only Churchill welcomed him. Two years later in 1941 in Washington, after returning from Latin America, Sumner Welles called Gunther in to brief Roosevelt on the region. Welles had provided letters of introduction to a dozen national leaders, and now Gunther was supposed to report what he’d found: Hitler had boasted of building “a new Germany” in Brazil, and Nazi sympathizers were everywhere.

But Roosevelt appeared less receptive than Churchill, and Gunther hardly got a word in. Instead he was treated to a rambling 45-minute lecture on foreign affairs during which, Gunther later wrote, “I kept thinking that FDR looked like a caricature of himself, with the long jaw tilting upward, the V-shaped opening of the mouth when he laughed, the two long deep parentheses that closed the ends of his lips.”

With Walter Duranty in Moscow

When John Gunther headed for Europe in 1924 it was after a two-year spell with the Chicago Daily News working alongside Ben Hecht and Carl Sandburg. In London he met Dorothy Thompson, a strong influence and life-long friend, and had an affair with Rebecca West, nine years his senior, who opened doors for him in British literary circles. In London he also married his first wife Frances—the beginning of a stressful relationship that ended in 1944.

During those years he reported from Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Constantinople, and Moscow. It was in Moscow in 1928 that Gunther first met the New York Times representative Walter Duranty—in those days it seems everybody who went to Moscow did. Visiting Duranty’s apartment he reported,

When one dines with him in Moscow, an extremely pretty girl, smart in semi-evening frock, opens the door, shaking hands. She then disappears again, and late in the evening, asks Walter if he wants to get to work, she has finished the Izvestia proofs. Then they go to bed together. In the morning, she shines the shoes. Mistress, secretary, servant. An unholy trinity for you! Of course, by Moscow law, since they share the same residence, she’s his wife, too…

The pretty girl’s name was Katya, by whom Duranty later had a son. But the mild irregularity of the arrangement Gunther witnessed in Moscow was merely the tip of an iceberg. In Paris in the years before 1914, Duranty was a close friend of Aleister Crowley, a genuine madman fascinated by excretory functions, sexually aroused by blood and torture, and a “master” of the occult.

Duranty and Crowley shared the same woman, Jane Cheron, and all three of them were heavily into opium, sex, and black magic. Even when Duranty was escorting Gunther around Moscow in 1928 he remained in some sort of marital relation with Cheron, who was still in France. Did Gunther know any of this?

Perhaps he did and perhaps he didn’t care. Duranty, who had lost a foot in a railway accident and had a limp (the picture shows him not long after this event) was a famous raconteur and the pleasure of his company seems to have swept all doubts aside. In Stalin’s Apologist (1990) Sally J. Taylor tells how forty years later he and his wife visited Duranty where he was living in Orlando, Florida. Duranty came over to the motel where the Gunthers were staying, and according to Jane Gunther he was “enchanting, in his very best form.” They all stayed up until 4.00am, with Walter being “terribly funny, and very very wicked.” After Duranty left their motel, John turned to his wife and said, “Walter is just a scamp!”

But Duranty was not, alas, just a scamp. He was also a man many regarded then and now as a scoundrel. Not for nothing did Malcolm Muggeridge call him “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism,” or Joseph Alsop describe him as a “fashionable prostitute”, or Robert Conquest, later, call for every word he ever wrote about the Soviets and collectivization to be challenged again and again.

It’s possible that Duranty was in the pay of the Soviets, though another long-term New York Times correspondent, Harrison Salisbury, who looked into things during his own stay in Moscow, denied that Duranty was ever in the pay of anyone except the New York Times.”

Perhaps. Yet it’s inescapable that his immediate reward for doggedly covering up mass murder in the Ukraine was the indulgence of the regime, the tumultuous applause he received in the Waldorf-Astoria in 1933 for assisting America’s diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union, and a call from Stalin four weeks after Duranty’s return to Moscow offering the unprecedented privilege of a second interview. Stalin’s words at the time, however accurately or inaccurately rendered by Duranty afterwards, were something he quoted with pride for the rest of his life:

You have done a good job in your reporting the USSR, though you are not a Marxist, because you try to tell the truth about our country and to understand it and to explain it to your readers. I might say that you bet on our horse to win when others thought it had no chance and I am sure you have not lost by it.

The literary culture of the time

All of this raises questions about the journalistic and literary culture of the time. How could someone from the world of Aleister Crowley and the Paris bohemian demi-monde be hired by the New York Times as its resident commentator in Moscow on Russia under Bolshevik rule? How did he become the best-read authority in the US on Stalin’s famous planned economy? Why was such a man invited to Washington in July 1932 to advise Roosevelt about Soviet gold production?

Whatever the answers to those question, it’s plain that Walter Duranty rubbed off on John Gunther. The reason seems to have had something to do with the fact that both Gunther and Duranty were the sort of men who would rather write anything than not write at all. More I suspect than is the case today, many journalists of Gunther’s time were novelists manqué. Only fiction was considered truly prestigious, and readable fiction was not about economic trends, voting patterns, or industrial production. Duranty periodically tried to write both novels and short stories, and in Hollywood, in the years of his decline in the 1940s, he teamed up with Mary Loos, a niece of the screenwriter Anita Loos, to crank out stories and scripts.

The same literary interests drove Gunther. He never stopped writing novels—The Red Pavilion, The Golden Fleece, The Lost City. Most of them sank without trace. Through Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson he knew dozens of novelists and yearned for literary recognition.

When success came, however, it was not for fiction but for his reportorial colossus Inside Europe (though he must have enjoyed a Popular Front gathering of the League of American Writers in 1938 when he was invited on stage, and dined with Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald).

When in 1935 Cass Canfield of Harper & Brothers approached him to write Inside Europe, Gunther turned him down—not once but twice. “In those days I was more interested in fiction than in journalism and my dreams were tied up in a long novel about Vienna that I hoped to write.” Only when offered the huge sum of $5000 did Gunther reluctantly accept. What’s interesting is that when he finally sat down to write, the approach was personal and novelistic almost as much as analytic and interpretive. Events in Europe were being shaped by a cast of extraordinary characters, Gunther believed, and Inside Europe would be about their beliefs, motives, and charisma.

To get under way he agreed to produce three articles, and “The three articles”, wrote Gunther, “turned out to be the three chief personality chapters in the book—Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin.” What drove him was the need to show the force of their personalities and how they wielded power over other men. In a letter to Canfield he said that this approach “derives from something deeper in me than political conviction; it comes from the fact, for good or ill, I instinctively think of myself as a novelist.”

* * *

Inside Europe is still riveting. No-one who reads Gunther’s description of Hitler and his friends will easily forget it, whatever they may have read since World War II:

He reads almost nothing. He dislikes intellectuals. He has never been outside Germany since his youth in Austria and speaks no foreign language, except a few words of French. He is nearly oblivious of ordinary personal contacts. A colleague of mine travelled with him, in the same aeroplane, day after day, for two months during the 1932 electoral campaigns. Hitler never talked to a soul, not even to his secretaries, in the long hours in the air; never stirred; never smiled.

Gunther had also spent time in Bucharest and knew the ominous mixture of Ruritanian farce and fascist menace to be found in Rumania. Only two streets away from King Carol’s palace one could see well-dressed members of the Iron Guard lounging in a café, sipping Turkish coffee, and talking about revolution. Founded in 1927 the program of the Iron Guard, he wrote, “was a fanatic, obstreperous sub-Fascism on a strong nationalist and anti-Semitic basis. Its members trooped through the countryside, wore white costumes, carried burning crosses, impressed the ignorant peasantry, aroused the students in the towns.”

The portrayal of Stalin

So far so good. And it’s reasonably good for hundreds of pages. But then one comes to Stalin—and it’s pure undiluted Walter Duranty. Stalin has, we are told

“Guts. Durability. Physique. Patience. Tenacity. Concentration. If he has nerves, they are veins in rock. His perseverance, as Walter Duranty says, is ‘inhuman’. When candour suits his purpose, no man can be more candid. He has the courage to admit his errors, something few other dictators dare do. In his article ‘Dizzy from Success’ he was quite frank to admit that the collectivisation of the peasants had progressed too quickly.”

This is truly a gem. Stalin’s magnanimity is shown by his “frankness” in “admitting” that collectivisation had “progressed too quickly.” Gunther sums up the desperate suicidal resistance of the peasants in the following four sentences: “The peasants tried to revolt. The revolt might have brought the Soviet Union down. But it collapsed on the iron will of Stalin. The peasants killed their animals, then they killed themselves.”

Yes. John Gunther actually wrote that it wasn’t Stalin, or the Communist Party, or the NKVD, or the Red Army troops who seized their grain and herded them without food or water onto railway wagons and shot them if they resisted; they “killed themselves.”

Even so, Inside Europe was a major achievement. It brought to public notice the Empire of Evil that was about to expand and take over the whole of central Europe. It powerfully confirmed the Nazi menace Churchill had toiled for years to publicise. And Gunther’s Inside Europe played no small part in bringing US elite opinion out of the dangerous miasma of isolationism that prevailed.

That such a perceptive journalistic observer could be drawn into Duranty’s deceptions about the Soviets had no simple explanation. It may however be because one of Gunther’s strongest personal virtues, loyalty, here became also a vice. He could never bring himself to believe (or to even imagine) that however entertaining Duranty may have been down through the years, and however firmly he had stood by his side during the painfully protracted death of Gunther’s son, his old friend from the 1920s was also a thorough scoundrel whose writings about Stalin were full of lies.

He would like us to believe that the decline and fall of the Maya was a tragic loss, and a sadly overgrown sculpture in the jungle ornaments the cover of his book Collapse.

But I don’t care if the Maya civilization did collapse. I don’t think we should shed a single retrospective tear. It might be interesting to know how or why it fell—whether from war or drought or disease or soil exhaustion—but I don’t much care about that either. Because quite frankly, as civilizations go, the Mayan civilization in Mexico didn’t amount to much.

Now I know this is a shocking thing to say. Gallery owners in New York and elsewhere will cry out indignantly about the glories of Maya art. They will show you terra cotta figurines and fine reliefs and paintings and tell splendid tales of “kings” and “nobles” and such. In deference to this view we shall gladly concede that Maya art is not uninteresting. But it is sheer romantic fantasy to mourn the passing, around 900 AD, of an aristocracy of hypersensitive native aesthetes—though anthropologists and art critics have written reams of such stuff.

Glamorous talk of “kings” and “lords” and “nobles” always sounds better than a realistic description of murderous and predatory chieftains with little but power, conquest, self-glorification, enslavement, and killing and torture on their minds. Yes: they wore spectacular feather head-dresses. Yes: they built sky-high piles of masonry. But their hands dripped blood—incessantly.

Even Ronald Wright in A Short History of Progress (2004) seems to agree. His disdainful view of civilization is not one I share, and is designed to serve a familiar agenda. He tells us for example that between the 8^th and the 10^th century AD, as things went wrong in Mayaland, and then got a whole lot worse, that the Maya solution “was higher pyramids, more power to the kings, harder work for the masses, more foreign wars. In modern terms, the Maya elite became extremists, or ultra-conservatives, squeezing the last drops of profit from nature and humanity.”

Alas for such speculations, this isn’t what happened at all. It is simply not the case that the Maya once lived in warm, loving, supportive communities, reciting nature poetry and drinking jasmine tea… and then somehow lost their way. Instead they were doing what bellicose tribal populations have always done—straining the carrying capacity of the land, warring with neighbours, and trying in grisly ways to appease their gods.

* * *

Who has not felt the pathos of ruins? Even a humble pioneer homestead with rusty pots lying in the grass, and a charred chimney still standing against the sky, makes you pause and wonder about the people who lived there once. Is it surprising that when the American John Stephens stumbled upon the ruins of Maya temples in Yucatan he should have been carried away?

“Here were the remains of a cultivated, polished, and peculiar people, who had passed through all the stages incident to the rise and fall of nations; reached their golden age, and perished… Architecture, sculpture, and painting, all the arts which embellish life, had flourished in this overgrown forest; orators, warriors, and statesmen, beauty, ambition, and glory had lived and passed away… We went up to their desolate temples and fallen altars; and wherever we moved we saw the evidence of their taste, their skill in arts… We called back into life the strange people who gazed in sadness from the wall; pictured them, in fanciful costumes and adorned with plumes of feather…”

From one point of view this is a natural response. But it is also a wholly aesthetic response—the response of a mind entirely untroubled by questionable social, economic, or political institutions, let alone simple humanity. Gazing upon the ruins Stephens conjures up in his imagination a world of “orators, warriors, and statesmen.”

Yet if he’d rashly “called back into life” some of the people painted on the wall he could have got a surprise. He might have found they weren’t so much “gazing in sadness” as contorted with pain. On page 172 Diamond tells us that “archaeologists for a long time believed the ancient Maya to be gentle and peaceful people.” (Although why archaeologists should have held this belief, beyond their customary wishful thinking, he doesn’t explain.) “We now know that Maya warfare was intense, chronic, and unresolvable…” and that the sadness Stephens detected long ago was due to some very nasty customs indeed:

“Captives were tortured in unpleasant ways depicted clearly on the monuments and murals (such as yanking fingers out of sockets, pulling out teeth, cutting off the lower jaw, trimming of the lips and fingertips, pulling out the fingernails, and driving a pin through the lips), culminating, sometimes years later, in the sacrifice of the captive in other equally unpleasant ways such as tying the captive up into a ball by binding the arms and legs together, then rolling the balled-up captive down the steep stone staircase of a temple.”

* * *

I suppose it all depends on what you expect a civilization to offer. The Maya, and the Aztecs too, offered barbarism plus pyramids. Personally I don’t think that’s enough. What we expect of any civilization worth the name is something that lifts us up, something elevating if not ennobling—something that looks beyond the endless cyclical violence of the barbaric past, however interesting its art may be.

Above all what we expect is a moral and philosophical perspective on human existence. The “examined life” as Socrates put it, with the fruit of this examination religiously incorporated and expressed. Egypt had this. India had this. China had this. But as far as we know the Maya did not.

Of course you need to also have a developed form of writing to record evidence that life has been examined, thought about, and critically assayed. It is true the Maya had a rudimentary script, and efforts have been made to prove they also had what might loosely be called a philosophical interest in time. Wright comments that “using their advanced arithmetic in a calendar known as the Long Count, the Maya charted the mystery of time, recording astronomical events and running mythological calculations far into the past and future—sometimes over millions of years.”

But my own impression is that however successful they were in “charting the mystery of time”, Maya calendrical calculations mainly reflected a mistaken devotion to astrology and numerology—and a more sterile dead-end it would be hard to find.

What I look for in a civilization is Mind at Work. That’s what we find in ancient Greece when Heraclitus maintained that everything changes, and Parmenides retorted that nothing changes. A serious religion with a seriously uplifting ethic is also welcome: failing that, as among the Greeks, let’s have a serious freethinker like Xenophanes, who wondered why the faithful always imagine that their gods look like themselves:

“If oxen or horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds.”

As for maths, one Pythagoras is worth a million Mayan astrologers, while a single calculation by Eratosthenes is worth a wilderness of numerologists. What Pythagoras said about right-angled triangles led to the discovery of incommensurables. In Bertrand Russell’s words, his argument

proved that, whatever unit of length we may adopt, there are lengths which bear no exact numerical relation to the unit, in the sense that there are no two integers m, n, such that m times the length in question is n times the unit. This convinced the Greek mathematicians that geometry must be established independently of arithmetic.

In the third century BC Eratosthenes used simple instruments and elementary geometry to measure the earth’s diameter. He came up with a figure of 7,850 miles—about fifty miles short of the truth. In connection with Greek science we might also mention Democritus, who once cried: “I would rather find a single causal law than be king of Persia!”

Then there’s drama. A serious civilization has to get beyond ritual, beyond charades and dressing up and sacred mumbo jumbo and human sacrifice. You have to see Mind at Work. And that is what the Greeks gave us too in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripedes. For sure, it all began with songs chanted in honor of Dionysus. But it didn’t get stuck there. See the first chapter of Allardyce Nicoll’s World Drama: from Aeschylus to Anouilh for details.

* * *

But over and above philosophy, science, and the arts, there must be an attempt to move politics beyond the turmoil of barbarian chiefs everlastingly contesting blood-soaked patches of ground. The civilization of the Maya never got past that in Yucatan. But in Greece, one thousand years before the Maya (and aeons before the Maya in terms of cultural development), an alternative and enlightened tradition of political thought and action, long in gestation, had already received its quintessential expression under Pericles. His oft-quoted speech in defence of Athens can never be quoted enough:

Our political system does not compete with institutions which are elsewhere in force. We do not copy our neighbours, but try to be an example. Our administration favors the many instead of the few: that is why it is called democracy.

The laws afford equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, but we do not ignore the claims of excellence. When a citizen distinguishes himself, then he will be called to serve the state, in preference to others, not as a matter of privilege but as a reward of merit; and poverty is no bar…

The freedom we enjoy extends also to ordinary life; we are not suspicious of one another, and do not nag our neighbour if he chooses to go his own way. But this freedom does not make us lawless. We are taught to respect the magistrates and the laws, and never to forget that we must protect the injured. And we are also taught to observe those unwritten laws whose sanction lies only in the universal feeling of what is right.

Our city is thrown open to the world; we never expel a foreigner. We are free to live exactly as we please, and yet we are always ready to face danger. We love beauty without indulging in fancies, and although we try to improve our intellect, this does not weaken our will.

To admit one’s poverty is no disgrace with us; but we consider it disgraceful not to make an effort to avoid it. An Athenian citizen does not neglect public affairs when attending to his private business… We consider a man who takes no interest in the state not as harmless, but as useless; and although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it.

We do not look upon discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of political action, but as an indispensable preliminary to acting wisely. We believe that happiness is the fruit of freedom and freedom that of valor, and we do not shrink from the dangers of war.

To sum up, I claim that Athens is the School of Hellas, and that the individual Athenian grows up to develop a happy versatility, a readiness for emergencies, and self-reliance.

* * *

The ripples of Greek civilization spread globally, and deserved to. There were no ripples from the Maya. No enlightenment. Nothing. Just art and masonry and the dried blood of long-dead sacrificial victims. That is not nearly enough.

(Encounter, December 1986)

“We found many of the natives dressed in a thin French gauze, which they called ‘byqui’; this being a light airy dress, and well calculated to display the shape of their persons. The manners of these females, however … were rude and troublesome in the highest degree … being so vehement in their solicitations that I found it impossible to resist them. They tore my cloak, cut the buttons from my boy’s clothes, and were proceeding to other outrages, when I mounted my horse and rode off, followed for half a mile by a body of these harpies… ” Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior of Africa (1799)

Mungo Park was lucky to have that horse for his getaway. Even 200 years later a horse might still be useful, for as Nigel Barley relates, a modern traveller in West Africa may have to deal with women no less vehement in their solicitations—and certainly no less rude—who “walk straight up to the intended male and simply grasp him between the legs in a vice-like grip.” Barley explains that an exhausted visitor might find some respite from their attentions in the shelter of a hotel; yet even there he found himself pursued by “an extremely large Fulani woman in her mid-fifties”, bearing a distinct resemblance to Oliver Hardy, who pushed her way into his room and promptly began to unrobe. Very soon, he says, he found himself “trapped in a farce”.

Like a lot of the entertaining anecdotes in The Innocent Anthropologist and A Plague of Caterpillars, Dr Barley’s two books about anthropological fieldwork in Cameroon,¹ this is obviously in questionable taste. And how grateful we must be for that, since with the exception of a mere handful of writings (the late Shiva Naipaul’s North of South comes to mind) reports on African life have been unusually mealy-mouthed, and as for the observations of social scientists, these have tended to read as if the United Nations General Assembly were peering over the author’s shoulder as he wrote. One never gets that sinister feeling with Barley’s work, which combines the candour and colour of the early traveller’s tales with a sharp wit and a laughing sense of the absurd.

This is just as well, for being “trapped in a farce” is the lot of every fieldworker. Misunderstandings never cease, and from the moment one muddily sets foot in a place like Cameroon, life is a comedy of errors. The times of appointments are wrong, not by hours, but by days: the ceremony has finished before one arrives. Recovering from setbacks like this, the anthropologist sits down to enquire into Cameroonian cosmology; but, tripped by a faulty noun, utters only farragos or obscenities.

Inevitably, word of his doings spreads. His more hilarious ineptitudes are related far and wide. He enters into lore: then into legend. The plain fact of the matter is that anthropologists provide so much innocent amusement that it is hard to believe the longueurs of primitive life were ever endurable without them. Sentimentalists sometimes tell of seeing tears in the eyes of their informants when, at long last, the farce concludes and the fieldworker packs to go home. But we all know why. Nothing can replace the fun an anthropologist provides.

Irreverent details

Yet anthropologists are not supposed to laugh back, even though primitive life abounds in material for guffaws. Doubtless it was Dr Barley’s violation of this rule of decorum, and the audible laughter echoing through his first book, which led The Guardian to describe it as “unconventional”; while The Times Literary Supplement, going further, felt obliged to comment on its “irreverent detail on African bureaucratic and anthropological customs.” Now, without wanting to make too much out of a casual expression, surely the word irreverent is a very odd one. Can the reviewer have actually believed that the normal attitude, and perhaps even the appropriate attitude toward “African bureaucratic and anthropological customs”, was one of reverence? Hardly. Yet it was a sound instinct which led the writer to this term, for as Barley himself said recently, “the subject of anthropology today is afflicted with a dreadful piety.”

The dreadfulness of this piety is a fairly recent development. It is mainly due to a notable change in the character and motives of those who are drawn to the subject of anthropology—a change which has seen the familiar figure of “the Anthropologist” being displaced by what, for want of a better term, we may call “the Anthropologue”.

At his best the anthropologist was disinterested. By contrast, when the anthropologue studies primitive life he always has an ulterior motive—often, if not invariably, of a salvationist kind. One consequence has been that the status of anthropology as a science is even shakier than it was, since science is of little or no interest to such people. Instead they vainly rummage about in the great ragbag of primitive cultures, seeking means of personal redemption or models for their political or ideological hopes.

Such high ambitions are not to be taken lightly. And this is the main reason why, like that prototypical anthropologue, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, they are driven by a deep emotional necessity to dignify everything in the pre-industrial world. The laughable must be made grave; the repellent must be made somehow endearing; and the downright revolting must be swathed in a language so latinate and extraordinary that it is often hard to know exactly what is going on. Words like sacred, sacral, and ritualistic may be called on to produce a vaguely sanctifying effect; and if this is successful, then plain speaking about African tribal life will always seem tasteless, and usually irreverent as well.

Plain speaking, of course, is the very last thing your true anthropologue wants—as a glance at Basil Davidson’s The Africans (1969) shows. When Mr Davidson wrote this, it was as an enthusiastic auxiliary rather than as a ranking member of the anthropological corps. But his chapter on kings and kingdoms in Africa could hardly be improved upon as an example of the language of anthropologuery and how it works.

The challenge, mind you, is considerable: his topic includes that place of legendary horrors, 19th-century Benin. But he takes it all in his stride. Speaking respectfully of “the royal party” and the “atmosphere of majesty at court” the author glances, more in sorrow than in anger, at a priesthood whose sacrificial excesses may simply have resulted from a fit of theocratic zeal; and he even manages to suggest that the carnage found by the British force of 1897 was largely, if not wholly, of their own making.

The quintessence of kingship

A quotation referring to kingship among the Nigerian Jukun extols “the indefinable spiritual potency which is the quintessence of kingship … immortal and indivisible”; while Davidson’s own prose, swelling in honour of his royal theme, proclaims that the Ashanti king was “the manifest apex and prime representative” of his people, whose task was to “procure unbroken the moral order” of the state. The moral order of the Tutsi state was symbolised by a “ritual drum”, and the cumulative adjectival effect Basil Davidson achieves is so majestical and impressive that we can only regard it as a gross tactical error when the author admits that the “ritual drum” is festooned with severed testicles, donated (presumably under duress) by defeated enemies of the king.

It is a thousand pities that Nigel Barley wasn’t around in 1897 to give us his impression of life at the court of Benin. Any man who can title one of his chapters “Ex Africa Semper Quid Nasty” would surely have revelled in the pits full of sacrificial victims and the altars running with gore. Still, I suppose we should be grateful that we have him at all, however belatedly, because his humorous attempts to throw light on current anthropological superstitions would be welcome at any time.

He observes that it is one of the more dearly held beliefs of a certain kind of fieldworker that you can only get to know your people, and win their acceptance, by labouring in a comradely way side by side while tilling the soil. But in The Innocent Anthropologist we find that the Dowayo of North Cameroon regard this insistent egalitarianism as pure affectation. As soon as they set eyes on Barley they know at once that this visiting Englishman is made for higher things than hewing wood or drawing water; when he tried to do so, he writes, “frail old ladies insisted on carrying the water jar for me.”

In his latest book, A Plague of Caterpillars, he again pokes fun at exhibitionistic “solidarity with the workers”, but this time it takes on a deeper seriousness with the appearance of Bob, the “Black White Man”. (The designation “Black White Man” is Cameroonian for a black man who is Westernised and behaves like a white man.) In the absurdity of his career and his expectations, Bob’s story has in it much of the pathos surrounding the sort of people drawn to anthropology in the era of the anthropologues. When Barley picks him up by the roadside and gives him a lift into town, the Black White Man, (an Afro-American), describes himself as an anthropologist.

Soul brotherhood

It turns out that Bob’s is the sort of anthropology offered in a Black Studies course at an American East Coast college, a course which led him to believe that “it was vital for coloured Americans to have an alternative cultural tradition that would assign them a higher place than did the white one.” He never celebrated Christmas, but observed an obscure festival of Swahili origin, and was mortified to discover that Africans had never heard of it. He had learned Swahili in the USA, and imposed it on his wife and children for one day a week in the house:

“Having never been informed otherwise and having assumed that Africa was in some sense a unity, he had been genuinely astonished that no one in Cameroon could speak it or had even heard of the language.”

Arrived in Africa, he installed his wife and three children in a waterless hut in an unsalubrious section of the town, “in order to share the rich and colourful life of the local people and “find his roots’.” Result: appalled by everything, and being sensible people never exposed to anthropology, his wife and children ran off home to the USA as fast as they could.

Bob so accurately depicts the confused alienation of many recruits to anthropology today that he seems almost too good to be true. Can we really believe in this incarnation of Soul Brotherhood whose determination not to impose on his African fellows the indignity of menial tasks “led him to refuse all offers from washermen, gardeners, house-repairers, drivers and the like”, thus directly violating the African rule that it is the duty of the rich to supply employment for the poor, and destroying all attempts to know the people?

Is Bob a fact or an artefact? The bit about being black is intriguing. But perhaps it is only a story-teller’s disguise, for the emotional and ethical make-up of the Black White Man is so eerily like that of certain White Black Men I have met that for all I know he’s just an ingenious invention. And if that is the case, shouldn’t a charge of wantonly fictionalising his material be indignantly brought against Barley by his peers?

Anthropology à la mode

Fat chance! Both Dr Barley and his Black White Man are on safe ground. And this is because so many practitioners of anthropology à la mode regard distinctions between fact and fiction as both positivistic and passé—and, more seriously, in very bad taste. For many years now they have thought and argued that, given the subjectivity of observers and the bias of observation, it would be the most painful of solecisms high-handedly to call for a distinction between facts and fiction in the name of anthropological “science”. All one can hope to do—all one should hope to do—is interpret the infinitely varied frames of social action; to decode the infinite codes of meaning which social life presents, codes layered as richly as a semantic sedimentary deposit 100 feet thick. They would gladly use almost any other word than science to describe this game of cultural cryptography—if only one existed of equal prestige.

“Interpretive explanation”, wrote Clifford Geertz in 1980, is a form of explanation, not just exalted glossography” (my emphasis). But there was a defensiveness in his phrasing all the same. Does it explain? And what does it explain? Could hermeneutics (“the science of interpretation, traditionally applied to the discovery of the real but hidden meanings of sacred texts”) ever even try to explain the principal dynamic forces of social life?

Stimulating this interpretive push was the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, work which increasingly authorised a form of ratiocinative aestheticism as the proper way of understanding the primitive world. All things cultural were best seen as shaped into symmetries and patterns—if only, that is, enough ethnographic odds-and-ends were assembled, and if enough inspired ingenuity were applied to their arrangement.

Just how far the Paris master himself was prepared to go in his explanatory claims for aestheticism can be found in The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology (1964, tr. 1970), which he hoped would be listened to as a sort of “musical work, as the plan and chapter headings try to suggest.” In what he calls the “Overture” to its “confused and indigestible pages” (and this characterisation is his own) Levi-Strauss asserts that:

“music itself is the supreme mystery of the science of man a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress …”

This enterprise simultaneously posed as a form of scientific enquiry, and prudently disclaimed any such status. Of the discussion of mythology to be found in The Raw and the Cooked, its author announced that “this book on myth is itself a kind of myth.” But within metamythology what did it matter if reality was this way or that? Whether it was the object or its mirror image, or any one of an infinite recession of subjectivities which had become the locus of enquiry? The important thing was not to notice what the recessive series was actually receding from.²

Spellbinding tales

When a narrative study of myths, and the myths themselves, were defined as pretty much the same thing (explanans and explanandum democratically shaking hands), this kind of anthropology could all too easily be regarded as little more than “the telling of tales about the tales other people tell.” There could not, according to the rules of this game, be such a thing as a false tale; nor was it easy to see how research which succeeded could be distinguished from research which had failed. Success would apparently be measured by the persuasiveness of the narrative, or the spellbinding nature of the tale.

Once this was accepted, anthropology à la mode became an intellectual disaster zone, waiting for Carlos Castaneda to happen. And pat he came, like the catastrophe in the old comedy, a real live sorcerer’s apprentice carrying under his arm a book he had written. The book’s title was The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968), and the title was itself significant, for it popularised the mere apprehension of the occult as “knowledge”. This usage, along with talk about there being a “way” toward it, was the traditional usage of mysticism; in future, the language of mysticism would often be anthropology’s language too. References to the knowledge of witches and sorcerers, meaning simply the baseless and unverified beliefs of witches and sorcerers, became commonplace in student essays—and not only there.³

After Castaneda’s global sales passed into the millions his muse appears to have fallen silent. But he had made his point, and had won disciples: the book Shabono: A Visit to a Remote and Magical World in the Heart of the South American Jungle (1982), written by yet another sometime California student of anthropology and bearing encomia on its cover from Castaneda himself, shows that the strain of writing he pioneered is still alive and well. Shabono, however, seems to have been received rather more sceptically than its predecessors.

A reviewer in The American Anthropologist discovered that this supposedly new work was largely made up of material pilfered from the earlier Yanoamo: The Narrative of a White Girl Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians (1971). It is worth noting, moreover, that in the course of discovering the fraudulent nature of Shabono, “the most unsettling clue” (according to the reviewer) was the crudity of the borrowings—not factual errors in the ethnographic detail.

The detection of plagiarism requires a sensitivity to literary rather than scientific criteria. Presumably, had the author shown more skill in the art of fabrication, her work (like Casteneda’s) might have enjoyed for a while the status of social science”. Marvin Harris’s criticism of interpretive anthropology as “mystification … an esoteric and nihilistic venture”, the product of “essentially literary minds hostile to applying scientific methods”⁴ may be relevant here. As scientific method declines, literary methods (a weak defence at best) may be all that remains as a protection against fraud.

The dialectitians move in

With the empirical base of the discipline becoming undermined and discredited, it was inevitable that the dialecticians would move in. Inevitable, in the first place, because the affinities between the anthropologues and the Marxists are so close. Both share an atavistic enthusiasm for BC—Before Commerce, Before Capitalism, Before Civilisation itself. The average academic Marxist, even while tippling convivially at the bar, betrays a deep unhappiness in modern industrial society, and is obviously pining for a more primitive social order than modern capitalism provides.

And the anthropologue is no less unhappy—anthropology being, as the editor of the quarterly journal Dialectical Anthropology, Stanley Diamond, has so trenchantly said, “the most alienated of the professions.” When both Marxists and anthropologues realised they had so much in common, they rushed into each other’s arms.⁵Observers foresaw a happy marriage, while wedding guests were later heard to remark that the only surprising thing was that it hadn’t taken place years before.

So much for the teachers. What about the taught? The success of Marxism was inevitable, in the second place, because it is so much more emotionally satisfying for modern anthropology students than the alternatives. Playing around with the meaning of meaning and the signification-of-signs can be very tough mental work, whether you are trying to follow Wittgenstein or Levi-Strauss.

Only a few rare souls can find fulfilment in translating a corpus of primitive fables into literary symphony—and after you’ve done it, what then? But the programme of the Marxist anthropologues requires only the mastery of a few slogans and cliches, leads straight from the lecture room into the streets, and promises not only the drama of local demonstrations but a sense of participating in world-historical upheavals in foreign lands.

Inevitable, in the third place, because for both the teachers and the taught it presented a congenially Manichaean view of the world—on one side the satanical West: on the other, the poor and oppressed. All the free-floating evangelical energy of our time could now be employed demonstrating, in course after course in the anthropological curriculum, that European expansion and colonialism

“created the underdevelopment of the Third World [and that] a constant drain of wealth … has produced incredible poverty and has not only hampered but systematically destroyed indigenous economic development.”

Indian poverty was created by the British, and

“…we will see that it is no accident that the post-colonial governments of Africa, Asia, and modern Latin America have so often been repressive dictatorships, and that so often military regimes of right-wing generals or admirals run countries in what is often curiously called the ‘free world’… The stake of the United States in maintaining police states in the Third World … Pinochet and the army … the Chilean ruling classes … The Shah’s police state … the Somoza dynasty … ” etc.

Political sorcery in Cameroon

Shadows are lengthening across the walls of the Seminar Room. The speaker has just returned from Cameroon. In a mixture of his native Dutch and the usual Marxified jargon he talks about “ze hegemonic project of ze neo-colonial elite under conditions of capitalist penetration.” His talk has been billed as a discussion of “Sorcery as Political Protest”; but after a few sketchy suggestions about revolutionary witchcraft he loses interest and has to admit that in Cameroon witches are everywhere. One feels that Nigel Barley’s presence would be welcome.

A still surviving Tory slumbers fitfully. The Leninists smile encouragingly at what they hope are jests (are those, perhaps, Dutch jokes?). At question time a grey-faced woman asks anxiously about Gramsci, while a particle of dust, drifting slowly down upon her agitated head, catches the evening light. Do the sorcerers constitute a potential hegemonic bloc? The speaker fondles his oily curls but is non-committal. A merciful silence follows.

Yes indeed, the Golden Age of Anthropology is well and truly dead.

2 Note the frequency of recursive or recessive formations in Clifford Geertz’s useful survey, “Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought”, American Scholar (No. 49, 1980), pp. 165-179: “so many signs signing signs …  what we assert in asserting … how we think about how we think… “

3 See Kenneth Minogue, “The Guru: Thoughts after Reading Carlos Castaneda” (Encounter, August 1976).

4 See “Anthropology’s Native Problems” by Louis A. Sass, Harper’s Magazine (May 1986), p. 52.

5 From Chapter 21, “The Creation of the Third World”, in Roger Keesing’s widely-used introductory student textbook. Cultural Anthropology (1981).