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Exclusively Concrete Reality

Aldous Huxley, on “the error of speaking about certain categories of persons as though they were mere embodied abstractions” (Words and Behavior):

Foreigners and those who disagree with us are not thought of as men and women like ourselves and our fellow-countrymen; they are thought of as representatives and, so to say, symbols of a class. In so far as they have any personality at all, it is the personality we mistakenly attribute to their class — a personality that is, by definition, intrinsically evil. We know that the harming or killing of men and women is wrong, and we are reluctant consciously to do what we know to be wrong. But when particular men and women are thought of merely as representatives of a class, which has previously been defined as evil and personified in the shape of a devil, then the reluctance to hurt or murder disappears. Brown, Jones and Robinson are no longer thought of as Brown, Jones and Robinson, but as heretics, gentiles, Yids, niggers, barbarians, Huns, communists, capitalists, fascists, liberals — whichever the case may be. When they have been called such names and assimilated to the accursed class to which the names apply, Brown, Jones and Robinson cease to be conceived as what they really are — human persons — and become for the users of this fatally inappropriate language mere vermin or, worse, demons whom it is right and proper to destroy as thoroughly and as painfully as possible. Wherever persons are present, questions of morality arise. Rulers of nations and leaders of parties find morality embarrassing. That is why they take such pains to depersonalize their opponents. All propaganda directed against an opposing group has but one aim: to substitute diabolical abstractions for concrete persons. The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. By robbing them of their personality, he puts them outside the pale of moral obligation. Mere symbols can have no rights — particularly when that of which they are symbolical is, by definition, evil.

Politics can become moral only on one condition: that its problems shall be spoken of and thought about exclusively in terms of concrete reality; that is to say, of persons. To depersonify human beings and to personify abstractions are complementary errors which lead, by an inexorable logic, to war between nations and to idolatrous worship of the State, with consequent governmental oppression. All current political thought is a mixture, in varying proportions, between thought in terms of concrete realities and thought in terms of depersonified symbols and personified abstractions. In the democratic countries the problems of internal politics are thought about mainly in terms of concrete reality; those of external politics, mainly in terms of abstractions and symbols. In dictatorial countries the proportion of concrete to abstract and symbolic thought is lower than in democratic countries. Dictators talk little of persons, much of personified abstractions, such as the Nation, the State, the Party, and much of depersonified symbols, such as Yids, Bolshies, Capitalists. The stupidity of politicians who talk about a world of persons as though it were not a world of persons is due in the main to self-interest. In a fictitious world of symbols and personified abstractions, rulers find that they can rule more effectively, and the ruled, that they can gratify instincts which the conventions of good manners and the imperatives of morality demand that they should repress. To think correctly is the condition of behaving well. It is also in itself a moral act; those who would think correctly must resist considerable temptations.

GLD at IWP

New at IWP Books: G. Lowes Dickinson, 1907, Justice and Liberty: A Political Dialogue. Books by GLD at IWP Books:

  • 1901, The Meaning of Good: A Dialogue
  • 1903, Letters from a Chinese Official
  • 1905, A Modern Symposium
  • 1907, Justice and Liberty: A Political Dialogue
  • 1914, Appearances: Being Notes of Travel
  • 1920, The Magic Flute
  • 1930, After Two Thousand Years

And: E. M. Forster, 1934, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson.

E. M. Forster wrote that A Modern Symposium, might be called the “Bible of Tolerance.” The same might be said of Justice and Liberty: A Political Dialogue.

All Night

New at IWP Books: Hugh Edwards (1933) All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s. One of Jacques Barzun’s “Favorite Books”:

A strange, short novel that has been rediscovered more than once, been called a masterpiece by James Agate and Ian Fleming, and became popular as a BBC broadcast. In my experience it never fails to grip those to whom I recommend it, though its power, like its plot, is hard to explain.

Review at the Neglected Books Page.

“Anthropology Should Begin at Home”

New at IWP Books: Bernard Berenson (1952) Rumour and Reflection. On April 19, 1944:

London and New York send missionaries to China, to Africa, to the remotest and wildest parts of the earth, to inculcate the Gospel by the example of their own standard of life. Likewise we send expeditions to study the manners, customs, folkways of Trobriand, Easter Islands and other fashionable haunts of over-excited anthropological curiosity.

Many, myself included, question whether missionaries are not wasting our money, and their energies not doing the objects of their zeal more harm than good. We believe there are no end of Trobrianders, Easter Islanders and other neolithics, not to speak of palaeolithics, in our midst: in our slums as well as in every grade of society, the fashionable not least. We should prefer our missionaries to sacrifice themselves rather in humanizing these savages or barbarians, these fetish worshippers in our own ranks.

Anthropology should begin at home.

By anthropology I mean the study of usages, practices, manners, customs, beliefs, superstitions, etc., etc., that do not readily submit to rational treatment but remain as they are, mobile or fixed, and find brilliant defenders armed with all the learning that up-to-date research can apply.

I could wish that our anthropologists grew serious, and forgoing aquatic picnics among Pacific Islands would devote laborious years to the study of all that is naively taken for granted and no less tenaciously than irrationally held, by the average matron, the average business man, the average cleric, the average lawyer, the average soldier, sailor, administrator, butcher, baker, etc., etc., in our own societies, high and low, low and high.

Something of this kind must have been in the mind of the late Prof. Sumner of Yale with his sociological investigation and publications. Far from being a Philistine as Van Wyck Brooks designated him, we should honour him as the great scholar and pioneer that he was. What he meant to initiate was an inquiry as to what in our own people was too fixed, too immovable to yield to immediate philanthropic effort or legislative decree. What among “the heirs of all the ages in the foremost ranks of time” remains as little subject to persuasion and even to force as any other irrational energy, say a certain volume of water in motion or turning to steam.

You know enough about the nature of water not to argue with it, preach to it, or appeal to its better instincts. You let it alone; or if you must deal with it and want it to take a more convenient turn, you provide ample space for its career by canals, sluices, safety-valves and other devices.

Human nature in a given moment, at a given place is scarcely more subject to reason or persuasion.

From Jacques Barzun, “Berenson and the Boot” (The Griffin, 1952, @ IWP Articles).

The title, which appears perfect as one looks back on it, does not disclose ahead of time the character of the work. It is a diary kept in wartime, yet it is by no means a war diary. It is a journal in the grand manner of Gide — full of observations of men, art, and society; yet it is not simply a stream of thought accompanying work in progress. No life goes on in it but that of rumor and reflection, linked with the hope of survival. The sequence of intermittent jottings does show a dramatic shape, but this comes from the time and the events. We meet the author in January 1941 and he drops us in November 1944, immediately after we have endured with him the suspense of liberation under bombs and gunfire and the marauding acts of a retreating army. We pass, in short, from peace to war and reach as a climax the chaos that precedes the return of peace.

Except toward the end of the book, it is not our feelings that are harrowed but our minds that are engaged, for Mr. Berenson is a reflector in the active and the passive senses of the word, and the interlude in his career which the present pages record finds him fully and uncommonly equipped to sort out impressions and attach meanings to the madness around him.