A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  Neiman follows these arguments (which I have described too tersely for their own good), as they weave like impatient drivers through her book, paying great attention to nuance and detail while employing a scholarship that’s wide-ranging as well as thorough; yet she represents them in a prose that is both clear and supple, turning intellectual corners without tire screech, and keeping even her careful pace vigorous and unimpeded by jargon or faddish ideological pretensions. Readers need only be willing to think while they read, and they will have a wonderful tussle, for hers is a subject of the greatest importance, open to opinions of every kind, and she approaches it in a manner that allows you to agree with pleasure, and disagree without animosity or any loss of esteem, experiencing that kind of happiness that comes when the mind is stretched to its own benefit; because when philosophy is done well (the doing is rare and difficult), then the trip is as breathtaking on account of the turns in the tracks as in the view from the windows, and the traveler is at last reluctant to complete a journey whose purpose seemed at first defined by its destination.

  God was cleared of evildoing by denying His existence. It was His only excuse, Stendhal remarked, though a good one. However, when Nature was discovered to be indifferent, not just to our fate or to the fate of salmon, buffalo, or redwood forests but to life of any kind, to Nature’s own reification even—indifferent to the indifference of its minerals, to the careless flow of its streams, to the fecundity of its own mothering nature—then man became the prime suspect. The old argument from design, whose candidates for the intelligent cause were God, Nature, and Man—the latter two plainly set up to be lopped off—was turned as topsy-turvy as a lotto basket; since it now had to be acknowledged that not only was Nature the origin of all those dismaying “acts of God” insurance companies don’t have to pony up for but it had allowed human societies of every stripe and character, of peculiar practices and dubious moral ideals (such as human sacrifice, public executions, racial cleansing, clitoridectomies, slavery, inquisitions, professional wrestling, scarification, and so on) to flourish the way the Aztecs and the Mayans or the Greeks and Romans did, as well as Islam managed at one time, or China during certain dynasties, the British Empire most recently, and even the American ego. Yet when these high societies stumble, fall, or fade away, it pays no never mind. Hills and valleys do not weep for Adonais or for anybody else. Nature’s built-in sanctions (men are mortal) inhibit no one, including the intellectuals, who invent new immortalities to combat the death rate, because there is always a brisk market for solace and the honey of future rewards. Maybe it is the manufacture of myth and the promotion of superstition that is evil. I rather like that idea.

  Neiman follows the argument like a sleuth, and indeed her book is a kind of thriller: What is it that menaces us? Will we find what evil is, and how may we escape it? She is a superb teacher, giving each side its due, accompanying the arguments with explanations that clarify, instruct, and surprise. The path leads from a God found absent past a Nature that’s indifferent till it fetches up at the house of man himself: a castle made of rock, on a rugged mountain’s top, its walls surrounded by a moat and defended by crenellated towers. For man to exist in harmony with nature had come to mean that he had to eat his meat raw, behave with indifference to everyone but his buddies, be wholesomely rude and free of customary social restraints. Spontaneous and instinctive were momentarily admirable words. A popular physical culture movement aped Greek and Roman statuary. The Reich liked hikers. Gauguin said he spat when he heard the word civilization (I bet he didn’t), and others said they drew their pistols (I bet they did).

  However, by this time, love of a “native” life was hopelessly reactionary. Perhaps, perversely, evil wrapped itself in glorious animality—D. H. Lawrence’s Nature Boy, Adolf Hitler’s blue-eyed blond ones—now that heaven was empty and the earth cruelly unconcerned. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “We’re not in tune. Not like migratory birds. Outmoded, late, in haste, we force ourselves on winds which let us down upon indifferent ponds.” (“Fourth Elegy,” Duino Elegies) Without other devices, man surrounded himself with man. But was that a help? What, after all, were the moat and walls and towers for, the readied molten oil, the axes and the arrows? Not the bumblebee. Safe inside, we died of damp, infected by our own wastes, impoverished by the expense and loneliness of self-defense. Safe inside, we dozed while Judas opened the gate. When we woke to realize we were no longer safe inside, we murdered one another with a zeal that could only be described as sacerdotal. Our own bodies flung our own bodies to the dogs. We had not been created in God’s image, but in that other guy’s.

  In the heyday of our reign, lies about man were as prevalent as those about God had been. We wore our hubris like a festival hat. The entire universe had been made for us. That’s why the earth was the center of the solar system. Among the creatures of that earth, we were its hilly aim, the fairest of them all. Man was the measure. Wasn’t that the ancient claim? So every human being was of intrinsic worth, equal with every other, and worthy of protection and praise; although we didn’t really believe a word of the “worth and equality” cliché, since we were so callous about the welfare of our own species as to shock every other creature into kindness. But not for long were we the glory and the center. As Freud pointed out, the earth has been demoted, our kind tossed among the others like a dirty rag. Perhaps we had a rank. Perhaps we were stationed ahead of the giant lizards that might return when we melted the polar ice, but we certainly were listed behind cockroaches, which had already lived longer than we and had better prospects; nor were we even masters of our fate, but prey to drives as remorseless—and desires as insatiable—as wharf rats.

  Human beings have rarely given their own lives good grades. Schopenhauer, for instance, was amply prefigured by the ancients. Only persistent thoughts of death, which most men have hated even more than life itself, made them hang around. Neiman quotes Goethe. “In all times and all countries things have been miserable. Men have always been in fear and trouble, they have pained and tortured each other; what little life they had, they made sour one to the other…. Thus life is; thus it always was; thus it will remain. That is the lot of man.” (Neiman.)

  What has emerged for me from this wrestle of the human mind with its own inhumanity, as Neiman opens her final chapter by returning to Lisbon’s quake and the fascinating doctrinal wars it stimulated, is that while the ground of evil is mere immorality, the cause of evil is evil itself. We know that white bigotry produces black bigotry, and black bigotry confirms white. I drive by to shoot your aunt; you drive by and shoot my uncle. I drive by to do in your papa; you drive by to do in my mama—merrily merrily, life becomes obscene. This tit-for-tat forms a circle rightly named “vicious.” But its beginnings lie in a muddle of ordinary misunderstanding and commonplace misfortune, in fatherly tyranny and motherly meanness. To steal Hannah Arendt’s adjective, beginnings are usually banal: job losses here, status losses there, humiliations here, foreclosures there, new people moving in, ethnic irritations, chagrin, lifetime disappointment. There is nothing anyone does wrong exactly, but living habits grate, values clash, competitions occur that do not make for harmony and happiness, but, rather, encourage slander and acrimony. Put-upon, people tend to club together, and club is the right word. Their enemies, the agents of their economic woes, and the authors of intolerable blows to their pride, belong to another club, driven together by present prejudice and past subjugations of their own. Clubs, gangs, tribes, sects, cults, parties, movements, blocs: collections of people who have given their loyalty (hearts and minds, as it’s often put) to a group whose reason for being is complaint and whose aim is redress and vengeance. Resentment is pursued like a hobby. The weak lie in wait for their opportunity to achieve justice through the infliction of reciprocal pain. They wait to be empowered.

  Injustices (and fancied ones are soon added to the real) are cataloged and kept fresh for future use by politicians who lie, bureaucrats who organize, preachers
who rant, historians who colorize, and schoolteachers who read and repeat every calumny they can collect, preparing their children to carry on crime. We are the pure, the chosen, the faithful, the saved, they brag—the state, the church, the schools, and finally the nation brays—while they are the beshat; they are the damned, the sinners, idolaters, and agents of evil. Soon every citizen has been trained in fear and blame and hatred like soldiers for battle. We call this being a good patriot.

  The sandhog wishes to hold his jackhammer, the computer geek his keyboard. Surely that is reasonable. Everyone takes their local miseries to the schools for instruction, to court for justice, church for benediction, history for justification of their historical blames and claims, to the military for reassurance and saber rattle, the state for presumption, pride, and swagger; and there they receive indoctrination, bias, mythmaking, fabrication, bluster, and braggadocio. Evil, it seems to me, is a mosaic made of petty little pieces placed in malignant positions mostly by circumstance in company with the mediocrity of the bureaucratic mind, and empowered, of course, by a gunslinger’s technology.

  Auschwitz, as Neiman suggests, was our Lisbon, although we have had a number of powerful before-and-after shocks: Passchendaele, the Soviet gulags, Hiroshima, Cambodia, Kosovo, Rwanda … a list too long for 9/11 to obscure, crimes greater than our monuments can justify. However, we are ingenious, and we try: (1) the Holocaust was a display of God’s wrath at Europe’s left-wing, atheist, assimilating Jews—an excuse as old as Eden. (2) The human race advances by means of suffering and catastrophe the way we learn to fix bridges that fall down or prevent spaceships from exploding—but historical progress, even painful, is now impossible to carry a torch for. (3) Oh dear, God does work in mysterious ways, but this “event” was unique in its mystery and horror, so much so it falls out of history altogether, and has no real forerunners, as it will have no progeny, hence only its survivors are competent to comment on it; otherwise, silence and awe is all that’s appropriate (Neiman slights this one, my favorite). (4) It was the largest and best organized pogrom in a long history of anti-Semitic persecutions, so, apart from size, there is no surprise; the Germans are demonically gifted, and this ritual of purification was German through and through; moreover, for most Germans, the killing was done at a distance and never became news; therefore, it was as easy to ignore as the mass murderer next door—a move that gets the human race off the hook at the expense of only one nation. (5) The evil that was Auschwitz is not like next year’s SUV, simply bigger and more dangerous, or even a vehicle that runs on brand-new fuel, but an evil as novel as a new species, unique as number 3 claims, and therefore naturally mind-boggling—here, the theory of emergent evolution is applied to dastardliness, keeping the Holocaust historical. (6) Since God is gone and nature excused, evil is simply a moral matter, and the question now is: Just how much human behavior is so “natural” that nothing can be done about it except, as against earthquakes, to build better? We are what we are and that’s all we are, said Popeye the Sailor. And Michel Foucault agrees with Popeye because he argues that the haves are permanently at war with the have-nots. Get used to it, he sternly tells us. It is no longer a matter of Manichean good versus evil, but a contest between those who have it and those who don’t, until those who don’t do, and those who do don’t, whereupon the combatants switch ends of the field and go at it again.

  Certainly, human horrors are old hat. It is history’s major burden, our principal trait. In these recent cases, the surprise is the size of the crimes, not just the sum of the victims but also the zeal and numbers of those committing them. Still, it is business as usual down at the old abattoir and carnage yard. It’s simply that business is now done at the global conglomerate level. In the near future, we shall drone our enemies to death between rounds of gamblers’ golf or cowboy cookouts by the corral.

  Neiman leads the reader through a careful analysis of the relation of intention, act, and consequence to kinds of useful knowledge and degrees of awareness. I give my son the keys to the car, knowing he has a tendency to drive too fast, but I don’t want him to drink, to speed, to hit another car, injure his girl, raise my insurance rates, bill me for repairs, contaminate the atmosphere, violate his curfew, or make his mother mad, though I know some of these things will happen and that others are likely. “Intention” as a concept is as slippery as an icy street. Moreover, degrees of awareness are mostly issued by poor schools: If I stick a finger in hot grease, I know I will be burned immediately; if I fail to visit the dentist in six months, maybe I shall pay for it, but later (on a payment plan the British call “the never-never”). How many consequences am I responsible for when I loan the car or when, obedient to orders given me, I sign a writ of execution? How far should I see through eyes my superiors will shade and vector for me?

  If Nature is morally indifferent (though not neutral exactly), and mankind is a species contained within Nature, then men can be indifferent, too. Or favor their own species, their own language, their own tribe, as Nature allows peonies their love of ants, or crows the flocks they fly in or the roadkill they flock to pick over, or we, for that matter, the meat we eat, leaves we chew, or friends we make. We can call good what our pecking orders suggest, and each of us support what supports our survival. Or not: Everything that happens, including the “unnatural,” is natural. Tautology tells us so.

  But Nature, even from the moral point of view, is not a homogeneous entity. Actually, the word is a wastebasket and probably should never be used for anything other than collecting its ambiguities. There are profound differences between rocks and trees (as the Greeks already knew), between trees and birds, and birds and men, who are ultimately conscious creatures. As conscious creatures, we are aware of what it means to be neutral or indifferent or callous or uncaring or cruel and malevolent. Consciousness may seem transcendent to some, an impotent epiphenomenon to others, and a mistake to a few; but it is with that consciousness that we give meaning to a world that we should be grateful is as meaningless as an earth’s shake, because otherwise its purposes would have to be deemed whimsical and malicious. It is consciousness that allows us to devise our works of art and discover Nature’s laws, but it is also consciousness where we harbor hate, and allow our reason to be crowded into a servant’s corner, our perceptions to be few and skewed, our sympathies buckled about us like a belt, our beliefs burdened to breaking by superstition.

  A great portion of the human race is literally homeless; mass migration is one of the darkest marks of our age, with the hunger, disease, and suffering that attend such displacements. But all of us—even in the comforts of Palm Springs or Beacon Hill—are metaphysically homeless anyway. Consciousness, as Nietzsche observed, although our fundamental means of connection with the world, has cut us off from it because we cannot live in the moment like an animal, but rather dwell in anger at the past and anguish over our future. Home is supposed to spell ease, identity, love, and that wonderful Victorian invention, comfort. Which it can do and sometimes actually does—if one can afford it. Above all, it is our refuge from the world, where we seek protection from its heartless pains. But what a dreary illusion that is. Home is also where we commit murder, mayhem, and suicide, where we shake a crying child loose from its life, where we quarrel like squirrels toward eventual divorce, where we grow accustomed to tyranny and the utility of lies, where we cultivate ignorance and pass on bigotry like a chronic cough, where children get to disobey and disappoint their parents and parents to abandon them, where we find to what lengths “ought” has gone to escape “is,” and where the tribe that we have allowed to define us claims its prize.

  Evil is as man-made as the motorcar. I suspect that, like the motorcar, evil as a prevalent state of things suits a lot of people. If nature is uneven, we can try to even it, but it is we who have made a habit of injustice, and we who must design the institutions that will discourage resentment, malice, ill will, and ignorance while fostering justice, intelligence, learning, and respect. The
question is whether it is better to die of a good life or from a bad one. If we fail (and I wouldn’t bet on our success), there will be one satisfaction: We shall probably be eaten by our own greed, and live on only in our ruins, middens, and the fossil record.

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2006 by William H. Gass

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Ltd., Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material.

  Alfred A. Knopf: Excerpt from “The Snow Man” from Harmonium by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted by courtesy of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Pollinger Limited: Excerpt from “Stand Up” from Pansies by D. H. Lawrence. Reprinted by permission of Pollinger Limited and the proprietor.

  Scribner and AP Watt Ltd: Excerpt from “Under Ben Bulben” from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume 1: The Poems, Revised edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1940 by Georgie Yeats. Copyright renewed © 1968 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, Michael Butler Yeats, and Anne Yeats. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group and AP Watt Ltd on behalf of Michael B. Yeats.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gass, William H., [date]

  A temple of texts : essays / William H. Gass.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-49824-3

  1. Gass, William H., [date]—Authorship. 2. Gass, William H., [date]—Books and reading. 3. Literature—History and criticism. 4. Books and reading—United States. 5. Authorship. I. Title.