Nostalgia for the Absolute

by George Steiner

  But I have a more general, structural feature in mind. Here are three great mythologies devised to explain the history of man, the nature of man, and our future. That of Marx ends in a promise of redemption; that of Freud in a vision of homecoming to death; that of Lévi-Strauss in an apocalypse brought on by human evil and human waste. All three are rational mythologies claiming a normative, scientific status. All three stem from a shared metaphor of original sin. Can it be altogether accidental that these three visionary constructs—two of which, Marxism and Freud, have already done so much to change Western, and indeed, world history—should derive from a Jewish background? Is there not a real logic in the fact that these surrogates to a moribund Christian theology and account of history, that these attempts to replace a dying Christianity, should have come from those whose own legacy Christianity had done so much to supplant?

  THE LITTLE GREEN MEN IV

  The first three talks in this series have not been altogether on the light side. Nor will the last be. So it is time for a break. But although the material I want to touch on now is inherently ludicrous, the economic prodigality which it entails, the waste of human hopes and emotions which it generates, do make it difficult for me to “keep my cool”. The cults of unreason, the organized hysterias, the obscurantism which have become so important a feature of Western sensibility and behaviour during these past decades, are comical and often trivial to a degree; but they represent a failure of maturity, a self-demeaning, which are, in essence, tragic.

  The phenomena I have in mind are so widespread, diverse, and interleaved that it is almost impossible in the format available to us, to do more than give a few shorthand indications. But the general fact is plain: in terms of money and of time spent, of the number of men and women involved to a greater or lesser degree, in terms of the literature produced and of institutional ramifications, ours is the psychological and the social climate most infected by superstition, by irrationalism, of any since the decline of the Middle Ages and, perhaps, even since the time of the crisis in the Hellenistic world. A classification of the relevant frauds and aberrations would be useful, as were the medieval compendia of Satanism and maleficence. But it is entirely beyond my competence, or my stomach; so let me suggest some broad, imprecise rubrics.

  Statistics, admittedly provisional, tell us that astrology is now a business running into something of the order of twenty-five million dollars per annum in Western industrial societies. The investment represented by astrological pursuits in the third world and in the emergent, semitechnological communities of Asia is, most likely, past accurate computation. The literature of astrology floods the book stalls; only a very few quality newspapers now appear without a daily or weekly astrological column. Periodicals, ranging from trash to the most elegant, run weekly or monthly horoscopes. At a rough count, the number of practising astrologers in the United States exceeds by a factor of three the total number of men and women affiliated with professional bodies in physics and in chemistry. Intensities of individual credulity modulate all the way from the totally obedient—adult human beings who stay away from work, who clamber into bed when the stars are in a threatening configuration—to the mildly embarrassed, self-deprecating murmur of elegant souls who “don’t really believe it all” but feel there might be something in it. “After all, don’t sunspots affect the magnetic fields, my dear, and cosmic ray incidence surround the earth?” The inferred analogy happens to be absolute nonsense, but never mind that.

  Now go up the scale of inanity, and you come to the astral or galactic. Unidentified flying objects have been observed in lit clusters circling, hovering above the planet Earth. Sober pilots have recorded sightings in the blue deeps of the jet stream. Aerodynamic saucers have given amiable chase to automobiles hurrying home on highways in Arizona or New South Wales. But these are only trifles. UFOs have landed, leaving egg-shaped burn marks and flattened grass. In a number of cases, bizarre but benign beings have stepped out and taken Earthlings into brief custody. They have voiced consoling or monitory sentiments about man’s future, his political destiny, his ecological salvation. They have entered into collaborative concourse with certain gifted human individuals, bestowing on them powers of clairvoyance and psychokinetic action (or so Mr. Uri Geller’s biographer assures us).

  Do you doubt these current visitations? Surely you cannot question the “overwhelming evidence” of extra-terrestial callers in the past? Just look around you: at the rock drawings in the Sahara or the Kalahari with their seeming astronomical markings and mysterious silhouettes of figures with pointed heads; at the odd criss-cross patterns and hatchings apparently incised in high Andean valleys, lineaments only fully perceptible from the air; at the skull of a Neanderthal man pierced by an allegedly spherical, metallic missile; at enigmatically sited dolmens and menhirs in otherwise trackless landscapes; at bits of putatively undecipherable writing or pictograms older than the Easter Island script or the runes of Mohenjo-Daro. Look wherever you will in ancient mythologies or, for that matter, at the account of how the sons of God came to the daughters of men in Genesis VI. There is no religion, no ancient body of myth, no archaic legacy of belief or ritual, which does not exhibit some record, some allusion to the descent on earth of creatures more perfect than the human species.

  Once again, of course, a totally spurious parallelism is being invoked. That we are now in the process of revising our whole estimate of the observational skills of prehistoric communities; that it looks as if megalithic stone circles and alignments, from the Balearic islands to the Hebrides, may have been rather precise astronomical and seasonal pointers; that our notion of linear evolution is being challenged in some measure by a subtler, more cyclical model—these are genuine facts, susceptible of rational investigation, susceptible of criticism and of refutation. They have nothing to do with the portentous imbecilities of the UFO craze or with the fantasy of galactic embassies. Yet both these topics have spawned a publishing vogue, indeed a publishing industry, which runs into millions of copies of magazines, pamphlets, and books.

  The term astral relates to a second great class of mumbojumbo. The occult is now a vast industry with multifarious sub-divisions. Psychic, psychokinetic, telepathic phenomena are being studied with the utmost seriousness. Clairvoyants of every hue flourish, ranging from the lady of the tea leaves on the amusement pier, to practitioners of graphology, palmistry, geomancy, and the Tarot pack. If ectoplasm is just now a little out of favour, having led to the detection of primitive fraud in every case fairly examined, media are not. It is simply that the old table-rapping routine and the veiled lamp have yielded to more suave techniques of magnetic aura and hypnosis. Extra-sensory perception is formidably in vogue. Basing itself on such occurrences as déjà-vu; deriving crude analogies from the existence of electromagnetic fields around material objects and events; drawing, in a profoundly naive way, on hypotheses of indeterminacy and complementarity in particle physics, the ESP lobby prospers.

  An entire edifice of pseudo-science has been erected on the foundation of certain unquestionably interesting anomalies in human perception and in the laws of statistics, which are not, of course, laws in any irrevocable, transcendentally deterministic sense. Coincidences, many of them grossly unverifiable, are assigned uncanny weight. Kinks, or apparently anomalous clusters in what should be purely random series of happenings—the right card turning up, a better-than-average divination of concealed symbols—these are cited in evidence of an occult, animist view of the universe. Unbeknown to himself, but in ways wholly familiar to adepts of Rosicrucianism, of the Golden Lotus, of the Hidden Atlantis, modern man is enmeshed in a network of psychic forces. There are reversals or synchronisms of time in which past, present, and future overlap. The astral presences will be made manifest; the die will turn up all sixes; the number on your dog licence is the cube thrice halved of the telephone number of the beloved. The builders of the Pyramids knew, Nostradamus knew, Mme Blavatsky whispered the secret to Willie Yeats. Send for th
e free introductory booklet.

  Again, there is a contrasting, rational analogy. But the point has to be put with extreme care.

  Granted numerous sophistications, it is none the less true that our daily language and routine imaginings do still operate with a rough and ready mind-body dualism. In our unexamined recourse to such polarities as psychic and physical, mental and bodily, innate and environmental, we have scarcely improved very much on the dissociative schemes of Cartesian and idealist philosophy. There is, to borrow a famous idiom, a ghost in the machine and somehow the two synchronize. When we bother to reflect, to consider the evidence, we know, of course, that this crude dualism won’t do. The categories are hopelessly indiscriminate; the intermediate zones, the modes of interaction and reciprocal determination, are far too manifold. Powers of suggestion do act on pain; sympathetic and hypnotic practices are often followed by the disappearance of warts; acupuncture is not a confidence trick (unless we take confidence to signify the nervous system’s active acquiescence in an analgesic process). These are banal examples chosen from a wide compass of psychosomatic realities. Recent studies of the generation of human speech indicate that there is a crucial mediation between the neurophysiological or even the neurochemical matrix on the one hand, and factors which can only be termed psychic-cultural on the other. Wherever we turn—to theories of human perception, to the study of stress and psychopathology, to linguistics, to molecular biology—we do find correlative revaluations of the whole model of how the mind and body may fit together. It is by now, surely, an honest commonplace to say that consciousness acts on the environment, that consciousness is, in some sense, the environmental structure, and that the reciprocities between the immaterial and the material are ones of dynamic feedback. Everywhere, the old divorcement of spirit from flesh is yielding to a much more complex metaphor of continuum.

  Similarly, there is a fundamental review in progress of such basic notions as chance, probability, law. The development of quantum physics has brought with it a philosophic debate of great intensity and great implication about the very basis of what we call objectivity. What characterizes current hypotheses on energy, on space, on the directionality of time, is an unprecedented delicacy, provisionality; even, I would say, poetic licence. The attack of the occultists and vitalists on the mechanistic determinism of the natural sciences is an attack on a straw man. The mechanism of Laplace, or of the nineteenth-century thermo-dynamicists, if such it was, has been largely undermined, not by mystery-mongers, but by the exact and mathematical sciences themselves. Very recent conjectures in cosmology even allow the possibility that physical constants and the laws of mass-energy relation have altered in the history of the universe. The present state of the arts is one of unparalleled speculative largesse.

  Compared to such considerations, the claims of the new magi, of the clairvoyants, of the spoon benders, are utterly boring and mechanical. This is the crucial issue. The advances of mathematic thought, the advances of empirical science into the as yet unknown, provide theoretic answers each of which, in turn, poses questions at an even higher level of complexity, at an even higher level of conceptual wealth and wit. The images of the world, of the place of consciousness in reality, which emerge from science, beggar our expectations and means of expression. By contrast, the explanations put forward by believers in astral emanations, in cosmic collisions, in occult forces from the fifth dimension, are utterly predictable and reactionary. They juggle counters and fantasms as old as human fear itself. They would impose on the measureless complexity and wit of the facts, as we learn to decipher them, a crude regimentation. Anti-matter and neutron stars are working conjectures as deep, as elegant, as great music; little green men with pointed ears or the ventriloquist’s forgery of the voices of our dear departed are simply a bore. Or to put it another way, there is undoubtedly much more in heaven and earth than was dreamt of in Horatio’s philosophy. But who ever affirmed that Horatio was a great philosopher?

  There is, moreover, a nastier side to the ouija-board. The Exorcist is only the most calculated, nauseating, amongst innumerable exploitations of the vogue for the occult. Satanic trash is now pouring out of books, magazines, films, seances, or the homicidal pornography which follows on such events as the Manson murders. The assertion that malign agencies are abroad and must be assuaged, is a deliberate exploitation of human fears and miseries. Remember that in magic there is always blackmail.

  The third of the major spheres of unreason is that which could be entitled Orientalism. It is by no means new. The recourse to wisdom from the East is habitual to Western feeling from the time of the Greek mystery cults to Freemasonry and beyond. It registers a dramatic upswing during the 1890s. It inspires the work of Hermann Hesse, of C. G. Jung and, to some extent at least, of T. S. Eliot. Since the Second World War, it has turned to a veritable flood.

  The flower children wend their way to Katmandu. The scalped, saffron-robed votaries of Hare Krishna bounce down Broadway and Piccadilly jingling their tambourines. The matron and the entrepreneur contemplate their deliquescent physique in the mournful stretch of the Yoga class. The joss stick burns softly under the mandala poster, the Tibetan peace sign, the prayer rug in the bed-sitter in Santa Monica or Hammersmith. In the university of Bacon and Newton, of Darwin and of Bertrand Russell, a thousand students crowd to the Maharishi’s sandalled feet. We meditate; we meditate trancendentally; we seek Nirvana in suburban trances. Teenage butter balls descend upon us via Air India, proclaim themselves to be the Way and the Light, offer ineffable clichés on the healing powers of Love, and scatter petals from their pudgy fingers. We fill the stadium to hear their revelation. It turns out that they are cunning mountebanks, and currency speculators. The Light and the Tao shine undimmed. “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” asks the Master of Zen. “The star is the Lotus; ommani padme . . . ”, mumble the Cook’s Tour’s lamas. Tanka and guru, haiku and dharma; an irridescent flimflam has entered our speech.

  It is not so much these externals that count; they may pass as did the rage for Chinoiseries in eighteenth-century cabinet making. It is the implicit idealization of values eccentric or contrary to the Western tradition. Passivity against will; a theosophy of stasis or eternal return against a theodicy of historical progress; the focused monotony, even emptiness, of meditation and of meditative trance as opposed to logical, analytic reflection; asceticism against prodigality of person and expression; contemplation versus action; a polymorphic eroticism, at once sensual and self-denying, as against the acquisitive, yet also sacrificial, sexuality of the Judaeo-Hellenic inheritance: these are the terms of the dialectic. The undergraduate fingering his prayer beads or contemplating a Zen koan as he drifts into a melancholy haze, the worn executive hurrying to his meditation class or lecture on the karma, are seeking to ingest more or less modish, pre-packaged elements of cultures, rituals, philosophic disciplines which are, in actual fact, fiercely remote, various, and difficult of access. But he is also, and this is more important, articulating a conscious or instinctual critique of his own values, of his historical identity. The trek to Benares or Darjeeling is an attempt to break out of the shadow of our own condition.

  These tides of irrationalism—astrological, occult, Oriental—are obviously symptoms. What are the underlying causes? Where they engage phenomena so widespread and confused, generalizations are bound to be inadequate. But because we touch here and there on the very springs of our contemporary climate, and of our theme, in these lectures, certain guesses may be worth making.

  It is a truism to say that Western culture is undergoing a dramatic crisis of confidence. Two world wars, the return to political barbarism of which the holocaust was only the most bestial example, continual inflation—a factor which corrodes the structure of society and of personality in ways at once radical and not yet fully understood—these have provoked a widespread failure of nerve. Already sapped by rationalism and the scientific-technological point of view, organized religion, and Christianit
y in particular, proved helpless, and indeed corrupt, in the face of the massacre of World War One, and in the face of totalitarian and genocidal terrors thereafter. It is not often said plainly enough. Those who realize that the same church blessed the killer and the victim, that the churches refused to speak out and pursued, under the worst terror ever visited upon civilized man, a policy of unctuous silence, those who know these things are not surprised by the bankruptcy of any theological stands since.

  Yet the very recrudescence of these great homicidal political terrors, the reversion to techniques of falsehood, torture, and intimidation which the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries had confidently regarded as nightmares dissipated for good from civilized humanity, these demonstrated the inadequacy of the Enlightenment and of secular reason. Again, we should not forget that the rationalist prediction went terribly, tragically wrong also. It is not easy to think back on the conviction of Voltaire, a conviction voiced with complete confidence 300 years ago, that torture would never again become an instrument of politics among European and Western men. In other words, there has been no place to turn. At the very moment when, in the guise of concentration camps and police states, men were translating Hell from a mythical underground to a mundane reality, the promise of a compensatory Heaven—the church promise—was all but dissipated. At the same time, the liberal humanist contract had been broken. That contract underwrites Western thought from Jefferson and Voltaire to Matthew Arnold and perhaps to Woodrow Wilson. It has now been torn to bits. The impact of this dual failure on the Western psyche has obviously been destructive—I have tried to analyze this process in more detail in previous writings.