Western culture, wrecked this fall

Prof. John Carroll e-mails tonight from Australia with the happy news that ISI is going to publish a U.S. edition of his "The Wreck of Western Culture" this October. Hoorah! (And really, how many other blogs will cheer a publishing event documenting the downward slope of civilization? I ask you.) I've been interested in Prof. Carroll's work since reading about the sensation his book made when it was published in his home country. Carroll is a sociology prof, and a secular humanist. But he does believe the jig is pretty much up, because a culture cannot survive without a transcendental framework, a metaphysical dream undergirding it all.

Here's the transcript of a lengthy interview with Carroll from an Australian radio program. The whole thing is well worth your time. Excerpt:

Stephen Crittenden: The opening sentences of your book are ‘We live amidst the ruins of the great 500-year epoch of Humanism, around us is that colossal wreck. Isn’t that way too dark? I mean we know what the excesses of Humanism have been, particularly in the 20th century, with Stalin and Hitler. On the other hand hasn’t Humanism brought about wonderful achievements, that none of us would give up in order to go back to I guess, the Dark Ages?

John Carroll: There has to be the counter-balance of the enormous achievement of industrial, scientific, technological Western civilisation, which has produced the modern city, the great comfortable cosmopolitan city that we all enjoy today. And none of us in our right minds would want to go back to the squalor of the Middle Ages, that goes without saying. My argument is wholly at the level of metaphysics, or culture, or meaning, and it’s at that level that the humanist experiment has been a comprehensive disaster.

Stephen Crittenden: Isn’t it true though, that you walk down to the beach on a lovely summer day in Sydney or Melbourne and you see people sitting at cafes, and small children wandering around and kids with skateboards, and so forth and so on, and you look around and you think, ‘Well, Australia at this point in time is a wonderful society for ordinary people.’ And sure, we’ve got problems with suicide and depression, and there’s no such thing as a perfect society. And a bit of depression is a pretty small price to pay for having hot and cold running water.

John Carroll: I think at the moral level, we’re still enjoying some of the achievements and triumphs of Humanism, and particularly the rise of the view of Universal Human Rights, which comes out of the Enlightenment, and is one of the triumphs of liberal Humanism, and our society benefits prodigiously for the fact in the last 50 years this sort of ethical or moral order has spread in its cultural influence. On the other hand, the feeling that is this all there is, the feeling that comes in the crisis moments of life, the big moments of life, the moments in life when we’re not just going through the motions, as pleasant as it may be, walking along that beach in Australia, that those times in life which make you think Yes, this is not just passing the time, those times, which are really metaphysical timers, require a framing story, a higher story, an engagement of the human individual with a sense of being part of a grander scheme of things.

Now the humanist culture has left us to go back to Holbein and the painting of ‘The Ambassadors’ which is on the cover of the book, with two men, two men of knowledge, two men of power, the Ambassadors from the Court of France to Henry VIII of England, two men with enormous prestige, power, rank, good-looking young men, also with the power of knowledge. But these men, roughly the age of 30, like Hamlet, suddenly have this image of the skull rising in front of them, and because they have no higher belief of any sort whatsoever, they’ve just got humanist knowledge, they’ve just got the walking along the beach in Sydney, Melbourne or wherever in Australia, the moment the whiff of a corpse enters the nostrils, they’re paralysed. And I think this is why the best of art and literature for the last 150 years has ended up in an extremely bleak, nihilistic view of the human condition.

Stephen Crittenden: In other words, what you’re saying is that Humanism hasn’t been able to overcome death; that’s one of your big themes. But isn’t it an impossible task to conquer death? Because death is a biological given. Why not speak about death as a limit on humanist ambition and achievement, rather than as the negation of humanist ambition and achievement?

John Carroll: Because it is the case, and I think this is just simply constitutive of what it is to be human, that we humans, probably unlike animals, need death to be more than just dying in a Darwinian sense, and like a dead fish, rotting and stinking on the beach. If that’s all death is, biological death in that sense, then life loses its meaning. If death doesn’t have meaning, one doesn’t need to argue this, one just needs to look at the great stories and the great paintings, the great wrestlings with precisely this question, from Tolstoy right back to Shakespeare and then back to the Greeks. It just is the case with us humans. If death has no meaning more than the biological sense, then life loses its meaning, and life becomes absurd, or horrible, to quote Nietzsche. So yes, looking back over 500 years of Humanism, Humanism was doomed from the start, and I think this is precisely Shakespeare and Holbein’s point in the Renaissance.

Stephen Crittenden: John, do you think this is a moment when, given what’s happening in the world, the fights with extremist Islam, the fights with fundamentalism, the decadence and collapse in our own society, when what we really need to be doing is shoring up the Enlightenment?

John Carroll: I don’t think that’s going to work, for the reasons that go through the humanist story, that an ethical order on its own will not stand up. The great film director, John Ford, I spend quite a bit of time on him, he spends a lot of time in a number of films trying to think through what makes good human community work, what binds it together and produces a decent life with people acting reasonably well. And at the end of the day in his greatest film, ‘The Searchers’, he comes to the conclusion if you put an ethical order or human communities or families under too much pressure, they won’t stand up unless there’s some sort of higher vision.

A newspaper review of the Australian edition said:

"Overblown, utterly misguided, and sometimes downright dangerous (not to mention half crazed), but important, and, at times, brilliant. What if he’s right?"

My kind of book!