MODERN AGE

A QUARTERLY REVIEW

Life in Babeldom

PERHAPS MOST depressing sign of the THE decline of American civilization is the growingabsence of standardsof discrimination, especially in the Republic o Letf f ters. From the literary supplements o our great national newspapers to the academic quarterlies to intellectual jourf nals o opinion that allocate space to the discussion of new books, the critical level of reviewing seems especially diminished and centerless. One finds that books selected for notice are often of an ephemeral and even tawdry nature, chosen for subject matter that is attuned to current fads and trends, or to some doctrinaire ideology, or to pluralistic concerns and programs, or to mainstream cultural requirements and preconceptions. Increasingly books chosen for attention are those written by famous personalities and celebrities who command instant namerecognition and appeal. And the reviewers of these books are often those who favor the conditions that characterize the state of culture, precisely because they are an intrinsic part of it. Even pubf lications that boast o their commitment to a consideration of serious problems and issues reflect the general confusion of values. Inevitably both literature and thought
Modern Age

f will mirror the temper o the time, which means the mirroring of the intellectual and spiritual poverty of the past twentyfive years or more. During these years there has been a steady retreat from excellence and from tradition. We have moved beyond the confines of mediocrity into the prison-house of decadence as we continue to discard, with astonishing abandon, basic moral and ethical values in favor of the freedom that is synonymous with t h e license of f deconstruction, of dislodgement, o debasement. Clearly we have chosen to travel on a kind of national freeway that stretches the long miles from nihilism to anarchy, and that on all sides adjoins the earthly creations of socio-political superstructures that reveal neither a sense o order nor a sense of ending. The eduf cational process is from top to bottom an inherent support of the new superstructures now being built across the land. Within each new superstructure one finds a new gospel being written, and furiously changing in accordance with the particuf lar demands o the dominant Zeitgeist. What we are witnessing in such a devolving situation is the rejection of the f civilizing disciplines o tradition, of faith, o history, and ultimately of language. f
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Indeed, we are finding fewer and fewer temples dedicated to the discipline of good order. The spirit of romanticism and of revolution seems to rule to such a f degree that any expression o opposition or dissent must be silenced, as in the f days of the Jacobins or o the Bolsheviki. Surely the terrors of this twin spirit aptly f dramatize the destruction o order both as a standard and as a need. But we are not an especially patient people who can f learn from the lessons o history, as we f chase after the banners o experimentation and change, in the name of which we cast aside the restraints of measure and limit. In the process, we make a shibboleth of an open society in which any creative urge is exalted. Such a process inevitably breeds the f worm o disorder in the human heart and f soul and in turn unleashes the attrition o society and culture in which standards of order are extinguished, and in which obligations are treated as the mortal enemy of rights. Yet we keep on building New Babels, new lofty superstructures and new visionary schemes, in the chambers of which the language of confusion becomes the common language of the huckster. Today, thoughout the chambers of Babeldom we hear the noisy language of confusion, now the adopted language of sectaries in academia, in literature, in the arts, in politics, in the media. But each New Babel we build, quicklyreplacing as it does another fallen one, becomes still another Babel of broken walls. Our Babel-builders honor neif ther the;rule of law nor the spirit o moderation rooted in our sacred patrimony; slaves of monomania and hubris, they indiscriminately sow the seeds of confusion in the mind and in the psyche. f They have no loyalty to the order o things, no reverence for what is o timef less and permanent value in the making of civilization. Their ideas become prof ductive o confusion that with the passage of time becomes worse confounded,
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as whole cities are filled with confusion and disorder. No aspect ofAmerican culture escapes the consequences of the Babel-builders dreams of avarice. Wherever one looks, one encounters a magnified state of confusion. As the language of confusion escalates in the unceasing drift o Amerif can civilization, we find that nothing ref tains any sanctity o meaning. Everything is questioned and everything is subject to alteration. Indeed, for our Babel-builders only the certainty of new and uglier constructions, new ideas, new doctrines has real credence. Religious orthodoxies no less than political sovereignties are subject t o sudden and total transformations; literarycanons no less than proven educational concepts are dismantled without thought or notice. We tear down ancient edifices unceremoniously to make way for the new pantheons of strange gods. We glorify music that confounds, art that blasphemes, clothing styles that scandalize, films that reduce life t o nudity and perversion. The antinomian and the aberrational thus become the norms of character and conduct, even in the highest political offices of the land. There is no surcease t o what contemporary Babel-builders propose t o d o in achieving their vision of a technologicobenthamite world order. For them there is no divine ladder of ascent in the spectacle of self-abandon. Their aim is to reconstruct the human personality into .the anarchic personality as the measure of all things. In a deep sense, the presentday Babel-builders are the most advanced collective version of the Grand Inquisitor, radically tailored t o the grotesqueries of an age in which rebellion, not f redemption, is the substance o life and belief. What these Babel-builders are acclaiming is that there are no limits to nature and to mans actions. Which also means that no moral limits can be permitted to
Fall 2001

restrict human possibility; that, in especial, no moral precepts can be allowed to impede the human capacity for good or for evil; that there is no frontier to mans aspirations; and that, therefore, there is no possible standard that can be imposed on the human potential without limitingits end-results in whatever shape or form, or in whatever quality or ethos. Limit is still another word that is now scorned insofar as it establishes boundaries to go beyond which involves incalculable risks and traps for both the individual and the community. To erase boundaries that in any way inhibit social action and moral freedom is now viewed as an imperial need. To go outward and upward, ad infinitum, regardless of costs, and without any fear of headlong extremities, is the persistent cry of the false priests and prophf ets o a new heaven and a new earth. Nothing, we are repeatedly told, should weaken our quest for self-fulfillment, no prescriptive counsel o r inner check should curtail our grand ambitions, no power on earth can dilute our illusion o f the man-god @ater omnipotens) in his dominion over all things and triumph over human tragedy. We choose, then, to worship the gods of secularism, and of a f relativism that takes us to the brink o chaos. Our Babel-builders will never admit that we are now deep into the night of chaos, of which disorder and confusion are the most evident symptoms. Any such admission must ultimately acknowledge some existing standard, or axion, or referent that helps to test and to correct, and in effect to give order to the conditions of existence in general and of society and culture in particular. We live in an age that venerates no f canon that is centered in a line o continuity of the history of mankind. Veneration is still another word deemed meaningless since it signifies a transcendental f act o humility, which constitutes sedition that cannot be tolerated. The lures
Modem Age

o seduction and indulgence now reign f with an unparalleled might that overwhelms humanity. The canons of critif cism, o judgment and analysis, are pushed aside in order to legitimate and to acclaim a diabolic imagination that is consonant with the needs o enlightenf ment in the guise of a participatory democracy. The preservation of a humane literature, and particularly the nurturing o the moral imagination, in these cirf cumstances, is menaced as language devolves and as the power of the word is cheapened. When language is emptied of moral meaning, o value, of history, of f spiritual truth, it is reduced to language o impiety stamped in violence, in disf jointedness, in depravity, in idolatry. What the contemporary lords of culture refuse to accept is that the flight from the logos is tied to the flight from God. Language is demeaned once the soul of man is demeaned, and in turn we become a f people o the lie who lie to ourselves and t o others. There are many among us who will f insist that the towers o opportunity are indestructible and no goal is unrealizable. And there are among us those who will ridicule even the slightest hint that our Babel-builders are arrogant and defiant in their schemes to scale new heights and to go beyond the furthest limits. In our furious pursuit of opportunity (as of rights) we ignore or denigrate all reality; nothing must get in the way of our utopian longings. What is to be most regretted today is the severe disproportion between opportunity and reality, to the degree that opportunity cancels both f the reality o things and the limitations imposed by reality on itself and within f which it resides. This process o cancellation leads to the blanket rejection of any moral code or religious creed that specifies standards and limits, and that stresses prudence and circumspectness. But neither moral code nor religious creed is esteemed in the present-day
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setting in which unlimited rights and opportunity are in themselves offshoots of the illusion of progress. Alas, what we fail to observe or to consider is that illusion is a tendency that turns into an overmastering and imperi!ing ha-bit

(praxis). At all levels o our national and f cultural life,as it becomes more dramatif cally evident, it is the pattern o disorder
and confusion that prevails and that defines life in Babeldom.
--Geoqe A. Pnnichns 7 August 2001

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