skip to Main Content

“Schooling for ‘the Democracy of the Dead”: How the Liberal Arts Connect Us with the Legacy of the Past

In seeking to explain the evolution of the American democracy, historians typically give great emphasis to the step-by-step enlargement of the franchise to vote. Thus, the expansion of the franchise figures prominently in the account historian Hugh P. Williamson gives of the slow political transformation of Britain’s 17th-century North American colonies into the mass democracy of the 20th-century United States. Restricted to adult white males who satisfied various state property and tax requirements, the franchise came to ever-more white males during the first half of the 19th century, as state legislators weakened or struck down these financial requirements. The number of Americans entitled to exercise the franchise grew much more dramatically in the aftermath of the Civil War, as the 15th Amendment to the Constitution opened the polling booth to male African Americans. And the electorate doubled in 1920 when women gained suffrage through the 19th Amendment.[i]  The franchise grew further as Americans gave real substance to earlier theoretical enlargements of the franchise when they outlawed poll taxes through the 24th Amendment and struck down discriminatory literacy tests through the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1964, and the Voting Rights of 1965.[ii]

But before Americans congratulate themselves too much on having safeguarded their democracy by enlarging the franchise, they should perhaps ponder the problematic cultural and political trends that have systematically dis-enfranchised an important constituency in any healthy country: namely, the dead. It might strike some 21st-century Americans as absurd that the dead should count as a constituency entitled to influence a living democracy. But the British journalist, novelist, and poet G. K. Chesterton counts them as a very important constituency, their influence manifest in the stabilizing power of inherited tradition. “I have never been able to understand,” Chesterton writes, “where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition.”  Chesterton then explains at some length why traditions inherited from the dead actually sustain rather than weakens democracy:

“It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. . . . . If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable. Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father. I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition; it seems evident to me that they are the same idea. The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones. It is all very regular and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked with a cross.”[iii]

As even a casual investigation will establish, Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead” is imperiled in 21st-century America, imperiled in political and legal proceedings, and imperiled even more gravely in mass culture. As a remarkably future-oriented people, Americans typically give scant regard to the past. Neither tradition nor history count for much with typical Americans. To some degree, American indifference to the past is not new. This is, after all, a country committed to the motto “Novus Ordo Seculorum”: “A new order of the ages.”[iv]  The dynamic novelty governing American political and cultural certainly caught the attention of Alexis de Tocqueville when he commented on the fate of literature within the American democracy in the mid-19th century, for he stressed that Americans were people who “do not resemble their own fathers; and they themselves are changing every moment with changing place of residence, feelings, and fortune. So there are no traditions . . . to forge links between their minds . . . . [E]ach generation is a new people.”[v]

However, Americans have grown decidedly more indifferent—even hostile—to cultural traditions and the constraints of the past since Tocqueville. Expressing an attitude all too typical among modern Americans, industrialist and cultural leader Henry Ford dismissed the cultural relevance of the past with his scornful maxim, “History is bunk.”[vi]  Not many years after Ford so contemptuously dismissed history, the novelist Aldous Huxley marveled in the Foreword to the 1947 edition to his novel Brave New World (1932) at how much mid-20th-century America had come to resemble the dystopian society he had depicted in his book a society in which government leaders have taken Ford’s animus towards history as their guide in waging a “campaign against the Past . . . closing . . . museums, . . . blowing up . . . historical monuments,” banning classic works of literature, and psychologically conditioning people so that they “haven’t any use for old things” but only like “the new ones.”[vii]

Writing at approximately the same time that Huxley was penning his 1947 Foreword, the distinguished rhetorician Richard Weaver expressed grave misgivings about how Americans were becoming “provincial in time” in a culture characterized by “hidden but persistent attacks upon memory,” attacks that engendered “rebellion against memory” and “hatred of the past.”[viii]  British novelist Evelyn Waugh indeed had good reasons for viewing mid-20th-century “Americans [as] the embodiment of modernity.”[ix] Animosity toward tradition and the past intensified even further during the 1960’s, a decade historian David Courtwright has aptly termed “the hinge decade of modern American history.”[x]  Writing as the cultural firestorm that was the Sixties was just beginning, poet Randall Jarrell lamented that American culture had become “essentially periodical: we believe that all that is deserves to perish and to have something else put in its place. . . . The present is better and more interesting than the past; the future will be better and more interesting, more real, than the present.”[xi]

Writing in the same vein, UCLA historian Joyce Appleby remarked in the late 20th century that because of the way Americans typically “projected [an] optimistic vision of the possible onto the future,” American “society . . . [was] always poised at the threshold of accomplishments, turning collective life into a kind of perpetual adolescence.”  The cultural hegemony of this thus adolescent optimism fostered an “expectation of positive improvement in the future [which] denigrated both past and present,” as “the past lost its attraction and the present became a mere springboard for the future.”[xii]

Dependent upon respect for tradition and reverence for the past, Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead” has almost disappeared from the cultural and political life of the 21st century. Cultural commentator Stephen Bertman indeed fears that Americans are now so “oblivious to the realities of historic time” that we are suffering from a “cultural amnesia” that amounts to “a type of national dementia.”[xiii]  As he contemplates how such “cultural amnesia,” ethical philosopher Zygmunt Bauman perceives real human loss in the “hurried life” that has emerged in our “nowist culture.”  Bauman argues while that the “uncanny feat of disabling the past” may seem emancipatory, it ultimately delivers us to the “tyranny of the moment,” a temporal tyranny that first reduces time to “a multitude of separate morsels” and then typically strands us amid “the debris of premature endings and stillborn beginnings” as these morsels fall apart into incoherence.[xiv]

The cultural consequences of “disabling the past” likewise trouble Jean Bethke Elshtain, who deplores the prevalence in contemporary America of “a certain post-modern attitude that sees in the past only ruin, ignorance and error.”[xv] Literary critic George A. Panichas has the same cultural problem in view when he decries the loss of “continuity, as a virtue of memory,” in a society pervaded by “a monomania for change” and deformed by “the tyranny of fragmentation, with each fragment comprising an entropic equality.”  Panichas indeed marvels at how completely 21st-century America has been willing:

“to surrender our traditions and standards to a postmodern time”: “Whether it is change in literary values, in educational systems, in educational policies, in cultural affairs, in religious doctrines, in moral standards—in anything and everything that relates to the virtues of character and conduct, and to the dictates of conscience—the demand for change is powerful and pervasive.” Such all-pervading change, Panichas warns, leaves us with nothing but “a vacuum of disinheritance, for increasingly we are cut off from roots, uncentered, unconnected.”[xvi]

Some progressive thinkers might assert that for 21st-century Americans, political and cultural advancement requires decisive, even iconoclastic breaks with the past.[xvii] These are people who share with anthropologist Jennifer James the belief that we solve social and political problems by “thinking in the future tense.”[xviii]  In other words, we not only can but even should dispense with the democracy of the dead.

Other commentators will acknowledge the possible value of tradition but will assert the impossibility of conferring normative or veridical value to tradition because traditions vary so much from group to group, region to region, and because even a single tradition changes over time. Reflecting defenders of tradition will acknowledge that traditions vary and change. And although thoughtful defenders of tradition will insist on the value of particular moral and social patterns they have inherited, they will acknowledge that sometimes an individual or an entire group must break with their patrimony. As a convert to a Catholic faith that his parents never professed, Chesterton himself would acknowledge that the person who assesses his life carefully must on occasion break with tradition.[xix]

Perceptive defenders of tradition will insist that tradition serves us not simply by perpetuating this or that practice, this or that value, but by inculcating an attitude of humility. Tradition teaches its adherents to begin with the assumption that their ancestors were wise and good, not knavish and foolish, and that therefore the practices and beliefs handed down by those ancestors deserve respect, even reverence. This respect does not preclude change: all healthy traditions must evolve and change. But a humble deference to tradition should make us very slow to accept cultural changes not recognizable as a fulfillment—not a repudiation—of our ancestors’ own expressed hopes. Thus, the proper attitude to change has been suggested by the historian of science Harold Fritzsche when he depicts an imaginary but entirely plausible conversation in which Albert Einstein helps his predecessor Isaac Newton to recognize in the bold conceptual innovations of Relativity a fulfillment of his own hopes for scientific progress.[xx]  In the same vein, we can imagine ancestors initially bewildered by some aspects of modern communication technology—including cell phones and e-mail—finally embracing the possibilities such technology holds for keeping family members in touch with one another. It is, however, quite impossible to imagine many of our ancestors ever regarding the radical cultural changes championed by sexual revolutionaries such as Alfred Kinsey and Hugh Hefner as anything but a betrayal of their deepest convictions.[xxi]

Deference to the democracy of the dead embodied in tradition thus allows for change yet safeguards its adherents against the excesses of arrogance. As historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto has noted, when one submits to “tradition [as] the consensus of the dead,” one is at least submitting to “claims [that] are prior to one’s own.”  Because this submission to tradition allows one to escape the egotism of the “entirely subjective,” Fernández-Armesto views it as something that “does one some sort of good.”[xxii] The genuine value of submitting to tradition is clarified by novelist Joseph Conrad when he declares: “[F]or life to be large and full, it must contain the care of the past.”[xxiii]  The past, of course, is densely populated by the dead. And Elshtain discerns dire political consequences in “regimes . . .[that have] defiled the dead and broke[n] the links between generations. It is often said that that we can judge societies by how they treat their most vulnerable—none is more vulnerable than the dead.”  “Respecting the dead [thus] enlarges life,” she writes, and she warns that when “we jettison the past entirely” by repudiating the dead, we perilously sever an essential link to a chain of “human meanings and imperatives that go back as far as recognizably human creatures go.”[xxiv]  The need for a chain of human meanings linking us to our ancestors was famously evident to the Edmund Burke, who warned that if men grew “unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors,” then “the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of summer.”[xxv]

The cultural vacuum that yawns wide when we repudiate the past and the dead who once inhabited that past looms greatly worried the 20th-century Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. He regarded the loss of the past as a cause of “the radical demoralisation of humanity” in a modern world mesmerized by the illusory “possibility of limitless progress”:

“This grave dissociation of past and present is the generic fact of our time and the cause of the suspicion, more or less vague, which gives rise to the confusion characteristic of our present-day existence. We feel that we [present-day] men have suddenly been left alone on the earth; that the dead did not die in appearance only but effectively; that they can no longer help us. Any remains of the traditional spirit have evaporated. Models, norms, standards are of no use to us. We have to solve our problems without any active collaboration of the past, in full actuality, be they problems of art, science, or politics. The [modern] European [or American] stands alone, without any living ghosts by his side.”[xxvi]

The absence of “living ghosts” likewise disturbs critic Anthony Daniels, who deplores the way the Sixties helped create a culture in which “every intelligent person was expected . . . to forge his own soul unguided by the wisdom of his ancestors.[xxvii]

But if the loss of the past entails so many cultural and political evils, why has it happened?  If we lose much of great moral and social substance by abolishing the democracy of the dead as we disenfranchise the dead, why have we done so?  And why have we done so in a particularly radical way in recent decades?

The democracy of the dead has largely disappeared from 21st-century life for a variety of reasons, some of them complex and interrelated. But one of the deepest and most potent cultural forces working against the democracy of the dead first emerged in the revolutionary economics of early-modern Europe in what historian Karl Polanyi has aptly labeled “the Great Transformation.”  The traditional agrarian patterns of life—patterns that governed the daily rhythms of most of our ancestors—were swept aside when subsistence agriculture of villagers gave way to a revolutionary new “Market Society” in which everything—crops, land, human labor, and even money itself—became a commodity for sale in a radically new way.[xxviii]  The triumph of this new market economy typically opened to those it affected an unprecedented range of choices in what they could purchase—food, clothes, modes of transportation—and in where and how they would earn the money they would use to make their purchases. However, it loosed a relentless economic process in which, as one of Polanyi’s students has remarked, “cultures are destroyed, [and] life becomes insecure and threatening.”[xxix]

Detailing some of the costs of the Great Transformation, author Richard Critchfield counted it as a great loss that capitalist dynamism disrupted the “cultural transmission” that had long integrated agrarian villages in which “fathers and mothers [were] physically with their sons and daughters . . . much of the time in the home or in the fields.”  The close proximity of parents to offspring meant that “[C]hildren learn[ed] useful chores from toddlerhood—how to collect eggs, how to milk a cow.… Handed down at the same time [were] religious beliefs, the agricultural moral code, respect for family ties and property, and subordination of self-interest to family and community solidarity.”  The economic patterns created by the Great Transformation produced modern cities that were “more secular, diverse, and incoherent” than the traditional agrarian villages, cities that won “their power and wealth at a heavy price in alienation, anomie, and personal isolation.”  And with that personal isolation came “a radical disjunction between generations” that typically entailed “the failure of cultural reproduction.”[xxx]

As early as the late 18th century, poet Oliver Goldsmith could discern the “failure of cultural reproduction” that the Great Transformation was effecting by drawing every more people away from the subsistence agriculture of tradition village life and into the factory production of the city. In his elegiac poem The Deserted Village (1770), Goldsmith decried “the depopulation of the country” in these lines: “[T]imes are altered; trade’s unfeeling train / Usurp the land, and dispossess the swain. . . . [R]ural mirth and manners are no more.”[xxxi]  Much nearer our own time, Harvard sociologist likewise perceived a failure of cultural reproduction in the economic dynamics that about 1900 reduced America’s farm population to a minority for the first time in the nation’s history. Though lacking Goldsmith’s poetic gifts, he shared the British writer’s grief at the cultural consequences of trends that depopulated the agrarian countryside and swelled the population of the burgeoning cities. When he contemplated what the displaced famer became when he became “the urban man,” Zimmerman discerned great cultural loss:

“He [the urban man] is in a very unsafe position and the ground under his feet is less stable. He is crushed as soon as some slight wind blows. To whom or what may he go for consolation in such a misfortune? He does not believe in God, or when he believes it is less dogmatically and in a less[er] proportion. He has lost his traditions.”[xxxii]

Among the tradition-subverting activities incubated by modern capitalism, perhaps none have been more subversive of the democracy of the dead than those that have opened the new mental vistas of modern science and have consequently forged the new devices of modern technology. Physicist and commentator C.P. Snow believed that the pursuit of theoretical or applied science engendered people who:

“have the future in their bones,” quite unlike the “natural Luddites” whose attachment to “traditional culture . . . [left them] wishing the future did not exist.” It was future-oriented scientists and technicians who had created “the industrial society of electronics, atomic energy, automation, [that] is in cardinal respects different in kind from any that has gone before.”[xxxiii]

The unprecedented scientific and technological feats that Snow contemplated in the 20th century, however, were but the fulfillment of the vision of the 17th-century evangelist for science, Francis Bacon, who declared that “the true and lawful goal of the sciences I none other than this: that human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers.”[xxxiv]

The scope of the new discoveries and powers human life has acquired through science has been indicated by immunologist and Nobel laureate Peter Medar, who lauds science as “incomparably the most successful enterprise human beings have ever engaged upon” before proceeding to catalogue some of its epoch-making accomplishments: “Visit and land upon the moon?  A fait accompli. Abolish smallpox?  A pleasure. Extend our human life by at least a quarter?  Yes, assuredly, but that will take a little bit longer.”[xxxv]

The effects of this technoscientific transformation of society come into focus in an acute observation by Weaver: “Progress makes father and child live in different worlds.”[xxxvi] But, when the rising generation inhabits a world decidedly different from the world of the parent generation, faith in tradition as the democracy of the dead will naturally fade. Faith in that tradition-mediated democracy disappears even more abruptly when scientific technology amplifies the malign effects of an inherently disruptive human enterprise: namely, war.

For all of his enthusiasm for future-oriented science, even Snow acknowledges that the same technology that he regarded as “the base of our social hope” had also helped make “it easy to organise [society] for all-out war.”[xxxvii]  The horror of all-out war between armies that science had equipped with unprecedented weaponry—including Maxim machine guns, Gotha airplane bombers, and phosgene poisonous gas—profoundly ruptured the cultural history of the West, severely undermining reliance upon tradition as the democracy of the dead. In the minds of many early 20th-century commentators, the war had rendered “recent history . . . discontinuous and fragmented, civilization…ruined, the past . . . lost.”[xxxviii]   Writing from this perspective of post-war disillusionment, poet Ezra Pound wrote bitterly of how soldiers had “walked eye-deep in hell / believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving / came home, home to a lie / . . . / to old lies and new infamy. “ In Pound’s acid assessment, these men had fought for nothing but “an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization” that had left no legacy but “two gross of broken statues, / . . . a few thousand battered books.”[xxxix]

Historian Samuel Hynes confirms that many of Pound’s contemporaries shared his interpretation of the War as “the death of civilization” at the hands of “tyrannous Old Men.”[xl]  It may seem strange, however, that “tyrannous Old Men” and the traditional civilization of the past ended up bearing so much blame for a war made singularly calamitous by the ingenuity of modernity-making younger men—the men with “the future in their bones”—supplying terribly efficient new weaponry. But science and its technological offspring had badly damaged the democracy of the dead even before they made war more devastating than ever before. As early as the 17th century, scientists were reducing the possibilities for sustaining the democracy of the dead by obliterating traditional points of reference for human self-understanding. Not long after Copernicus and his epigones had displaced the earth from the center of traditional cosmology, pushing the only planet humans know out to somewhere on the kinetic periphery, the poet John Donne voiced profound confusion about the relevance of traditional sources of human understanding:

And new philosophy calls all in doubt,

The element of fire is quite put out;

The sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit

Can well direct him where to look for it.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;

All just supply, and all relation.[xli]

But the challenge Copernicanism posed to traditional understandings of the human condition was actually much less profound than that of Darwinism. As Tennyson poignantly put it, Darwinism shocked those “who trusted God was love indeed / And love Creation’s final law” with a picture of “Nature, red in tooth and claw…[which] shrieked against his creed.”  Many confused traditionalists thus found themselves joining Tennyson in asking, “Are God and Nature then at strife, / That Nature lends such evil dreams?”[xlii]  Explaining “the traumatic effect of Darwinism,” cultural historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has stressed the way “Darwinism . . . imperil[ed] moral faith by making the ‘great central ganglion’ of animal life the nerve center of human life as well,” so “displac[ing] man by nature, moral man by amoral nature.”[xliii]

Ruptures in traditional thinking about the human condition have accompanied other unexpected scientific revelations—including the discovery of the genetic foundations of life (causing some to jettison the traditional belief in free will in favor of the doctrine of genetic determinism[xliv]) and the formulation of quantum physics (so disturbing that even Einstein protested against its dissolution of traditional understandings of causality with his famous outcry, “God does not play dice with the universe”[xlv]). The corrosive effect of new scientific paradigms has proven particularly invidious whenever scientists have claimed for their groundbreaking empirical and mathematical methods a monopoly on truth. When, for instance, Princeton physicist Robert Park affirms that “scientific laws are the only way to explain the world” and that therefore “God . . . is not a useful concept,” he is relegating the religious and metaphysical traditions of most of our ancestors to the dust bin.[xlvi]   Likewise destructive of traditional doctrines that have long linked generations are scientists who join geneticist David Comings in explaining away religious conviction as the biochemical effect of the DRD4 gene (sometimes called “the God gene”).[xlvii]

Toxic to religion, scientific dogmatism has also injured the imaginative literature that long gave substance to intergenerational cultural traditions. A voice for such dogmatism, critic Thomas Love Peacock declared in the early 19th century that the future belonged not to “the poet . . . wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance,” but rather to the “scientific and philosophical part of the community” responsible for the “progress of knowledge” and for “the comforts and utilities of life of which we have witnessed so many and so rapid advances.” “A poet in our times,” Peacock asserted in a nineteenth-century world intent upon absorbing the latest scientific advances, “is a semibarbarian in a civilized country. He lives in the days that are past. His ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and exploded superstitions. The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward.”[xlviii] Peacock’s belief that traditional imaginative literature loses its place in a scientifically-minded world seems at least partly validated by Snow, who acknowledged that in the middle of the 20th century “incomprehension” of the literary arts prevailed among most scientists, who had lost all but a “tenuous” link to the world of poetry and fiction.[xlix]

The march of scientific and technological progress has also impaired the traditions that sustain the democracy of the dead by so overawing the practitioners of the traditional arts that many have deformed their work in destructive attempts to make their own discipline resemble an ever-improving science. Thus in trying to explain why the advocates of free verse pressed a prosodic revolution that “free[d] poetry . . . from its own history,” poet Timothy Steele discerns the problematic “influence of modern science on poetry.”  Worried that “poetry and art [were] not making the kinds of advances that science is making,” poets began to believe that “in order to insure itself a central position in modern culture,” poetry needed to achieve “breakthroughs” through the kind of “experimental” endeavors that promised “the kinds of quantitative progress of which science is capable.” Steele, however, questions the wisdom of “imposing the model of scientific progress on poetry,” seeing in the quasi-scientific experiment of free verse as a deeply unfortunate abandonment of traditional meters that embody “our ability to organize thought and speech into measure.”[l]

Looking more broadly, cultural historian William R. Everdell posits a conceptual parallelism between the groundbreaking work of pioneering scientists (including theoretical physicists Albert Einstein and Max Plank, neurophysiologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, and molecular statistician Ludwig Boltzmann) and the daring work of iconoclastic artists (including cubist painter Pablo Picasso, stream-of-consciousness novelist James Joyce, abstract painter Vassily Kandinsky,  naturalistic dramatist August Stindberg, and pantonal composer Arnold Schoenberg). Everdell thus asserts that modern artists share with modern scientists a commitment to exploring “ontological discontinuity—of atoms and void.” For just as modern scientists learned to calculate the “combinatorial collisions” of atoms in a void, so too “for [modern] artists, the independent particle idea led to seeing the subject of a painting as a set of independent dots of color.”  Scientists and artists consequently collaborated in overthrowing the traditional “old belief that things could be seen ‘steadily and whole’ from some privileged viewpoint,” so leading modern thinkers into “the nonlogical, nonobjective, and essentially causeless mental universe in which (with the exception of a few historians) we all now live.”[li]

Nor is Everdell alone among critics who invoke a perceived parallelism between modern art, on the one hand, and revolutionary science, on the other. Historian Louise Gilder relies on this supposed parallelism in explaining why “before 1900, a painting could be relied on to speak about what the painter intended,” whereas modern art now typically confronts the auditor with bewilderingly opaque canvases, such as Sad Young Man on a Train, a bewildering “series of razor-edged swaths of brown that give an impression of motion” but give no clue as to its theme except on its “little title card.”  Gilder thus considers it entirely appropriate that a disorienting work of modern art—namely, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1913)–appears on the cover of a paradigm-shattering book of quantum physics by Werner Heisenberg. In Gilder’s mind, the modern art and the modern physics constitute “perfectly contemporaneous and analogous break[s] with the past. Just as much as the paintings of Duchamp and his successors, quantum mechanics needed that little title card to connect with a reality outside its beautiful mathematics.”[lii]

Critics perhaps suppose that the parallelism they posit between artistic progress and scientific progress will deepen our appreciation for the imaginative accomplishments of modern artists. But in the end this supposed parallelism may actually validate the judgment of Thomas Mann, whose telling portrait of the Faustian composer Adrian Leverkühn implies that “when modern art has aimed for scientific novelty and for radical refinements of apparatus, it has tended to derail, paradoxically, into magic and barbarism.”[liii] Critics may congratulate artists for an imaginative daring that equals that of scientists. But when iconoclastic artists break with tradition, they do so unguided by none of the theoretical and mathematical rigor that guides scientists. What is more, while scientists can justifiably point to empirical laboratory results ratifying their new formulae, iconoclastic artists can only point to point to befuddled and alienated auditors. In other words, when modern scientists break with tradition, they do so in pursuit of a fuller grasp of the truth, evident in more refined theories and more reliable experimental findings. But when modern artists jettison tradition, they resemble scientists in little except their rejection of the past, for they can offer no mathematical rigor, no empirical validation of their radical novelties.

Traditional thinking has sustained real losses through high art twisted by the pursuit of “scientific novelty and…radical refinements of apparatus.”  But the traditional beliefs that undergird the democracy of the dead have suffered even worse though the technologically mediated bombardment of novelty in the popular news media. Journalists never seem to tire of belittling and deriding traditional social patterns and practices while championing those who defy these patterns and practices.[liv]  But readers err if they suppose that this media bias against tradition reflects no more than writers’ personal preferences. Journalists, as the cultural historian Christopher Lasch well understood, have been shrewd capitalists, maximizing profits by simultaneously increasing the supply of, and demand for, their product—which is news. Modern consumer capitalism of the sort that the Great Transformation made possible has—in Lasch’s trenchant analysis—made “the need for novelty and fresh stimulation” a compelling “addiction” among American consumers. Lasch carefully scrutinizes the incentives the news media are responding to in catering to this addiction:

“The value of news, like that of any other commodity [in the modern consumer market], consists primarily of its novelty, only secondarily of its informational value. . . . The news appeals to the same jaded appetite that makes a child tire of a toy as soon as it becomes familiar and demand a new one in its place.”[lv]

Many journalists do wage war against traditional thinking as mercenaries, paid to barrage the democracy of the dead with a withering hail of novelty. But careful analysis of the media will detect the influence of more than cupidity. Anti-traditional journalists are also often motivated by sincere commitment to an anti-traditional ideology, an ideology shared by many scientists. The most zealous journalistic advocates of the new hope—like the most audacious scientists—to create the ultimate novelty—a utopian New World.

The craving for a new utopian world that many journalists and scientists to wish to create is in some ways as old as Plato’s Republic. But the utopian ideology has grown decidedly stronger since the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, as may be inferred from such works as Campanella’s City of the Sun (1623), Deschamp’s Le Vrai Système (1761), Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905), Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), Perkins’s Moving the Mountain (1911) and Skinner’s Walden Two (1948).[lvi] The utopian vision has particularly attracted scientists, Medawar explains, because “Utopias embody the idea of improvement and melioration of just the kind that scientists think they have it in their power to promote or confer.”[lvii]  But it has not just been scientists who have advanced the cause of Utopia: political activists from a wide range of professional backgrounds have labored to build Utopia.

And though blueprints for Utopia differ from one another in various ways, virtually all require a radical repudiation of the past. Virtually all mandate the rejection of traditional social patterns, the complete termination of the democracy of the dead. Utopian repudiation of the past manifests itself with particular force in the way utopian engineers dramatically weaken or altogether abolish traditional patterns of family life and in way these engineers repudiate traditional religious belief.

The most radical utopians have, with Campanella and Deschamps called for “the community of wives” (à la that depicted in Plato’s Republic), thereby simply abolishing traditional marriage.[lviii]  More typically, however, utopians have simply weakened marriage by undermining traditional marriage, allowing—for instance—for easy divorce in “cases of incompatibility” in Wells’ utopia[lix] and even without any legal proceedings in Morris’ utopia.[lx]  In the same vein, Bellamy anticipates ending the practice of a woman’s taking her husbands’ last name and of her depending upon his income.[lxi]  Morris also anticipates the end in his utopia of all public stigma attached to illegitimacy and the extinction of “certain follies about the ruin of women for following their natural desires.”[lxii]

Hostility to the traditional family patterns of the past also surfaces in plans for collectivized child care. Gilman’s utopian apologist considers it an utter horror that “babies [were] left utterly at the mercy of amateurs [i.e., parents]” in the past, and rejoices that under the new utopian regime children are generally under the care of certified government experts professional qualified to provide “proper nourishment, and clothing, and environment—from birth.”[lxiii]  The utopians of Skinner’s Walden Two insist that “group care is better than parental care” because group care allows the experts who oversee such group care to apply psychological principles unknown in “the old pre-scientific days.”[lxiv]

The high divorce rate in “certain American cities” had already convinced Huxley in 1946 that the United States had moved a good way towards the realization of the anti-family principles in Utopian blueprints.[lxv]  So it can surprise no one that that political theorist George Kateb would acknowledge in the Sixties that even though “a sufficient antiutopian case could be made to rest on the sanctity of the family,” such a anti-utopian case was already “out of touch with what had already become part of the political life of the United States”—as well as that of much of Europe.[lxvi] The increasing triumph of utopian thinking over the traditional family patterns that inform a healthy democracy of the dead may be surveyed in the  remarkable erosion of family life in the decades since Kateb wrote—evident in high rates for divorce, non-marital cohabitation, and illegitimate births; low rates for marriage and marital child-bearing; and increasing dependence upon non-parental child care.[lxvii]

But then utopian ideology has been as destructive of traditional religion as it has been of traditional family life. Morris’s utopians explicitly repudiate the “Judaic God” of “times past.”[lxviii]  In Gilman’s Moving the Mountain, the United States begins to transform itself into utopia only when Americans turn their backs on “the old tribal deity of the Hebrews” and embrace a radical new faith in which “God” is simply another name for “Social Energy.”[lxix]  Catechized in the principles of this new utopian faith, Americans “have no longer the fear of death—much less of damnation, and no such thing as ‘sin.’”[lxx]  Likewise an exponent of a new utopian religious faith, the leader of Skinner’s Walden Two frankly acknowledges that he himself “like[s] to play God,” while boldly asserting that by creating an ideal society, he has effected “an improvement on Genesis.”[lxxi]

Predictably, the same triumph of utopian thought that has severely undermined traditional family life has also eroded traditional religious belief. Just as Kateb saw traditional views of the sanctity of the family as “out of touch” with the increasingly utopian character of the United States in the Sixties, even so sociologist Timothy T. Clydesdale has remarked that religion held “an established cultural status in America” until “the cultural challenges of the 1960’s disestablished this religious ethos.”[lxxii]  This cultural disestablishment of traditional religion is evident in what Berkeley sociologists term a “startlingly rapid” upsurge in the percentage of Americans acknowledging no religious affiliation, an upsurge traceable to “more cohorts with a 1960’s experience.”[lxxiii]

Of course, not all Americans who have damaged the democracy of the dead in recent decades by repudiating the traditional ties of family and religion have been doing so as a conscious affirmation of utopian principles. Indeed, though utopian principles and utopian technologies helped legitimate the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties, most of those who have feverishly asserted a radical new freedom from religion and family in “claiming their own sexuality” have simply been following the anarchic impulses of the libido.[lxxiv]  But whether following William Morris or Hugh Hefner, the sexual revolutionaries have manifest a temporal orientation that Medawar describes as typical of utopians. Such utopians, Medawar explains: “look forwards, never backwards, and seldom upwards.”[lxxv]  A refusal to look backwards can only be fatal to the democracy of the dead. And given the deep importance of religion to most of our ancestors, a reluctance to look upward cannot foster such a generation-uniting democracy either.

Complacent 21st-century observers may discern nothing disturbingly novel in the utopianism that has made many Americans indifferent—if not openly hostile—to traditional family life and religion. After all, didn’t Tocqueville describe 19th-century Americans as a people “changing every moment,” a people with “no traditions . . . to forge links between their minds,” a people among whom “each generation is a new people”?[lxxvi]   But let it be remembered that this same 19th-century observer marveled at the strength of America’s marital, familial, and religious commitments. “Certainly,” Tocqueville avers, “of all the countries in the world America is the one in which the marriage tie is most respected and where the highest and truest conception of conjugal happiness has been conceived.”  Tocqueville commented further that “when the American returns from the turmoil of politics to the bosom of the family, he immediately finds a perfect picture of order and peace.”  The Frenchman even suggests that, at least in America, as:

“democracy loosens social ties . . . it tightens natural ones. At the same time as it separates citizens, it brings kindred closer together.”  And in the strength of American marital and family bonds, Tocqueville saw evidence that “Christianity reigns without obstacles, by universal consent” in this country, rendering “everything in the moral field . . . certain and fixed.”[lxxvii]

The commitments to family and faith that attracted Tocqueville’s attention once provided Americans with strong links to the past, so preserving a powerful democracy of the dead. Those commitments—and that democracy—now stand in unprecedented peril. But what is to be done?  How can individual Americans oppose the powerful cultural currents destroying the democracy of the dead that once profoundly shaped America’s democracy of the living?  Some observers have tended to agree with Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, who believed only a dramatic moral and religious renewal could reverse the “the ‘blackout’ of culture” and the disintegration of “the family as a sacred union” which he believed 20th-century America was experiencing. Only “new Saint Pauls, Saint Augustines, and religious and ethical leaders”  could—in Sorokin’s view—bring society “back to reason, and to eternal, lasting, and absolute values.”[lxxviii]

No doubt new Saint Pauls and Saint Augustines could do much to restore to 21st-century America a healthy democracy of the dead. But such figures being in very short supply, we might wish to consider other possible sources for reconnecting our culture with its traditions. One such source is surely the liberal arts, especially literature. In this context, it is worth remembering that in the same work in which he decried the “persistent attacks upon memory” that were fostering “hatred of the past” in 20th-century America, Weaver still believed in imaginative literature as a cultural restorative. Because it can “teach the evocative power of words” and so open “language . . . as a great storehouse of memory,” Weaver looked to “poetry [as] the fairest hope of restoring our lost unity of mind.”[lxxix]

The possibility of reviving a tradition-based democracy of the dead through poetry—and the other forms of literature that help define the liberal arts—gains credibility through  the words of poet J.D. McClatchy, who has remarked, “Poetry is the most conservative of the arts. . . . Why? . . . Perhaps the nature of the language itself, perhaps the channels of imagination, perhaps an abiding response to a few themes and stresses.”[lxxx] The capacity of poetry and all of the other literary arts to connect us with our past is further illuminated by critic Stefan Collini when he explains the disappointment of those who expect “’progressive,’ egalitarian, modernity-welcoming attitudes” to inspire a powerful literature. Such people, Collini asserts, are ignoring “the memory-powered tendencies of the imagination.”[lxxxi]

The “memory-powered tendencies of the imagination” manifest in literature also help to account for the fact that the literary work that, in critic Harold Bloom’s words is, “widely recognized as the major novel of the twentieth century,”  bears the English title Remembrance of Things Past (or, in a more recent translation, In Search of Lost Time).[lxxxii]  It was literature’s fundamental orientation toward the past that Victorian essayist Thomas DeQuincey had in view when he contrasts the ephemeral character of scientific publications (what he calls “the literature of knowledge”) with the enduring presence of imaginative works (what he calls “the literature of power”). Recalling how quickly Newton’s groundbreaking Principia (1687) was thrown “out of the sunshine and into decay and darkness” as soon as the French astronomer Pierre-Simon La Place had published his Mécanique Céleste (1799-1825) incorporating a few minor theoretical refinements, De Quincey remarked upon the staying power of works of imaginative literature, which “survive as finished and unalterable among men,” exulting at how the Iliad, the Prometheus of Æschylus, the Othello or King Lear, the Hamlet or Macbeth, and the Paradise Lost are not militant but triumphant forever, as long as the languages exist in which they speak or can be taught to speak.”[lxxxiii]

The power of the literature we study in the liberal arts to connect us with the past and so to school us as citizens in the democracy of the dead manifests itself in poetry that helps us, in the manner of T.S. Eliot, to understand that “the past experience revived in the meaning / Is not the experience of one life only / But of many generations.”[lxxxiv]  Strengthening and enriching the rootedness of literature are the numerous works memorializing the dead. Consider, for instance, Matthew Arnold’s “Memorial Verses” honoring a trio of great deceased poets:

Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece,

Long since, saw Bryon’s struggle cease.

But one such death remained to come.

The last poetic voice is dumb—

We stand to-day by Wordsworth’s tomb.[lxxxv]

Or consider Tennyson’s monumental poem In Memoriam (1850), devoted to the memory of a particular friend (Arthur Henry Hallam), but more broadly reminding readers of all “those we call the dead.”[lxxxvi]

Prospects for the democracy of the dead are immensely improved by a host of other literary memorials. These would include Shelley’s poignant Adonais (1821), which honors the memory of John Keats with the promise that “till the Future dares /Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be / An echo and a light unto eternity!”[lxxxvii]  Also included in this genre would be Milton’s Lycidas (1638), in which the poet consoles himself after the drowning death of his friend Edward King by drawing from the inherited resources of classical poetry and the Christian religion, invoking both “the Sisters of the sacred well, / That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring” and “the dear might of him that walk’d the waves.”[lxxxviii]

Much nearer to our own time, poet W.H. Auden marked the death of a fellow poet with his powerful poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” (1939) a funereal literary gesture that ensures that honors not only a specific Irish poet but also the enduring power of literary language:

Time that is intolerant

Of the brave and innocent,

And indifferent in a week

To a beautiful physique,

 

Worships language and forgives

Everyone by whom it lives;

Pardons cowardice, conceit,

Lays honours at its feet.[lxxxix]

And the list of such literary memorials goes on.

But the literary works that might most powerfully fortify the democracy of the dead might be those in which poets evoke the past by actually allowing us to hear the voices of the dead. Recall, for instance, how Odysseus enters the underworld in Homer’s Odyssey and there talks with “great souls who perished in times past,” engaging, for instance, the dead king Alkínöos in a dialogue about “the past deeds and the strange adventures” of life.[xc]  Virgil likewise gives the dead a voice when Aeneas visits the underworld in Book VI of the The Aeneid and learns from dead Anchisës how the greatness of “his own Trojan ancestors” will live on “Souls of the future.”[xci] Virgil himself becomes one of the voices of the dead in Dante’s Commedia, as the dead poet guides the living poet-narrator “lead[ing] [him] forth through an eternal place” where he “see[s] the ancient spirits” of the deceased and talks with them about their past lives.[xcii]

Nor have modern poets entirely lost the power to hear the voices of the dead. Consider, for instance, how Stephen Vincent Benét allows America’s Third President to speak from “under the gravestone” in his poem “Thomas Jefferson”:

I liked the people,

The sweat and the crowd of them,

Trusted them always

And spoke aloud of them.[xciii]

The attentive reader will, of course, note that as an approach to the democracy of the dead, the great literature of the past hardly delivers an egalitarian version of that democracy. It is, in truth, largely a meritocracy of the talented dead that speaks to us the works most often celebrated in the liberal arts. To be sure, a more egalitarian democracy of the dead speaks through folk tales and folk ballads, works generally accorded at least a marginal place in the liberal arts.[xciv]   But it will still be noted that even in a poem such as “Thomas Jefferson,” it is the singular voice of Benét/Jefferson that the reader hears, not the common voice of “the crowd.”

Even when it allows us to hear the voices of the common people of the past, the literature studied in the liberal arts delivers something other than a simple one-man-one-vote majoritarian democracy of the dead. Consider how the 20th-century Cornish poet Charles Causley opens a vision of his own deceased parents in “Eden Rock,” allowing his parents to speak about the passage from life to death: “’Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’”[xcv]  Causley’s poem allows quite ordinary and unremarkable people to speak from beyond the grave. But these are not people Causley has selected at random any more than Virgil is choosing at random when he allows he allows Aeneas to learn from Anchisës about the greatness of “his own Trojan ancestors.”  In the democracy of the dead that the liberal arts delivers, we will still likely listen more attentively to our own ancestors than we will to deceased strangers.

But whether the liberal arts deliver the voices of dead ancestors or dead strangers, such literature will generally not fare well in utopia. Indeed, we see a persistent antithesis between the past-obliterating ideology of utopia and past-honoring creative literature. Some of the most potent foes of utopian thought have consequently chosen to express their opposition through imaginative literature—more specifically, though powerful novels commonly characterized as dystopian. Among the outstanding dystopian novels of the 20th century, we find We (1924) by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley, 1984 (1949) by George Orwell, and The Wanting Seed (1963) by Anthony Burgess. Though these dystopian authors differ in many ways, they all recognize the threat utopianism poses for literature. Zamyatin depicts the rulers of We’s utopia as hostile to the “idle” preutopian literature and determined to replace it with poetry that has been “tamed and harnessed” to ideological purposes. Yet something of the non-ideological old “memory-powered” impulses that inform traditional literature survive in We’s poet-protagonist, D-503, whose mind feels the strong gravitational pull of the past as he reflects upon “the language of our ancestors.”[xcvi]

Huxley shows the utopian hostility to traditional literature through his treatment of John the Savage, a young man whose upbringing on an Indian Reservation has allowed him to grow up untouched by the utopian leaders’ “campaign against the past.”  Deeply schooled in Shakespeare and inclined to quote passages from his work, John comes to realize that utopia has destroyed poetry at the same time that it has eradicated religion and marriage. After appealing in vain for the opportunity to marry a young woman—and not just have indulgent sex with her—John cries out also for religion and poetry. “I want God,” John exclaims. “I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”[xcvii]

Utopian animosity toward traditional literature manifests itself in 1984 in the way government specialists at the Ministry of Truth work to translate Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Byron into “Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be.” Nonetheless, 1984’s protagonist, Winston Smith, begins to understand how literary language can mark a channel for memory when he begins to write in a personal journal about “a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone.”  He wakes the next morning from a dream of “the Golden Country” with “the word ‘Shakespeare’ on his lips.”[xcviii]

The threat creative literature poses to the past-annihilating ideology of utopia likewise surfaces in The Wanting Seed, where the historian protagonist Tristram Fox finds his academic career in peril when he begins to argue that the state has driven the impulses that create great art (including literature) from its utopian world. Fox asserts, in particular, that the utopian suppression of natural fertility within the family prevents the creation of great art because “great art . . . [is] a kind of glorification of increase.” Fox further imperils his professional position within utopia by probing the origins of the two great traditional literary genres—tragedy and comedy—in the fertility ceremonies of antiquity.[xcix]

Fox’s analysis of literature’s perilous status within utopia would certainly resonate with literary scholar Alvin Kernan, who has suggested in The Death of Literature, that the cultural dynamics threatening literature—particularly poetry—in contemporary America are similar to those tearing the family apart. In Kernan’s view, “the death of literature may be . . . interesting . . . for the precise schematic way in which it represents changes taking place elsewhere, as in the family, in more complicated and less obvious ways.”[c]  For those who see the family as a cultural presence that—like literature—depends upon “memory-powered tendencies,” rediscovering the literature studied within the liberal arts may offer a way to renew a fundamental social institution long central to the democracy of the dead.

But the possibility of renewing family life or the democracy of the dead through a liberal-arts education rooted in literary study would seem to depend in large measure on the context for that study. Unfortunately, that context is not always favorable in the leading academic institutions of 21st-century America. For the “memory-powered tendencies” that sustain literature are clearly in hostile territory within an academic world that, as sociologist Lewis A. Coser has remarked, is pervaded by what he aptly labels “neophilia . . . that is, the one-sided value emphasis on what is new.”[ci] To some degree this neophilia is merely mercenary and careerist: in order to win tenure, young academics must find ways to say strikingly new (that is, publishable) new things about classic texts, even if saying these new things requires radical subversion of traditional understandings of these texts.[cii]

Traditional literary texts become very frail supports for the democracy of the dead when they are encompassed by a cloud of unreliable new interpretations. The threat to the democracy of the dead grows truly lethal when the new interpretations are inspired by utopian ideologies. It is the baleful effects of such ideologies that W. Robert Connor, former director of the National Humanities Center, has in view when he expresses misgivings about how the modern university is teaching students “to set themselves above the [literary] text as judges of its social or political messages, or even as censors”; consequently, “Milton . . . must be seen primarily as a misogynist, Shakespeare as an elitist,” and “Homer as [a] pornographer.”[ciii]  Kernan sees profound harm in the “way literature has been emptied out in the service of social and political causes that are considered more important than the [literary] texts themselves.”  In Kernan’s view, such ideological fixations could rapidly mean “literature is out of business.”[civ]  Modern literature-killing ideologies have so hardened into academic orthodoxy that Panichas complains that tradition-minded literary scholars like him are “increasingly treated as outlaws.”[cv]

Those who care about the democracy of the dead can only wonder if ideological mis-reading of traditional literary texts in academe does not reflect the presence of the same utopian ideological attitudes that have made university scholars remarkably hostile—as has been demonstrated by sociologist Norval Glenn—to the traditional family.[cvi]  For the family, like classic literature, inclines us to look backward in time, something unacceptable in utopia, or any other neophiliac environment.

But hope remains so long as the great works of literature themselves remain. If they will, those who teach the liberal arts can still help their students to hear not the ideological clamoring of ideologues and neophiliacs, but rather the authentic voices of these great works themselves—the resonant choir of voices of Homer and Virgil, of Dante and Petrarch, of Shakespeare and Milton, of Hawthorne and Melville—they will hear some of the wisest and most powerful voices ever to address the world. And when those voices ring out, the dead will again make a profound claim on us, allowing the democracy of the dead once again to enrich our cultural and political lives.

 

Notes

[i] Hugh P. Williamson, “Evolution of the Franchise in England and the United States,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 6(1947): 413-419.

[ii] Cf. “Voting Rights Act of 1965,” Duke Law Journal 2(1966): 463-483.

[iii] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, in Collected Works, ed. George J. Marlin et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986), 1: 250-251.

[iv] Cf. Richard J. Stillman, II, “The American Constitution and the Administrative State,” Public Administration Review 47(1987): 4.

[v] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1848), trans. George Lawrence, ed. J.P. Mayer (1966; rpt. New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 473.

[vi] Ford qtd. in F.C.G., “To Quote Henry Ford, ‘History is Bunk,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 50(1991): 98.

[vii] Cf. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932; rpt. New York: Harper & Row, 1946), xvii-xviii, 34, 35, 225.

[viii] Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (1948; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 67, 104, 111.

[ix] David Wykes, Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 144.

[x] David T. Courtwright, Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 272.

[xi] Randall Jarrell, “A Sad Heart in the Supermarket,” Culture for the Millions? Mass Media in Modern Society, ed. Norman Jacobs (Boston: Beacon, 1964), 97-100.

[xii] Joyce Appleby, “Liberal Education in a Postliberal World,” Liberal Education 79.3 (1993): 18-24.

[xiii] Stephen Bertman, Cultural Amnesia : America’s Future and the Crisis of Memory (Westport: Praeger, 2000), 122.

[xiv] Zygmunt Bauman, Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 172-175.

[xv] Jean Bethke Elshtain, Sovereignty: God, State, and Self (New York: Basic, 2008), 313.

[xvi] George A. Panichas, Restoring the Meaning of Conservatism (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2008), 4-5, 52-54, 56.

[xvii] Cf., e.g., Edward Rothstein, “Well, Wouldn’t It Be Pretty to Think So?” New York Times 15 Aug. 2005: E6.

[xviii] James qtd. in Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms With America’s Changing Families (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 177.

[xix] Cf. Joseph Pearce, “Chesterton and St. Francis,” Ignatius Insight 27 Jan. 2009 <http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2005/jpearce_gkfrancis_may05.asp>.

[xx] Cf. Harold Fritzsch, An Equation that Changed the World: Newton, Einstein, and the Theory of Relativity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 27-90.

[xxi] Bryce Christensen, “The Age of Aquarius?  The False Promise of the Sexual Revolution,” The Family in America Oct. 2005: 1-8.

[xxii] Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Truth: A History (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 224.

[xxiii] Conrad qtd. in Panichas, op. cit., 5.

[xxiv] Elshtain, op. cit., 310-311.

[xxv] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1789-1790), ed. J.G.A. Pocock, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 83.

[xxvi] Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1932; rpt. New York: W.W. Norton, 1957), 36,107, 125.

[xxvii] Daniels qtd. in R. R. Reno, “The End of the Road,” First Things Oct. 2008: 31.

[xxviii] Cf. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Rinehart, 1943).

[xxix] Ernest Stanberg, “Justifying Public Intervention without Market Externalities: Karl Polanyi’s Theory of Planning in Capitalism,” Public Administration Review 53.2(1993): 100.

[xxx] Richard Critchfield, The Villagers: Changed Values, Altered Lives (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1994), 5-9, 448-458.

[xxxi] Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770), Eighteenth Century Poetry and Prose, ed. Louis I. Bredvold et al., 3rd. ed. (New York: Ronald Press, 1973), 1199-1200, ll. 63-64, 74.

[xxxii] Zimmerman qtd. in Allan Carlson, The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement Toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2000), 35.

[xxxiii] C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures (1959; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 11, 22, 30.

[xxxiv] Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, I.lxxxi, Ixcii, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert L. Ellis, and Douglas D. Heath (Boston: Taggard and Thompson, 1863), 7: 113, 128.

[xxxv] Peter Medawar, The Limits of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 65.

[xxxvi] Weaver, op. cit., 164.

[xxxvii] Snow, op. cit., 27.

[xxxviii] Samuel Hynes qtd. in Louis D. Rubin, Jr., The Summer the Archduke Died: On Wars and Warriors (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 91.

[xxxix] Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (1920),  IV, ll. 11-13, 15; V, ll. 3-4, 7-8. Department of English, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. 3 Sep. 2008 <http://www2.english.uiuc.edu/finnegan/English_300/hugh_selwyn_mauberly.htm>.

[xl] Hynes qtd. in Rubin, op. cit., 27.

[xli] John Donne, An Anatomy of the World (1611), Major British Writers, ed. Walter J. Bate et al. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959), 1: 383, ll. 205-208, 213-214.

[xlii] Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H.[1850] , Victorian Poetry, ed. E. K. Brown and J.O. Bailey, 2nd. Ed (New York: Ronald Press, 1962), LV, 5-6; LVI, 13-16.

[xliii] Gertrude Himmelfarb, Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 79.

[xliv] Cf. I. De Melo-Martín, “Firing Up the Nature/Nurture Controversy: Bioethics and Genetic Determinism,” Journal of Medical Ethics 31(2005): 526-530.

[xlv] Einstein qtd. in Arlen J. Hansen, “The Dice of God: Einstein, Heisenberg, and Robert Coover,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 10(1976): 50.

[xlvi] Robert L. Park, Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 5, 215.

[xlvii] Cf. Lee Silver, Challenging Nature: The Clash of Science and Spirituality at the New Frontiers of Life (New York: Ecco Books/HarperCollins, 2006), 77-79.

[xlviii] Thomas Love Peacock, “The Four Ages of Poetry” [1820], Critical Theory Since Plato, Ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 496-497.

[xlix] Snow, op. cit., 11-12.

[l] Timothy Steele, “From the Introduction to Missing Measures,” The Formalist 11.2(2000): 55-56.

[li] William R. Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 11, 352.

[lii] Louisa Gilder, The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 4-5.

[liii] Cf. Steele, op. cit., 56.

[liv] Cf., e.g., Sheila A. Wellington, “A Few New Faces for the Board,” Chicago Tribune 13 Feb. 1994: 8; John C. Cotey, “One of the Boys,” St. Petersburg Times 15 May 2005: 1C; Stephen Lynch, “Roles vs. Roles,” Orange County Register 31 Mar. 1998: E1; Linda Greenhouse, “Women Join Battle on All-Male Draft,” New York Times 22 March 1981: A19; Gary D’Amato, “Burk Calls on Corporate America to Support Cause,” Knight-Ridder Tribune News Service 12 Apr. 2003: 1.

[lv] Christopher Lasch, “What’s Wrong With the Right?” Tikkun 1 (1987): 23-29.

[lvi] Cf. Bryce Christensen, “The Family in Utopia,”  Renascence 44 (1991): 31-44.

[lvii] Medawar, The Limits of Science, op. cit., 35.

[lviii] Tommaso Campanella, City of the Sun (1623), trans Thomas W. Halliday, Ideal Commonwealths (1901; rpt. Port Washington: Kennikat, 1968), 156; cf. also Dom [Léger-Marie] Deschamps, Le Vrai Système, ed. Jean Thomas and Franco Venturi (Paris: Librarie E. Droz, 1939), 126-127; Plato, The Republic, trans. B. Jowett, Plato, ed. Louise R. Loomis (Rosyln: Walter J. Black, 1942), 333-343.

[lix] H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1905; rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), 200-210.

[lx] William Morris, News from Nowhere: Or an Epoch of Rest (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1891), 110-115.

[lxi] Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888; rpt. New York: Random House, 1951), 205-212.

[lxii] Morris, op. cit., 112.

[lxiii] Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Moving the Mountain (New York: Charlton, 1911), 197-198.

[lxiv] B. F. Skinner, Walden Two (1948; rpt. New York: Macmillan, 1976), 131.

[lxv] Huxley, op. cit., xiii.

[lxvi] George Kateb, Utopia and Its Enemies (London: Free Press, 1963), 209,232.

[lxvii] Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2000, Tables, 57, 60, 62, 86, U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2 Sept. 2003 <www.census.gov>. U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2002 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2002), Table 546.

[lxviii] Morris, op. cit., 86.

[lxix] Gilman, op. cit., 243-244.

[lxx] Ibid., 47-48.

[lxxi] Skinner, op. cit., 274-281.

[lxxii] Timothy T. Clydesdale, “Family Behaviors Among Early U.S. Baby Boomers: Explaining the Effects of Religion and Income Change, 1965-1982,” Social Forces  76 (1997): 607.

[lxxiii] Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer, “Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference: Politics and Generations,” American Sociological Review 67 (2002): 165-190.

[lxxiv] Cf. Bryce Christensen, “The Age of Aquarius?  The False Promise of the Sexual Revolution,” The Family in America Oct. 2005: 2-4.

[lxxv] Medawar, The Threat and the Glory: Reflections on Science and Scientists  (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 103.

[lxxvi] Tocqueville, op. cit., 473.

[lxxvii] Tocqueville, op. cit., 291-292, 589.

[lxxviii] Pitirim A. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics, rev. and abridged ed. (1957; rpt. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1985), 695 – 702.

[lxxix] Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (1948; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 67, 104, 111, 158, 166.

[lxxx] McClatchy qtd. in Brad Leithauser,  “The Confinement of Free Verse,”  The Formalist 10.1 (1999): 51-68.

[lxxxi] Stefan Collini, Introduction, The Two Cultures, by C.P. Snow, op. cit., lii.

[lxxxii] Bloom qtd. in Jerry Farber, “Scott Moncrieff’s Way: Proust in Translation,” Proust Said That Mar. 1997: par. 25, 23 Sep. 2008 <http://www.chick.net/proust/PSTv6.html>.

[lxxxiii] Thomas De Quincey, “The Literature of Knowledge and the Literature of Power” [1848, from The Poetry of Pope], English Romantic Poetry and Prose, ed. Russell Noyes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 709-710.

[lxxxiv] T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages,T.S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971), 133;  II, ll. 49-51.

[lxxxv] Matthew Arnold, “Memorial Verses” [1850], Victorian Poetry, op. cit., 399; ll. 1-5.

[lxxxvi] Tennyson, In Memoriam, op. cit., CXVIII, l. 5.

[lxxxvii] Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais (1821), English Romantic Poetry and Prose, op. cit., I, ll. 7-9.

[lxxxviii] John Milton, Lycidas (1638), John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (Indianapolis: Odyssey Press, 1957), ll. 16-17, 173.

[lxxxix] W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” W.H. Auden: Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1989), 82, III, ll. 9-12.

[xc] Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald, The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, ed. Sarah Lawall et al., 7th ed. (New York: Norton, 1999), 340, 347; XI, ll. 412, 707.

[xci] Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald, The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, op. cit., 882, 884; VI, ll. 622, 735.

[xcii] Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. John Ciardi (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 6; I, ll. 107-108.

[xciii] Stephen Vincent Benét, “Thomas Jefferson,” Stephen Vincent Benét: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Basil Davenport (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), 25, ll. 3, 21-24.

[xciv] Note, for instance, the inclusion of folk tales in the programs conducted at the University of Virginia’s Center for the Liberal Arts, Home Page, Center for the Liberal Arts, University of Virginia, 23 Jan. 2009 <http://www.virginia.edu/cla/programs.html>.

[xcv] Charles Causley, “Eden Rock,” Secret Destinations: Selected Poems, 1977-1988 (Boston: David R. Godine, 1989), 114, l. 19.

[xcvi] Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, trans. Mirra Ginsburg (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 40, 60-61.

[xcvii] Huxley, op. cit., 246.

[xcviii] George Orwell, 1984 (1949; rpt. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961), 27-29, 47.

[xcix] Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963), 66-67.

[c] Alvin Kernan, The Death of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 8.

[ci] Lewis A. Coser, Introduction, The Social Role of the Man of Knowledge, by Florian Znaniecki (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1986),  xx.

[cii] Cf. Bryce Christensen, “What Perishes When Literature Teachers Publish,” Modern Age 29(1985): 278-282.

[ciii] Robert W. Connor, “Milton as Misogynist, Shakespeare as Elitist, Homer as Pornographer,”  Chronicle of Higher Education 5 Dec. 1990: A48.

[civ] Kernan, op. cit., 40.

[cv] George A. Panichas, Growing Wings to Overcome Gravity: Criticism as the Pursuit of Virtue (Macon: Mercer University, 1999), 37.

[cvi] Cf. Norval Glenn, “A Plea for Objective Assessment of the Notion of Family Decline,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 55 (1993): 543.

 

This excerpt is from The Democratic Discourse of Liberal Education, Lee Trepanier, ed. (Southern Utah University Press, 2009).

Avatar photo

Bryce Christensen is a Professor of English at Southern Utah University. He is the author of the non-fiction books Utopia Against the Family (Ignatius, 1990) and Divided We Fall (Transaction, 2006); the novel Winning (Whiskey Creek, 2007); and The Portals of Sheol’ and Other Poems (White Violet, 2012).

Back To Top