432
JOHN HENRY RALEIGH
Benthamite in its concern for the greatest happiness of the greatest
number. It has no ideal world in the past, such as the study of the
classics, especially Greek, used to provide for the educated. It has
separated art and politics, and in so far as it is political at all, it is
Parringtonian, subscribing
to
ideas that are of a "benign, enlightened,
moralized, liberal kind." In politics it pursues the pleasure principle; in
literature the unpleasure principle. What it would like to see is politics
disappear.
I have gone into such detail-and much of this composite descrip–
tion of the modern spirit is drawn from remarks scattered throughout
the entire book-to underline what a formidable genie has been con–
jured up, protean, powerful and desiring to be absolute. This, as I un–
derstand it, is the modern self, or an important part of the modern self,
according to Mr. Trilling.
Counterpointing this is another absolute: culture. In an essay on \
Freud modern culture is seen as what God or fate or destiny used to be
to the human imagination:
But the idea of man-in-culture provides, as it were, the meta–
physic, the mystique, of our ideas of man-in-community. It gives
us a way of speaking more profoundly about community, for
talking about souls, about destiny, about the grounds and sanc–
tions of morality; it is our way of talking about fate, free will
and immortality.
In this same essay it is argued that the only "free will" left to modem
man is his biological inheritance, for that alone cannot be culturally
conditioned. Moreover, this overwhelming outside power is not overtly
tyrannical; it is bland, warm, subtle, insidious, although implacable and
omniverous, for it is really a gigantic esthetic or a hierarchy of esthetics,
those pitiless "styles of life," from which we must choose. Further,
according to the argument, all ethical and moral judgments will have
reference to this iron esthetic that will fetter us all. Thus now and in
the future we will not judge others by a knowledge of their "mere ac–
tions" but by intuitions that "transcend" these matters:
The timbre of the voice, the rhythm of the speech, in how the
foot meets the ground, in the feel of the chosen cloth, in the
fashion of the house inhabited.
This vision-and I do not know if it was intended literally-conjures
up a kind of esthetic 1984, with the Editor of
Vogue
as Big Brother.
In short,
if
all the essays in
Beyond Culture
are put together, a larger
