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GEORGE LEVINE
and the death camps." Steiner comes to believe what many of us have
been forced to face on a much less apocalyptic scale during the last few
years, that the "humanistic traditions" not only proved a "frail barrier
against political bestiality," but that they in some ways "express solici–
tation of authoritarian rule and cruelty." We may feel comfortable
in
replying that this is
all
too easy, that so unpolitical a bunch as humanists
could hardly be expected to provide a strong barrier, and that, in any
case, it
is
absurd to cast such severe blame on that tradition when
there are so many more obvious, direct and powerful forces implicated.
But
if
we are to have such brilliant humanists as Frye and Steiner
providing analyses of culture, we do have a right to ask questions about
the political realities of the traditions these analyses represent.
If
humanists are directly implicated in these inhumanities, they should
either stop writing about culture or stop making such high moral
claims
for their profession, or both.
The Nazi death camps were, according to Steiner, no accident, but
the properly consistent and symbolic outcome of the major develop–
ments of Western culture. The details of Steiner's indictment of
this
culture constitute the second of these T. S. Eliot lectures, but I leave
the precise counterarguments (many of which are obvious) to others.
I prefer rather to stay with the major intuition, which I find largely
convincing, that there is not only no apparent connection between
moral humanity and the practice of the humanities (cynics will repeat:
"Who ever thought there was?"), but that the humanities are seriously
implicated in the worst as well as in the best of Western civilization.
Steiner provokes melodrama. But let us see where this intuition
takes him. For one thing, it forces him to break out of the provincial–
ism of Western civilization with which every child
is
imbued before
high school. Humanists are used to reading past - or excusing histor–
ically- the xenophobia of Western literature, its resentment and fear
of Blacks, Jews and Asians. It is more difficult to do this in class–
rooms full of aliens with the pressure of Viet Nam and Nazi Germany
at one's back. And in the long run, this xenophobia
is
not peripheral
but central to Western art. "For the great majority of thinking beings:
Steiner says, "certainly for the young, the image of Western culture
as self-evidently superior, as embodying within itself almost the sum
total of intellectual and moral power, is either a racially-tinged absurd–
ity or a museum-piece."
But this account of Steiner's views does not do justice to his
quite
sensible awareness of the futility of Western guilt. This awareness, how–
ever, is mixed with another, a contradictory and telltale element: a
