BEYOND THE TWILIGHT OF REASON
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As
body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Oflaughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done and been; the shame
Ofmotives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things
ill
done and done to others' harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
There is more, but that is enough.
407
In this passage, Eliot presents the human condition in its physical,
spiritual, and moral bearing. We feel, behind these manifestations, the
force of a religious vision and a metaphysical aura. Many people do not
accept Eliot's religious belief or anyone else's. To those people, our fate is
entirely social and personal; it consists of the authority we submit to, the
local conditions, the ideology that bewilders us or suppresses our bewil–
derment. Those people construe culture as the social body, the
concatenation of practices within which they live their daily lives. The
claims of religion and metaphysics are quietly discounted; or, if not, they
are deemed to be active only in the privacy of ethical relations.
In the West, the general culture for most people means the conven–
tions and practices of the liberal democratic state, the public arena of
modem democracy. Such a state is not universal - we have proof from
every continent that it isn't - but the idea of a liberal democratic state is
virtually a universal aspiration. Those who haven't got it want it. The So–
viet Union broke down not because of military or economic pressure but
because of television and air travel. Images of the apparently abundant
middle-class life that many Russian people saw in the West proved far
more attractive than the Marxist promise of social transformation, long
delayed. The resurgence of the Communist Party in Russia is a sign of
frustration: the benefits supposed to arise from Boris Yeltsin's administra–
tion - ownership of land, free markets, and an open economy - have
been disappointing. Meanwhile local conflicts of identity and historical
definition have declared themselves.
Not that the establishment of liberal democracy has put an end to
human misery in the West or to the turbulence of history, as some social
critics think it should. The main objection I have to Francis Fukuyama's
book,
The End of History and the LAst Man
-
as a case in point - turns
upon its title. An end implies a beginning and a narrative development
