Self-Deprecation

Self-deprecation may be a gesture of meekness, like a dog that shows its belly: a sign that you mean no harm, or are not worth harming. It may be calculated to lower expectations: whether out of discretion, not to disappoint them, or by design, to surprise them. Or it may be an indulgence, extorting praise by threatening self-harm.

(In this way self-deprecation helps define friendship: what is a friend but someone who praises you for what you regret, someone who finds unthinkable the things you fear may be true? These precious offices can only be performed when self-deprecation occasions them.)

It may be a way to evade responsibility. “I couldn’t x to save my life” is a polite way to say no when it was wrong to ask. And it avoids embarrassment: of course you could x, if you put your mind to it, but when there is nothing to gain, why risk failure when you can excuse abstention?

Of course self-deprecation is not always serious. It may be an indirect boast. “All censure of a man’s self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare.” Which is harmless in moderation. Or it may be a provocation. Montaigne appalled his friends by insisting that he had no memory. In the French of the time memory stood for intelligence: but Montaigne made the distinction, and the very absurdity of his self-deprecation enforced it.

All these uses are legitimate, but none of them can excuse the habit of self-deprecation. If you expect others to take you seriously, you should try it for yourself. Tell me often enough how stupid and useless you are and I may begin to believe you; apologize for yourself often enough and I will begin to believe you have something to be sorry for.

Of course some lives are just that lost, some people are just that broken; if patience can help them, they have a right to it. But I have no patience for people who fear being resented more than they fear being despised. It doesn't even work.

You may resent people for having things you could never have; but the people you hate are the ones who have the things you could never have – and despise them.

Aristocracy was invulnerable as long as aristocrats took pains to enjoy, and be seen to enjoy, their wealth and privilege; but the moment they started to doubt themselves the masses rose up and devoured them and raised the clear conscience of plutocracy in their place.

All persuasion begins in confidence. And since respect will be given, if those who deserve it cannot stand by their words, deeds, and lives, others will receive it undeservingly.

Causes

The axiom of finance is that having something now is better than having the same thing tomorrow. One who calculates by how much is said to discount. The same axiom holds elsewhere, but no one wants to do the math. The sacrifice that would be saintly if it were selfless is too often only thoughtless.

Take someone who refuses a dish because of ethical objections about how it is now made. Someone who abstains from foie gras has made a permanent stand against an inherent evil, and means it. But someone whose argument begins “Do you know what kind of—” may not have weighed their position. You will not live forever. You are not guaranteed the ability to enjoy food even as long as you live. While you could still enjoy food, your health may forbid it. Whether or not you have bothered to count, at the end of your life there will have been only so many meals and far fewer good ones; are you certain you want to subtract this one?

Anyone who proposes to change the world needs to be asked: “If the world were as you want it to be, what would you do with yourself? Could you be doing it now? Why don’t you?” Perhaps the answer would deprive a worthy cause of a capable supporter; but if there is nothing good or worthwhile in the world except making what is worst in it less bad, then there is nothing good or worthwhile in the world at all.

(Besides, the most dangerous people in the world are the ones who try to change it without having learned how to live in it. Danton on Robespierre: Cet homme-la ne saurait pas cuire des oeufs dur: “That man couldn’t hard-boil an egg.” A man might become a monster only because he was good for nothing else.)

The taste for causes can be a jaded one. Helping people is one way of hiding from them. Trying to save the world is one way of giving up on it. Devoting your life is one way of throwing it away. You say the fruits justify the tree; but who would eat of it, if they knew how it grew?

Laika

How fitting that a dog went first, and that, for a time, she was between us and darkness. All our proud rockets, all our brave pioneers, and we entered space as a child might enter a basement, holding onto a dog’s tail. She was a Moscow stray. A stray, and therefore nobody’s dog, or everybody’s – yours and mine, even. A Moscow stray, distant aunt to that remarkable unbreed of hustlers and idlers – Russia’s last aristocrats.

Strays live by the old covenant. Dogs never needed us. The deadliest hunter of the African plains is not the lion but the wild dog, whose kills are efficient, coordinated, and relentless. And they chose to throw in their lot with us. What honor! And what responsibility! There is a play (a radio play by Dunsany) where mankind is put on trial. One by one the animals testify against us; only the dog speaks in our defense, with such praise as is, in its way, worse than accusation:

He is man: that is enough. More is not needed. More could not be needed. All wisdom is in him. All his acts are just; terrible sometimes, but always just.

Bacon writes (against atheism) that men are better for having a god as dogs are better for having a master: a strange and improper argument. But if our faith is as heavy as the faith of dogs is to us, we can have a sort of sympathy, and imagine how gods might know shame.

Muhammad relates that a woman was forgiven a lifetime of sin for giving a thirsty dog a drink of water. Consider how the balance is weighed; what does it mean to harm a dog? “Who could eat a dog?” is really the same question as, “Who could eat a man?” Traditionally, nobody eats a dog for its meat; men eat dogs like men eat men: to absorb their power. It is at least respectful. When dogs are twisted into brutality, neglected into savagery, beaten into helplessness, there is no respect; better to be eaten. And yet each new puppy is a fresh expression of absolute trust, never diminished. Our terrible debt vanishes in that unquenchable devotion.

In his last years, isolated in deafness, Goya gave up canvas and impasted the walls of his own house with a series of alien images, primordial and apocalyptic at once. A lone dog – all alone – sinks below the horizon, howling as she recedes over the edge of the world. We sent Laika to die; we sacrificed her. She died within hours. And then for five months, dead, in her dark, silent capsule, she circled our bright world, falling and falling as the horizon slipped away beneath her, one dead dog keeping solitary watch over the billions. Then she fell as a star falls, a burnt offering, trailing fire, scattering earth and sea with her ashes.

Even the sky is haunted.

Genteel Tradition

In 1911 Santayana was ready to leave the United States. In California (already liminal America), he said what he could not say in Boston:

The truth is that one-half of the American mind, that not occupied intensely in practical affairs, has remained, I will not say high-and-dry, but slightly becalmed; it has floated gently in the backwater, while, alongside, in invention and industry and social organization the other half of the mind was leaping down a sort of Niagara Rapids. This division may be found symbolized in American architecture: a neat reproduction of the colonial mansion – with some modern comforts introduced surreptitiously – stands beside the sky-scraper. The American Will inhabits the sky-scraper; the American Intellect inhabits the colonial mansion. The one is the sphere of the American man; the other, at least predominantly, of the American woman. The one is all aggressive enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition.

This phrase, “genteel tradition,” became the weapon of choice for the Mencken gang. They carried it in their hip pockets like a flask of violet perfume, ready to dash over an opponent’s head. And once the scent was on you, whatever you had to say, all anyone heard was the calico whine of a high-minded Protestant spinster.

But what did Santayana mean by it? He defines the genteel tradition as a form of anthropocentrism: an anthropocentrism that emulsifies transcendentalism – the sense that the world is your creation – with Calvinism – the sense that the world is your fault. Historically he traces it to the seventeenth century and the renewal of orthodoxy.

That is where it comes from; but what is it?

The genteel tradition opposes education to life. It wants things to be done the right way, openly, and for the right reasons, or not done at all. It requires play to be exercise; thinking to be persuasion; learning to be study. It wants us to be unfettered and spontaneous, but not to run in the halls. It does not care what is avoided, unless it approves of what is done instead. Just avoiding apathy, boredom, ignorance, prejudice, and stupidity – in the judgment of genteel tradition, avoiding them is only permissible when they are avoided properly.

Wealth, learning, and beneficence, even on a grand scale, must leave them cold, or positively alarm them, if these fine things are not tightly controlled and meted out according to some revealed absolute standard.

This should sound familiar; this is our world. Santayana thought the genteel tradition was dying; instead it enjoys absolute victory. It has coopted or outlasted every challenge made to it. How did this coffin case recover and reconquer?

In his speech Santayana names Whitman and William James as models of what was to come after the passing of the genteel tradition. How badly his prophecy failed shows in how unthinkable either man is as our contemporary.

Whitman’s generous sympathies would wither in our frost. How dare such a creature of privilege – white, male, educated – presume to contain us? His faith in active humanity – in discoverers, settlers, builders, farmers – is embarrassing. He accepts where we require indignation; he holds faith where we require doubt.

Whitman is an outcast, but James is worse off. He has been brought as low as a dead thinker can be brought. We say he anticipated recent discoveries – “now that we know everything, we can admit he was right all along.” And this is safe to say, because he has no heirs. Our psychology is blithely built on the compulsive, thoughtless quantification that he travestied.

We shelve pragmatism beside hypocrisy. A judgment that can be changed is a judgment that was never held properly. The impulse of the genteel tradition is theocratic: it will have you only hot or cold, never lukewarm.

Santayana’s examples have aged badly. Aggressive enterprise has been outsourced; skyscrapers turned out to be a gimmick, not half so efficient as the anomie of the exurban office park; the colonial mansion was not reproduced, but renovated.

More importantly, women made their own claim on the future: not just assuming male roles, but dignifying female ones. Gender is the worm in the apple of Santayana’s thought. Even for his period he is obtuse about it.

The American intellect is shy and feminine; it paints nature in water-colours; whereas the sharp masculine eye sees the world as a moving-picture – rapid, dramatic, vulgar, to be glanced at and used merely as a sign of what is going to happen next.

Santayana underrated women – women as people, and women as a subject. He observes a divide down the middle of humanity, and assumes that one side mirrors the other: one left, one right; one weak, one strong; one shy, one brash; one sentimental, one enterprising.

(In The Sense of Beauty, for example, while investigating the mutuality of sex and aesthetics, he infers that, because women are the most interesting thing in the world to men, men must be the most interesting thing in the world to women; whereas [aesthetically speaking] women are the most interesting thing in the world to men and women both.)

When Santayana made this metaphor – the genteel tradition is female, modernism is male – he corrupted his view of one dilemma with the quality of caricature that spoiled his view of the other. Thus he sketches both the genteel tradition and modernism (as he names its opposite) clownishly, in greasepaint. If the genteel tradition is feminine, retiring, domestic, careful, then the opposite must be masculine, daring, upthrusting, public. On these terms there is only one complete escapee from the genteel tradition in American letters: Ayn Rand. Ask a silly question, get a silly answer; posit the genteel tradition in Santayana’s playground terms and you get Objectivism.

Every form of modernism is tantamount to testosterism. It is the one thing every species of modernism had in common, the weakness they all shared; so when the thing happened that no one expected, they were all susceptible to it, and the genus went extinct.

(I cannot say how far Santayana himself is to blame; but even if others made the same mistake, it is still the same mistake, and bears the same analysis.)

The kind of thinking that modernism valued was the kind of thinking that felt most like work: laborious, therefore masculine, straightforward without the effeminate detours of inspiration or insight, muscular and tense, measurable in foot-pounds and horsepower.

So what happened? This is hard to see because Santayana’s future is our past. It belongs to the middle distance; we cannot see it for our own shadow.

What no one expected was the computer. Suddenly, there appeared the machine that proves there is no connection between how hard thinking feels and what it is worth. The labor theory of value does not apply. Thinking feels hardest when it is most trivial. Calculation is effortful, but not difficult – even a computer can do it.

Somehow we still admire feats of memorization and calculation. What computers prove is that these feats are dead ends. Mental mathematics, total recall, musical prodigality, are not signs of a powerful mind, but of a mind that has plenty of room because nothing else is going on inside it.

In this way the computer refutes modernism. Consider painting. Look across, from the first half of the twenty-first century, to the first half of the twentieth. What do we see there? We see nothing worth doing. There are no more Pointillists, Impressionists, Cubists, because Photoshop trivializes them. There is no more Abstract Expressionism, no more Suprematism, because the possibilities of these schools are exhausted by the screensaver.

“No,” I hear, “the computer no more refutes abstraction than the camera refutes representation.” But a painting is different from a photograph: one cannot see a photograph as a painting that could have been made, but wasn’t. But a work of modernism is always something that could have been generated by computer, but happened to be made by a human being.

(This definition applies to more than painting – Serialism, Brutalism, Oulipo – but less than everything that has been called modernist. I draw the line here.)

If we mute the caricature – if we correct for Santayana’s error – what is left then? The idea of a genteel tradition will stand. But what of the accompanying diagnosis? Do we have that divided mind? Certainly we have inherited the division as Santayana made it, and as others elaborated it: we find ourselves obscurely constrained to destroy the genteel – even under other names, like pretentious or inauthentic – wherever we encounter it, like the tribe of Amalek.

But the things the genteel tradition wants and provides are good in themselves. There is sufficiency and even bounty in it. It preserves what might be lost, incubates what might be stillborn. But for the sake of these good things the genteel tradition sacrifices things that may be better. It smothers everything it touches with an anxious sobriety: it would leave us in marmoreal disgust before it let us enjoy too meltingly. This I oppose. I side with ecstasy, rhapsody, and multitude, if only from a distance.