GRGR 31 Shit'n'Shinola

[jbor]

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>From: Terrance <Lycidas at worldnet.att.net>
>

>  Since these qualities of simplification and
>         certainty were themselves illiberal, the enlargement
> of
>         freedom risked producing a contraction of freedom.
> "Some
>         paradox of our natures," Trilling wrote, "leads us,
> when once
>         we have made our fellow men the objects of our
> enlightened
>         interest, to go on to make them the objects of our
> pity, then
>         of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion."
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/072900trilling-profile.html


And you accuse me of selective quotation! Other excerpts:

snip
> In fact, in the 1940's, when Trilling first became a prominent intellectual
> as an English professor at Columbia University, the most fashionable
> approach to literature was known as the New Criticism. It boasted an
> abstract, furiously modern vision: each literary work could be analyzed
> without reference to the author, his life or time. Criticism was to become
> a science. Trilling insisted on just the opposite. Criticism, like
> literature, had to engage with the full mess of human life, most notably
> the customs and beliefs we call "politics."

snip
> Mr. Rodden's anthology reminds a reader that Trilling was complicated
> enough to be hailed by such disparate figures as Edmund Wilson and Irving
> Kristol. A second, more significant, new anthology, "The Moral Obligation
> to Be Intelligent," edited by Leon Wieseltier, shows just how much is at
> stake. It is the most capacious and pungent single volume of Trilling's
> work ever published, with writings spanning his entire career: classic
> essays on the Kinsey Report, on Wordsworth, on Jane Austen and on Kipling.
> It also includes Trilling's magisterial discussion of Henry James's novel
> "The Princess Casamassima."
>
> What gives these pieces enduring importance is not Trilling's judgment that
> the Kinsey Report fetishizes science or that Kipling gave nationalism a bad
> name. The essays' subjects really were occasions for Trilling to brood on
> much larger themes that, far from being dated or quaint, have lost none of
> their urgency.
>
> "The Liberal Imagination," for example, was partly a critical response to
> the Stalinism that tinged the era's liberalism. But in the book's
> influential preface Trilling uncovered deeper tensions within liberalism
> itself. One of the great achievements of modern times, he suggested, was
> the liberal conception of humanity: the view that there were universal and
> inalienable human rights, and that the powers of reason could both honor
> those rights and eradicate the world's evils.
>
> The problem, Trilling went on, was that liberalism, in its search for
> freedom and justice, had to exert power; it required legislation and
> organization. Stalinism was an extreme oversimplification of liberalism,
> one in which the social engineering was ruthless. But even democratic
> liberalism, Trilling believed, exhibited a simplified view of the world and
> an unwavering conviction about how the world might be regulated. Since
> these qualities of simplification and certainty were themselves illiberal,
> the enlargement of freedom risked producing a contraction of freedom. "Some
> paradox of our natures," Trilling wrote, "leads us, when once we have made
> our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make
> them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion."
>
> The impact on the mind could be even more baleful. The ambition of
> rationally reforming society tended to minimize the importance of the inner
> life, shrinking the conception of the mind. All dark desires, untamable
> impulses, ambivalent feelings and contradictory thoughts would then be
> considered failures of the outside world, imperfections in the social order
> that could be controlled or legislated away. In this way, liberalism risked
> evolving into doctrinaire puritanism -- or worse.
>
> Such was liberalism's great temptation, in Trilling's view (a view he
> shared with Isaiah Berlin). "Life presses us so hard," he wrote, "time is
> so short, the suffering of the world is so huge, simple, unendurable --
> anything that complicates our moral fervor in dealing with reality as we
> immediately see it and wish to drive headlong upon it must be regarded with
> some impatience." And while liberalism was, in its adversary position
> toward the world, a transforming force, it was also, in its adversary
> position toward the mind, a limiting force.
>
> This is where literature came in. Trilling suggested that the variousness
> of literature could help shape the liberal imagination, that it could
> temper impatient liberal objectives with reminders of the complexities of
> the inner life and encourage a "moral realism" that could soften the
> demands of "moral righteousness." Literature would not serve the adversary
> culture; it would humanize it.
>
> Because of this extended skepticism about liberalism, Trilling was often
> attacked by liberals for being a conservative and attacked by conservatives
> for not being sufficiently forthright. During the 1960's, for example, he
> grimly but cautiously criticized the counterculture for turning
> liberalism's adversary position into sweeping orthodoxies. His arguments
> for rejecting the simple formulations of radical liberalism did indeed have
> conservative implications, emphasizing limits more than possibilities. But

snip
> Trilling would also have objected to the conservative impulse to simplify
> the relationships he perceived. Who in the midst of such complexity could
> afford the certainty of self-righteousness, let alone a declaration of
> allegiance? Complexity was Trilling's prescription for all political
> positions; ambiguity was the solution. Moral realism is a balancing act.

snip
> his portrait of the American democratic mind, imperially pious one minute,
> queasily unsteady the next, illiberally making demands in the name of
> virtue and liberally tolerating virtue's ambiguities, celebrating reason
> while distrusting its demands -- this mind remains as current now as it was
then.