SLSL Burgess (reading victorians) etc.

[William Zantzinger]

The guides, as always, lie among the writers and
artists. And Americans ought to note that, however
things may seem to be falling apart, art and the human
scholarship are flourishing here, as they are not, for
instance, in England. I'm not suggesting that Bellow,
Mailer, Roth and the rest have the task of finding a
solution to the American mess, but they can at least
clarify its nature  and show how it relates to the
human condition in general. Literature, that most
directly human of the arts, often reacts magnificently
to an ambiance or unease or apparent breakdown. The
Elizabethans, to whose era we look back as to an
irrecoverable Golden Age, were far more conscious than
modern Americans of the chaos and corruption and
incompetence of the state. Shakespeare's period was
one of poverty, unemployment, ghastly inflation,
violence in the streets. Twenty-six years after his
death there was a bloody civil war, followed by a
dictatorship of religious fanatics, followed by a calm
respite in which the seeds of a revolution were sown.
England survived, America will survive. 
	I'm not suggesting that America sit aback and wait
for a transient period of mistrust and despair to
resolve itself, like a disease, through the
unconscious heeling nature that lie deep in organic
nature. Man, as Thornton Wilder showed in The Skin Of
Our Teeth, always comes through-though sometimes only
just. Americas living here and now have a right to an
improvement in the quality of their lives, and they
themselves, not the remote governors, must do
something about it. It is not right that man and women
should fear to go onto the streets at night, and that
they should sometimes fear the police as much as the
criminals, both of who sometimes look like mirror
images of each other. I have has too much evidence, in
my years in New Jersey, of the police behaving like
the "fascist pigs" of the revolutionary press. There
are too many guns about, and the disarming of the
police should be a natural aspect of the disarming of
the entire citizenry. 
	American politics, at both the state and the Federal
level, is too much concerned with the protection of
large fortunes, America being the only example in
history of a genuine timocracy. The wealth
qualification for the aspiring politician is taken for
granted; a government system dedicated to the
promotion of personal wealth in a few selected areas
will never act for the public good. The time has come,
nevertheless, for citizens to demand, from their
government, a measure of socialization-the provision
of amenities for the many, of which adequate state
pensions and sickness benefits, as well as
nationalized transport, should be priorities. 
	As for those remoter solutions to the American
nightmare-only an aspect, after all, of the human
nightmare-an Englishman must be diffident about
suggesting that America made her biggest mistake in
becoming America-meaning a revolutionary republic
based on a romantic view of human nature. To reject a
limited monarchy in favor of an absolute one (which
is, after all, what the American presidency is) argues
a trust in the disinterestedness of an elected rule
which is, of course, no more than a reflection of
belief in the innate goodness of man-so long as he
happens to me American man. The American Constitution
is out of date. Republics tend to corruption. Canada
and Australia have their own problems, but they are
happier countries than America. 
	The angst about America coming apart at the seams,
which apparently is shared by 50 percent of the entire
American population, is something to rejoice about. A
sense of sin is always admirable, though it must not
be allowed to become neurotic. If electric systems
break down and gadgets disintegrate, it doesn't matter
much. There is always wine to be drunk by candlelight,
uniced. If America's position as a world power
collapses, and the union dissolves into independent
states, there I still the life of the family or the
individual to be lived. England has survived here own
dissolution as an imperial power, and Englishmen seem
to be happy enough. But I ask the reader to note that
I, an Englishman, no longer live in England…I come to
America as a country more stimulating than depressing.
The future of mankind is being worked out there on a
scale typically American-vast, dramatic, almost
apocalyptic. I brave the brutality and the guilt in
order to be in on the scene. I shall be back. 
							(1971) 

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Fragmentary the British mind might be, but in those
days it was doing a great deal of work in a very
un-English way, building up so many and such mast
theories on such narrow foundations as to shock the
conservative, and delight the frivolous. The atomic
theory; the correlation and conservation of energy;
the mechanical theory of the universe; the kinetic
theory of gases, and Darwin's Law of Natural
Selection, were examples of what a young man had to
take on trust. Neither he nor anyone knew enough to
verify them…Henry Adams was a Darwinist because it was
easier than not, for his ignorance exceeded belief,
and one must know something inorder to contradict even
such triflers as Tyndall and Huxley. 
	By rights he should have been a Marxist, but some
narrow trait of the New England nature seemed to
blight socialism, and he tried in vain to make himself
a convert. 

Natural Selection led back…


http://www.bartleby.com/159/15.html


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The Future of Man, de Chardin (1959) 
 

Not much more than a hundred years ago Man learned to
his astonishment that there was an origin of animal
species, a genesis in which he himself was
involved….we [are] rooted in the fauna and soil of the
planet-evolving Man in the forefront of the animals. 



That is why 'Darwinism', as it was then called,
however naive its beginnings, came at exactly the
right moment to create the cosmological atmosphere of
which the great technicosocial advance of the last
century stood in need if it was to believe
passionately in what it was doing. Rudimentary though
it was, Darwinism afforded a scientific justification
of faith in progress.

But today, by a development natural to itself, the
movement has come to look like a receding tide. For
all his discoveries and inventions, twentieth century
man is a sad creature. How shall we account for his
current dejected state except basically by the fact
that, following that exalted vision of species and
growth, he is now confronted by an accumulation of
evidence pointing to the reverse-the species is doomed
to extinction? The extinction of the species…

It is difficult to imagine what form the ending of the
world will take. A sidereal disaster correspond nearly
enough to our individual deaths. But this would entail
the ending of the Earth rather than of the cosmos, and
it is the cosmos itself that must disappear. 


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