And not, one should note, because of their political system either, from which the Western democracies draw much of their inspiration. The Greek political system was an outgrowth of Greek culture, with its sophisticated sense of self, not the other way around. Societies cannot create a political system from the top down (as opposed to one that grows organically) any more than they can create a truly living language from the top down, as shown with Esperanto and Volapük, languages that linguists constructed but that failed to take hold. Languages are plastic and evolutionary, but they are never random. Neither are the cultures to which they give rise.
This is not a trivial issue. As bilingual speakers know, one thinks slightly differently, depending on the language one is using, not simply in matters of vocabulary, but in sentence structure, even conceptualization of both concrete and abstract ideas. “Evening” or “twilight,” for instance, evokes one image in English (the fading of the light), while the German “Abendrot” conjures up something richer, more colorful, even poignant; the English “gloaming” probably comes closest. Richard Strauss chose “Im Abendrot,” based on the poem by Eichendorff, as one of his ineffable Four Last Songs, and a more affecting evocation of day turning to night has never been written.
The situation becomes even more complex when the two languages are not members of the same family of tongues. Obviously, it is possible to switch smoothly between, say, English and Chinese, but that does not mean it is easy, and much imagery will inevitably be lost in translation. No matter how much or how often the egalitarian Left tries to argue in favor of its one-size-fits-all ideology, empirical evidence and experience tell us that this is simply wishful thinking, advanced for a political purpose. Not all languages or cultures are the same; nor do they have the same value. But despite the plain evidence of your senses, the Left has ways of making you toe the line.
“Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him,” ventured the Nobel Prize–winning author Saul Bellow in 1988, thus setting off a firestorm of feigned outrage among the bienpensant readers of the New Yorker—an early violation of the repressive strictures we have come to know as political correctness.
“The scandal is entirely journalistic in origin,” Bellow later explained in a 1994 piece for the New York Times, defending himself. “Always foolishly trying to explain and edify all comers, I was speaking of the distinction between literate and preliterate societies. For I was once an anthropology student, you see. . . . My critics, many of whom could not locate Papua New Guinea on the map, want to convict me of contempt for multiculturalism and defamation of the third world. I am an elderly white male—a Jew, to boot. Ideal for their purposes.”
Bellow concluded with this remarkably prescient passage:
Righteousness and rage threaten the independence of our souls. Rage is now brilliantly prestigious. Rage is distinguished, it is a patrician passion. The rage of rappers and rioters takes as its premise the majority’s admission of guilt for past and present injustices, and counts on the admiration of the repressed for the emotional power of the uninhibited and “justly” angry. Rage can also be manipulative; it can be an instrument of censorship and despotism. As a one-time anthropologist, I know a taboo when I see one. Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists, or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated.
In other words, celebration of diversity stops where any possible cultural superiority or inferiority might begin. But, to use leftist cant, isn’t diversity our strength? And if so, where did that diversity begin?
Seen in this light, the incident in the Garden takes on a new meaning: Eve is not the cause of the Fall of Man, but its enabler. The Serpent’s Temptation of Eve is not only the first great satanic crime—although, to be sure, Adam and Eve had free will before the First Mother encountered the Snake—it is also the liberating act, the felix culpa, or happy fault that freed Man to fulfill his destiny as something other than God’s humble, obedient servant. As St. Augustine wrote in the Enchiridion, “For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.”
Paradise may have been lost, but what was gained may have been something far more valuable, something, when you stop to think about it, that more closely comports with God’s stated plan for humanity: creatures endowed with free will and thus potentially superior to the angels. Eve’s first bite of the apple is not, then, simply Original Sin—it is the inciting incident of mankind’s own drama. Something was lost, to be sure, but something was gained as well, implanted in our breasts from the beginning: a sense of where we are going. Evil, sin, change, flux, drama, and death itself are the means to get there.
As poets and authors have known since the time of the ancient Greeks, a world without conflict cannot exist. And, by our lights, accustomed to this world, if it did, it would be a very dull place indeed. For here, outside the Garden, without God available for direct consultation, it is only in the clash of conflicting ideas that truth—furtively, hesitantly—emerges, however unwelcome that truth might ultimately be. Oedipus’s search for his father’s killer first drives him into the arms of his mother and later, when the truth is revealed, to his own self-blinding and exile.
So the modern American tendency to regard peace as man’s natural state and war as its aberration has it exactly backward. We intuit this about man’s nature, and history validates this insight recurrently and bloodily. To be human is to be Fallen. But to be satanic—that is to say, to accept uncritically the legitimacy of Critical Theory’s anti-human argument—is to have no chance at redemption at all. For how can nihilism be redemptive?
A world at peace, absent the arrival of the Second Coming, would surely be a very dull and unproductive place, perhaps possible only through a universal tyranny. While no one wishes war, sometimes war must come; war is an inevitability, and peace is the outcome of its successful, if temporary, sorting-out. Hobbes was right, although he failed to allow for man’s nature, divine as well as human. Though red in tooth and claw, nature occasionally calls for, and sometimes obtains, a temporary state of balance, out of which the world promptly spins and begins the cycle again. This is not pessimism, this is realism. Free, we differ, argue, fight, and sometimes kill. Enforced peace ends in slavery and the grave—as one of the world’s major religions promises and, in its Dar al-Islam (house of Islam), tries to practice. Trying, testing, questioning, pushing: These are man’s true natural attributes, and trouble, his natural state.
A world without conflict, or post-conflict, however, is exactly what various all-encompassing political systems have promised. But the path to this utopia has been paved with much misery and death. In our time, the main retailer of such a myth has been socialism, in two forms: German National Socialism and Soviet Marxism—especially the latter.
The two prime movers of the Frankfurt School, Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács, sought to overturn the existing order—first the moral order and then the political order—like the the nineteenth-century radicals that they were. (Except for their outsized influence, there is nothing “modern” about either thinker.) More akin to anarchists such as Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Luigi Lucheni (who assassinated the Empress Elisabeth of Austria in 1898), Gramsci and Lukács had no interest in any compromise that could be the result of the Hegelian formula of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. For them, there were only winners and losers—and in this, we must grudgingly admit they were right. To compromise is to negate the validity of one’s own position and succumb to the temptation to see reason at work, when the true radical knows that reason is only a tool, put to base uses. In the ur-Kampf, both sides seek a lost Paradise, and it is clear from both cultural and religious tradition whose side each is on. The forces of good seek a kind of Edenic restoration, with