CCF and the Boomers' Shakespeare

by Tony Papert - - June 12, 2023

Kent: I cannot conceive you.

Gloster: Sir, this young fellow's mother could: whereupon she grew round-wombed, and had indeed, sir, a son for her cradle ere she had a husband for her bed....

Lear

COMPASSION alike for the afflicted and for those they then victimize in their turn, urges us to discover: Why is it that no Baby Boomer* can read a poem? -- read, that is, except as farce: either like a nursery jingle, or with one or another crazy affectation? Nor read Shakespeare or Schiller, except as soap opera: Hamlet as an "adolescent crisis"; Portia as "pure goodness"; or William Tell without the crucial redemption scene of the last act.

While more intertwined causes come into play than I can indicate here, the Congress for Cultural Freedom deserves much of the blame. The first and earliest definition of art and high culture for every Boomer, whether PhD or grade-school dropout, came from some part of the CCF's artistic stable. It is not necessary to study Stravinsky or Schoenberg. (Almost no one does that, after all.) It should be almost self-evident that you need not to have read any of T.S. Eliot's poetry yourself, for instance, to absorb a precise impression of him or his equivalent, from the general cultural ambience.

To grant that much, however, only raises a second and more puzzling question. How is it that this first impression has perpetuated itself through so many decades, even among the most promising Boomer cases? What is it that has prevented these old greyheads, through the entirety of their lives to date, from ever being able to read Heine, Keats or Shelley, except through James Joyce's eyeglasses?

To begin to approximate the answer, step back a moment and remember some larger considerations. The commitment which is natural to every human being, is an effective commitment to truth and to the good, -- as two sides of one and the same thing, actually. Every man and woman is naturally a Platonist to that extent. And the artistic tradition of globally-extended European civilization is Platonic. The man or woman who is an artist, still more a great artist, has a greater commitment to truth and to the good, and greater power to make it effective.

But what do the spawn of the CCF say? Take the writers I was most familiar with as an adolescent, like T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. Go down the whole CCF list; take any of them, for all their many and real differences. With only the occasional odd exception which proves the rule, every one is a fanatic apostle of the dogma that effective commitment to truth and to the good is simply impossible! Every one, in some way, a crippled and perverted soul, pressing us to believe that such is the very essence of "art."

But what then becomes of Keats and Shelley, Mozart, Bach, any great artist? An insuperable gulf separates them from the Boomer.

Indeed, every Boomer understood long ago, that the conviction that this natural human commitment was impossible, was the "open sesame," without which no one could enter the Elysium of the "artists." It is the Masonic handshake of the "artsy-fartsy" subspecies of Boomer.

Prudence whispers: By all means adopt the best, the latest, and the most-approved opinions of whatever set you find yourself in. But do you really want to throw out that old, trusty magic ring once and for all? And to throw it out right now, just as you're reaching retirement age?

There are other and perhaps deeper issues. Start with the fact that the Boomer is sincerely unable, no matter how he struggles, to find any difference between the sort of Platonic commitment I reference, on the one hand, and his endorsement of an approved list of "positions" on the other. This blindness of his, is the same as that of his near-cousin, the religious fundamentalist of the type of a Pat Robertson follower or Mel Gibson groupie.

Now Lyndon LaRouche has referenced the brawls over his punctuation as an illustration of what is at stake here. Indeed, I have a slightly older relative, who told me of two passionate disagreements with LaRouche, virtually in the same breath, in a conversation some years ago. One was that LaRouche was involved in some of the same causes he was; he objected to that because "sometimes the messenger discredits the message." The other was punctuation: He told me that LaRouche had a right to say what he wished in a certain document he had read (or something of that sort), but then added angrily, "but it should be punctuated properly!"

Those who accuse LaRouche of violating rules of punctuation, have completely missed what the whole thing is about. They want to make everything completely logical. They are saying, "You must explain this in ways which don't offend my teacher." They have the Aristotelean contemplative view: they believe that the universe can be somehow understood by privately manipulating symbols according to certain self-evident rules. Ultimately, that you can work your will on the universe in that way, as if by Babylonian magic. Or, that reality is ultimately mathematical equations, so that the written language can only represent reality to the extent it becomes a kind of mathematical notation itself.

The truth is that art, no less than science, exists in the complex domain. It is irony in art, in the broad sense, which, like paradoxes in nature, forces the prepared mind to make the discovery of an idea it never had before, or never placed in that context before.

But the artists of the Congress for Cultural Freedom swing back and forth between the soulless mathematical formalism of an Arnold Schoenberg, and the wild, irrational emotionalism of the Abstract Impressionist sociopath-psychopaths like Jackson Pollack.

Bertrand Russell once wrote that, having been reared in the age of Victorian stolidities, he found it difficult to accept, as an old man, a world dominated by America.  Indeed, after the Civil War, the United States became the world's great economic power, and was growing apparently without limit. The British Empire was becoming a has-been relative to these others, who even spoke English! Are we going to have a world dominated by these hicks and rubes? How do we stop it?

Now, from his fight with A.N. Whitehead around Principia Mathematica, Russell knew that there do exist axiomatic paradoxes, and that they are linked to scientific discoveries. Now, how can we stop them? How? We must outlaw anything conceptual!

In this sense, the CCF goes back to Socrates' and Plato's opponents among the ancient Eleatics, the Sophists, and the Aristoteleans. To Paolo Sarpi of Venice, his puppet Galileo, and the latter's student, Thomas Hobbes. To Francis Bacon's campaign against Shakespeare, the Shakespeare who was actually rewritten to soap-opera in 18th-Century Britain, as the Boomers do today, only to be revived in Germany.

Thus, in this sense, the CCF is an old story, but, as Heine wrote, it is always new.

*Americans and West Europeans unfortunate enough to be born during roughly 1945-1964.