False prescriptions
Christopher Booker
Enemies of Society Paul Johnson (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £5.95) This book is bound to arouse considerable expectation in many, people's minds. The question to which it is addressed could scarcely be more important or fascinating: why, at the end of the twentieth century, does our civilisation appear to have entered on a crisis of unprecedented magnitude?
Almost any serious attempt to discuss this question should be widely welcomed. And in recent years Paul Johnson's fiery and trenchant journalism has shown him to be the sort of author who might come up with some thoughtful and unexpected answers.
Certainly any analysis which is to make sense of our present crisis must go very wide and very deep, both into human nature and into history. And Johnson promises well by plunging us at once as far back as he could possibly go, to discern in the archaic civilisations of the post-Neolithic world all those factors which seemed to preserve them in a kind of timeless amber of ritualised stagnancy. What intrigues Johnson, as it has intrigued many before him (Toynbee, Wells, Spengler etc) is — what makes a civilisation dynamic, and what brings about its eventual collapse?
He begins by examining the rise and fall of what he sees as the first truly dynamic civilisation, that of Greece and Rome. Why was it dynamic? Because it developed the spirit of free inquiry, and an enterprising middle class. Why did it collapse? Because in the end, the institution of slavery, by providing cheap labour, was a disincentive to true technological progress, so that when Rome's resources were stretched by the rising tide of barbarism, it could only defend itself by ever higher taxation, ever greater bureaucracy. Freedom was thus stifled, the urban middle class destroyed. End of a civilisation. QED.
The second great dynamic adventure was given its thrust by the new Christian notion of time as linear, directed towards a distant goal. Johnson traces its emergence through the Middle Ages and the Rennaissance to what he calls the point of 'final take-off', the Industrial Revolution (which happened in Britain simply because we had the greatest social freedom, and a strong, propertybased middle class). In the past two centuries, culminating in the great boom of the twenty years after Second World War, we seemed to have arrived at 'the permanent miracle' — happy, free, little materialists on an ever-rising growth curve. Then out of the blue the whole adventure came to a crashing halt. We were plunged into what Johnson rather melodramatically describes as 'the great depression of the 1970s' — 'which must be the starting point for any investigation of the ills of our civilisation'.
What are those ills? Johnson immediately takes the steam out of any visions of apocalypse which might be rising in the reader's mind by an astonishing chapter called 'Ecological Panic', in which he blithely dismisses any notion whatever that our civilisation might be threatened by such horrors as pollution, over-population, the exhaustion of natural resources, or the H-bomb. Mere fantasies! Any such fears are pure hysteria, usually springing from a naive anti-capitalism.
So what are our real worries? Well, for a start, and somewhat bathetically, the imprecise use of language. He has a lot of simple fun with the suffocating weight of academic and bureaucratic jargon. Then the collapse of old-fashioned institutional Christianity, which has left a void which is filled with pseudo-religions like Communism. There is the collapse of old-style philosophy (the pursuit of wisdom) into more vacuous word-spinning (Russell, Wittgenstein). There is the collapse of the great tradition of honest scientific inquiry, into the modern woolly pseudo-sciences (Freudianism, Marxism, sociology, Marcuse). There is the collapse of the universities into hotbeds of 'aggro-Fascist' students. There is the rise of moral relativism (Tillich, Ivan Illich, Edmund Leach's 'beware of moral principles'). There is inflation, destroying middle-class differentials (a 'disaster' among other things for 'theatre, music, and the arts'). There is the blurring in psychology and literature of the line between sanity and madness (Laing). There is the exhaustion and disintegration of the arts (blank canvases, Schoenberg, random noise). There is the sanctification of violence (Sartre), and finally, the explosion of unreasoning hatred of the white among blacks (Fanon) and the Third World (reducing the United Nations to 'the World Theatre of the Absurd').
Perhaps the first thing which strikes one
about this catalogue is how incrediblY random it is. At no time does one feel that Johnson has taken any overall view. He has merely strung together a series of little journalistic essays on some of the themes which have after all preoccupied serious or non-so-serious thinkers for some years. Bet much more seriously there are simplY erPt even the beginnings of a synthetic analysis of where all these symptoms of cultural dis
integration might have sprung from. .
The triviality of Johnson's view summed up in his last chapter, 'A New Deuteronomy' as he calls it, in which he lists the 'ten new commandments' which Might bring us back on course. We must 'reassert our believe in moral absolutes'. What ntora absolutes? Whence should they be derived; Violence is wrong. I agree — but witY" Democracy is the least evil and most fte' tive form of government. Really? Why thee does it appear to be so fragile? We nitts: reassert 'the Rule of Law' and the itnP°'' tance of the individual. Unbelievably, th.e sixth Johnsonian commandment is 'there Is nothing morally unhealthy about the existence of a middle class'! Number nine ts. 'Trust science . . . our best hope for t"p future'; and finally `No consideration should deflect us from the pursuit and recognition of the truth'. If Johnson genuinely wishes to pursue the truth he will have to produce something a great deal more rigorous than this merdc anthology of attitudes and opinions, base,. on hasty research and riddled with mill.°n" inaccuracies (double-entry book-keePItib was first recorded in Genoa, not Venice' Teilhard de Chardin was a geologist, rit)t, botanist, the last great London smog was hal 1952 or 1963, not 1951, the Lisbon e; quake was in 1755, not 174-',' Oppenheimer's quotation am becorn''t death, the destroyer of worlds' WaS,,,,aii Alamagordo in 1945, not at the explon of the first H-bomb, etc etc). Above all, 'r he wishes to understand the roots of nut present crisis, he will have to travel a gre3ci deal deeper into the nature both of man an of our civilisation. You could argue (as I might) that the whole post-Renaissance adventure has lent Western man into increasing estrangerile7r, from his own nature, and from his place le nature; that we have therefore bec0te. increasingly trapped in our little materl°0f rationalistic prison; that this is the rootcs, our increasing sense of meaningiessue-.t, disintegration and despair; and thac, without a very drastic change of persPeas tive, we are heading for catastrophe. BLIt.,.s a true child of so many of the orthodony whose consequences he so furt°u„sch deplores, Johnson has ruled out anY. sr. at analysis. We are therefore inevitably le,"lly the end with nothing more than his piti'n,,s, scratched. together list of prescriPti°1,, which are not unlike a man on theritati",f just after it has hit theiceberg, saying thatri'y only the passengers would dress for dinner then the ship might some"' keep afloat.
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