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The Sublime and the Ridiculous from Dr. Berlinski the Elder
Dr. David Berlinski has a new book out “Human Nature.” It is a series of interesting essays on what might be called the intellectual geography of our time. He leads off with an essay that I consider sublime. It is a discussion of the causes of WWI. More importantly, it is a criticism of the standard banal take on WWI that satisfies so many but not Dr. Berlinski (nor I). It would be wrong to place the entire text of the piece here on my post (however tempting that is). I have left the Amazon link and there is an inexpensive Kindle version you can read on your phone if necessary (I did). Instead, I will take a few quotes that I find very interesting.
The First World War was a catastrophe for European civilization because it destroyed its moral structure. The war demonstrated to European statesmen and their military leaders that they had misjudged, and misjudged profoundly, the ground over which they were walking. They had imagined that their system was so conceived as to be continuous in its fundamental aspect and that a general European war among all of the great powers would be like a local European war among some of them. They were mistaken.
…None of the Great Powers were compelled to go to war. They could have walked away. If these considerations are admitted, the causal chain that was designed to explain the outbreak of war is less a chain than a series of unconnected links. None of them are properly causes because each could have occurred without effect, depending on how they were described or what the various actors believed.
…Richardson persuaded several generations of political scientists that his was a scientific attitude toward war. The research that has resulted has the very great merit of having occupied many political scientists in an undertaking that is as innocent as it is irrelevant. Nothing has been discovered about the onset and seriousness of war that was previously hidden from common sense.
Men go to war when they think that they can get away with murder.
Berlinski gives detailed arguments to back up his claims. Even employing his skills as a professional mathematician. However, I have chosen these particular quotes not just to tantalize you into reading his whole book but to present a little thought of my own. If you take the four sentences in bold out of context reading them one after another a hypothesis comes to my mind.
What if WWI didn’t destroy the moral structure of European civilization but rather the moral structure had already been destroyed not by war but by an intellectual erosion of values from a new nihilism? This new nihilism coming into vogue in the late 19th century and early 20th century undermined not only religious values but all secular ethical values also. Whether it was the elegant Positivists and their symbolic logical conclusion that the concepts of morality had no objective meaning (they were only emotion-charged words) or it was the wildly romantic Nietzsche, convinced that Judeo-Christian morality itself was the cause (not the cure) for societies problems or still the pretentious claims of the new sciences Darwinism, Marxism, Freudianism, Jungianism,etc., by 1914 the intellectual underpinnings of European civilization’s moral structure had been torn to shreds. Thus the minds & consciences of the European statesmen and military leaders had been anesthetized to paralysis. They could have walked away if their brains and their souls had been functioning as normal. My hypothesis is that they were already neutralized by the new nihilism into accepting what should have been unacceptable.
Now Dr. Berlinski demonstrates his range and switches gears. From the sublime to the ridiculous. He is after a very big fish. A fish as big as Moby Dick but Dr. Berlinski is no Ahab. Ahab had no sense of humor. In this wildly sarcastic piece, he deconstructs a prime American Deconstructionist, Stanley Fish. Here are a few quotes.
…In reading Fish, skepticism starts early and it never flags. If literal meanings go in one essay, transcendent truths disappear in another. Whatever they are, these truths “would not speak to any particular condition or be identified with any historical production, or be formulated in terms of any ethnic, racial, economic, or class traditions.” Lacking these identifying caste marks, they would be humanely (but not divinely) inaccessible. Yet if there are no transcendent truths, there are nevertheless transcendent statements— those that fail to mention history, class, race, and gender, and of these, there are many.
…“There is no such thing as literal meaning,” he buoyantly affirms, “a meaning that because it is prior to interpretation can serve as a constraint on interpretation.”
…Might Fish have been a seal in another time or place? Under what other circumstances? It is again a contingent fact that cats do not have pink fur and lack the capacity to play the oboe, but not a contingent fact that cats are mammals rather than reptiles or amphibians. It is a part of the essence of literary criticism that it is not dentistry. Whatever a critic’s position on essentialism, and the issue is yet vexed and has long been vexed, the distinctions embodied by these commonly made and intuitively plausible judgments need either to be enforced, or, if rejected, explained convincingly as artifacts. This Fish does not do.
…Expatiating on this theme, Fish remarks that “it is no longer taken for granted,” and surely not taken for granted by him, that “molecules and quarks come first,” in the scheme of things, “and scientists’ models of molecules and quarks come second.” These theses taken literally, it follows that so far as sociologists of science are concerned, a speech act such as “Arise, Dumbo” could bring an elephant into being; and that molecules, and so the materials they compose, did not exist before the molecular theory of matter, the Cathedral at Chartres thus acquiring, on Fish’s account, its molecular structure eight hundred years after its construction. This is not a conclusion that inspires confidence.
…The requirement that words be used assertively means that uttering a specific form of words on a particular occasion is never sufficient for the charge of speech crime. The argument just given implies that uttering a specific form of words on a particular occasion is never necessary for speech crime either. And if uttering a specific form of words is neither necessary nor sufficient for speech crime, it is hard to see that any independent content remains to the concept.
…Had Stanley Fish really been rejected for some senior position in favor of a less-qualified woman or black, he would not have yielded gracefully in the name of remedial affirmative action. Strong illness, strong remedy? Not a bit of it. He would have been outraged.
I have left out some of the more pungent harpoons with which Dr. Berlinski skewers the great fish. You must read the book to enjoy these. Not to be a spoiler of some really good sarcastic wit, I would come back to my own theme. I propose that it was nihilism that undermined European Civilization before WWI. The new big fish represents more than just a modern nihilistic triumph of the inane. However absurd, we should realize just how dangerous such ideas are if they go unchecked. Luckily we have Dr. Berlinski to do the checking.
Enjoy the book.
Published in General
Thelonious,
OK, OK, so dadaism had its moments. I think we agree more than we disagree. Actually, Dr. Berlinski goes after the causal chain really well. Read his book. I’m using a possible alternate historical scenario to make my point. I believe there was a lapse in reasonable moral thought with a nihilistic amoralism being lionized by the intelligentsia. I really haven’t proved this in anything like a definitive way. However, I think it is a thought worth considering. Right now we are facing the “facts don’t matter, only the narrative matters” crowd and they can’t see the incredible harm they do. We need to point out the dangers of their new “stupidisms”.
Regards,
Jim
I’ll put his book on my list. Thanks.
Probably more than the new key nihilism, but it gave us. the Soviet Communists, the decay and decline of Great Britain and France, WWII and the Cold War. Not a bad tally for mostly stupidity. And the destruction continues.
And then invade Mexico, proving your prediction in my living room correct.
I think it is a horrible mis-perception to state that the Brits, French, Italians and Americans, felt any guilt at all.
The Germans were decent enough to say “Uncle” in 1918, and there was no real reason why they were viewing themselves as winning or losing more or less than anyone else. It was simply the humane thing to do.
For that sense of decency, they were slammed by the Treaty of Versailles. This treaty forced the populace of Germany to pay the full costs of reparations for the war. (Which would have amounted to 80 billions of dollars in 1950’s money, and would not have been fully paid off until 1980 something.) The demand for reparation monies was perhaps the leading factor in how the German economy collapsed in the early 1920’s.
The stage that was set for the rise of Hitler had nothing to do with the Allies’ guilt. It had to do with the punishment exacted upon a nation that had been no different than the others. All were equally culpable for their ludicrous involvement in the willingness to fight a monstrous war over the assassination of a rather inconsequential nobleman. And at the end of each single year of the Great War, the winners were considered winners by the fact that the other side had moved back some four feet or so, hardly a considerable distance across the desolate landscape of the trenches.
I have held the theory for a long time now, that if bankers and defense contractors were given IOU’s instead of intense profits during the economic surge for some nations that wars manage to bring about, war would be ended in a heartbeat.
Weaponry and logistics had advanced significantly since the Crimean War, but tactics had not. The gap was significant. They weren’t learning the weapons so much as they were learning how to deal with them.
The Vardar Offensive on the Macedonian Front led to the collapse of the Bulgarian Army in late September 1918. The Bulgarians asked the Allies for an armistice. That severed the rail link between Germany and Turkey. The Allies split their forces, with the French and the Serbs pushing north to the Danube and the British closing in on Constantinople. The Austrians had no reserves. The Turks had none either. Turkey asked for an armistice, followed by Austria and Hungary. That left Germany with neither the troops nor the time to mount a second defensive line when the western one was already collapsing.
Does the statement “there is no such thing as a literal meaning” have a literal meaning? Asking for a semanticist friend.
I have to disagree a bit here. Some of this comes from other sources than the usual Barbara Tuchman school. France loaned huge sums to both Russia and Serbia, which they used to buy arms, also from France. Secondly, Britain was at fault in the Boer War, which seems to have been a significant factor in Germany’s decision to build a “high seas fleet.” The British navy stopped and searched German ships that were supplying the Boers with weapons and supplies. When contraband was found it was seized. This is close to an act of war but Germany had no war fleet that could defend its merchant fleet.
There is no question that the Germans behaved disgracefully toward the Belgians but that was after hostilities began. Britain had good cause to fear a German occupation of Belgium and the coast of what they called “The German Sea.” I would argue that France was not innocent in the steps toward war.
And professional armies.
One factor that should not be ignored when considering the outcome of the war and the psychology of its aftermath: the Allied (British) blockade.
There’s a discussion of this in the memoirs of the Austrian submarine commander Georg von Trapp, best known as The Captain in ‘The Sound of Music.’ I reviewed the book and commented on the blockade, here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/43171.html
Pretty good except for that part. The most disgraceful part of Germany’s behavior towards Belgium was being in Belgium. The Belgians’ only crime was being in the way. Belgium didn’t walk up to Germany in a bar and make fun of the way Germany’s girlfriend was dressed. The Schlieffen Plan said go through Belgium, so they went through Belgium.
Ah, we now delve into the world of relativity. Your statement with “a literal meaning” is what it is only for you. As once the words fly out of your mouth, they are now heard by someone else and now almost always have a different meaning than the one intended. (Or at least a slightly different meaning.)
Perhaps absolutes like “the sun rises in the east and sets in the west” have a literal meaning. Outside of those physically entrenched matters, most things are less literal than the statement maker would believe.
James,
Well done. Just re-read Turgenev’s Father and Sons. In many ways Barozov was prescient as was Turgenev in exploring nihilisms seductive appeal in Russia, to the corruption left in wake of Vienna, 1848, the Crimean War, 19th century France and its restorations, republics, and defeat summarily in 1870, Germany’s yearning for order and war traps to acquire possessions, Britain’s presumptions and weariness with leadership. European institutions were failing long before WWI. They were a casino of intrique and deception.
One autocrat did rethink the war and attempted to open negotiations to end it in early 1917. Franz Joseph died in 1916. His successor Emperor Charles made initial, secret proposals to the French in early 1917 via his brother-in-law Prince Sixtus. Sixtus was a Bourbon who had been fighting with the Belgians. This was perhaps a last gasp example of dynastic diplomacy and was almost certainly doomed from the start. But it was an independent bid to the Entente initiated by the Emperor of Austria-Hungary and made almost a year and a half before the war finally ended. When Imperial Germany found out about this it quickly “brought” Charles into line.
Perci,
Without question, the weaponry and logistics had advanced so rapidly that tactics even strategy were left behind. Again, the first year of the war should have been demonstration enough that they weren’t in Kansas anymore. I’m not expecting prescience but rational analysis given hard facts from immediate experience.
Regards,
Jim
Perci,
I think you have hit on the core of the absurdity that Dr. Berlinski is wryly working on. Remember, Fish is no trivial lightweight. He is a big fish and a strong voice for the new American Deconstructionist gang. This is why I enjoyed so much Dr. Berlinski pulling his chain.
Regards,
Jim