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The Pen's Sharp Sting
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11105 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1986 |
3,528 Words |
| Author
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Gregory Wolfe
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STANLEY AND THE WOMEN
Kingsley Amis
New York, Summit Books, 1984
256pp., $14.95
THE STORIES OF MURIEL SPARK
Muriel Spark
New York, E.P. Dutton, 1985
314 pp., $18.95
According to its most trenchant critics, modern liberalism has at least one Achillies' heel. That sore spot lies in the contradiction between the emphasis liberals place on "dialogue" and toleration of different points of view, and the formal and informal censorship practiced by these proponents of the "open society." Thus liberals would allow subversive revolutionaries and pornographers the right of "free speech," but regard a moment of silence at the beginning of the school day as an intolerable intrusion of religion into the public realm. Of course, ideology and sexual exploitation are inherently intolerant: the revolutionary and the pervert are bent on imposing their will on others, whether in the form of a lust for power, or just plain lust. Religion on the other hand, which cultivates the moral virtues of love and respect, is perceived by liberals as a threat to freedom.
The worst type of intolerance often involves denying the very existence of opposition. Thus the Bloomsbury Group, that quintessentially liberal movement of English intellectuals (whose members included Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey), had such a domination over the organs of public opinion in its day that it could nearly ruin the careers of such critics as Roy Campbell and Wyndham Lewis by simply pretending that they did not exist. Given this ability to be so selective in their perception of reality, it should be no surprise that liberals have studiously avoided one of the overwhelmingly obvious facts about twentieth-century literature, namely, that it is profoundly hostile to liberalism. This has occasionally been noted about the great poets and novelists such as Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Faulkner, and Frost. But it is even more strikingly characteristic of the twentieth century's leading satirists.
Satire is in many respects "conservative" by its very nature. The Satirist holds society and its mores up to scorn for deviating from moral and traditional norms. The satire need not, and often does not, directly uphold those norms; through the medium of irony, they are present by their conspicuous absence; in short, they are implied. That modern liberalism should be so consistently a target for satire should be nor surprise T.S. Eliot, who penned a clutch of dryly satirical poems early in his own career, has provided a definition of liberalism which indicates why it should be so fit a subject for satire.
[Liberalism] is something which tends to release energy rather than accumulate it, to relax, rather than to fortify. It is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point….By destroying rational social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents…by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom…Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanized or brutalized control which is a desperate remedy for its
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