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Eminent 'Progressives'
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15969 |
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BOOK WORLD
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7 / 1989 |
2,847 Words |
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Michael D. Aeschliman
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INTELLECTUALS
Paul Johnson
New York: Harper and Row, 1989
385 pp., $22.50
Paul Johnson's Intellectuals is a companion volume to his Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties, arguably one of the most important books of the last quarter century. The scope and range of Modern Times are vast, its detail and specificity exact, its subject vitally important. In an era of scholarly proliferation and narrow focus ("knowing more and more about less and less"), on the one hand, and the terrible simplifications of glossy magazines and television, on the other, his book succeeded in digesting and deploying masses of the best modern scholarship in a highly readable and instructive overview of our tragic century. There is something Victorian in this achievement, something reminiscent of the attempts of John Henry Newman and Matthew Arnold "to see life steadily and see it whole," in the light of an overarching sense of normative value and truth. Of the decline of this conservative Victorian moral insistence and aim, G.M. Young wrote about how modern culture had become "impoverished for the benefit of the specialist, the technician, and the aesthete: we go out into the wasteland of experts, each knowing so much about so little that he can neither be contradicted nor is worth contradicting."
As Thomas B. Macaulay provided mid-nineteenth-century English readers with a great historical work that itself helped to shape the culture of its readers--their aims, values, and views--so too has Paul Johnson. He is a literary journalist and a historian, but also a moralist. But how different the story he tells from that of Macaulay! For Macaulay modern history was the story of progress, and his triumphant narration of it could not fail to flatter those liberal Victorians who saw themselves as its fruit and peak. But the world since 1914 has not been kind to this view. By 1931 Herbert Butterfield would write a far slimmer and more somber volume in critique of the whole mentality of modern progressive ideology, The Whig Interpretation of History. Yet even in the nineteenth century there was a historian who had seen how disastrous the faith in progress and in secular man's "liberation" from the past would prove to be. This was Jakob Burckhardt of Basel, a man very much of Johnson's cast of mind.
Yet the belief in secularization and human "liberation" from the classical-Christian moral legacy as the road to utopia grew immensely strong in Bruckhardt's nineteenth century and--oddly, given the evidence of our century--retains an extraordinary ideological appeal in our own. To this allure Johnson is immune: "The history of modern times," he wrote, "is in great part the history of how the vacuum caused by the decline of orthodox religion" has been filled. "Nietzsche rightly perceived," Johnson continued, "that the most likely candidate would be what he called the 'Will to Power.' …In place of religious belief, there would be [some kind of] secular ideology." Or, as the saintly sage G.K. Chesterton put it, the difficulty that ensues when people cease to believe in God is not that they then believe in nothing, but that they believe in anything.
'Learned foolishness'
Johnson's new book consists of a series of chapters on the lives of prominent modern secular intellectuals who were all particularly eager not only to dispose of the old
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