The 45th, page 37
They reached the White House, but Julian was not finished. With Rachel trailing behind him, he kept talking as he moved at a quick, steady pace inside to the Oval Office. Leaning back in one of the sofas, he folded his arms and crossed his ankles. It was not clear to Rachel, who sat in the middle of the sofa opposite, that he even knew she was there. His eyes, burning with an intensity all their own, seemed to move in every direction at once, a movement that had the odd effect of making him seem almost immobile, his mind somehow detached from his senses which were left to do their own, separate, work.
“Something to look up to,” he repeated, the phrase which seemed so central to his thought. “We started out a republic, grateful for, and dependent on, our separation from all the evils, the political ambitions, of the old world, of Europe. We were that City on a Hill Reagan liked to talk about, a beacon of hope to the rest of the world. But even then it was nothing more than a hope of our own, a dream, a myth of our own devising. We were never content to live with what we had: there was a whole continent to conquer. We thought ourselves a republic and, like ancient Athens, wanted an empire: the continent we had to conquer - all of it, including Canada, which we tried to take in the War of 1812, Mexico in 1848, and then, at the end of the first century of our existence as a nation, Cuba, the Philippines, everything we could get our hands on in the Pacific. And then, with the wars of the 20th century, we became, along with the Soviet Union, the dominant power in the world; and now, today, responsible in our own minds for everything that happens. It is the nature of things, part of what we are, this need we have to expand our power, expand our reach, nothing ever enough, always this need for more. It is the way that we - most of us - forget our own mortality; the way we ignore the requirement, the specific excellence, of our own nature. It is too late; we can’t go back. Science, modern science, which we thought would make us free has forced us to live with its requirements, the need to keep finding something new. The only chance we have is to use it for something that will make us interested in something more serious, more lasting, than the comfort of our own self-indulgence. The reaction tonight….”
His eyes stopped their endless movement. For the first time, he looked across to where Rachel sat, pen in hand.
“You saw it, you heard it. I may be wrong, but it seemed to me this was, quite without knowing it, what they, and the country, have been waiting for. Now,” he said, as he got to his feet, “tell me what you know about our good friend, Louis. I know he’s dying. Is there anything you think I can do?”
Chapter Twenty Four
“I know this is ludicrous, a complete waste of time,” explained Julian, as he finished pulling up his tie. “But, you have to admit, it is really quite irresistible: talking to people who because of their positions think themselves every bit as intelligent as what those positions once used to mean.”
Ismael rattled the ice in his glass and sank lower in the green overstuffed chair. The president’s bedroom, everything clean, neat, and orderly, was so well-insulated that the bare whisper of a voice could be heard without misunderstanding wherever in it you happened to be.
“Did you read it - what I wrote?”
“What you wrote that night, a week ago, when you stayed up all night? Yes, of course I read it.”
“And…?”
Ismael shrugged his shoulders and took a long, slow drink. He put it down on the lamp table next to him, pursed his lips and for a moment did not say anything. It was not that he was reluctant to tell Julian the truth; it was not that he had found anything to criticize or that he thought needed correction.
“Have you thought that it might be better if instead of English you spoke in Greek?” he asked with a droll expression.
Lifting his eyebrows, Julian acknowledged the wisdom of the suggestion.
“My Greek isn’t that good.”
“Who would know?” replied Ismael, with a dry, searching glance, a reminder, as if one were needed, that what Julian had written, the speech he was going to give that evening, was as far from the interest, or the capacity, of his audience as it was possible to go.
“Which would be a good reason to do it - to teach them their ignorance.”
“Which, I take it, is the reason…?”
But the mention of Greek reminded Julian of something he thought he could use.
“Years ago - remember ‘Love Story,’ the movie about a college girl and college boy who fall in love. The boy is from a wealthy, established family; the girl from a working class home. His family opposes the marriage; the girl dies of cancer at the end. The people who were making the movie decided that it would be better if they first had a best selling book. Someone knew someone who taught at Yale. What does this have to do with anything?” he said, laughing at the look of helpless wonder on Ismael’s face. “Its what the author, Eric Segal, who taught classics once said, a remark no one would have noticed if he had not been thought to have created a story that nothing whatever to do with the classes he taught. I think I’ll use it tonight.”
Two dozen university presidents, with their wives and husbands, along with another two dozen assorted university provosts and deans - the American academic establishment - were seated together for a White House dinner at which, they had been told, the president would make a few remarks about the state of higher education. What they got instead was a lecture that invited them to forget everything they thought they knew. Julian began with an observation that put them at their ease, but should have put them on their guard.
“I am reminded for some reason of a dinner held here at the White House more than half a century ago for all the then living American recipients of the Nobel Prize. President Kennedy - and he wrote this in his own hand on the margin of his prepared remarks - said that ‘there hasn’t been this much intelligence gathered together at a dinner in the White House since Thomas Jefferson dined here alone.’”
There were bright smiles and cheerful laughter everywhere. Comparing their presence with a dinner for Nobel Prize winners guaranteed their confident strict attention.
“I used to believe, when I first read what President Kennedy had said, that with his usual charm and grace he was putting things in perspective, reminding an audience knowns for its intelligence that there had been men in public life who had some considerable intelligence of their own. He had in fact something deeper, a more profound lesson, in mind for those with wit enough to understand it: Instead of the progress we all believe has marked our history, there has instead been a significant decline. There were more than two dozen Nobel Prize recipients at that dinner, but for Kennedy, Jefferson was as good - no, better - than all of them combined. Kennedy knew more about Thomas Jefferson than we know about Kennedy: He knew what Jefferson had read; we have forgotten - if we ever knew - that among the dozen or so of Kennedy’s favorite books were the seven volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Kennedy knew something else as well, that when Jefferson read all the works of Plato and Aristotle, the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, all the most important works of ancient Greece, he read them, not in some translation, but in the original Greek.
“We don’t read what Jefferson read, even in translation, and as for anyone reading Greek - recall what someone who once taught classics at Yale - but became famous for other reasons - once said about a Harvard - and not just a Harvard education: that it used to be necessary to know both Greek and Latin to be admitted, and now you did not need to know either one to graduate. We call this progress, this getting rid of dead languages, this escape from everything old and ancient, this ardent, single-minded devotion to every form of innovation. Which raises a question, a question we all should ask: Does history have any use?”
Dressed in a dark suit and solid color tie, an easy, gentle smile on his face, Julian studied his audience of distinguished academics with a look that challenged them to show they deserved to be taken as seriously as they thought they should. It was not a look they were used to, a look most of them had not seen since they were children in school: the look of someone who could tell you why everything you ever thought you knew was wrong.
“The question is what does the past have to teach us, we moderns who think we stand at the end of history; we moderns,” he added, with quick, flashing eyes, “who have inherited all that science can teach. Why should we bother, why waste our time, learning what others, burdened with ancient prejudice, thought about the world? Is it not better to concentrate on the future, better to consider how we can use the technology that has made us able to conquer time and space, better to conquer, and therewith change, nature, better to improve the conditions under which we live? Better, in other words, to continue the way we have been going, better not to think too much about how we have gotten to where we are, better not to wonder what it was like when the human race was still young and, instead of through aging, half-blind, eyes, saw everything with clear and unobstructed vision?”
Pausing long enough to let them wonder where he might be going, what it was he was trying to tell them, he looked one way, then the other, with a determined gaze.
“We think ourselves newer than the past, as if an old man was newer than a child. We are the latecomers, clinging to existence, the only dream left the empty dream of a long life and comfort. Old and infirm, we are too weak in spirit to dream of anything that might risk everything. The memory of the time when the human race was young, that time when everything was questionable and we still knew how to ask questions, that time when we relied on our own intelligence instead of assumptions given to us by other, earlier generations, has vanished in the fading memory of our own senility. The present is older, much older, than the past. We are older, much older, than the Greeks. We, who like to call ourselves modern, are the ancient ones.”
Sitting at a table near the back, Ismael watched the reaction of an audience mesmerized by what they heard. Some of them sat with their mouths half open, astonished by the way that in two short paragraphs the president, of all people, had somehow managed to turn everything upside down. Ismael had read what Julian had written, but the words sounded different in Julian’s different voice. What had seemed on paper too arcane, too removed from what was most on the minds of this, or any other contemporary audience, suddenly seemed the only thing you wanted to hear about. The voice, Julian’s voice, had a quality no one else could rival, a voice that made you stop whatever you were doing and listen.
“But the present, some of you may object, is the product of the past. History is nothing if not the record of the progress that has been made. Whatever the Greeks, or the Romans, whatever any nation or civilization, may have accomplished is next to nothing in comparison with what we have been able to do. Everything that ever happened was building to what we have now. Everything. All the wars and revolutions, all the slaughter, the blood and hatred, all the selfish short-sighted ambitions of vain politicians and greedy men of business - what were they but the means by which to move history forward to its appointed goal? - a goal described in different ways by Hegel and Marx, but first discovered - or invented - by Rousseau: the perfection of the human race, the natural right of everyone to live as he thinks best, the proud achievement of the 20th century, the century of the common man, the century of unsurpassed, of unprecedented, scientific progress, the century of mass murder and genocide, the century that was built on the history, and the idea of history, of the l9th century, the century,” Julian went on, speaking faster with every word, “the century of the ‘overproud Europeans,’ who were, in the judgement of the most insightful mind of that century, ‘stark raving mad!’
“There were those,” said Julian, his voice become once again conversational, “a few who saw it coming; a few who with their knowledge of the past - the ancient past - understood what was about to happen, how the world, or more precisely, the West, had lost its reason. In 1825, Goethe not only foretold the coming barbarism, but insisted ‘we are already in the midst of it.’ Writing to Karl Freidrich Zelter, he remarked, ‘Nobody knows himself anymore, nobody comprehends the element in which he resides and operates, nobody comprehends the material with which he works…Wealth and alacrity are what the world admires and what everyone strives for. Railroads, express mail services, steam ships, and every possible way of facilitating communications are what the educated world wants in order to overeducate itself, though as a result it persists in mediocrity. Of course it is also the result of universality that an average culture becomes base.’
“Goethe closed by observing that the 19th century would be characterized by ‘quick-witted people who, equipped with a certain adroitness, feel their superiority over the masses even if they themselves are not capable of what is highest….We will, together with perhaps just a few, be the last of an epoch which will not return very soon.’”
Julian was speaking without a note. The only copy of the speech as he had written it out was in Ismael’s inside jacket pocket. That, it seemed to Ismael as he sat watching, was what struck everyone so forcibly: that the president could speak with this kind of eloquence and quote from memory long passages from a letter Goethe had written almost two hundred years ago . Had they been less impressed with the manner, they might have wondered whether Goethe’s prediction of what would constitute success in the future applied to them.
“And they did not return, those few, the last of an epoch; they are not even remembered, footnotes in the unread books of writers who view the past from the perspective, the all-too narrow perspective, of the present, recording, if they mention at all, the warnings and the misgivings about what had happened as the distorted imaginings of men who failed to grasp the great lessons of the French Revolution: that there are no essential differences, no important distinctions, between one man and another, that everyone has a right, a natural right, to freedom and equality. Instead of a difference in what men aspire to, a difference between what was noble and what was base, everyone was now seen to be driven by the same desire for self-preservation and the kind of comfortable existence produced by an ‘invisible hand’ that, through the wonders of the new science and an instinct for acquisition that was no longer regarded as a sin, could provide material abundance for everyone. Rousseau, though he had more than anyone helped bring about the French Revolution, understood that this meant the loss of what was most important in the interest of what was easiest to obtain: ‘Ancient politicians invariably talked about morals and virtue, those of our time talk only of business and money.’
“And now? - What do we think of the contrast between what the ancients talked about and what today dominates the discussion? We know nothing about it - we take for granted that money and business are the only things that count and refuse to believe that this could ever seriously be questioned. The only history taught in our universities is the history of humanity, a history that is for all intents and purposes, to quote Goethe again, ‘merely the continuation of the history of animals and plants.’ It is the history of evolution, of modern science altogether: the attempt to find the end of things in the origin of things, the attempt to find the meaning of things in the meaningless motion of matter, the principle of the pre-Socratics, the Atomists like Democritus, the history of random chance that somehow leads to a grand design, an infinity of minuscule parts forming and reforming themselves into an intelligible whole, guided by something unknown: the many gods of Hesiod and Homer, or the one god of Christianity. It is the history of the higher mathematics, the world converted into the handmade work of numbers, numbers by which nature is not so much discovered as forced into the useful, and usable, pattern of human design. Nothing has a nature; there are no unchanging and unchangeable beings. There is no human nature, only a drive to become different than we are, with the result that the nature of the human being has become endlessly perfectible. History has a meaning after all.”
There was a dead silence in the room, the only thought anyone had what Julian might say next.
“We know nothing of this: it happened before our time. It happened in the past, four hundred years ago, in the l7th century, when the belief in an ordered universe was replaced by the new science, the belief that what was rational, the world as we know it, is the result of forces that are themselves not rational at all. The principles of the new physics became the principles of the new politics. The discovery of the best regime - those ‘superb palaces built on mud and sand,’ as Descartes described it - on which the ancients expended so much useless genius, was abandoned in favor of the search for a reliable political order, one built on the secure foundation of the irrational, i.e. the passions, and specifically the desire for self-preservation. The aim was no longer human excellence but a tolerably decent regime of satisfied wants and limited ambitions. Building on the same principle - the desire for self-preservation - Hobbes taught the necessity of the Leviathan, the single ruler who, being of one mind, would eliminate the chance of civil war, while Locke taught the necessity of republican government in which everyone had an equal voice in how best to preserve their lives, their liberty, and their property. Both involved a lowering of the horizon, what it means to be a human being, the only thing important now life itself. It produced, in the words of Rousseau, men without morals who cared only about money. It produced, in other words - us!
“This is the origin of the world in which we live, an origin that was new precisely because it was a conscious break with the past. We cannot know our own beginnings unless we know that as well; we cannot understand modernity - the world as it is now - unless we understand antiquity. We cannot understand Europe and the West - we cannot understand America - unless we understand what Athens was, unless we understand what Athens meant. At the end of the l9th century, Nietzsche, according to one of his most profound students, ‘sought, by a new beginning, to retrieve antiquity from the emptiness of modernity and, with this experiment, vanished in the darkness of insanity.’ But if it is impossible fully to recapture, impossible to return to what once has been, it is still possible to read ancient authors and try to understand them, not as we understand ourselves today, but as they understood themselves.
