Autumn Journal on Autumn Journal: 9
- By Michael Thurston
Read Part 8 here
“Now we are back to normal”
Munich agreed, peace in our time promised, and September done and dusted, MacNeice can settle back to work. The fall term is beginning and MacNeice must “return to work, lecturing, coaching, / As impresario of the Ancient Greeks.” Finally, after sections saturated with anxiety over impending war, he can relax back into the mundane worries of the teacher and professor: what is the value today of this hard-won knowledge and understanding I have of a far distant past and its ways of thinking?
There is much to recommend the Greeks, MacNeice writes. Living on the Mediterranean diet avant la lettre (“on fish and olives”), they talked both “philosophy and smut,” facing the truths of age and mortality while not stinting the pleasures of the body in youth. Confronting the fact of necessity twenty-five centuries before Engels, the Greeks “plotted out their life with truism and humour.” But the “Glory that was Greece” fell, first upon “the pikes of Macedonia,” then to the “swords of Rome,” and finally, fatally, over centuries, into the academy, where teachers like MacNeice himself could “put it in a syllabus, grade it / Page by page / To train the mind or even to point a moral / For the present age.” Reduced from seekers after truth to distributors of truism, the likes of Pindar and Alcibiades, of Plato and Aristotle, once “Models of logic and lucidity dignity, sanity, / The golden mean between opposing ills,” are replaced by “crooked business men and secretaries and clerks,” Athens no longer capital of the west’s intellectual life but merely a “university city.”
It was at Oxford, as a student of classics at Merton college, that MacNeice (a gifted student of the languages and literatures of Greece and Rome) came to know so well both the heights of classical civilization and the depths to which it fell. Studying with the eminent classicist, E.R. Dodds, MacNeice also developed an understanding much like that which shapes Eliot’s Waste Land: the putative “golden age” was no such thing, every document of civilization bequeathed to us is at the same time (in Walter Benjamin’s famous formulation) a document of barbarism. Which is to say not so much that there was a fall-off from former greatness but, instead, that rather than (or at least mixed in among, and perhaps indistinguishable from) the “paragons of Hellas,” the ancient Greeks were “the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists, / The careless athletes and the fancy boys, / The hair-splitters, the pedants, the hard-boiled sceptics, / . . . / the demagogues and the quacks.” Why, then, the preservation and promulgation of their language, history, philosophy, and literature? Why their enshrinement in the syllabi MacNeice constructs, the class sessions he plans?
Things feel nothing at all like normal right now. Unlike MacNeice, with the reprieve of Munich, you and I are in the thick of lethal weirdness, a pandemic continuing to rage while our infected and corrupt state tilts toward despotism. Even teaching, for my colleagues who are doing it right now, feels strange and estranging. Perhaps even more pressing than usual (and the usual state has been intensely pressing for as long as I’ve been in the higher education game), questions arise about the value of liberal education. What is the use of Greek or Latin (or, say, the English poetry of the earlier twentieth century), of history or philosophy, when none of them leads to vaccines or innovative ventilators? What is the “real-world” value of arts and letters, the humanities, of any education other than the vocational, practical, operationalizable, and immediately remunerative (beyond the linguistic taste sufficient to judge the word “operationalizable” an abomination)? As MacNeice suggests, one can’t even make the case for the Greeks on the basis of their superiority to our own fallenness, for they had their own despots and corruption, their vaunted democracy and invaluable literature perched on the labor and corpses of slaves and the dispossessed, their poems and plays grounded in gore and the whims of execrable gods. Why, they’re just as bad as we are. What’s the use of knowing them?
MacNeice concludes that it’s impossible to “imagine oneself among them,” but it seems to me that it’s all too easy to do so. I know, I know. The past is a foreign country, and we do well always to remember just how alien most of a culture like that of Periclean Athens is to our own. At the same time, all of the complaints MacNeice lodges against the Greeks could just as easily be made about his own society (and in spades about our own). The value of making the acquaintance—no, more than that, of intently studying—the Greeks and what we know and have of their civilization, is precisely that in their own confrontation with human faults and frailties, corruption and cynicism, violence and inhumanity, they derived means of understanding our flaws and our evil inclinations, and, from that understanding, the means of transcending them. In the Symposium, to which MacNeice perhaps nods in his glancing reference to Alcibiades (who shows up to the drinking party late and horny, hoping to couch with Socrates), the indirectly related sermon of the priestess, Diotima (from whom Socrates learned the true nature of love) posits a ladder we might ascend, each rung a higher mode of attachment or a step closer to detachment, so that, ultimately, our animal and affective commitments to individuals or families or states dissolve into an undifferentiated sea. To offer, in the setting of a learned and sustained contemplation of its arguments and contexts, the vision Socrates elaborates to young people struggling with the costs and consequences of passionate conviction, is to open a pathway to transcendent understanding and transformative possibility. Our current parlous state (in all sense of that noun) could use much more, rather than less, of just this kind of education.
Michael Thurston is the Provost and Dean of the Faculty, and Helen Means Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College.
