Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture by John Carroll

When Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth appeared in Britain, British feminists asked, ‘where has Naomi Wolf been for the last 20 years?’ The same question might well be asked of John Carroll. His assessment of humanism seems imperiously oblivious to structuralist and poststructuralist critiques of the humanist edifice. Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture studies the rise and fall of humanism in Western culture. Carroll’s argument is straightforward. Humanism posits man (yes, man) as controller of his destiny by virtue of possessing free will. Free will, however, is a delusion, because it fails to reconcile man with his destiny. It does not provide a system of thought that allows man to surmount his fear of death. Carroll uses the image of Archimedes’ fulcrum to highlight this lack. ‘Give me somewhere to stand and I shall move the earth’, said Archimedes. Humanism’s place to stand, or rock, was free will. The consequences of free will’s failure to provide a stable and enduring foundation are ‘contradiction, exhaustion and inertia’. Carroll’s approach is avowedly eclectic: ‘to select the best and ignore the rest’. His choice of material ranges from Shakespeare to Marx, from some insightful interpretations to grubby gossip. The thread of humanism gets strained by the vigour of the romp -sometimes it’s not clear how local conclusions relate to the overall argument. Carroll’s reading of Velazquez’s Las Meninas is one such case. His observations form an engaging and at times illuminating interpretation of an artistic self-consciousness verging on arrogance: ‘the man of the future, the scornful crusading artist, has the measure of his King’. The conclusion of his reading of the painting is that once there is free will ‘then there is no choice, for once one lounges on the back stairs one is outside, and cannot get back in, one is stranded in a cultural no man’s land’. Fair enough, but what has that got to do with humanism specifically? There is a subversion of authority, but not a uniquely humanist authority. And then, where does this subversive self-consciousness lead us? Reading Humanism is not like reading about the idea of humanism, it’s rather about a history of ideas that includes humanism. It is bold, occasionally thoughtful, often blustering and in the end irritating to the point of alienating. Carroll’s desire to incorporate the fruity anecdote leads to assertions that are at best misleading, often reductive and sometimes just plain wrong. After an elementary introduction to Descartes comes, apparently by way of helpful amplification, ‘the defining feature of man, what distinguishes him from the beasts, is that he thinks’. The obvious implication is that this ‘new Archimedean rock’ is a grant from Descartes. St Augustine, for one, would feel sadly neglected if such a view were to gain currency. While on the topic of reason, I note that women do not suffer from any acknowledgment of twentieth-century or feminist thought. Without any exception I could find, Carroll refers always to ‘he’ and ‘mankind’ when he means both men and women, and it is not an instance of language policing to find this sort of ill-informed and unselfconscious use of language unacceptable today. On this score, the reading of Rembrandt’s David and Uriah is more an occasion for hilarity than offense. King David abducts Bathsheba, and when her husband, Uriah, returns from battle to find her pregnant, he refuses to sleep with her. David sends him back to battle and he is killed. Carroll observes that in return for Uriah’s faithful service, his wife ‘is stolen, and he, the victim, is sent to his death because his innocence shows up the King’s shame ... fidelity is repaid with betrayal’. Bathsheba’s plight, which could well strengthen, enrich and extend Carroll’s conclusions about free will and tragedy, is ignored. The omission of a powerful feminist critique of humanism is just as difficult to understand as the omission of structuralist arguments. Carroll makes it very clear that his voice is a twentieth-century one: ‘a just politics depends on conscience, men acting honestly for a good higher than their own ego’. His twentieth-century exclusion of women from any consideration itself questions the ‘liberal’ assumptions of a humanist-derived democracy about ‘the capacity of every adult to reason, to think intelligently about how he is ruled, and about his being free to will what he thinks is right’. Again, Carroll rejects an alliance which offers a powerful criticism of his own subject of liberal humanism. If he had thought more systematically about his own voice and assumptions, as well as those of his subjects, Carroll might have made his fulcrum a little less of a bludgeon and more of a scientific instrument. St Augustine, however, shouldn’t feel too badly – the Middle Ages fares worse. ‘For the humanists ... the Middle Ages had been an age of darkness. They were right. The darkness had been both mental and physical.’ It goes on, and gets worse, but Carroll has, and exercises freely, the liberty of a verbosity not permitted to a book reviewer. The passages on Marx reach a nadir of petty and unscholarly viciousness. Marx’s ‘true pleasure and goal was in annihilation for its own sake. His work is full of emotionally charged images of devastation.’ And this from the author of ‘we live amidst the ruins of the great, five-hundred-year epoch of Humanism ... Our culture is a flat expanse of rubble.’ Writer, read thyself! Carroll’s work seems to make up for in extravagant assertion what it lacks in comprehensive argument, and thereby undermines the insights it does contain. His personal attack on Marx exhibits all the single-minded vileness he attributes to Marx. Its connection with humanism seems tangential if not tendentious. We are told that Marx ‘was never interested in considering alternative hypotheses’. Perhaps this attack is all the more vehement because its basis is precisely what is lacking in Carroll’s own work. It is at times, in the words of Ezra Pound, packed with Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale or two,Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something elseThat might prove useful and yet never proves What alternative does Carroll proffer after his requiem to humanism? It seems to be the soul, the ‘eternal laws, and the human conscience ... which does not allow us to suppress within ourselves what we know’. It is the solution which makes the book’s conclusions so unsatisfactory, and so determinedly uninformed about recent, relevant and more powerful critiques of humanism. Carroll quotes from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and this recalled for me the lines ‘water, water everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink’. I have an image of Carroll as an ambitious and ill-prepared venturer himself: fulcrum, fulcrum everywhere, but never a place to stand. Was that fear on Carroll’s mind when he entitled Chapter 8, ‘Mockery, Mockery Everywhere’? The main problem with this book is that it contains very little that a reasonably intelligent contemporary observer could not have written. On the one hand this means that Carroll ignores powerful allies in the enterprise of dismantling the implicit and explicit claims of liberal humanism. Structuralist critics effectively demonstrated that humanism’s assumptions, rather than inherent truths, are themselves constructs. On the other hand, and more tellingly, Carroll’s failure to adopt a position informed by twentieth-century intellectual developments deprives him of a place to stand. The consequence is a paucity of vision – he offers no view of where to go after humanism is dead and buried. Such vision would seem to be the only justification of yet another book on humanism.

Bronte Adams

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