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[Sep. 8th, 2015|08:42 pm] |
To Pierre Elliott Trudeau
March 26, 1974
Dear Pierre:
There may be some relevance in the questions that Clare Booth Luce asked recently [March 19], and my replies. First, her questions:
(1) How do you explain why Vatican II, which closed in a burst of ecumenical fervor that was expected to revive the faith of the Catholic world in the Church’s institutions and teachings was, instead, followed (and so soon) by the greatest loss of faith in them that we have seen sinee the Reformation? Was Vatican II the cause?
(2) Please explain why you think (or don't think) that the impeachment of R[ichard] N[ixon] is going to purify democratic politics and “restore integrity” to Government, and how this will help us control inflation, pollution, repair the breach with NATO, etc.
(3) What are your theories of money and of value? Why, for example, did those great Etruscan statues which stood for years in the Great Hall of the Met., praised by all the critics and admired by all the populace, valued in nine figures, suddenly become valueless when they were discovered to be forgeries? Are Value and Money, like Beauty, in the eye of the beholder ? Or, what other than life itself (and health in life) has intrinsic value?
Now, my replies to her questions:
Vatican II was a blossoming of liberal individualism and a kind of immolation of the individual in the great new involvement plunge made possible by the TV sensibility of inner-tripping. The moment that people become deeply involved they lose their private identity and their direction. If the Reformation was the tossing away of acoustic and musical hierarchies in favour of visual and private points of view, Vatican II was the burial of this individualism in the newly created swamp of electronic togetherness and total involvement, as in a skin-flick where everybody gets inside one skin. In the novel Silence [1969), Shusaku Endo has an introduction explaining how impossible it is for Hellenistic or Western Christianity to find a foothold in the tribal or acoustic swamp of Japan. I have written in the Critic and elsewhere on this subject, asking Catholic philosophers and theologians to explain what successor to the Graeco-Roman literary tradition they foresee. The mystery of how the Church was committed to this Graeco-Roman thing is quite beyond me, although I perceive it as providential, in the strict sense. Today, under electric conditions there's no way in which the Graeco-Roman tradition can survive in the West.
To use the terms of Ballandier who invented the phrase “the Third World there is the First World of 19th-century industrialism and the Second World of Russian Communism and the Third World is that which is left out of these benefits. But he forgot the Fourth World, the instantaneous global village which, since Sputnik (October, 1957), created Spaceship Earth, an ecological entity, without passengers but only crew. The First World has as much trouble relating to the Fourth World of electronics as the Third World has in obtaining benefits from the First World of industrial hardware. On the other hand, the Third World has no trouble in relating to the acoustic and electronic Fourth World.
The magisterium of the Church tends to become multi-locational and acoustic, with central Roman authority becoming difficult to imagine. Please note that I am doing now, as elsewhere, a structural or a formal meditation on the situations we have encountered.
The Protestant strategy in the 16th century was to use the new portable book as a God-given means of escape from the Roman yoke. Rome used the book in the opposite way, as a means of standardizing and centralizing by uniformity. The law of implementation is always to use the new thing for the old purpose, while ignoring that the new thing tends to destroy the old purposes. I have discovered over the years that the effects of innovation are always subliminal, and people resent having this pointed out, feeling that you are invading their privacy in so doing.
Let us turn, then, to your question about the impeachment of Richard Nixon. Nixon and the U.S.A. is caught between the First World and the Fourth World. That is, while having all its commitments to the old Graeco-Roman hardware, it is totally involved in the new electronic information environment which is dissolving all the controls and all the goals of the First World. The Fourth World, or the electronic world, reduces personal identity profiles to vestigial level and, by the same token, reduces moral commitments in the private sector almost to zero. Paradoxically, however, as private morals in the private sector sink down, new absolutist demands are made of ethics in the public or political sector. R.N. had the misfortune to bring the old private morals into the public place just when this reversal had occurred. There is also the misfortune of his image which is intensely private and non-corporate and therefore totally unsuited to TV. (Charisma is looking like a lot of other people—anything except one's self!)
The U.S., the only great country in the world based on a written Constitution, has no way of coping legally or politically with the new oral and acoustic situations created by the electronic bugging and the general X-ray procedures in the entire private sector. Man-hunting has become the biggest business on the planet in the electronic age, and is a return to the Paleolithic conditions of the hunter. The impeachment threat represents the rage of the literate media against the new electric environment which has invaded their world and corrupted all their values. I would like very much to explain in more detail the clash between written and oral patterns to commitment in society and politics and personal life alike.
You ask also about inflation and pollution and the breach with NATO. etc. I have an unpublished paper in which I try to explain that inflation also is the encounter of incompatible worlds, the clash between the old commodity markets and the new money, or information markets. Money as information, and investment, now moves at instant speeds, putting an unbearable strain and rim- spin, as it were, on the old price system with its quantified commodities. This huge disproportion between the old speeds of the hardware world and the instant electric speeds of the software Fourth World extends to our private lives as much as to our social existence. It is impossible to retain private goals in an instant world. One must flip instead into role-playing, which means submergence in corporate situations. Strange that I should be mentioning these things today when I am going to introduce Eric Havelock to a University of Toronto audience. In his Preface to Plato (Oxford University Press, 1963) he explains how the phonetic alphabet evoked a private image of the substantial individual. I understand this much better now than even he explains it. The unique technology of the phonetic alphabet was the fact that its components were phonemes (meaningless bits) rather than morphemes (meaningful bits). Magically, the fission of the phonetic alphabet is to isolate the visual sensory factor from all the other senses, and to constitute the image of the private person. We are now playing this drama in reverse in the electric age.
Your questions about my theories of money and value and the Etruscan forgeries would take a little while to elaborate. Let me mention, however, that we live in the age of the “genuine fake" because we understand for the first time the art process and the making process as never before, so that Picasso said long ago: “I always paint fakes". The function of art in relating us to ourselves and to our world and in freeing us from the adaptive or robot role, has changed entirely in the electric time. The art product as such becomes relatively insignificant compared to the process of making and of participation in that making. What you mention as the “value” of the Etruscan images, relates very much to their commodity character in the First World of industrial hardware. In that world they stood for the antithesis and, therefore, the ideal of industrialism. Hypocritically, the First World worshipped ail as its own opposite. The Etruscans themselves would have agreed with the Balinese who say: “We have no art. We do everything as well as possible.” Or, they would agree with a local junkyard sign which reads: “Help beautify junkyards. Throw something lovely away today." |
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