Chasing Our Faustian Tails

In the decade following the Allied victory, church attendance and religious affiliation grew at an unprecedented rate, and critical debate over the significance of the increase reached a fevered pitch in intellectual circles as well as popular culture. During an era that witnessed the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the Nuremberg trials, a neo-orthodox revival, the beginning of the cold war, and the Korean conflict as well as congressional investigations into un-American activities, the postwar "turn to religion" took place within a heightened atmosphere of crisis, conspiracy, and conformity. John Lardas, The Bob Apocalypse, p. 38.

It is instructive to re-visit the era which saw the rise of the Beats and, as John Lardas rightly did, place that social and literary phenomenon within its cultural context. Then, to step back (as Lardas neglected to do), and--drawing from the Spenglerian inheritance that the Beats themselves cherished--bear witness to the sorry repetitions of the American religious imagination.

The Beats were, as Lardas acknowledged, Spenglerian Transcendentalists. Their strong American literary precursors were Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. Collectively and individually, the Beats attempted to renew the promise of the American experiment that Emerson articulated in Nature. Unlike Emerson, however, the Beats did not draw their inspiration from a romanticized view of the natural world but from a Spenglerian (romantic) view of a cultural type: the fellaheen.

Echoing Tolstoy's peasants (themselves an echo of Rousseau's "noble savage" figure), the Beats attempted (like the mysterious W.D. Fard of the Nation of Islam before them) a transvaluation of racialist stereotypes. In the process, they performed what Northrop Frye named as the goal of ethical criticism: "... to look at contemporary social values with the detachment of one who is able to compare them in some degree with the infinite vision of possibilities presented by culture. One who possesses such a standard of transvaluation," Frye argued, "is in a state of intellectual freedom. One who does not possess it is a creature of whatever social values get to him first: he has only the compulsions of habit, indoctrination, and prejudice" (Anatomy of Criticism, p. 348).

It is difficult for one who regards the religious imagination as a source of cultural fecundity to observe the present American scene with equanimity. The bizarre revisionist history (participated in and approved by no less a figure than the current occupant of the Oval Office) that seeks to valorize the Reagan era as a time of peace and prosperity represents a kind of moral effrontery that leaves one not only speechless but gasping for air.

Those who lived during the Reagan years and witnessed that Administration's irresponsible saber-rattling-as-foreign policy combined with its war on organized labor and the middle class recognize the Obama betrayal for what it is: an unabashed continuation of rule by the militarized corporatocracy. The Christian Right's blessing of this travesty of democracy exposes the moral bankruptcy of early 21st century Protestantism. At the same time, American embrace of Catholic social teaching seems to be a quaint relic of the first half of the 20th century. The Mazeppist advocates the renewal of post-Spenglerian cultural criticism of the kind practiced by such unlikely bedfellows as Kerouac and Frye (On The Road and Anatomy of Criticism both appeared, if I'm not mistaken, in 1957).

Frye's strong precursors in the historical reflection upon culture were Vico and Spengler. Hayden White was right to celebrate Frye as a thinker who, like Sartre, "was nothing if not a philosopher of human freedom, of artistic creativity, and beyond that of a generally human power of species self-creation" (White, The Fiction of Narrative, p. 266). His eclipse in the field of literary criticism is but one more symptom of the tragic onset of Faustian winter.