On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely

Thoughts on Culture and Society by

Gertrude Himmelfarb

Brilliant, Concise Essays On Culture And The Arts

In these provocative essays, one of our most distinguished historians looks

into the abyss of the present. Himmelfarb exposes the intellectual and
spiritual impoverishment of some of our most fashionable current ideas--
and shows how the vogue for historical structuralism has made it possible
to trivialize the tragedy of the Holocaust.

Personal Review: On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely

Thoughts on Culture and Society by Gertrude Himmelfarb
With impressive scholarship, keen insi ght and courteous polemics,
Himmelfarb challenges the intellectual deception and spiritual poverty of
our era. Most of the essays examine the trash that's become intellectually
fashionable since the1980s. The title essay braves the swamps of
postmodernism inhabited by the demons of nihilism, irrationality and
immorality. She dissects deconstruction and related pseudo-philosophies
particularly for their baleful effect upon philosophy, literary criticism and
historical studies. In the madhouse of deconstruction, the interpreter takes
precedence over the text that is interpreted, with comical or insane results.
The objective is to undermine reality by denying that it exists.

She warns of the consequences when we are informed that philosophy

has nothing to do with wisdom or virtue, that metaphysics is really
linguistics, that morality is a form of aesthetics and that the best approach
is not to take philosophy seriously. And about what happens to our sense
of the past when we are told there is no past except that which the
historian creates, or to our perception of the significance of history when
we are assured that it is we who give it meaning, or to that terrifying
historical event, the Holocaust, when it can be so easily 'demystified' and
'deconstructed'?

Hegel deified Reason, arguing that every individual could rely on their own
reason, accepting as true what seems rational according to individual
judgment. Thus a train of thought was set in motion that led to Feuer bach
representing religion as the failure of humanity's critical reason and Max
Stirner claiming the Ego as the only reality. The destination becomes
obvious. Himmelfarb shows up many contradictions in Marx: his habit of
portraying his proletarian protagonist in pejorative ways, his counterfactual
assertion that the needy would forever become poorer and the sinister
sacrificial vision lurking behind his materialist interpretation of history. The
author's epitaph for Marx has proved to be far too optimistic: the collectivist
serpent returns from Hades again and again.

The essay on Liberty confronts the icon of modern liberalism, John Stuart
Mill. She convincingly argues that his doctrine of the absolute freedom of
the individual inevitably leads to relativi sm. And if truth can be relativized,
morality will follow. She laments our materialist culture that bans unhealthy
foods but not sadistic movies and forbids racial segregation but not moral
degradation. Absolute liberty tends to subvert the very freedom it seeks to
maintain as it grants itself the right to assault the foundations. This was
also clearly pointed out by Polanyi in his seminal work Science, Faith and
Society.

The Dark and Bloody Crossroads Where Nationalism and Religion Meet
includes a comparison between the newer versus the established nation
states. As the newer ones become more assertive and brutal, the older
nations are becoming spineless and passive, ashamed of affirming the
legitimacy of their own benevolent expression of nationalism and afraid of
challenging the legitimacy of the oppressive tribal mode. The same can be
said for Western standards of decency and what's left of our religion. In
this regard, The Return of History and the End of Dreams by Robert Kagan
is most relevant.
Himmelfarb believes that the historian should be able to identify heroes
and villains in history and judge their behavior. The denial of good and evil
trivializes the Shoah/Holocaust and the Gulag. It is incumbent upon us to
maintain the reality of the past. She maintains that professionalism in
history respects the reader and our ancestors whilst upholding the
credibility of the discipline. The practice of professionalism confirms the
humility of the serious historian that rejects both the arrogant claim to
exactly recapture the past and the ludicrous notion of the past's unreality.

Historians educated in the old school of footnoting is struck by the

increasing number of academic publications that have no notes at all and
even boasts about their lack of sources. The skeptic Voltaire called
historical details "the pests that destroy books." His heirs the
postmodernists have taken this disdain for research to extremes by
denying truth itself. The fatuousness with which postmodernists proclaim
the failure of beauty, truth and value contrasts sharply with the reverence
of the modernists who defined it. Chantal Delsol sets out an interesting
diagnosis of this affliction in her books Icarus Fallen and The Unlearned
Lessons Of the Twentieth Century.

Himmelfarb explains how postmodernist historians long to be considered

creative and imaginative but by rejecting the causal and chronological
narrative, they turn history into fiction. Like all honest historians, the
modernists were aware that total objectivity is impossible but they still
pursued it through the critical evaluation of evidence. They placed a
premium on research and primary sources, the authenticity of documents,
reliability of witnesses, the need to obtain substantiating and countervailing
evidence, the accuracy of quotations and citations and prescribed forms of
documentation in footnotes and bibliography.

Postmodernist philosophy holds truth in such contempt that one doubts the
jokers themselves believe their assertions. Just like literary critics play wit h
texts by twisting them in a myriad ways, so postmodern historians tell tales
aimed at empowering whatever victim group is the flavor of the moment.
Himmelfarb's abyss refers to the chasm of meaninglessness and despite
her courtesy, at times a tone of exasperation and more rarely of revulsion
surfaces in her writing. She takes on both the originators like Nietzsche,
Mill, De Mann and Heidegger and their disciples such as inter alia Derrida,
Foucault and Rorty.

I also recommend The Reckless Mind: Intellec tuals in Politics by Mark

Lilla, Last Exit to Utopia by Jean-Franois Revel, Explaining
Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks, Why Truth Matters by Ophelia Benson
& Jeremy Stangroom, Experiments Against Reality by Roger Kimball and
the same author's Tenured Radic als in the 3rd edition of which he
demonstrates how the trends he observed in the early 1990s had taken
over the humanities and started to seep into popular culture within the
space of a decade.
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