From Dewey to Huey

 

To a superficial observer, philosophers seem like people who inconsequentially spin their idle theories in their ivory towers while the real world blithely goes its own way. The truth is otherwise. Aristotelian thought refurbished and re­ shaped by medieval Thomists, for centuries governed life in Western Europe far more pervasively than did any of the “absolute” monarchs who ruled during the period. More relevant to the American experience is that fact that two European philosophers, Locke and Montesquieu, probably did as much to shape the Constitution as did any man alive in 1787. And in 20th-century America, the millions who have taken “Will it work?” as the highest measure of truth are, consciously or unconsciously, under the philosophical spell of William James and his disciple John Dewey.

 

 

Indeed, Charles R Morris convincingly demonstrates in A Time of Passion: America, 1960-1980 (Bessie/Harper & Row; New York) that the pragmatism that largely determined American policy in the 1960’s owed as much to these two philosophers as it did to Kennedy, Johnson, or any of their living advisers. Such pragmatism fostered almost un­ bounded confidence among government leaders in the power of management techniques, social science expertise, and potent weaponry to banish poverty and inequity at home and to contain communism abroad. “Neither people, the economy, nor other nations,” Morris observes, “were so plastic as they hoped.” Further, because it subordinated ends to means, pragmatism lacked the “moral resonance” necessary to combat the barbarities of a Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, or Huey Newton.

 

Regrettably,  Morris concludes a generally praiseworthy book with a facile prediction, based on little more than demographic patterns, of a new period of social stability and moral integrity. His own study provides too much evidence that men and nations may grow into middle-age and beyond without attaining moral wisdom if they are suckled on immature philosophy. (BC)      cc

 

 

 

Pathetic Comedy

 

At one time it was well understood that comedy required a religious underpinning. To Dante, the modern addition of the word Divine to the original title (Commedia) of his cosmic epic would seem superfluous. To him and most of his contemporaries it was obvious that without God no narrative could ever end joyfully; there could be no undivine comedy. Since Dante, however, poets, authors, and dramatists have often constructed comedies which exclude the transcendent. While a beguiling charm still surrounds the Shakespearean romp or the Victorian marriage comedy, it is hard in the late 20th century to believe that marital union happily resolves all human problems. The high old sense of comedy now largely replaced by the trivial modern one of “funny story” cannot be refurbished without a reintroduction of Deity into literature.

 

In The Gods, the Little Guys and the Police (Harper & Row; New York), the Argentinian writer Humberto Costantini seeks to again make the divine a major element in literary comedy. Unfortunately, Mr. Constantini’s supramundane realm consists merely of petty and ineffectual Greek gods who survey the goings on of an Argentinian poetry circle threatened in the mid 70’s with massacre by brutal parapolice. Drawn with a playful lightness of touch, these deities are the most amusing part of the absurd drama, which ends “happily” when the poetry devotees are spared, but 12 other innocent people are murdered in their stead. Costantini’s mythical machinery is part of a “black comedy,” meant to satirize Latin American parapolice as foolish but bloody agents of Hades. But on a higher level the work seeks to deify the “little guys” who are “little parading monkeys, yes, but suddenly men, resembling gods, and suddenly gods.” What Costantini fails to realize is that when the gods themselves are reduced to laughable dimensions, everything else, including humans and human suffering, istrivialized not apotheosized. The result is not high comedy, merely a dismal joke.     cc