Tuesday
I recently finished reading A.S. Byatt’s Babel Tower at the same time that I was working with fellow Carleton alumni on a “Truth, Education and Democracy” session for our 50th reunion next year. The novel has me reflecting both on my Carleton experience and the liberal arts ideal in general. Allow me to explain.
Byatt’s 1996 novel has several threads, one of which involves excerpts from a novel that a tormented character named Jude Mason has written. In this novel, a group of aristocratic free thinkers, fleeing from the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, retreat into a solitary castle. Cutting off ties with the rest of the world, they determine to live an existence free of social convention and sexual restraint. The name of this novel within Babel Tower is Babbletower, with the word “babble” having arisen from the Biblical city of Babel.
The ringleader of the group is one Culvert, who sounds like Rousseau and other Enlightenment philosophes. He regularly gives inspirational lectures outlining the guidelines the group is to live by. Here are the first three of the guiding principles he recommends:
1. The community must strive towards complete freedom for each and every member to live and express himself—or herself—to the utmost.
2. To this end all false distinctions of the corrupt world from which they had fled must be abolished. There must be no masters and no servants, no payment and no debt, but a common consent about the workd to be done, the delights to be enjoyed, the just sharing of these, and the proper remuneration of all from the common fund of goods and talents. Professions must be abolished, along with privileges, all must turn their hands to all tht was possible, as their desires led them, for work desired to be done is work well done, and slave labor is always ill done.
3. “It will be found,” Culvert said, “I believe, upon just reflection, that many of the evil distinctions and oppressions in our world come from institutions we have not dared to question. Most of us have already questioned and rejected the religons of our forefathers and compatriots, seeing to what evils they have led, but we have ot sufficiently studied how those unnatural instituions—marriage, the family, the patriarchy, the pedagogic authoritarian relation between teacher and pupil—have also harmed our natural impulses and inclinations
Byatt sets her own Babel Tower in the freewheeling 1960s, when there were intense debates on these issues. Sometimes communes were set up with similar guidelines. Jude Mason, using his novel Babbletower to explore the world in which he lives, explores the dark side of the Enlightenment. The community, which starts off with embracing free sex and an end to hierarchy, eventually descends into bloodshed and torture. In the 1960s, one can think of Woodstock as the aspirational ideal and mass murderer Charles Manson as freedom gone awry. In the novel-within-the-novel, the tension is between French utopian socialist Charles Fourier and the Marquis de Sade.
Because Jude Mason’s novel describes horrific tortures, including an instrument that is introduced into a woman’s vagina, first to pleasure her and then to cut her to pieces, the novel is taken to court as pornography. One of the witnesses defending the novel draws the Fournier/Sade contrast and argues that, rather than indulging lascivious tastes, the novel is actually examining the complexities of freedom, which many in the 1960s ignored. Here’s the defense attorney questioning philosophy Professor Marie-France Smith, who wants to “produce a dry, scholarly account of what she believes to be the intellectual background of Babbletower.” After outlining Fourier’s ideas, she turns to Sade:
Smith: Fourier really believed that the Terror in the French Revolution might, pushed a little further, have ushered in one desirable further breaking down of rules and conventions—the abolition of marriage, which made almost everyone, in his view, unhappy. “In Harmony,” he wrote, “every mature man and woman must be granted a satisfying minimum of sexual pleasure.”
Attorney: And you see Babbletower as in that tradition?
Smith: The first part, yes. The characters are setting off to found a Nouveau Monde Amoureux, a New World of Love. What happens owes as much to de Sade as to Fourier.
Attorney: Tell us bout de Sade. You take him seriously as a thinker?
Smith: You must. He is important. He represents the line from the Enlightenment philosophers who extol human reason and free will, in its cynical vein. He asks, If we are free to follow our passions, who can prevent us from following our desire to hurt others, to kill, to rape, to torture? Those are, he says, human passions; they are natural. Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, the freethinkers, lead, according to one view, to the guillotine and the Sadeian boudoir. Mr. Mason has understood this. He has shown it.
And further on in the examination:
Smith: The Babbletower community is Fourier’s Nouveau Monde Amoureux. It is also Sade’s Chateau de Silling [the castle in 120 Days of Sodom], where the libertines cut the bridge that connects them to the outer world so as to perform their terrible deeds.
So how does this relate to a class reunion session on “Truth, Education, and Democracy”? Well, the modern college traces many of its ideals and practices to the 18th century Enlightenment. Students retreat from the world—in some schools there are even gates closing them off from the outside world (as in Harvard and Columbia)—so that they can engage in a free and open discussion of ideas. This in turn is held up as a model of how a democracy should function, with people of different perspectives coming together to engage in a collective project. Critical to the enterprise is a willingness to entertain different perspectives.
But colleges and democracies only work if everyone agrees to certain ground rules. If dialogue is not genuine—if one group refuses to listen to another, or even strives to silence another—then the community breaks down. And if there is not an agreed-upon way to arrive at truth and establish facts, whether through logic, reason, or the scientific method, then the institution is put into peril. This is not to say that we will all agree with the conclusions of others, but we must agree about how to conduct the dialogue that leads to conclusions, just as citizens in a democracy must all agree to abide by election rules.
Our group consists of an Emory philosophy professor, an American University law professor, an IUPUI Library Professor, a St. Mary’s College of Maryland English professor (me), and a noted doctor, so all of us are dedicated to the pursuit of truth, each in his own disciplinary way. One question we are encountering is how much credence to give to those who dismiss truth, facts, and expertise altogether. If educators are censored because they don’t have the proper political views, if facts are determined by whoever shouts the loudest and bullies the best, if Enlightenment reason is attacked when it leads to unpopular and uncomfortable perspectives, then goodbye to truth and all truth-seeking endeavors.
It is always good to be skeptical and self-critical. That’s a vital part of the university project. But skepticism is not the same as anti-intellectualism. There has to be a commitment to the project itself. This commitment must undergird the session we are putting together.
Further thought: When it comes to the question of truth, I myself follow in the tradition of Aristotle, Horace, Sir Philip Sidney, Samuel Johnson, Percy Shelley and others in seeing great literature as capturing the deepest truths about human beings. Salman Rushdie has written (in response to the torrent of lies we encounter in the public realm),
[A]s far as writers are concerned, we need to rebuild our readers’ belief in argument from factual evidence, and to do what fiction has always been good at doing—to construct, between the writer and the reader, an understanding about what is real. I don’t mean to reconstruct the narrow, exclusive consensus of the nineteenth century. I like the broader, more disputatious view of society to be found in modern literature. But when we read a book we like, or even love, we find ourselves in agreement with its portrait of human life. Yes, we say, this is how we are, this is what we do to one another, this is true. That, perhaps, is where literature can help most.