the oddly prescient name of Mustapha Mond, understands that people prefer happiness to truth, “happiness” being defined as round-the-clock sensory gratification—food, drugs, sex, consumer toys. Given that he was writing in the late Twenties, Huxley’s parody pop songs anticipate very well the sensual torpor of our own
“Soma,” a word Huxley took from Sanskrit, is a drug that both intoxicates and tranquilizes. In his brave new world, we’re seduced into passivity. And in such a society, as Charles Murray wrote of Europe, “ideas of greatness become an irritant.”8 Go to the heart of western civilization—Rome, the capital of Christendom; Madrid, Lisbon, and Paris, the seats of mighty empires that sent their men and ships to every corner of the world and implanted their language and culture. And yet these cities are all now backwaters—mostly pleasant and residually prosperous backwaters, but utterly irrelevant to the future of the world. And that suits their citizens just fine.
Is that the fate the United States is destined for? It’s what a lot of Americans would like. In 2008 many people were just exhausted by the “war on terror.” Not because it demanded anything of them—quite the opposite: it was entirely outsourced to a small professional soldiery the twenty-first-century Eloi rarely encounter. But so what? They still had to hear about the war, and they were bored by it. Having to be at Code Orange in perpetuity was just kind of a downer. So they voted for “change”—by which they meant a quiet life: I don’t want to have to think about wacky foreigners trying to blow us up; I don’t need that in my life right now.
As for the Eloi’s mostly inactive “activism,” professions of generalized concerns about “world poverty” or “saving the planet” do not testify to your idealism so much as what Adam Bellow calls “a certain blithe assurance about the permanence of freedom”:9 you worry about lofty and distant problems because you assume there are none closer to home. Our Eloi are smugly self-satisfied. I cite at random four stickers from the cars parked outside a children’s “holiday” concert in small-town Vermont:
What kind of sentient being boasts on a bumper sticker about his giant brain? And cites as evidence thereof his unyielding loyalty to a political machine? Talk about putting Descartes before the whores. What that translates to is: “I’M A DEMOCRAT. THEREFORE, I HAVE NO NEED TO THINK.”
Including the need to question everything? Doubting everything gets kinda exhausting. In practice, questioning “everything” boils down to questioning nothing in particular—for, if everything is a social construct, a manufactured reality, why bother? Fortunately, “QUESTION EVERYTHING” ceased to be operative on January 20, 2009. After that date, dissent was no longer “the highest form of patriotism,” but merely racism.
That’s a total failure of imagination—a failure, under the guise of universalist multiculturalism, to imagine that outside your fluffy cocoon there is a truly many-cultured world full of people so “diverse” they do not view things as you do. Underneath the “IMAGINE” sticker was another:
That’s true if you’ve got in mind someone like Scotland’s Bill Millin, personal bagpiper to Lord Lovat, commander of 1st Special Service Brigade, who piped the men ashore on D-Day as he strolled up and down the beach amid the gunfire playing “Hieland Laddie” and “The Road to the Isles” and other highland favorites.10 Bill Millin was a musician and a truly heroic one.
But I would doubt our myopic Vermonter has even heard of him. I wonder if he’s aware that, under the Taliban, music is banned. For all the much vaunted “empathy” of the caring class and their insistence on “celebrating diversity,” they seem blissfully ignorant of the great diversity out there in the world, and of how hostile much of it is to their preoccupations. “Peace through Music” is inertia masquerading as a mission: hey, I’ll just sit on the porch, smoke a little dope, strum my guitar, and tell myself that it’s a great contribution to humanity.
Because anything other than striking self-flattering, mock-dissident poses is too much like hard work.
Adam Bellow may be understating the problem: even as they take their own freedoms for granted, it’s not clear the Eloi care much about freedom per se. And even the lofty and distant causes are merely a pretext for a pampering overweening conformism. So don’t pick up
The very next poem is about geese in October: Geese, October 2002.
The poet, Lucy Adkins, notes that even as “our country’s leaders/are voting for war,” outside her home in Nebraska “the geese fly over/the old wisdom in their feathers.” Not into geese or doves? How about insects? Like Kim Addonizio, for Kelli Russell Agodon war poetry starts with your daughter’s play activities, but in this case the young Miss Agodon is endeavoring to help fire ants and potato bugs in their “small seaside community outside of Seattle”:
You don’t say! But enough about war, let’s talk about me, and my daughter, and whatever happens to be flying or crawling by the window. Would it kill you to include one lousy detail about Iraq—you know, the ostensible subject? Maybe you could have the geese and gray doves fly over and take a look at what Saddam did to the Iraqi marshlands. As Bruce Bawer wrote in his review, “Throughout these poems, the implicit argument is: Why can’t the whole world be as peaceable as my little corner of it is?”11 Yes, indeed. If only geopolitics were like a pledge drive on Vermont Public Radio: tedious and disruptive, but only for a few days, and if you give them $50 to leave you alone you get an organic tote bag.
Campaigning for the Democrats in 2004, Ben Affleck offered a pearl of wisdom to John Kerry and his consultants: “You have to enervate the base,” the Hollywood heartthrob advised solemnly.12 As it happens, if it’s enervating the base you’re after, Senator Kerry was doing a grand job. It would be easy to mock Mr. Affleck as a celebrity airhead, but these days even the airheads are expensively credentialed: Ben is an alumnus of one of the same colleges as President Obama (Occidental). And liberal progressivism has done a grand job of enervating its base. A self-absorbed passivity is now the default mode of the enlightened worldview. Behind those “IMAGINE PEACE” stickers lies a terrible failure to imagine.
