John Carroll
There are some books, only a few, where reading them again is rather like being invited back into a warm and welcoming house, a reassuring homecoming. In part it’s an issue of familiarity: I know this work, this author, and I enjoy the process of re-immersion, of being reminded of the author’s ideas, arguments and suggestions which had both intrigued and challenged me. At the same time, it’s a result of feeling comfortable: this is a place I know. It’s been one of the important stepping-stones along a path I’ve followed, helping to improve my thinking, teaching and ability to discuss issues. And yet, and there always seems to be an ‘and yet’, it is also like a homecoming in another sense, that in returning to a familiar text you discover you have to adjust, that what seemed so insightful or so important before now looks a little different, subtly so, but still not quite the same.
Returning to John Carroll’s book ‘Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture’ is like that. This is an analysis I know and love, and yet in returning to thirty years ago when I first read it, I am no longer the person I was back then. My thinking has developed, and as I have moved forward so now I want more, a conversation, not a rerun. An important book for me, it’s become a source to be discussed. Carroll, ever the teacher, revised the book in 2004, eleven years after the first publication, to add in comments on the Twin Towers attack of September 11, 2001, and on music, Bach and Mozart. I am older, the edition I am reading has new material. I feel at home, but I can’t help noticing the chipped paint, faded wallpaper and scuffed furniture. A home that’s familiar but needs to be spruced up, updated for today.
John Carroll was a professor of sociology at Melbourne’s La Trobe University when he wrote Humanism. It reads as a course text, drawing on a series of masterworks from the 15th to the 20th, Century as illustrations for his teaching. The structure is simple: Part One, Foundation, deals with the emergence of humanism; Part Two, Middle Acts, addresses the consolidation of humanist ideas, and emergence of tensions and strains; Part Three, Fall, explores the how the humanist agenda began to fall apart; and Part Four, Death Throes, brings us to the present, and the collapse of the humanist agenda as the underlying core for modern society.
If the structure is simple, the content is not: examples include Donatello’s sculptures and Velázquez Las Meninas, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Mozart’s Cosí Fan Tutte. The analysis is complex, inspiring, and challenging. Each chapter examines one or more great works in literature, art or music, century by century. For example, Chapter 3 has eighteen pages devoted to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Detailed but gripping, we are taken through a dissection of how both works were constructed, how they speak to us directly but also what they say less obviously. The result is not just memorable, as his insights and observations are provoking and exciting. It’s a masterful elucidation which has ensured I have never forgotten what he had to say about the play and the painting.
With this brief introduction to The Wreck of Western Culture, I am left with a challenge. Should I attempt to provide a summary of Carroll’s book? I am tempted to fall back on that familiar excuse: you must read the book for yourself. And you should, but that isn’t enough. To begin with, the overall thesis is relatively easy to explain. The arc describing the rise and fall of humanism in the West begins with the Renaissance and the slow shift away from the pre-eminence of god and religion. Christian religion had provided both meaning and certainty, with moral principles and rituals all holding out the promise of everlasting life in heaven once your life on earth was over. Certainty was central, the confidence that anyone could acquire eternal salvation as long as they followed the rules.
The erosion of that confidence began slowly, but once started it was unstoppable. John Carroll’s first illustrations come from sculpture, and almost inevitably from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. As this play puts honour, reason and personal responsibility at the centre of the action, so they offer the first steps in answering the question ‘If not god, then what gives our lives meaning’. For Shakespeare, virtue was the point of transition: it could be that virtue was defined by religious prescription, or that it was defined by doing good in relation to others. However, through Hamlet Shakespeare also added the first seeds of doubt, having his central character confront us with the emptiness of living by virtue and reason alone: no god means death is about nothingness. Darn it, how come Shakespeare was so smart?
Carroll moves on examine the contrasting roles of Calvin and Luther, and their roles in displacing the traditional power of Catholicism, followed by describing how various great artists emphasised the ‘humanness’ of what had previously been religious themes. He discusses several paintings, bringing out their references and meaning. As one example, his description of Holbein’s Corpse of Christ is unforgettable. No religious iconography, instead what we see is a dead, cold, and already slightly decaying body. From that unsentimental and disturbing image, Holbein moved on to paint scenes of earthly power and authority. The Ambassadors portrays two dominating men, surrounded by the evidence of their importance. However, Carroll takes the symbolism of the painting apart, with that weird anamorphic skull a central and disturbing element in the picture. These men are atheists, their world rooted in the present, but as that skull makes clear, there’s more to this than first meets the eye!
As the book continues, we move on to Carroll’s examples from the 18th and 19th centuries, and a growing divergence that remains with us today. On one side is the Enlightenment, the domination of reason, slowly evolving to take us into a world defined by science and rationality, one which squeezes the place for religion and god into an ever-shrinking space. On the other side is romanticism, the glorification of personal passion rather than religious devotion, gradually creating the platform for individualism to grow. He charts these changes through examining works by Vermeer and Bach in one chapter, followed by Descartes, Mozart and Kant in the next. By the end of the 19th Century, humanism had largely replaced religion, but there was a problem: the church had its god to give it certainty, humanists had no equivalent and unarguable focal point. In Carroll’s analysis, what remained was power, the survival of the fittest in two senses: in capitalism for Marx, and in evolution for Darwin.
The Wreck of Western Culture ends with the aftermath following the collapse of Christian religion in the west, the dominance of science, technology, the use of power, and the threat of uncertainty encouraged by competing and irreducible ways of seeing the world. That uncertainty was thrown into stark relief with the Twin Towers attacks, which Carroll uses to bring his book to a conclusion in the updated version of 2004. Where does this leave us? Carroll points out “The awkwardness of the concept ‘God’ is one sign of the decline of the longing for authority. Arguably there is no stronger example of the change in Western culture since the Renaissance—a period with which we still have much in common—than that representations of God as the old man with the long grey beard, such as exemplified by Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, have become laughably incongruous. Today, even within the mainstream churches, priests and ministers are increasingly reluctant to use the G word. But if a church doesn’t have God, what is left? Why bother with a church?”
I have chosen to focus on The Wreck of Western Culture because it was, for me, such an important book. However, John Carroll has continued to write (born in the stellar year of 1944, he is now an emeritus professor at La Trobe). He has explained that he believes, “the discontents of our time lie squarely in the domain of life-meaning—or rather, in a feared lack of it. Unbelief shadows the post-church, secular West. Once faith waned in the existence of a higher divinity guiding human affairs, as it has for most who inhabit the modern world, the central metaphysical questions rise to the fore. These are the questions about where we have come from, what should we do with our lives in order to make sense of them, and what happens when we die. Doubt becomes pervasive, even if left lurking beneath the surface of everyday life; grey replaces what was black and white; absurdity and futility threaten; and anxiety mounts. The central and difficult truths require answers, for which the primary resource is personal experience. But personal experience is itself framed and articulated and this is done through shared images and stories supplied by the wider culture. If it is art that takes account of changing times, that helps us understand the world we inhabit, and our place within it, then the issue becomes, which works of contemporary art stand out in terms of finding a language that may speak to the times?” Carroll asks, “Indeed, are there any?”
In the last twenty years he has concluded that the Western narrative has largely abandoned high culture, although liberal arts courses in many US universities still cover Western Civilisation, and its key texts. Although this perspective has been updated and defended by authors like Harold Bloom, and used by others, especially Samuel Huntington, as defining what must be preserved in fighting other cultures (especially Islam), Carroll suggests most contemporary intellectuals have turned against the Western Canon, critical of that high-culture tradition from Homer and Plato onwards that focussed on ‘the true, the beautiful and the good’. He sees contemporary thinkers more concerned to criticise society, shifting the approach to put the spotlight on those who are oppressed, marginalised and disadvantaged.
In the face of this reorientation, Carroll suggests it is popular culture has taken on the big questions, successfully managing to enlarge our understanding of our world and how to live in it. In one of his recent articles, he suggests the latest quality thinking taking place can be found in television series, in The Sopranos, Deadwood and Treme (and he adds my own favourite, The Wire, as his fourth). What do these series say to us? “Both The Sopranos and Deadwood cast their central characters in a milieu stripped of all civilised costuming and props, one in which there are no binding rules—everything is permitted. These characters are driven by an elemental human striving for power—power over necessity, in order to survive, power over others, and power as an energising buoyancy in itself. … [They] speak today, to times that are focussed on everyday life, as lived relentlessly in the here and now. They take up the big meaning questions of what to do in order to make sense of a life, if that is possible; how to find some fulfilment, if that is possible; and how to move and act free of the shadow of death, which threatens as the big nothing. They do this with more insight, originality, and evocativeness than anything else. By any criteria, they are works of the first rank”.
In the same vein I consider the 2012 HBO television drama Treme an outstanding example of how television can offer a ‘dry-eyed’ scrutiny of how we live and what gives meaning to our existence. Created by David Simon (who also wrote The Wire) and Eric Overmyer, this series has post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans as its setting, (the title comes from Tremé, a neighbourhood in New Orleans, where much of the drama is set). The city is close to anarchy. Many homes were destroyed in the floods, others are being arbitrarily demolished. Much of the population has fled, leaving a few residual businesses to keep the economy afloat and offer employment. Treme portrays the central government as distant, detached, and uninterested, local government lining its own pockets, enabled by a corrupt police force.
In this dystopia, with theft, assault, rape, and murder everyday occurrences, Treme asks the question of how individual humans manage to live in the midst of squalor, a collapsing community, and despair. Some do more than survive, finding meaningful roles for themselves, often driven by a sense of mission. A police officer is trying to clean up his force. A chef whose restaurant failed successfully moves to New York but never loses her nostalgic love for New Orleans. One heartbreaking character is a bar-owner who struggles on in a badly damaged building trying to sustain some elements community while battling to retain her sanity after being assaulted and viciously raped in her own bar. And there’s the music, the evocative music of the city, from jazz to the haunting cries of a melancholy fiddle.
The message of Treme is that the individual is on his or her own to make what they may of the circumstances into which they are cast, however unpromising they may be. If they are strong enough and have a determined and unwavering will, then they can survive, make some form of headway, even increase the morale of others and life in their community, and prove that they can’t be crushed. Carroll notes, “they are exemplars of to your own self be true. It is through taking on adversity, and making a stand, that they gain a clearer sense of that self. Their presence counts”. In a world without meaning, it seems only personal fulfilment exists.
John Carroll’s approach is immensely satisfying. In a debate that has been with us for centuries, between a higher mystical purpose for humanity and nothingness, the battleground today appears to be about the personal. On one side, religion has been replaced by business, power and control, winners and losers. On the other, the small satisfactions of living personal authentic lives. As another example I found the contrast between the two brilliantly caught in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, which can be read as a tale about a likely dystopian future, or a tale about the ways in which our essential humanity prevails.
Never Let Me Go follows three teenagers in an English Boarding School. We quickly discover they are clones, bred to provide organs for the favoured families from which they have been cloned. Their lives are prescribed. They will ‘donate’ organs as they get older, and, inevitably, they will die young. The three youngsters soon find out about their future, but they also know they are in a system they are powerless to change. A dystopian future indeed. At the same time, the novel is about love, passion and attachment as the complications of relations between the two women and one man unfold. In this side of the story, we see how caring for others, selflessness and an underlying sense of common humanity prevail, even in the most dreadful circumstances.
Carroll regards people like Simon and Ishiguro as the creators of contemporary works to stand alongside those covered in The Wreck of Western Culture. Neither is concerned with some kind of overall and embracing system that makes sense of everything: god is dead. At the same time, both are grappling with how we construct lives and meaning at a time when power and control dominate society. It’s an old story. It was true before the Renaissance, it was true during the flowering of humanism, and it is true in our current fragmented world. If the idea of an embracing religion has died in the West, (although it remains strong in other parts of the world), then the question ‘How Shall I Live?’ remains. The social contract in the West suggested that we should cede power to a government, in return for which it will look after us. We developed that idea to embrace democracy, that we could both choose those who govern us and participate in government ourselves. However, that’s all under pressure today as ‘freedom marches’ take place in capitals in Europe and North America. Carroll asks us, is this one of the final stages in the wreck of the Western approach or is just another iteration of the never-ending quest to give meaning to human life. What do you think?
