A shade less brutal and vulgar

"In 1966 Life magazine, planning a series of articles on the history of Rome, commissioned [Auden] to write six thousand words on the fall of the empire, for which he was offered ten thousand dollars, far more than he had ever receive before. After much labor and extensive reading, he prepared a typescript, titled "The Fall of Rome". It concluded with his 1947 poem "The Fall of Rome", preceded by a few paragraphs of reflection that make the same point that the poem had made about the fall of two civilizations:

I think a great many of us are haunted by the feeling that our society, and by ours I don't mean just the United States or Europe, but our whole world-wide technological civilisation, whether officially labelled capitalist, socialist or communist, is going to smash, and probably deserves to.

     Like the third century the twentieth is an age of stress and anxiety. In our case, it is not that our techniques are too primitive to cope with new problems, but the very fantastic success of our technology is creating a hideous, noisy, over-crowded world in which it id becoming increasingly difficult to lead a human life. In our reactions to this, one can see many | parallels to the third century. Instead of gnostics, we have existentialists, instead of desert hermits, heroin addicts and beats (who also, oddly enough, seem averse to washing), instead of mortification of the flesh, sado-masochistic pornography; as for our public entertainments, the fare offered by television is still a shade less brutal and vulgar than that provided by the amphitheater, but only a shade, and may not be for long.

The editors of Life, unwilling to inflict anything of the kind on their millions of readers, asked Auden to rewrite it. He refused, as he had refused to rewrite his essay on Hammarskjöld. The essay was rejected and he was paid nothing."

E. Mendelson, in the introduction to W. H. Auden: Prose Volume V: 2963-1968 (pp. xxiv-xxv).

 

 

 

 

How far?

We've covered ground since that awkward day

When, thoughtlessly, a human mind

Decided to leave the apes behind,

Come pretty far, but who dare say

If far be forward or astray,

Or what we still might do in the way

Of patient building, impatient crime,

Given the sunlight, salt and time.

--Introduction to "In and Out" (the second half of About the House (1965))

Conservative liberalism

...It would be hard to find a more classical case than this book—as which it is well worth reading—of the bewildered liberal who,. accustomed for two hundred years to being the enfant terrible, suddenly finds himself dismissed as an old fogey. (Is there, for instance, any word which sounds more comically conservative today than the word “progressive”? 

Liberalism began as a protest against the vices of the Old Order, political tyranny which claimed eternal validity for temporal structures, religious fanaticism which attempted to impose by physical force beliefs which, however vital to salvation, can only be acquired by subjective acts of faith, human ignorance which held many things as beliefs which were really propositions verifiable by experiment, and human fear which evaded responsibility for its desires by denying them consciousness. Against these enemies, liberalism have the proper offense of weapons, skeptical rationalism, pragmatism, naturalism, pedagogy–all forms of reflection. But now– and no one knows this better than Mr. Mumford– it is on the defensive and against quite another enemy. The new tyrant is a technician, the new fanatic a pedagogue, the new ignoramus a relavist, the new coward a naturalist, the new ultramontane an agnostic. What is poor Little Bo-Peep, whose liberal Super-ego, as Mr. Mumford would call it, is shocked by carnivorous habits, to do when her very own sheep start behaving like wolves?

The emergence of the New Order within a liberalized culture, is itself proof of how brilliantly liberalism has succeeded in its historic mission of unmasking. From Montaigne to Freud it has shown up the pretender to faith, justice, chastity, but in the assumption that men were required to be pious, just, and chaste, the unmasker and the hypocrite were all time at one. Neither foresaw that round the corner lay another and much more dangerous problem, that Requiredness itself.

“In Poor Shape,” [a review of The Condition of Man by Lewis Mumford], The Sewanee Review, Autumn 1944. In E. Mendelson, ed., W. H. Auden: Prose, Vol,. II 1939-1948, p. 222.