Cultural Amnesia (9 page)

It was always a bad mistake to suppose that Aron was some kind of Gallic Dr. Strangelove
who had learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. The contrary was true: the annihilation of the defenceless was at the centre of his worries. The point to grasp is that he had already seen it
happen. Hitler had dropped the equivalent of an atomic bomb on at least six million perfectly innocent people—a weapon more than sixty times more powerful than the one that obliterated
Hiroshima. Stalin had dropped the equivalent of an atomic bomb a hundred times more powerful on his own citizens. Those bombs had gone off in comparative silence, but Aron had understood the
repercussions. For an era in which mass extermination was already not just a possibility but a reality, he presciently drew the conclusion that mutual assured destruction would be the only
possible guarantee against disaster. Arguments that it was a guarantee for disaster did not impress him. Hence he was free from the debilitating impulse to warn the world that the arms race was
dangerous. Obviously it was: too obviously to need pointing out. While whole generations of intellectuals on the left exhausted their thin talents in an effort to say something that Kate Bush
couldn’t sing—she, too, daringly believed that a nuclear weapon was an offence against love and peace—Aron occupied himself with the more useful task of examining the peace that
had finally come to Europe, guaranteed at last by no further armed conflict being possible, no matter how thoroughly each side might plan for just such an eventuality. In fact the more concretely
they planned, the more the possibility retreated into the notional. Political conflict, however, was clear-cut as never before, and here, for once, Marx was proved right. Economics determined the
outcome.

The conflict began and ended in Berlin, with not a shot fired except against unarmed people attempting to cross the
killing zone between East and West. Nobody was ever shot trying to cross from West to East. When the Wall went up in 1961, its creators called it the Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier. There were
no longer any fascists who mattered, but the need for protection was real. East Germany, and by extension the Warsaw Pact countries taken as a totality, all had to protect themselves against the
glare from the shop windows of West Berlin. Soviet bloc propaganda, faithfully echoed by
gauchiste
theorists in the West, asserted from the beginning that a
free Berlin could not be free
at all: its materialist attractiveness was being artificially enhanced by American imperialism as a forward outpost of West Germany, which, in its
turn, had been artificially bolstered by the Marshall Plan as a capitalist armed camp. In actuality, the
Bundesrepublik
would have outperformed the German
Democratic Republic whatever the circumstances, merely through its not being burdened with a centralized economy. The propaganda was a fantastic response to a real and potentially lethal threat,
already identified by Stalin before 1948, when he made his one and only military move: an armed blockade. Without the resulting Berlin airlift, he would have succeeded in reducing the city by
starving and freezing its inhabitants—methods to whose human consequences he had already proved himself indifferent when applying them on a much larger scale against his own people.

Plane-loads of food and coal were the Allied response, which could not have been mounted without the threat of atomic war
to back it up. When Stalin lifted the blockade, his battle was lost and the war along with it. From then on, the armed aggression of the East German regime was against its own citizens. In 1953,
they had to be put down with tanks. The Wall was put up because too many of them had fled: East Germany was dying from its brain-drain. The Wall ensured only that it would die more slowly, from
envy. The confrontation over a divided Berlin, a divided Germany and a divided Europe was one long war, which at any previous point in history would unquestionably have been fought with weapons.
It was called the Cold War mainly in derision, by those who had managed to convince themselves that it was all an American idea. But Aron was surely right to view as peace a war in which the
winning side made every effort not to fire a shot, and the losing side could have no recourse to its weapons even in despair. There were many thinkers who disagreed with him over the issue,
especially among the French left. But he had more trouble with agreement from the right. He succeeded in detaching himself, however, from the addled notion that the long drawn out defeat suffered
by the Soviet bloc was a victory for the American Way of Life. He was too clear-sighted for that, and the triumph of his lifetime’s effort as a writer on politics was to demonstrate that
the believer in liberal democracy, and not the believer in an autocratic utopia, is the one with the hard head. By now everybody realizes that the West’s material abundance was
decisive. Aron was the first to realize that the fight would have to be without weapons. That was what he really meant by his famous slogan “Peace impossible, war
unlikely.” He meant that there could be no settled peace without the threat of war, but that the war would probably not happen, and as long as it didn’t there was a kind of peace
anyway: the only kind available at the time.

An aggressor would not be able to destroy them without killing
American personnel, which is to say, without running a grave danger of reprisals.

—RAYMOND ARON,
Paix et guerre entre les nations
, QUOTED IN
Les Dernières Années du
siècle

Aron’s
Realpolitik
was distinguished by
being real, as
Realpolitik
in the strict sense rarely is. When he reminds us of Machiavelli, he reminds us of Machiavelli’s truly hard-headed style,
and not of the would-be hard-headedness of his political philosophy—a philosophy that was essentially nihilistic. Machiavelli, perhaps encouraged into admiration by the ruthlessness with
which the Medicis would eventually rack him, wrote an invitation to despotism. Aron was writing a prescription for democracy. But the prescription had to include a realistic assessment of the
totalitarian challenge (a menace even though the opportunists who made a career from opposing it amounted to a menace in themselves) and in that department realism had to include an
acknowledgement that a nuclear confrontation between West and East could not be wished away. In this particular passage, he makes a point which was so antipathetic to the proponents of unilateral
disarmament that they were obliged to rewrite history in order to circumvent it.

European countries
wanted
American atomic bombs based on their soil, not just to
fulfil their NATO obligations but because the weapons were accompanied by American personnel. A Soviet strike against the weapons would thus constitute an attack on the United States, which would
be unable to remain uninvolved in the conflict. Hence there could be no localized nuclear exchange: only a global one. Unilateralists, unable to accept that it was in the interests of a European
country to play host to American nuclear weapons, were obliged to argue that
they were an imposition. By extension, this argument fitted a picture in which the U.S.A. was an
imperialist presence in Western Europe, like the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. (Even further to the left lay the belief that the U.S.A. was the
only
imperialist presence in Europe, the Soviet Union acting merely as a protective power against the further encroachment of a capitalist hegemony.) At this distance it is difficult to appreciate how
thoroughly Aron’s position went against the general trend of liberal sympathies. Stated on its own, this one point was enough to make him sound like Edward Teller, whose political
programme—which had only parodic relevance to his practical ability as a scientist—amounted to building bigger and bigger bombs, and digging deeper and deeper holes in which to hide
from the consequences. Teller being the principal model for Dr. Strangelove, it became easy to hint that Aron might share the same enthusiasms, even though his own right hand showed no tendency
to shoot spontaneously skyward.

But Aron was right, and the effort the USSR made to back the unilateral nuclear disarmament movement in Europe proves it.
With the American weapons in place, the USSR was unable to contemplate exerting military pressure in Western Europe in any circumstances. In
Paix et guerre
Aron made many other points of similarly unpalatable realism, the whole tract adding up to an advance on Clausewitz (one of Aron’s passions: he wrote a two-volume commentary), in which
Clausewitz’s connection between diplomacy and war was extended into a further connection between perpetually imminent total war and the only possible form of peace—an armed truce.
That the armed truce included an arms race was incidental, because the high cost was merely material, whereas the price of a shoot-out would have been the loss of everything. Salvation lay in the
obviousness of this latter point to all. Aron’s conclusion was an epigram: “Peace impossible, war unlikely.” But it is the way his whole argument is laid out that needs to be
appreciated. He was fully aware of the bitter irony inherent in reaching such a position from humanist principles, but he saw no paradox in the irony: if there was an apparent contradiction,
history had enforced it. A real contradiction would have been to disarm in the hope that moral superiority would have prevailed. For Aron, such trust would have flown in the face of his basic
geopolitical precept, which he held to be true for all time: that the nation states are in a state of nature with one
another. It would also have flouted his reading of
contemporary history, in which totalitarian nation states were bound to find it intolerable to cohabit with democracies unless forced to by the inevitable consequences of failing to contain their
patience.

Personality affects thought—or at any rate affects the train of thought—and there can be no
doubt that Aron’s quiet but considerable
amour propre
got a boost from his being the only one in step. Near the end of his life, when his views became
less unfashionable, he was at his least decisive. Jean-François Revel, recalling, in his book of memoirs
Le Voleur dans la maison vide
(The Thief in
the Empty House), his time as editor of
L’Express
, complains sharply about the senescent vacillations of the paper’s most distinguished
contributor. Old men with many laurels often use them to lie down in. Aron was at his best when out of the swim, saying hard things—hard things that were made harder to say because they
superficially echoed the unthinking right. During the war, for example, he had been no toady for de Gaulle, but when de Gaulle, in 1963, came back to supremacy on the promise to keep Algeria and
then promptly gave it away, Aron clearly enjoyed saying that only de Gaulle possessed what the Fourth Republic had lacked,
l’héroïsme de
l’abandon
—the bravery to renounce (
Démocratie et totalitarisme
, p. 11). There was always an element of sombre relish, of hushed
gusto, in Aron’s readiness to puncture liberal assumptions. But he himself was the very model of the liberal, and those on the left who persisted in believing that liberal democracy was
itself ideological were bound to despise him, because he was the one who proved it wasn’t. Liberal democracy was, and is, reality. No ideology can tolerate a full historical consciousness.
Only realism can, and Raymond Aron’s long shelf of lucid books will always be there to tell us why.

Walter Benjamin

Marc Bloch

Jorge Luis Borges

Robert Brasillach

Sir Thomas Browne

WALTER BENJAMIN

Walter Benjamin was born in Wilhelmine Berlin in 1892 and committed suicide on the Spanish border
in 1940, almost within sight of safety. In the 1960s, when his work as a critic began to appear in English, he was hailed as an original contributor to the assessment of the position of the
arts in modern industrial society, and by now he is taken for granted as one of the early giants of Theory, that capitalized catch-all term which is meant to cover all the various ways of
studying the arts so as to make the student feel as smart as the artist. Benjamin is above all taken for granted as a precursor of post-modernism. It remains sadly true, however, that he is
more often taken for granted than actually read. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is the Benjamin essay that everybody knows a little bit about. Whether its
central thesis is true is seldom questioned, just as the value of his work as a whole is seldom doubted. His untimely death was such a tragedy that nobody wants to think of his life as less
than a triumph. But there had already been many thousands of Jewish tragedies before his turn came, and what is remarkable for the historically minded observer is just how slow so brilliant a
man was to get the point about what the Nazis had in mind. About
the other tragedy, the one in Russia, he never got the point at all. This might seem an unpitying line to
take, as well as a presumptuous one. Reinforced by the impressive density of his prose style, Benjamin’s intellectual status is monumental, and it is bathed in the awful light of his
personal disaster. As a critic devoted to the real, however, Benjamin deserves the courtesy of not being treated as a hero in a melodrama.

Far from inaugurating a purer sphere, the mythic manifestation of
immediate violence shows itself fundamentally identical with all legal violence, and turns suspicion concerning the latter into certainty of the perniciousness of its historical function, the
destruction of which thus becomes obligatory.

—WALTER BENJAMIN,
Selected Writings
, VOL. 1,
1913–1926
,
P. 249

B
UT LET’S BREAK
the flow of eloquent opacity at that point and ask ourselves about its author. The essay is called “A Critique of Violence” and yields a lot more in the same strain. With Benjamin,
“strain” was the operative word. Part of his sad fate has been to have his name bandied about the intellectual world without very many of its inhabitants being quite sure why, apart
from the vague idea that he was a literary critic who somehow got beyond literary criticism: he got up into the realm of theory, where critics rank as philosophers if they are hard enough to
read. Clever always, he was clear seldom: a handy combination of talents for attaining oracular status. More often mentioned than quoted, he has become a byword for multiplex cultural scope. But
the unearned omniscience of post-modernism depends on its facility for connecting things without examining them, and the routine invocation of Benjamin as a precursor is symptomatic. In the
under-illuminated conference hall where everything is discussed at once, everybody who matters knows his name, even if nobody seems to remember much of what he actually said. One of the few
things Benjamin
is
remembered for actually saying is that his country was not Germany but German, meaning the German language. The idea poignantly
harked forward to the unified New Europe which is now, we are assured, in the final stages of getting its act together. Populated by the merrily flush inhabitants of twinned towns,
it will be the good New Place with no real borders except where languages meet. Unfortunately for Benjamin, as for nearly all the Jews of the Old Europe, he lived at a time when unity was being
striven for by other means, and for other ends. In Hitler’s New Europe, where all internal political frontiers had indeed been dissolved but only at the cost of surrounding the whole
expanse with barbed wire, Benjamin, a French-speaking cosmopolitan who should have been at home everywhere, was safe nowhere. At the border between France and Spain, within hailing distance of
freedom but without a proper visa, he took his own life because he was convinced that for him there was no getting out of Nazi territory. He had devoted his career to pieces of paper with writing
on them, but he didn’t have the right one.

Had he reached liberty, he might have written a classic essay about passports and permits. To write with
scholarship and insight about the small change of culture was his calling card. He could have written an essay about calling cards: granted life, he would probably have got around to it. In the
words of Ernst Bloch (from an encomium included in
Über Walter Benjamin
, a 1968 collection of tributes by various hands), Benjamin was blessed with a
Sinn für Nebenbei
: a nose for the lurking detail. The idea of studying cultural by-products wasn’t new. His beloved Proust (of whom he was the
first serious translator into German) had already said that when one reaches a suitable level of receptivity there is as much to be learned from a soap advertisement as from a
pensée
by Pascal. Mallarmé did not consider himself to be slumming when he got involved with women’s fashion magazines. Baudelaire, less afraid of
the ephemerally chic than of the stultifyingly elevated, presaged the tradition by which to this day the most high-flown French artists and intellectuals show little reluctance when asked to be
guest editor of
Vogue
. Just try to stop them.

What was unique about Benjamin was not his readiness to take a side track, but the lengths he would go to when he took
one. He would devote more attention to children’s books than he did to books for adults. Even then, if all the side tracks had led downwards he would never have acquired his prestige. But
enough of them led upwards to
give the totality of his work an impressive air of the intellectually transcendent. Unlike Mr. Casaubon in
Middlemarch
, whose Key to All Mythologies was as endless as a scheme for joining the stars, Benjamin, we are encouraged to feel, really could see how it all tied up. He
had theories about history which still sound good even in the light of the general agreement among practising historians after Arnold Toynbee that any history written in conformity to a theory is
likely to be bad. Benjamin argued strenuously that science needs a theory, too: not just theories but
a
theory, a theoretical background. The empirical
evidence already suggested that it was a defining condition of science to need no such thing. (Whichever way Einstein arrived at a theory of relativity, it wasn’t by departing from a theory
of science.) But Benjamin’s urge to validate his interest in concrete detail by elevating it with a suitably abstract lifting apparatus looked like a guarantee of seriousness during the
Weimar Republic, when the German tradition of cloud-borne metaphysics was still strong. Posthumously and with renewed vigour, the same urge helped again during the 1960s, when Benjamin, like
Gramsci, was rediscovered worldwide as a thinker about culture whose Marxist emphasis could be regarded as unspoiled because he had not stayed alive long enough to see everything go wrong in the
Soviet Union. (He had, in fact, but the significance of the 1937–1938 Moscow trials was lost on him, perhaps because by then his own situation was getting desperate.) For the semi-educated
Beatles-period junior intellectual intent on absorbing sociology, philosophy and cultural profundity all at once and in a tearing hurry, Benjamin’s scrappily available writings constituted
an intellectual multivitamin pill, the more guaranteed in its efficacy by being so hard to swallow. The various English translations concentrated the effect by reproducing all the tortuous
cerebration of his original texts without any of the occasional poetic flair, thereby forestalling accusations of frivolity. The less comprehensible he was, the more responsible he was held to
be. Here was no lightweight.

Benjamin’s most famous essay, whose title might best be translated as “The Work of Art in the Age of Its
Technological Reproducibility
,
” is atypical for featuring a general point designed to be readily understood. Unfortunately, once understood, it is
readily seen to be bogus. Benjamin argued that an art object would lose its “aura” through being reproduced. The logical extension of this line would entail that any
painting would retain aura through being a one-off, whereas any photograph would be deprived of aura through its capacity to be copied by the million. I made up my own mind about
this seductive notion one afternoon in Los Angeles, during one of those breaks in filming that I had learned, over the years, were better devoted to self-improvement rather than to just lying
down and praying for release. At the Getty Museum, which at the time was still in Malibu, I happened to look at the sumptuous but frozen Winterhalter portrait of a Sayn-Wittgenstein princess. The
picture was hung so that she was gazing out to sea towards Catalina Island, and she looked as if she could afford to buy it. As an ancestress of one of the Luftwaffe’s top-scoring
night-fighter pilots, she was bound to attract my interest. She had some history ahead of her as well as, presumably, behind her: she was a bewitching glamour-puss. Or so, at any rate,
Winterhalter was trying to assure us. He might have been trying to assure her as well, in which case he was worth the fee. But it was a pretty ordinary portrait, rather along the hagiographic
lines of that other faithful servant to the aristocracy, Makart, except with a bit more light thrown on the subject. No doubt her price tag would have been in the millions, but she personally was
a dime a dozen. Later on, back at the hotel, I was leafing through John Kobal’s excellent coffee-table album
The Art of the Great Hollywood
Photographers
. Not for the first time I was transfixed by Whitey Schaefer’s spare but incandescent photograph of Rita Hayworth. The Sayn-Wittgenstein princess had looked very nice,
but for aura, in any meaningful sense of the word, she came nowhere near the film star.
Which
painting, and
which
photograph? And what about all those lovely-looking books Benjamin collected and cherished even when he couldn’t read them: what else were they but reproduced works of art, and why else
caress them if not for their aura? Whenever Benjamin transcends his sense of the relevant detail, one’s own sense of the relevant detail tends to punch holes in his abstractions. Luckily
for his reputation, if unluckily for the world’s sum total of mental health, his conclusions are seldom so separable from his relentless metaphysical vocabulary. A more typical essay is the
one on Karl Kraus, of which Kraus confessed that the only thing he understood was that it was about him.