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A new series focusing on reviews of older books. Today, we examine Gertrude Himmelfarb — noted Neocon and historian — and her book: “Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society.”

Hierarchies exist and they’re not bad. That’s the principle axiom and message expressed by Gertrude Himmelfarb in her essay collection entitled, On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society published in 1994. These hierarchies exist in our interpersonal relationships, academic circles, and literary achievements. Himmelfarb fully embraces this and, judge her as you will as a neoconservative or an elitist, she does not shy away from the defense that certain people have reached higher plateaus than others. At its essence, this collection of essays is strung together by her laments over the loss of the sacred nature of literary and historical canon and the elevation of the academic over the genius.

Himmelfarb begins this discussion with the eponymous essay, aptly discussing her core thesis:

“Today, students in some of the most distinguished departments of literature are all too often reading books about how to read books. Literary theory has replaced literature itself as the fashionable subject.”[1]

Himmelfarb wastes no time reaching what she views as the root problem in academia today: the predilection for self-styled experts to rely on abstract theoretical approaches to literature rather than the texts themselves. Himmelfarb reflects on the teachings on Lionel Trilling who spoke of each work of literature functioning as the Nietzschean ‘Void’. Like the original void, literature must act as a mirror to the reader’s own thoughts; and yet Himmelfarb posits that those in academia today have ceased to use that mirror. Instead, through decontextualization and critical analysis, they have dissembled the mirror, and with it the essence of literature, and reassembled it in a way more fitting of the academic’s purpose.

She views this as a complete failure to not only the text but great authors who laid them out in the way that they were. Academics are able to twist meaning out of literature in ways to “demystify” that which should not be.[2] What is left is no longer a deep void but a mere shadow puppet on the wall. The core reason to read literature is to wrestle with the questions and the text. In today’s classroom, that struggle has already been performed by an “expert.” Students need not contend with the text but rather read it with one eye on the literary guide that destroys the holistic process.

In a way she’s not wrong. We are all certainly guilty of performing the same decontextualization, especially of literature. Today in the awakened political climate of intersectionality, literature must once again contend with attacks on the character and condition of the authors and time they were writing. As she describes in, “Of Heroes, Villains, and Valets,” texts must once again answer for the human shortcomings of their authors rather than standing on their own merit. After all, if we consider the intersectionalists approach, the authors, and by extension their written work, can only ever capture the experiences of the groups to which these authors belonged. It has thus become easy to wipe out these works as irrelevant to majorities of people, not because the works themselves are bad, but because the works cannot inherently express the wider range of experiences that are being sought. So too can the works be dismissed based on the actions of the author when they lived. Perhaps it is too far to say, “separate the art from the artist,” but perhaps it is fair to exclaim we must “separate the art from the time-period.” These works should not be terminated from the canon for the conditions of the society they were created in. While the texts may be ‘problematic’ from the standpoint of the world today, it’s ironically self-defeating to wipe out an era of literature and disallow ourselves the opportunity to learn.

Himmelfarb is not blind to her own moral stance. In the introduction itself she confesses that this book could just as well be titled, “The Confessions of an Unregenerate Prig.”[3] This is a surprising level of self-critique for an author who, not ironically, published an entire essay on the decline of scholarship due to authors favoring end-notes over footnotes.[4] This criticism is not without Himmelfarb’s textbook qualifiers, though. She’s a ‘prig’ on account of her audacity to assert that,

“there are such things as truth and reality and there is a connection between them, as there is also a connection between the aesthetic sensibility and the moral imagination, between culture and society.”[5]

And if there’s one passage that best describes the purpose of this series of essays it’s just that: hierarchies exist and they are rooted in reality; despite the best efforts of certain academics who seek to play word games and deconstruct that reality.

Where she finds annoyance in this treatment of literature, Himmelfarb senses danger when these same principles are used in the application of history. She is especially critical of movements like the Alltagsgeschichte, stating that by observing the Holocaust through the lens of an ‘average’ German — one preoccupied with their own lives — we might create,

“‘a final Solution with no anti-Semitism; a Hologcaust that is not unique.’ It might even remove Hitler altogether from the social history of the Nazi period. And with Hitler gone…Alltagsgeschichte becomes an ‘apologia for Nazism.”[6]

This is one of her more convincing arguments. There are some events that stand out in world history unlike others. They should be treated as such.

Progressing in her essays, it becomes clear to see where she would stand on the modern-day issue of speech on campus. There has been much uproar in recent years about the illiberalism of college campus and what, if anything, can be done about the situation. The essay, “Liberty: ‘One Very Simple Principle’?” talks about the internal conflict of liberalism, stating,

“Such absurdities point to a more serious problem: the tendency of absolute liberty to subvert the very liberty it seeks to preserve. By making particular liberties dependent on the absolute principle of liberty, by invalidating all those other principles — history, custom, law, interest, opinion, religion — which have traditionally served to support particular liberties, the absolute principle discredits these particular liberties together with the principles upon which they are based.”[7]

Further, she asserts that a society based on absolute liberties is doomed to suffer under the weight of individuals never being liberal enough by the standards of such a society. In other words, she asserts that the positive values of the American liberal ultimately destroys the very negative liberties that, in Himmelfarb’s view, America was founded upon. In this she finds the absolute extremeness of liberalism akin to a form of “social tyranny.”[8]

She believes this stems from a lack of context. That is, when speech is rooted within a certain framework it allows for liberty, and more importantly truth, to be preserved. When removed from that framework, however, it allows for speech, morality, and truth to be completely relativized. It is here, where no truth exists and all ideas are equally valid, where Himmelfarb finds the risk of social tyranny.[9] If all ideas are viewed as potentially equal, then the only determinant of truth is the number of people who stand behind them.

And her opponents would absolutely agree. Himmelfarb plainly ignores that there is context within this framework. Unlike traditional logic, where individuals have been told that words can only have an effect so far as they are allowed to, it’s a context where ideas inherently have power. Ideas entrenched within existing power structures have the ability to shape the baseline of the narrative causing damage because they conform to traditionalism without any valid level of critique.

It is the exact same mentality. To her opponents, traditional ideas are not rooted in absolute truth, but rather in the fact that they represent existing power. Ideas held by those at the very top are naturally propelled further than those at the bottom and wash out any criticism of them. While Himmelfarb laments the ability for liberals to legislate hate speech against minorities but go about “adamantly defending the freedom of obscene, pornographic, or blasphemous speech,” she plainly ignores that her ideas of obscenity and blasphemy are rooted in a self-reinforcing system of power.[10]

Reapplied to the campus debate, the perspectives that are often protested are not unique opinion, students are not objecting to new ideas, but those already so engrained in society that they demand a counterpoint, which the students seek to offer. When the ideas being protested have, in the protesters’ view, resulted in the deaths and oppression of thousands, being called a ‘racist’ not only isn’t in the same ballpark but it’s not even on the same planet in terms of scale. Each is open to decide their viewpoint on this situation, but it’s very clear it doesn’t come from a problem of liberalism or lack of openness to new opinion. It stems from a movement far deeper that seeks to, at its very core, question the basic assumptions people like Gertrude Himmelfarb take for granted.

To bring this review full circle: for Himmelfarb, hierarchies exist, and they’re not bad. To take it a step further, she seems to posit that hierarchies exist because of essential truths that have, in essence, created them. But she falters within her own logic, refusing to critique her own beliefs because they hold such power in society. To be completely intellectually honest would be to agree that her own ideas exist within a framework of power that enables them to hold that weight. Social tyranny exists, but under the assumption of the ‘rightness’ of traditional thought. Himmelfarb’s collection of essays has a number of valid ideas and interesting commentary, but it leaves the reader grasping why she seems incapable of self-critique, and often that’s more valuable than any social critique one can make.

[1] Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). 6–7

[2] Ibid. 25

[3] Himmelfarb. xii

[4] As an aside it has pushed me to be very meticulous about my footnotes for this book review, so perhaps it accomplished its goal. Though, at the same time, I’m confused by the irony of her book featuring end-notes itself. And to be even more fair, she’s right. The levels of academic standards have slipped in the world of academia. It’s preferential to the author to do away with the “infrastructure of scholarship.”

[5] Himmelfarb, xii

[6] Ibid, 19

[7] Ibid, 105

[8] Himmelfarb, 105

[9] This view accurately represents her fears in previous essays, especially in her viewership of history. If there is no absolute truth to the Holocaust, then there is room by which it can be reduced to just another page of history.

[10] Himmelfarb, 96

Works Cited:

Himmelfarb, Gertrude. On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.