There is Simply Too Much to Think About by Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow's widely acclaimed novels include Seize the Day, The Dean's December and Humboldt's Gift, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. He is also a winner of the Gold Medal Award and the first three-time winner of the National Book Award.

Asked for an opinion on some perplex­ing question of the day, I sometimes say that I am for all the good things and against all the bad ones. Not everybody is amused by such a dinner table joke. Many are apt to feel that I consider myself too good for this world, which is, of course, a world of public questions.

Was President Kennedy right to tell us, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country"? In the ordinary way of life, what can one do for one's country?' One can be preoccupied with it. That is, one can hold enlightened opinions. Most people con­clude that there isn't much, practically speaking, they can do. A few become activists and fly around the country demonstrating or remon­strating. They are able to do this in a free and prosperous America. I speculate sometimes about the economics of militancy. There must be a considerable number of people with small private incomes whose life work is to march in protest, to picket, to be vocal partisans. At this moment the Roe v. Wade issue has attracted demonstrators to Washington and to Buffalo. Atomic energy, environmentalism, women's rights, homosexual rights, AIDS, capital punish­ment, various racial issues - such are the daily grist of newspapers and networks. The public is endlessly polled, the politicians and their advis­ers are guided in their strategies by poll statistics. And this, let's face it, is ,the action." This is where masses of Americans find substance, im­portance, find definition through a combina­tion of passion and ineffectuality. The level of public discussion is unsatisfactory. As we be­come aware of this, our hearts sink. The absence of articulate political leadership in the country makes us feel that we are floundering.

What are we, today, in a position to do about the crises chronicled daily in the New York Times - about the new Russia, and the new Germany, about Peru and China and drugs in the South Bronx and racial strife in Los Angeles, and the rising volume of crimes and diseases, the disgrace of the so-called educational system - about ignorance, fanaticism, faction, about the clownishness of candidates for the presidency?

Is it possible to take arms against so wide a sea of troubles?

Wherever it is feasible, arms, of course, should be taken. But we must also consider what it requires to face the trouble-sea in its planetary vastness -what an amount of daily reading it demands of us, to say nothing of historical knowledge. It was brave of Karl Marx to say that the time had come for thinkers to be doers. But to consider what his intellectual disciples did in the twentieth century will send us back to our seats. It is, after all, no small thing correct our opinions frequently, and when you come right down to it, the passivity imposed to us to acknowledge how necessary it is to think hard, to reject what is mentally dishonorable.

We feel heavy when we recognize the limits of our effectiveness in the public sphere, when we acknowledge the weight of the burden laid upon us and the complexities we have to take into account - when we become aware of impoverished state of public discussion. Reading and hearing what most editorials and TV commentators tell us about the Los Angeles crisis, for instance, forces us to recognize that few opinion makers are able to think at all. To leave matters in their hands is an acute danger.

The Good are attracted by Men's perceptions, And think not for themselves.

William Blake, who wrote this about two hundred years ago, did not really believe in the goodness of the nonthinking good. He meant that the nonthinking good were inclined to surrender their mental freedom to the cunning – the sharpers and con artists - who would eventually show “their private ends.”

It is apparent to experienced observers that the well-meaning people emphatically prefer the “good” things. Their desire is to be identified with the “best.” The more prosperous and the “better educated” they are, the greater the effort to identify themselves with the most widely accepted and respected opinions. So they are naturally for justice, for caring, compassion, for the abused and oppressed, against racism, for the abused and oppressed, against racism, sexism, homophobia, against discrimination, against imperialism, colonialism, exploitation, against smoking, against harassment - for all the good things, against all the bad ones. Seeing people virtually covered with credentials, buttons, badges, I am reminded of the layers of medals and campaign ribbons worn by the Soviet generals in official photographs.

People who have the best of everything also desire the best opinions. Top of the line. The right sort of right-thinking, moreover, makes social intercourse smoother. The wrong sort exposes you to accusations of insensitivity, misogyny and, perhaps worst of all, racism. As the allurement of agreement -or conformism - grows, the perils of independence deepen. To differ is dangerous. And yet, as we all must know, to run from the dangers of dissent is cowardly.

So much for the first part of Blake's proposition. "The good are attracted by Men's perceptions." Now for part two: "And think not for themselves"

To illustrate what this may mean one need no further than the daily papers. As I write, the Chicago Tribune reprints a piece on Michael Jackson, the pop music prodigy, by Charles Burress, a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Michael Jackson's video "Black and White”, attracted a worldwide audience of half a billion youngsters. Jackson, Mr. Burress says, has achieved "monumental prominence in the cultural landscape." To what is this prominence due? Jackson frolics over the boundaries of race and sex, Burress writes. "We've told our children that race shouldn't matter, that boys and girls are equal and that many sexual roles are arbitrary. Could youngsters be enthralled at seeing these ideas made flesh?

"The refrain in the `Black and White' video is ‘It doesn't matter if you're black or white.' Most riveting is a computer-enhanced segment where a person changes ethnicity and sex in rapid succession. Jackson seems to be say­ing we are first of all human, and secondarily male or female, one race or another. He urges us toward hu­man unity and away from prejudice."

And finally, "In a world threatened by racial tensions and overpopulation, the survival instinct could summon a new human, one who has no single race and who, by being most asexually androgynous, is less subject to the procreative urge."

Readers may feel that I have gone far out of my way to find such a bizarre example. But no. Those of us who read widely in the popular press and watch the flakier channels of cable TV know that views like Burress' are not at all uncommon. The language he uses identifies him as a college graduate - possibly, though not necessarily, a California product. Besides, his preoccupation is with what appears to have become a national project, namely, the fashioning of a new outlook, a new mind. The mind of this "new human" is synthetic, homoge­neous, improved. It transcends the limits of heredity, nature and tradition, goes beyond all limits and all obstacles. "How do we object to [Jackson's] changing his appearance when we tolerate many body alterations, from shaving and bodybuilding to face-lifts and sex-change opera­tions?" Burress asks.

Now, a term widely understood to signify not thinking for oneself is ideology. Ideology for Marx was a class-induced deformation, a cor­ruption of reality by capitalism. Ideology, to make it short, is a system of false thinking and nontruth that can lead to obedience and conformity. In putting Mr. Burress in high company, my sole purpose is to throw light on the attempted invention of an altogether new human type. This new and “more desirable” American will be all the good things, a creature of no single race, an androgyny, free from the disturbing influence of Eros. The idea is to clobber everything that can be used to be accepted as given, fixed, irremediable. Can it be that we are tired of whatever it is that we in fact are - black, white, brown, yellow, male, female, large ,small, Greek, German, English, Jew, Yankee, southerner, westerner, etc.- that what we now want is to rise above all tiresome differences?- Perhaps gene-fixing will realize this utopia instantly.

But the rejection of thinking in favour of wishful egalitarian dreaming takes many other forms. There is simply too much to think about. It is hopeless - too many kinds of special preparation are required. In electronics, in economics, in social analysis, in history, in psychology, in international politics most of us are, given the oceanic proliferating complexity of things, paralyzed by the very suggestion that we assume responsibility for so much. This is what makes packaged opinion so attractive.

This is where the representatives of knowledge come in - the pundits, the anchormen, the specialist guests of talk shows. What used to called an exchange of views has become a “dialogue” and “dialogue” has been invested a certain sanctity. Actually it bears no resemblance to any form of communication. It is a hard thing to describe. Two or more chests covered with merit badges are competitively exposed to public view. We sit, we look, we listen, we are attracted by the perception of hosts and guests.

When I was young the great pundits were personalities like H.G. Wells or George Bernard Shaw or Havelock Ellis or Romain Rolland. We respectfully read what they had to say communism, fascism, peace, eugenic, sex. I recall these celebrities unsentimentally. Wells, Shaw and Romain Rolland brought punditry into disrepute. The last of the world-class mental giants was Jean-Paul Sartre, one of whose contributions to world peace was to exhort the oppressed of the Third World to slaughter whites indiscriminately. It is hard to regret the passing of this occasionally vivid spirit .

On this side of the Atlantic our present anchormen are the successors of the Arthur Brisbanes, Heywood Brouns and Walter Lippmanns of the Twenties, Thirties and Forties. Clearly, figures like Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, Dan Rather and Sam Donaldson, with their easy and immediate access to the leaders of the nation, have infinitely more power that those old word-men, their predecessors. Rather odd looking, today’s tribunes (not magistrates chosen by the people), with their massive hairdos, are the nearest thing observable to the wigs Versailles or the Court of St James’s. These crowns of hair contribute charm and dignity, but perhaps also oppress the brain with their weight. They make us aware, furthermore, of the study and calculation behind the naturalness of these artists of information. They speak so confidently and so much on such a variety of topics – do they really know enough to be fluent? On a talk show not long ago, a prominent African-American declared that the Roosevelt Administration had closely supported Hitler until the Pearl Harbor attack. The journalists on the panel made no objection to this. Had none of them heard of Lend-Lease, hadn't they read about ­F.D.R., were they unaware of Nazi hostility toward the United States? Can these high-finish, well tailored and hair-styled interviewers know so little about history?

America is, of course, the land of the present; its orientation is toward the future. The Americans should care so little about the past is fetching, even endearing, but why should we take the judgments of these splendid-looking men and women on public matters seriously? That they have had “backgrounders” or briefings we may take for granted. One is reluctant to conclude that their omniscience is a total put-on. But this, too, may be beside the point. The principal aim of these opinion makers is to immerse us again and again in a marinade of "correctness" or respectability.

What is it necessary that we Americans should know? When is ignorance irrelevant? Perhaps Americans grasp intuitively that what really matters to humankind is here - all around us in the capitalist U.S.A. Lincoln Steffens, playing the pundit in Russia after the Revolution, said, "I have been over into the future, and it works." Some secret wisdom! As a horseplayer he would have lost his shirt. Sigmund Freud, visiting the U.S. before World War I, said America was a great experiment that wasn't going to work. Later he called it a misgeburt - a miscarriage. This was the judgment of German high culture on us. Perhaps the death camps of World War II would have changed his mind.

That America is an experiment is self-evident. Consistent with this - in a small way - Charles Burress on Michael Jackson is advocating ex­perimentation. "Suppose Jackson were seen," he writes, "not as a freak, but as a brave pioneer devoting his own body to exploring new frontiers of human identity." The underlying hypothesis seems to be that we human beings, considered as material, are totally plastic and that the material of which we are made will take any (improving) shape we choose to give it. A less kindly word for it is "programming." The postulate is that it is necessary to reject what we are by nature, that the given, the original, the creature of flesh and blood is defective, shameful, in need of alteration, correction, conversion, that this entity, as-is, can contribute nothing, and that it would be better to remake us totally. In my youth the civilized world was taken aback by the Stalin model of Soviet Man as pictured in newspapers, textbooks and in art and literature Stalinist falsification, we called this. Now we, too, seem to come up with a synthetic man, a revised, improved American. What this implies is that human being has no core - more accurately, that his personal core, if there should be one, would be undesirable, wicked, perverse, a lump of prejudices - no damn good at all.

We are beginning to feel the effects of the project. Perhaps the personal core, or what we are by nature, is becoming aware what lies behind this drive to revise us is tyranny, that consciousness raising and sensitivity training are meant to force us to be born again without color, without race, sexually neutered, politically purified and with minds shaped and programmed to reject "the bad" and “affirm good” Will the real human being become persona non grata? No wonder so many of us are in a blue funk.

A self-improving lot, Americans have a weakness for this kind of thing: the idealist holding aloft a banner with a strange device. Huck Finn had no use for the nice bright clean New England boy advancing under the motto Excelsior. When Aunt Sally threatened to “sivilize” him, he decided to "light out for the territory ahead." There was a time when it was normal for American children to feel that “self-improvement" propaganda would lead us not up the mountain but into the sloughs.

In the matter of opinion, America are vulnerable to ideologues, “originators,” trendsetters, heralds of the new. Lacking the sustaining traditions of older cultures, we cast about for prescriptions; we seek - in our uncertainty, the next necessary and “correct” step. I can’t at the moment remember who it was who said (sounds like Elbert Hubbard), “Invent a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” Revised and updated, this would go “Invent a new cliché and you will attract a tremendous following.”

Perhaps the worst thing of all is the language used by these “originators,” these heralds of the new. Can anything palpably, substantially, recognizably human be described in words like theirs? It was perhaps in reaction to the degradation of this newspeak - the very latest - that I instinctively turned to William Blake:

The Good are attracted by Men’s perceptions

And think not for themselves;

Till Experience teaches them to catch

And to cage the Fairies & Elves.

And then the Knave begins to snarl

And the Hypocrite to howl;

And all his good Friends shew their private ends

And the Eagles is known from the Owl.