Economists have recently started using the term “polycrisis” to describe the multiple meltdowns of our globalized world, a concept the political scientist Daniel Drezner has defined as “the concatenation of shocks that generate crises that trigger crises in other systems that, in turn, worsen the initial crises, making the combined effect far, far worse than the sum of its parts.” And while some historians have challenged the notion that our age is in any worse shape than previous eras, it seems fair to say that the consciousness of the modern media-literate American is verily drenched in the perception of crisis. We live in an age, if not of crisis, at least of crisis-thought.
With Donald Trump’s reckless and vengeful second term fully underway, polycrisis is, for many, more of a felt reality than ever. As basic goods and services become more difficult to access, political dissent is silenced, and climate and medical research and regulations are eviscerated, crisis seems to be a core feature of Americans’ daily lives. Crisis-thought runs even more rampant in such a context, our urge to tune out and stop following the barrage of insanities and inanities held in check by a gnawing sense of irresponsibility, a nebulous feeling that any relaxation of vigilance is a form of complicity.
What is noteworthy about the tenor of our moment is not that we perceive our society to be under threat; almost every period of American history has been characterized by danger and disaster. Rather, what is more significant is the pervasive sense that such crises must dwell at the front and center of our mental lives. To live with a constant awareness of the ways in which darkness, evil, and societal collapse threaten our daily existences is in many quarters deemed to be a sign of intellectual profundity and moral maturity. To live otherwise is typically considered to be a particularly egregious form of escapism. As the philosopher Jonathan Lear has written regarding the climate crisis, “If we read newspapers or participate in social media, read blogs, or watch television, it would be surprising if the end of the world were not somehow on our minds. Indeed, there is cultural pressure to feel anxious about the future.” The spiritual motto of the age might best be summed up in the words of Theodor Adorno, who wrote in 1944, “There is nothing innocuous left. The little pleasures, expressions of life that seemed exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have an element of defiant silliness, of callous refusal to see, but directly serve their diametrical opposite. Even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is seen without the shadow of terror.”
It was not always this way. The reigning ideology of America in the Victorian Age, for example, has been described by the historian Jackson Lears as one of “evasive banality.” Many of our late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century forebears were enchanted by visions of scientific and moral progress stretching endlessly into the roseate future, which were combined with ideals of strict social and ethical propriety in the present. These Americans were not unacquainted with the night, having lived through the gruesome bloodbath that was the Civil War. But their sights were set on building a happier future rather than lingering over the torn limbs and shattered spirits that still hobbled among them.
Yet as Lears and others have shown, the generation of intellectuals coming of age in the 1890s–1910s rebelled against the blithe optimism of their parents’ generation, which they perceived to be both hypocritical and repressive. By the time of the twentieth century, with its panoply of catastrophes, was fully underway, cosmic affirmation was out and tragedy was in. As Mark Greif has succinctly summed up, “In the middle decades of the twentieth century, American intellectuals of manifold types, from disparate and even hostile groups, converged on a perception of danger.” The word of the day was crisis. The theologians spoke of a new “crisis theology,” pioneered by Karl Barth and Emil Brunner and Americanized by Reinhold Niebuhr in the magazine Christianity and Crisis; W.E.B. Du Bois named his influential magazine The Crisis; pragmatists such as John Dewey and Sidney Hook could speak of a “crisis of liberalism”; reactionary political theorist Carl Schmitt would describe a Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy; and, to this day, books about twentieth-century intellectual life bear names like The Age of the Crisis of Man and The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis. The near-obsessive incantation of the word crisis bespoke (and bespeaks) a feeling that twentieth-century Americans (and Europeans) were living through an age of unique tribulation. The forces of evil—whether religiously or secularly conceived—were on the rise, and a renewed attention to the roots and fruits of the resurgent darkness was now required.
The Dragon and the Dragon-Slayer
But if many of us take for granted that we live in an age of crisis and that any slackening of our attention to danger is simply a reactionary kind of escapism, we should, perhaps, think again. For even in the recent past, it was not so obvious that the contemplation of evil was an unambiguous moral good. We might consider the case of one mid-twentieth-century intellectual who dissented from this prevailing view: the literary and cultural critic Lionel Trilling (1905–1975). Trilling, whose life coincided with all the major upheavals of the twentieth century, explored the moral implications of what he perceived to be the era’s obsession with the extremes of human experience—especially extreme evil. In brief, Trilling remains one of our finest critics of the limits of crisis-thought.
Lionel Trilling was born in Queens, New York, the son of a Polish Jewish tailor and a British Jewish mother (he would always remain an unregenerate Anglophile). He was an intellectual whose career was in many respects inseparable from a particular institution, Columbia University. Trilling capped his Columbia education by earning his doctoral degree in 1938, and then went on to become the first tenured Jewish professor in the esteemed but WASP-dominated English Department. From his perch at Columbia, Trilling both embodied the image of the cultivated, bourgeois, mid-century intellectual and wrote a series of essays that secured him a reputation as one of the leading literary and cultural critics of his generation. Trilling’s style of criticism was urbane and elegant, eschewing the knotty formal analyses and close readings of the New Critics in favor of an approach that emphasized a literary work’s place in intellectual history and culture. For Trilling, reading classic authors like Jane Austen or Henry James provided insight into lost thought-worlds that, through contrast, shed light on the troubled present of twentieth-century America.
While Trilling, along with the rest of his generation, believed that his time was witness to unique and extraordinary evil, he was not so sure his literary and intellectual peers had come up with a proper response. Trilling’s reply to the crisis-obsessed culture of his day was that, like Nietzsche’s dragon-slayer who ends up becoming the dragon he slays, the contemplation of evil—far from making us better, more conscientious people—may actually make us worse. The ultimate resistance against evil, for Trilling, is a renewed commitment to a certain kind of pleasure and a firm attachment to the integrity of individual identity—evil really does exist, but it is resistance to evil through human spiritual striving that allows us to overcome or at least live well with it; and this entails a relinquishing of our unremitting attention to suffering, violence, and crisis.
Style and Substance
The possibility of a just appreciation of Trilling’s contributions to modern thought has been marred by two misconceptions about his work. The first is that Trilling was a mere stylist, a gifted writer whose honeyed words concealed a lack of intellectual substance. The second, more compelling judgment is that Trilling, while claiming to delineate the liberal imagination, actually laid the path to the reactionary conservatism of the 1970s and 1980s, so-called neoconservatism. This view was first advanced by the literary critic Joseph Frank in an enduring 1956 article “Lionel Trilling and the Conservative Imagination,” in which Frank alleged, “From a critic of the liberal imagination…Mr. Trilling has evolved into one of the least belligerent and most persuasive spokesmen of the conservative imagination.”11xJoseph Frank, “Lionel Trilling and the Conservative Imagination,” The Sewanee Review, vol. 64, no. 2 (April/June, 1956), 308; https://www.jstor.org/stable/27538545. In 1986, Cornel West would agree, giving the name “Lionel Trilling: Godfather of Neo-Conservatism” to his examination of the critic.22xCornel West, “Lionel Trilling: Godfather of Neo-Conservatism,” New Politics (Summer 1986), 233–42. Both of these charges—shallowness and conservatism—are misguided. In his writing on the limits of crisis-thought, Trilling was neither simple nor resigned.
Trilling’s early essay “Art and Fortune” gets at the issues of twentieth-century crisis by taking up the question of the “death of the novel.” Trilling considers various reasons why a critic in the 1940s might consider the novel a dead genre, among them the theory that the historical conditions under which the novel was created are now (i.e., in the twentieth century) either completely changed or so intensified that the aesthetic form of the novel is no longer adequate to address the new environment. The question of whether contemporary historical conditions are conducive to the writing of novels allows Trilling to lend his most sustained attention to his generation’s intuitions and beliefs about the state of their civilization.
In language as strong as that of any of the major chroniclers of twentieth-century horror, Trilling records his belief that evil has reached a zenith in his own age. If evil always dwells in the human heart, it has been revealed so fully and flagrantly in the death camps that intellectual and spiritual life can never be the same. “The façade is down,” he writes,
Society’s resistance to the discovery of depravity has ceased; now everyone knows that Thackeray was wrong, Swift right. The world and the soul have split open of themselves and are all agape for our revolted inspection. The simple eye of the camera shows us, at Belsen and Buchenwald, horrors that quite surpass Swift’s powers, a vision of life turned back to its corrupted elements which is more disgusting than any that Shakespeare could contrive, a cannibalism more literal and fantastic than that which Montaigne ascribed to organized society. A characteristic activity of mind is therefore no longer needed. Indeed, before what we now know the mind stops; the great psychological fact of our time which we all observe with baffled wonder and shame is that there is no possible way of responding to Belsen and Buchenwald. The activity of mind fails before the incommunicability of man’s suffering.33xLionel Trilling, “Art and Fortune,” The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), 264.
The novel, according to Trilling, once took the human being as its primary subject, as a fit object for aesthetic consideration and, ultimately, admiration. But in the age of Nazism, the human can only seem actually or potentially monstrous. If the novel celebrated, as Trilling believed it did, the human will in all its various manifestations, a society that had witnessed humans happily willing torture and destruction would have little time for such a genre. The novel, Trilling wrote, “has been of all literary forms the most devoted to the celebration and investigation of the human will; and the will of our society is dying of its own excess. The religious will, the political will, the sexual will, the artistic will—each is dying of its own excess. The novel at its greatest is the record of the will acting under the direction of an idea, often an idea of will itself.”44xIbid., 266.At this point, many twentieth-century philosophers, theologians, and artists would embrace a doctrine of will-lessness, as in Karl Barth’s radical submission of the human will to God, or Heidegger’s late turn to Gelassenheit (releasement), or Simone Weil’s gospel of “decreation.” But for Trilling, it was not obvious that the solution to the imperial will was a total suspension of willing; indeed, to him this seemed to raise more problems than it settled.
Trilling and Sartre on the Will
In a polemical spirit, then, Trilling announced, “Surely the great work of our time is the restoration and the reconstitution of the will.” Responding to the prophets of will-lessness, he wrote:
I know that with some the opinion prevails that, apart from what very well may happen by way of Apocalypse, what should happen is that we advance farther and farther into the darkness, seeing to it that the will finally exhausts and expands itself to the end that we purge our minds of all the old ways of thought and feeling, giving up all hope of ever reconstituting the great former will of humanism, which, as they imply, has brought us to this pass. One must always listen when this opinion is offered in true passion. But for the vision and ideal of apocalyptic renovation one must be either a particular kind of moral genius with an attachment to life that goes beyond attachment to any particular form of life...or a person deficient in attachment to life in any of its forms. Most of us are neither one nor the other, and our notions of renovation and reconstitution are social and pragmatic and in the literal sense of the word conservative.55xIbid., 267.
The tyrannical human will is responsible for evil in the twentieth century, and thus many advocate its abandonment. And yet that sort of “apocalyptic renovation” does not solve the problem of evil but rather implies becoming a morally ambiguous sort of creature. The only kind of person who could truly will nothing would be either, in Aristotle’s words, a god or a beast. In the former case, one would have to identify so thoroughly with being itself that one really did not care whether human life persisted or not; and in the latter, one would have to be a monster who cared little for the well-being of family, friends, or community. Most people, Trilling thinks, do care about other human beings (or at least themselves): Thus we do not want an “apocalyptic renovation” but rather a “reconstitution” that would lead to the existence of more-just societies where human individuals could flourish.
The cash value of Trilling’s advocacy of a reconstitution of the humanistic will comes out more clearly in his criticism of the “dogmatic realism” of Jean-Paul Sartre. Trilling takes issue with Sartre’s literary creed on multiple levels, but his major point of contention is with the French author’s conception of the “authorless novel,” in which “the novel is to be written as if without an author and without a personal voice.” Trilling’s rejection of this idea goes beyond literary theory and gets right to the heart of his thinking about the dangers of crisis-thought. “The banishment of the author from his books, the stilling of his voice,” he writes, “have but reinforced the faceless hostility of the world and have tended to teach us that we ourselves are not creative agents and that we have no voice, no tone, no style, no significant existence. Surely what we need is the opposite of this, the opportunity to identify ourselves with a mind that willingly admits that it is a mind and does not pretend that it is History or Events or the World but only a mind thinking and planning—possibly planning our escape.”66xIbid., 268. In other words, for Trilling, literary theories that advocate the death of the author—much like the “apocalyptic renovation” considered earlier—tempt one to think as if one is not a human being. For Trilling, evil is that which disintegrates the self. And a self willingly rejecting its own selfhood in favor of the boundless identification with impersonal forces is a self that shuts itself off from responsibility and even cooperates with the forces of depersonalization impinging from the outside.
Trilling and Acquiescence
Although Louis Menand once called Trilling “an apostle of acquiescence,” the active resistance to evil through a reconstitution of the human will that Trilling advocates in “Art and Fortune” belies any caricature of Trilling as quietist. Even more challenging to such a reductionist view is Trilling’s much-admired essay “The Poet as Hero: Keats in His Letters.”
For Trilling, Keats’s worldview provides a more wholesome counterpoint to modernism’s obsession with dissolution, evil, and crisis. In the first place, Keats did not believe that literature should too much represent evil. He “quite shocks the modern literate mind by requiring of poetry that it should not ‘feed upon the burrs and thorns of life’ and by judging those poets to be most worthy of respect ‘who simply tell the most heart-easing things.’” Trilling insists Keats was not a Pollyanna, ignorant of the realities of suffering and tragedy. “But for Keats,” he writes, “the awareness of evil exists side by side with a very strong sense of personal identity and is for that reason the less immediately apparent.”77xLionel Trilling, “The Poet as Hero: Keats in His Letters,” The Opposing Self (London, England: Secker and Warburg, 1955), 38.
“At the same time that Keats had his clear knowledge of evil,” Trilling continues,
he had his equally clear knowledge of the self. Most of us are conventional in our notions of reality and we suppose that what is grim and cruel is more real than what is pleasant. Like most conventionalities of thought, this one is a form of power-worship—evil and pain seem realer to us than the assertions of the self because we know that evil and pain always win in the end. But Keats did not share in our acquiescence. His attachment to reality was stronger and more complex than ours usually is, for to him the self was just as real as the evil that destroys it. The idea of reality and the idea of the self and its annihilation go together for him.… He conceives of the energy of the self as at least one source of reality.88xIbid., 40.
The modern idea that evil and cruelty are ultimately real and must be artistically represented so that we may offer them our baffled silence and amazement is, for Trilling, not a form of resistance but rather one of “power-worship.” In the same way that Sartre’s “authorless novel” encourages the reader to identify with world-historical forces (which are more likely to be inhuman than humane), the representation of evil as ultimate leads to a submission to the final victory of evil in the world; we may be tempted to admire and become the very thing we claim to despise. Keats, on the other hand, by embracing the reality of the self in its coherence and distinctness, can truly oppose evil. As Trilling sums it up, “It is in terms of the self confronting hostile or painful circumstance that Keats makes his magnificent effort at the solution of the problem of evil, his heroic attempt to show how it is that life may be called blessed when its circumstances are cursed.”
A dogged critic might accuse Trilling of justifying “cursed” circumstances by appealing to the heroic energy of individual will. Wouldn’t it be better to fix the circumstances than to praise the energetic soul that opposes them? And indeed, Trilling does himself no favors when, to the reader’s immense surprise, he writes that “Shakespeare suggested the only salvation that Keats found it possible to conceive, the tragic salvation, the soul accepting the fate that defines it.” After hearing so much about Keats’s heroic opposition to circumstance and the evil of existence, where does this late turn to acceptance come from? The critics who charge that Trilling became, as Menand had it, an “apostle of acquiescence” take such statements at face value and ignore all the praise of activity and will that comes before and after them. As Trilling emphasizes, Keats’s core idea was that of human life as “the vale of Soul-making,” suffering being seen as a trial for the refinement of character. Soul-making through energetic confrontation with evil and passive acquiescence are plainly incompatible. So when Trilling invokes acceptance, it seems that the careful reader ought to reflect on what exactly might be meant.
By acceptance, Trilling does not, I believe, mean acceptance of evil or of unjust social arrangements. (Incidentally, in his own lifetime Trilling was enraged by the accusation that he was a mere apologist for the status quo.) Rather, what must be accepted is our situatedness as human beings in human bodies in human history. What must be accepted is what Sartre wants to deny—the reality of the self. The reason for this is that in rejecting the self, or our situatedness in human time and space, we jump to an identification with inhuman forces that ironically compounds the problem of evil by further disintegrating our selves and our concrete attachments to other selves. And this yearning to transcend our own humanity is precisely why, Trilling feels, the modern reader cannot understand Keats’s heroism. We lack:
the implicit and explicit commitment to the self even in the moment of its extinction. Events, it would seem, have destroyed this commitment—and there are those who will rise to say that it was exactly the romantic commitment to the self that has produced the dire events of our day, that the responsibility for our present troubles, and for the denial of the self which our troubles entail, is to be laid to the great romantic creators. And even those who know better than this will yet find it all too easy to explain why Keats’s heroic vision of the tragic life and the tragic salvation will not serve us now. They will tell us that we must, in our time, confront circumstances which are so terrible that the soul, far from being defined and developed by them, can only be destroyed by them. This may be so, and if it is so it makes the reason that Keats is not less but more relevant to our situation.99xIbid., 40.
Trilling does not believe the wholesomeness of the Keatsian vision of the self can simply be reclaimed. The modern approach to suffering and evil is too ingrained, and even Trilling himself—formed, as he was, by his reading of the modernist classics—clearly sympathizes with the view that the avoidance of the representation of evil comes dangerously close to escapism. And yet, representing and fixedly contemplating evil is, Trilling believes, a dangerous endeavor. It is too likely to encourage us to abnegate ourselves, to make us drop our human resistances and paradoxically allow us to become agents of the very evil we believe we oppose.
Trilling as Artifact?
There is a prevailing sense in our culture—as there was in Trilling’s—that humanism is a dead end. This feeling has sometimes been accompanied by the idea that a focus on self, a commitment to cultivating wisdom and a refined sort of pleasure, is a reactionary bourgeois ideal that is at odds with political projects of reformation or revolution. Of course, what Trilling advocated was not what we would now call self-care. He was insistent, like Keats, that the human will attained maturity through a tough-minded encounter with difficulty and opposition, not an embrace of easy comforts and pat political clichés. Trilling would have been just as set against the passive concern with self that defines certain sectors of progressive culture as any contemporary critic—a fact suggested by his skepticism toward the modern ideal of authenticity in his late Sincerity and Authenticity (1971).
Yet the rumors of humanism’s death notwithstanding, it is certainly true that the bourgeois literary culture of mid-century New York that for many came to define intellectual life in America is now a thing of the past. Trilling himself seemed to outlive his own relevance; during the 1968 student strike at Columbia, Trilling found written on his office wall “Fuck Bourgeois Culture” and “Lionel Trilling you pig,” and posters were circulated around campus with Trilling’s face above the words “Wanted Dead or Alive.” The radical spirit of the New Left had no time for Trilling’s mild-mannered high culture. If Trilling’s milieu and context are now artifacts, can his writing about evil and crisis still speak to us today?
Jonathan Lear recently pointed out the same phenomenon Trilling diagnosed, noting, “In the name of drawing attention to the problems we face, there is a form of discourse that discourages creativity and hope in addressing them. Despair thrives when it is not fully conscious of what it is. It portrays itself as truthfulness: as the courage to face grim reality straight on, without the wishful illusions that keep us so complacent. It does not understand its own motivated fantasy structure.”1010xJonathan Lear, “We Will Not Be Missed!” The Point, March 16, 2021; https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/we-will-not-be-missed/.
Trilling can still show us an alternative to the despair-induced fantasies of dissolution that Lear, among others, still perceive at work in our culture. Through reading Trilling, we might come to understand that an obsession with danger and the “damaged life” may ironically only damage our lives more irreparably. In our own time, when so many of us relentlessly refresh our news feeds with dismay and horror, Trilling’s work can show us there is an alternative to the false dilemma of a paralyzing obsession with darkness on the one hand and a checked-out quietism on the other. To address the real crises of our age, lament and prophecies of doom are insufficient. As Trilling knew, we must find better, more human and humane ways to plan our escape.