Wednesday, June 28. 2006
Reposted from Feb, 2005:
The great Gertrude Himmelfarb on the great Lionel Trilling. I remember well this dignified gent from my undergrad years: he expected a lot! You were to be a scholar, not a student, which meant he wanted you to show him something he didn't know, or hadn't thought about. A paragraph from the piece, which uses T.S. Eliot as a central theme (nicely covers my personal theme of "the tyranny of good intentions") : TRILLING WAS RESPONDING to the problem George Orwell had posed so dramatically in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Reviewing that book when it appeared in 1949, Trilling made clear that Orwell was not, as liberals liked to think, merely attacking Soviet communism. "He is saying, indeed, something no less comprehensive than this: that Russia, with its idealistic social revolution now developed into a police state, is but the image of the impending future and that the ultimate threat to human freedom may well come from a similar and even more massive development of the social idealism of our democratic culture." A few years later, reviewing another book by Orwell, Trilling repeated this theme: "Social idealism" is not the only thing that can be perverted into tyranny; so can any idea "unconditioned" by reality. "The essential point of Nineteen Eighty-Four is just this, the danger of the ultimate and absolute power which the mind can develop when it frees itself from conditions, from the bondage of things and history."
Image: from the top link, by Cecil Beaton
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