Here’s a book you probably haven’t heard of: The T.S. Eliot Myth by Rossell Hope Robbins. It was published in 1951, and it’s 226 pages long. The reason libertarians will enjoy it particularly is for Robbins’ insightful critique of Eliot’s philosophy, as revealed in his poetry. Eliot has long been revered by paleoconservatives like Russell Kirk, who saw in Eliot an artistic depiction of the “arrested state” that they so admire. For conservatives, the ultimate political goal is permanence—the unchanging state in which every person knows his or her place and never seeks to escape it. Eliot is the ultimate poet of “stasis,” as opposed to dynamism. (The ultimate poet of dynamism? I would suggest Walt Whitman.)
Kirk said that one of the foundations of conservatism was the “belief that a civilized society is hierarchical (requiring orders and classes) and…a clear sense of natural distinctions.” He saw in Eliot the same love of order and class, and a consequent hostility to ingenuity, to innovation, above all, to independence. In The Roots of American Order, Kirk said that the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson caused “a partial collapse of the leadership of the ‘American gentleman’ who had guided America for more than a century and a half,” and then added parenthetically, “Both Henry Adams and T.S. Eliot, in the twentieth century, would write that the America which their families had represented had ended with the election of Andrew Jackson.” Id. at 443. (Not that Jackson was a good President—he wasn’t—but the one good thing that can be said about Jackson was that he represented the American spirit of individualism.)
Eliot was even more reactionary than Kirk, as Robbins explains. “At one time,” he writes, “Eliot’s ideal society seemed to depend on a via negative or religious withdrawal....”His latest position, however, seems to depart from quietism and comes closer to an active clerico-fascism, based on a strict class society, dominated by his church, with very limited movement between classes. He postulates government by those “whose responsibility was inherited with their affluence and position.” Admission into this Platonic utopia, although technically open to “rising individuals of exceptional talents” not born into it, would be in fact carefully regulated denying to the rest that education which might possibly evoke the “exceptional talents”:
…to be educated above the level of those whose social habits and tastes one has inherited, may cause a division within a man which interferes with happiness…. And to be trained, taught or instructed above the level of one’s abilities and strength may be disastrous; for education is a strain, and can impose greater burdens on the mind than that mind can bear. Too much education, like too little education, can produce unhappiness.
(Quoting T.S. Eliot, Notes towards The Definition of Culture 102 (1949)).
As Robbins shows, Eliot’s politics are based on an “unquestioning acceptance of authority and obedience” surrounding outright theocracy. “The national faith,” Eliot wrote, “must have an official recognition by the State, as well as an accepted status in the community.”(The Idea of A Christian Society 51 (1940)). Writes Robbins,How can the following quotation be reconciled with the form of government we profess to honor: “I think that the virtue of tolerance is greatly overestimated, and I have no objection to being called a bigot myself.” To avert any suspicion in the reader’s mind that this quotation is wrenched from its context, I offer this longer quotation from The Idea of a Christian Society; the sting of this extract is in the tail:
What is often assumed, and it is a principle that I wish to oppose, is the principle of live-and-let-live. It is assumed that if the State leaves the Church alone, and to some extent protects it from molestation, then the Church has no right to interfere with the organisation of society, or with the conduct of those who deny its beliefs. It is assumed that any such interference would be the oppression of the majority by a minority. Christians must take a very different view of their duty.
(Quoting Catholicism And International Order, in Essays, Ancient And Modern 129 (1936) and Idea, at 96).
Eliot’s theocratic intolerance metastasizes into something literally approaching Nazism. In 1925, Eliot wrote that “The best we can hope for, the only thing that can save us is a dictator,” and, writes Robbins, “[h]e commented favorably on Nazism as late as October, 1939: ‘But totalitarianism can retain the terms “freedom” and “democracy” and give them its own meaning: and its right to them is not so easily disproved as minds inflamed by passion suppose.’” (quoting Idea at 17). Eliot never outright proclaimed himself a fascist, but defended those who had been accused of it, and attacked people for what he called “the weakness” of refusing to have anything to do with fascism. “The fundamental objection to fascist doctrine,” wrote Eliot, “the one which we conceal from ourselves because it might condemn ourselves as well, is that it is pagan.” (Ideal at 18.) Just as Russell Kirk would later acknowledge that he did not believe in equality of opportunity, Eliot wrote what would become the touchstone of paleoconservative hostility to the open society:Equalisation of opportunity, then, and democratisation of education, are in danger of becoming uncritical dogmas. They can come to imply, as an ultimate, a complete mobility of society—and of an atomised society… It is to think of the individual in isolation, apart from family and from local milieux, as having certain intellectual and sensitive capacities to be nurtured and developed to their full extent…. The result might be to produce a race of spiritual nomads.
(Quoting T.S. Eliot, Christian News Letter Mar. 13, 1940, Supplement 20).
This reflects the classic conservative interpretation of freedom: human beings in a free society are “atomized” because they are able to seek for their own future without having to do what they’re told by their society or their “mileu.” They commit the great sin of living for their own sake—of pursuing happiness—rather than serving. In The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand’s villain, Ellsworth Toohey says that his goal is to make people “act together. To think—together. To feel—together. To unite, to agree, to obey. To obey, to serve, to sacrifice…. One neck, ready for one leash….. The individual held as evil, the mass—as God. No motive and virtue permitted—except that of service….” Rand has long been criticized for exaggeration and melodrama for this passage. But in at least in Eliot’s case, she was exactly correct. As Robbins concludes,The philosophy of Eliot, as revealed by these quotations and illustrations from his work, can be summed up in one word: Anti-Humanism. It manifests itself in destructive hatred of the world and contempt for people. “In my end is my beginning” has adequately been spelled out by one commentator: “For just as man’s purpose is set at his birth, so only at death does that purpose begin to be realized.” It is, after all, only natural that one who is an enemy of life should be concerned with death. He is a poet of death.
This reveals itself in more than just his politics. His anti-Semitism is well documented. In his poem “Lune de Miel,” he depicts a newlywed couple in bed, and focuses on the fleas biting them; and in many other poems, he focuses on imagery which, says Robbins, “remains revolting to those who hope for a world free from the landmarks of Eliot’s country: the one-night cheap hotels, decayed houses, bats with baby faces, drying combinations, female smells in shuttered rooms, the drooling of an old man’s mouth, protozoic slime, rancid butter, frittered lives, squalid deaths….”
Robbins exposes Eliot’s hostility to man and his reason and his freedom with precision and fearlessness. For libertarians—or at least, for Objectivists—Eliot’s hostility to individualism, reason, and freedom condemn him in the darkest colors. It’s unfortunate that too few modern readers of poetry are familiar with these aspects of Eliot, or with the poems that reveal them.
The book does have some shortcomings; Robbins is a socialist, which undermines his defense of individualism, though not to the degree you would imagine. Also, Robbins attacks Eliot for writing too obscurely. In some cases, I think he’s right—Eliot certainly is “perversely pretentious” and did write poems with “considerable scaffolding.” But Robbins goes a little too far to say that “when the man-scorning, life-hating prejudices in his work have been swept away and forgotten except as source material examples of intellectual perversity, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is the book that future generations will read and enjoy.” Old Possum certainly is great, but I think there’s a legitimate place in the poetic world for man-scorning and life-hating, and Eliot is unquestionably a master and portraying it, in poems like “Prufrock.” I actually think Eliot is the greatest poet of the Twentieth Century—great because he depicts with precision and brilliance exactly what made it such an awful, awful century.
You can probably find The T.S. Eliot Myth in some used bookstores. I highly recommend it.
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