00:00:02.200 - 00:00:18.580

in the future. Let me begin by a number of organizational remarks then. The tapes will be available for your use at instructional services in about, I guess we're off it now.

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Okay, thank you. Sorry. You don't have to record this material though. The tapes will be available for your use in about two weeks when the reorganization is

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completed at the instructional services. So my tell you'll notice that you're not expected to read every one of the books. There are various selections there. They may be supplemented in the different sections.

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Our immediate problem is that we still do not know how many sections we will have because basically money and a number of administrative problems. I hope when we meet on Thursday that we can begin to get organized on that basis. For the immediate future then, your only duty is to come here on Tuesday and Thursday. I

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hope by next week we can get started on the sections. I'm sorry this has been necessary but it is due as you know to the budget. Ordinarily in the old times we could set up sections in the time schedule and that would all be arranged when we met on the first day.

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I'm going to repeat a few of the things I said on Wednesday because not all of you were here, the announcement being made only to crown students. For the moment there is no restriction on the enrollment in the course. Now I see we are getting pretty close to the capacity of the hall.

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In fact, some of you over there don't seem to be very comfortably situated from the point of view of writing or sleeping or whatever it is you'd like to do. And if we find that, or I say we, if the college authorities feel that the crowd is too large, then we will have to reconsider.

00:02:15.320 - 00:02:41.460

But the last word that I got was that the course would be open to all, regardless of race, color, creed, class, sex, what not. As long as you are formally enrolled on the campus that's all that required. I have by the way told individuals that auditors will be allowed but that again is subject to space. I think we obviously can't allow anyone to

00:02:41.540 - 00:03:01.460

audit if that means restricting some regular member of the campus from attendance. So for For the moment, let's consider the course then as open to everyone, and I hope it will have some particular message to non-history majors, non-humanities, social science majors, that is to scientists.

00:03:03.070 - 00:03:22.420

Also to history majors who have asked to have a course of this sort available. In fact, we're thinking of listing this as both a history course and a college course for their benefit. The only unpleasant remark I want to make before I begin, as you see, we're not taking

00:03:22.720 - 00:03:34.880

role. There is no attendance compulsory. So if you feel you want to read the newspaper or if you feel exceptionally sleepy or something of the sort, don't bother to come.

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There will be no penalty for not coming. The course of course is not required to begin with, but attendance in the course is not compulsory. I hope you won't come here simply and go to sleep and read the newspaper, though I realize that the flesh is weak and that after 45 minutes or so, particularly after a nice comfortable

00:04:01.440 - 00:04:25.900

breakfast that you had here, one does begin to doze and I'm aware of these weaknesses and I'm not going to crack down on anybody, but if you don't feel in the mood, don't bother to come because I would like to have as much as possible your undivided attention for the one hour that we will be here. I think we'll usually adjourn around 11 o'clock

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though we're technically set up for 10 to 1115 but I don't think it's fair to ask you to sit that long and try to absorb material for that length of time. At least I personally can't follow any lecture no matter how brilliant he is for more than a certain amount of time because you just get tired.

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So I will promise to let you go around 11 o'clock. Think of this as a good solid hour then. I reminded you that I will have office hours set up in time for the moment I'm simply in my office most of the day.

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Feel free to come around if I can help you. I hope in time that the section instructors can get organized and also have office hours. I mentioned this as a general proposition.

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And in part also, because as always happens, once I've met with you, as we did informally last Wednesday, once I've met with you, then a certain amount of feedback begins.

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And I begin to hear that I said so and so, or I left a certain impression with you, or something of the sort. And that's, of course, as it should be,

00:05:36.540 - 00:05:48.860

but I would be glad to defend myself if that's necessary on some points, or to clarify these matters, or to discuss them with you, please don't feel you have to take what I say here

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as ex-cathedra, that is coming down as an official statement to which there is no contrary statement possible. In fact, to be a little more specific, someone came in the other day,

00:06:03.360 - 00:06:14.620

whom I not met before, said I'm interested in socialism and capitalism. Could you recommend some authors who are socialistic? And I recommended some authors, and then I said,

00:06:15.680 - 00:06:27.020

of all the distinguished experts on the campus, what was it that led you particularly to me? Because I'm not an economist, not particularly an authority in these matters.

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Well, he said I talked with my girlfriend, and she said she listened to you Wednesday, and you sounded sort of socialistic to her. (audience laughs)

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So she thought you might have some good ideas about socialism. Well, that's all right. But if you feel I seem to support this or that ism, I would like you to come around and discuss it with me

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so that we understand just exactly what it is that I do stand for. Because I did not intend the lecture Wednesday as a lecture in socialism. However, it may have impressed you at the time.

00:07:05.020 - 00:07:20.500

Another comment I thought was a very fair comment, one of you after the lecture said to me, you sounded rather defensive on this political issue. And I suppose any faculty member might sound defensive

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nowadays if he raises the political issue because this is very much in all our minds on the campus. And I had said you remember and I meant it seriously, though it may have sounded somewhat like a joke.

00:07:36.180 - 00:07:48.540

I had said the course would be intensely political. I didn't mean this as a provocation to the authorities to step in here and leave me away. I did say the course would be extremely political in the sense

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that it is ultimately about the good life, the best life, the better world, the way things ought to be arranged. And these are ultimately political issues. If I should, for instance, bend over backwards,

00:08:04.100 - 00:08:14.200

never to make the slightest reference to anything contemporary. If when we talk about the Greeks having a war, I warn you now, this has nothing to do with any war you heard

00:08:14.280 - 00:08:20.780

about. Do not, for a moment, confuse this with anything in the modern world. This happened 2,000 years ago, and it

00:08:20.860 - 00:08:39.120

must be regarded as an antiquarian fashion. If I should bend over backwards on that basis every day, I'd still be being intensely political because I would then, of course, be defending the status quo, and that would be just as political as though I were attacking the status quo.

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Now, needless to say, this kind of politics would go over much better with a number of my employers than with the other kind of politics. But the course can't escape politics in this broad sense unless it becomes completely meaningless, completely antiquarian, completely irrelevant,

00:08:57.600 - 00:09:12.300

as you would say. I do qualify, though, this political statement at the outset, possibly in time, you'll guess my own politics from the way I go at it, subject to your own cross-examination

00:09:12.400 - 00:09:27.740

as often as you like, here and in the office. I would subject this, or qualify this by saying that a course, to me, is political in the sense that I've briefly described it, but non-political.

00:09:28.980 - 00:09:42.440

I think this is the ultimate test for academic excellence. The course ought to be non-political in the sense that a student may be successful in the course no matter what his political politics are, or what his politics are.

00:09:42.580 - 00:09:53.940

A political course is one in which the student cannot pass it unless he agrees with the particular views of the instructor, whatever they may be. If you haven't run into a course of that sort,

00:09:54.080 - 00:10:04.200

you will sometime before your career is over. A non-political course in this sense is one in which you will be able to get something out of the course.

00:10:04.360 - 00:10:16.460

You can be successful in it in the literal sense of passing it and getting credit for it, regardless of what your own particular views may be. So I begin with those two, perhaps rather vague

00:10:16.530 - 00:10:28.860

at the moment, ideals. a course intensely political in one sense, and a course intensely non-political in this other sense. Because I do want you to think of this course

00:10:29.060 - 00:10:42.640

as a practical affair, a very serious business, which pertains to real people in real life, even though we may be talking about things that happened a thousand or even 2,000 years ago.

00:10:45.980 - 00:11:00.020

Because when we start now in the year 1970, and each of these first days, I think back over the opening lecture from the very first one in 1956 in this particular course, thinking

00:11:00.160 - 00:11:16.200

what was uppermost in my mind and in the minds of the audiences when we began, aside from the actual subject matter, which in a sense is pretty much the same year after year. I think the thing upremoted in all our minds,

00:11:16.280 - 00:11:30.820

aside from the particular problems on the campus that I alluded to in this political discussion, is the fact that there is so much more awareness, possibly exaggerated by those who make a living

00:11:30.920 - 00:11:47.300

by writing about it, but still so much more awareness of this thought that society's falling apart, the world's coming to an end, or more specifically in terms of our problem here, the increasing discussion

00:11:48.460 - 00:12:00.760

that the Western society as we knew it is now in its last stages, or perhaps has even disappeared, that this is a good or a bad thing, depending upon the person you're reading,

00:12:04.160 - 00:12:16.600

along with a tremendous use of such words as alienation, polarization, and so on, ideas that aren't really new in a sense. We'll run into them again and again in our discussions.

00:12:17.880 - 00:12:31.820

But which seem to have a new kind of urgency to many of the people who talk about them, a new kind of compulsion almost. So that sometimes after you lay down

00:12:31.850 - 00:12:42.360

the particular sections of the mass media which you may prefer to read, you have the sense that this is a kind of unique period as far as Western civilization is concerned.

00:12:43.600 - 00:12:54.360

But some people saying civilization itself has disappeared, and that's a bad thing. Some people saying civilization itself is over, and that's a good thing, because Western civilization was

00:12:54.460 - 00:13:04.840

really a very bad thing, and at high time, it did disappear. Others saying none of these questions matter, only the present matters. There's no future, and there's no past.

00:13:07.640 - 00:13:16.680

Others looking to science. Others rejecting science. Others looking to social regeneration. Others looking to purely personal solutions.

00:13:18.460 - 00:13:31.120

The whole world, as it would impinge upon a student of any civilization, including Western, seems at least through the media that discuss it, far more chaotic, if not hopeless,

00:13:32.080 - 00:13:48.760

than I think at any single time in the 23 years now, 24 years that I've been associated with university teaching. And that, I think, gives this particular subject a greater interest or a greater urgency.

00:13:50.160 - 00:14:01.500

Because if it's true that the particular form of life that we call Western civilization is now coming to an end, that's certainly important to us. If it's true that it ought to come to an end

00:14:01.560 - 00:14:18.020

because it really was a highly undesirable and a very bad thing, That certainly calls for a total reconsideration of this Western experience on our part. Now in undergoing this total reconsideration,

00:14:18.480 - 00:14:28.800

which you're agreeing to do by your acting, signing up for the course, and trying to find out what we really mean by West and by civilization,

00:14:30.160 - 00:14:41.660

and by all sorts of other things like Catholic, Protestant, conservative, radical, classical, romantic, by trying to get at all of those things and insofar as possible turn them inside out

00:14:41.880 - 00:14:55.180

and evaluate them. In doing all this, we may seem, as I've put it, to be doing something extremely practical and important, even though our subject matter often deals with things

00:14:55.180 - 00:15:06.860

a long way away. But also doing something that's very old-fashioned and out of style. This is one of the few campuses where a course of this sort

00:15:07.040 - 00:15:21.440

is considered desirable and important. Most universities have now abolished such a course or downgraded it and have moved away from the older notion and not only that this reconsideration was urgent,

00:15:21.540 - 00:15:35.760

as I've put it, but that this simply was the basis for an educated person. Now, some years ago, for instance, I heard a professor say, It's a disgrace that students can graduate from a university

00:15:36.000 - 00:15:50.040

without ever having been exposed to Thucydides. Now, this was a part of the older view, which is still much stronger in Europe than it is in this country, and which was more or less taken for granted

00:15:50.140 - 00:16:00.720

until the last generation or so. This was a reflection of the older view that there was a kind of common core of knowledge that everybody ought to know about,

00:16:01.260 - 00:16:12.740

anybody who was considered educated. This consisted of some exposure to the classical writers, to the biblical writers, perhaps to the great novelists of the 19th century, to the scientific method,

00:16:12.940 - 00:16:25.400

things of this sort. And hence, the universities at one time went through a phase of having core courses, breadth requirements, things of this sort, which itself reflected

00:16:25.540 - 00:16:42.540

a swing away from the earlier elective system, to which we are now swinging back again, there being, as you will soon learn, nothing new under the sun from the point of view of the historian anyhow, and perhaps all life consisting simply of a series of oscillations between one vanity and

00:16:42.560 - 00:16:59.900

another to anticipate one of the biblical writers that we'll be looking at one of these days. So we're doing something here old-fashioned, something which is rather aristocratic, because this used to be considered the education for the aristocracy and for those who had the leisure

00:17:00.610 - 00:17:13.080

to worry about these things. We're doing something that I'm portraying as urgent and extremely practical at the moment, but we're also doing something that extremely old fashioned

00:17:13.560 - 00:17:21.460

and not at all with it, by the standards of a good many campuses and by the standards of a good many expressions in our own day.

00:17:23.620 - 00:17:37.860

It's stylish in many quarters to reject historical methods, to reject scientific method, to reject rationalism. One of the quote, "typical freshman" interviewed in the paper yesterday

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said, "speech is such a strange thing. It really doesn't communicate anything." This would be, I take an ESP or body language or something of this sort.

00:17:53.420 - 00:18:06.620

And we are going to be doomed here to communicating via speech, which I grant is imprecise, as shown by my little story about the Socialistic lecture last Wednesday. It's true speech is imprecise, but I

00:18:06.740 - 00:18:18.860

think if we just sat here in silence and communicated via vibrations and body language, that we would probably be far worse off. So we're being old fashioned in the sense of rational method,

00:18:20.140 - 00:18:34.900

precise expression, things of this sort. And you may, in fact, I warn you, grow tired of this old-fashioned course, but I ask you if you sign up for it

00:18:35.100 - 00:18:47.520

to stick it out at least for the quarter, and give me a chance to make the best presentation I can of this particular kind of thing. Let me become now a little more specific

00:18:47.660 - 00:19:09.520

in terms of our own material. And say that I'm starting with still another theory or hypothesis as I've called it in mind. This is that you really can't understand anything, not just a big thing like a civilization, but a person, an idea, a movement, a situation, whatever it be.

00:19:10.090 - 00:19:24.960

You can't understand anything unless you know how it got to be that way. Where it came from, some people call this genetic thinking in the sense that you look back to the origins or genesis of something, we can simply call it historical thinking here,

00:19:25.490 - 00:19:37.240

in that you ask where this came from, how to get to be this way. And you're always conscious of the fact of this vast historical process

00:19:38.100 - 00:19:49.780

for us going back about 5,000 years or so, in which everything we're concerned with or every body we're concerned with has to be placed in this particular historical stream.

00:19:52.080 - 00:20:06.380

Now, just yesterday, to be very current, I found something in the media which seems to talk about this, though I picked this up at random. I wasn't looking for it.

00:20:08.300 - 00:20:21.160

This particular author reminds us that there's been a widespread feeling in our day that no theory can any longer account for all our facts. A famous collection of essays some years ago

00:20:21.180 - 00:20:31.460

was entitled The End of Ideology. And this phrase has come into the language for many commentators. The end of ideology being there is no particular theory

00:20:31.640 - 00:20:49.000

which seems to give you any guide towards evaluating life, predicting action, anything of this sort, because no-ism, Christianity, Marxism, what not, no-ism is really sufficient to all the facts that we have now.

00:20:49.680 - 00:20:58.180

Therefore, our lives have become completely chaotic if you worry about this, or to those who feel it's a good thing we have become completely pragmatic.

00:21:00.460 - 00:21:11.940

We just simply try to solve immediate problems, don't worry beyond that. And some idealize this in recent years by saying, "Petitive American society."

00:21:12.440 - 00:21:24.240

We now have no more conflicts, no ideologies, no ideological struggles, no party conflicts. We've moved beyond the Marxian frame. We've moved beyond the Freudian frame.

00:21:24.360 - 00:21:39.960

We've moved beyond every kind of frame you can imagine. And we simply have a stable, harmonious society of consensus in which upheavals from time to time are smoothly fitted into the system via its ability to adjust.

00:21:41.360 - 00:21:52.420

Now, as this author points out in the last few years, it's become impossible to retain any such theory, or at least more and more people have found. The world seems all of a sudden to have exploded,

00:21:53.020 - 00:22:06.360

particularly in the '60s and in the last part of the '60s, with all kinds of ideological conflicts, all kinds of gaps, all kinds of questioning of values, And indeed, a basic loss of faith by many

00:22:07.030 - 00:22:18.060

in any notion of a stable, self-adjusting, harmonious system of consensus. It's difficult to find any consensus in our own country right now, for instance, if you think

00:22:18.060 - 00:22:31.900

in these immediate practical terms. So he says, this particular author, we've had to abandon the view that everything was really for the best in this best of all worlds of consensus.

00:22:33.100 - 00:22:43.340

Even some political scientists were speaking of consensocracy as the new kind of world we lived in. We no longer had aristocracy or democracy or even meritocracy.

00:22:44.020 - 00:22:54.360

We now had consensocracy in which everybody really believed the same thing or could be manipulated into believing the same thing. And therefore, there were no real conflicts.

00:22:55.760 - 00:23:10.700

They were simply imaginary conflicts that people talked about in the classroom. Well, he says, now there's a new critical view of things. And in the process of developing this new critical view,

00:23:10.860 - 00:23:23.340

various Marxist ideas have been absorbed, though he said earlier Marxism no longer fits the facts of our world. Parts of Marxism have been absorbed in an unsystematic way

00:23:24.100 - 00:23:35.900

into this new critical sociology. The most important of these in the present state of the social sciences is, I think, the historical conception, which requires

00:23:36.040 - 00:23:49.960

that particular events should be studied in their wider context as occurrences within long-term processes of economic and social change. Now, the consensus theory saw our world

00:23:50.020 - 00:23:57.780

as lifted out of the historical stream. History had ended. We had no more conflicts. We could not change into anything else.

00:23:58.420 - 00:24:08.740

We simply had minor adjustments. It was something like that Marxian utopia where the dialectic stops. There are no more class conflicts and problems

00:24:08.810 - 00:24:20.040

are simply solved on a scientific basis, as though this were the question of how best to keep the streets clean or turn the lights on or things of this sort, but no really fundamental clashes.

00:24:20.940 - 00:24:42.300

Now as we give this up, we have to recall again that we are back in the historical stream. He warns, however, that the new view, which tends to be to the left, where the older view was to the right, that is, if you conceive of society as harmonious, no more problems, lifted out of the stream of history,

00:24:42.410 - 00:25:01.040

then, of course, this tends to be a conservative status quo conservative view. If you say, on the other hand, we're back in the stream, life or our society consists of very important conflicts between groups, classes, ideologies, movements, then you tend to be more towards the left

00:25:01.320 - 00:25:15.540

and you may well identify yourself with the desirability of the success or failure of one of these struggles, which you cannot do if you view the world in this sense of stability and harmony.

00:25:17.520 - 00:25:31.200

So he says it may be just as dangerous for the left in our day to lift their movements out of history and see themselves as a unique phenomena. And many of our radicals today say, only the present exists.

00:25:31.960 - 00:25:40.640

We have no concern for the past and only a vague sense of the future. Just as, he argues, the conservatives, particularly in the '50s in this country, said,

00:25:41.300 - 00:25:56.020

we've lifted ourselves out of the past now, no more conflicts, only stability, consensus. If the critical sociologists do not give this historical orientation to their studies.

00:25:57.600 - 00:26:13.080

If they treat the upheavals of the late '60s as unique events or timeless phenomena of revolt-- now, timeless phenomena of revolt means people always revolt in the same way, and therefore,

00:26:13.260 - 00:26:26.800

a revolt in a Greek city state is much the same as a revolt in a modern city. You have an ideal type, and you can analyze it on this timeless basis without worrying about any kind of stream of change in between the two.

00:26:29.640 - 00:26:52.280

If they succumb to the temptation then of lifting themselves out of the historical stream, they will be adopting substantially the viewpoint of those they criticize, who conceived of stable democracy as an unhistorical absolute, an unhistorical absolute, something always the same, something that's never really going

00:26:52.280 - 00:27:26.380

to change in any fashion. Now notice as an aside here that this is one of the ways in which history is a most subversive study and one which greatly alarms the parents of all undergraduates. Notice that implication. They must reject the temptation to look at unhistorical absolutes. But now if we say there are no unhistorical absolutes, aren't we falling into the pit of

00:27:26.460 - 00:27:50.380

relativism? Aren't we saying nothing's good or bad? Nothing's desirable or undesirable, but people just have felt it was good or bad in particular historical contexts. And what people thought was good in the 16th century is what they thought was bad in the 19th century. Therefore, doesn't the study of history or allied subjects destroy any

00:27:50.460 - 00:28:13.960

sense of moral absolutes in the mind of the young? Doesn't it turn them out chaotic, relativistic, spoky, and so to speak, in the current criticism, and therefore ready for any kind of mischief? Now, I bring this out in the open at the beginning so you'll see one of the chief temptations and possibly weaknesses of the historical

00:28:14.320 - 00:28:30.660

attitude. What we want finally to say about this, we'll have to wait a course until the end of our efforts when all the returns are in as of the spring of 1971, and we can make a provisional estimate of western civilization down to that particular point.

00:28:32.620 - 00:28:48.020

This business about unhistorical absolutes is a potentially dangerous and very disturbing attitude. And it's something that has been widely discussed in the last few hundred years in particular.

00:28:50.560 - 00:29:05.220

Now, an example always comes to mind, which is so old, it probably won't amuse you as it amuses me. But there was a famous woman columnist some years ago, I don't use the term sneeringly, but it was one of our few women columnists, now deceased.

00:29:06.560 - 00:29:26.940

And she had a series of columns back around 1940 saying that the trouble with the youth and people were just as upset about the youth in my day as they are now. The trouble with the youth was not Dr. Spock, who didn't exist then, but the fact they'd taken all these history courses where professors told them that what was good in one century

00:29:26.940 - 00:29:45.440

is bad in another century and there wasn't anything absolutely good. The young people, she said, had been brainwashed, though we didn't use that term then, had been brainwashed in the schools to believe that a thing was good only in terms of the particular time in which it appeared and had no absolute validity.

00:29:46.340 - 00:30:06.260

And that's why we had young people who were resisting the war, who were against the draft, this may sound familiar to you, and who were making a tremendous furor about things. In fact, there was a young lady at the University of Washington about the same time who had dressed up as Paul Revere and set out to ride across the country in order to alert the citizens

00:30:06.540 - 00:30:27.260

to the danger of the draft, which would be the first peacetime draft in American history. Her father informed the press that she had been a victim of the Communist professors at the University of Washington, and this was why she was opposed to the draft. Or another group of students had said that the area east of the Appalachian should simply

00:30:27.280 - 00:30:43.500

be cut adrift and allowed to go out to sea because the east was a feat and they would not defend the east coast in any future war. And there are a whole series of instances of this sort which greatly alarmed older people and commencement speakers talked much of it in 1940 and 1941.

00:30:43.940 - 00:30:56.840

Well this lady columnist Dorothy Thompson by name said this was the fault of historians who had taught this moral relativism to people. Well, days passed, and then she said, I know all my readers are terribly concerned about whom

00:30:56.960 - 00:31:06.480

I'm going to support in the coming election. Trust you, we'll forgive a political note of 30 years past. Everybody's concerned about whom I'm going to support in the current election.

00:31:06.580 - 00:31:16.440

Now, it's true, she says, I've attacked the New Deal for years. I've cut it to pieces, flayed it up and down. I've had no use for it. But she said, I'm going to support Roosevelt in 1940,

00:31:16.540 - 00:31:28.240

because under these particular circumstances, this seems to be the right thing to do. Now there you had the difficulty put very neatly, did you not? It's bad to teach the students that under a particular

00:31:28.460 - 00:31:38.500

circumstance is something's right, what we now call situational ethics. It's bad to teach them, but there are occasions when even middle-aged people, as in her dropping

00:31:38.620 - 00:31:47.740

of the Republicans and supporting the Democrats for the first time in her career, presumably, even adults sometimes are tempted to see that such and such is the best thing

00:31:48.260 - 00:32:01.520

under the circumstances. Well, this author then warns both the right and the left against creating unhistorical absolutes. Their moral response will be different.

00:32:02.240 - 00:32:12.400

Now, the left, he says, will have a different moral response than the right for obvious reasons. But they will arrive at no better understanding of the course of events if they lift themselves out

00:32:12.400 - 00:32:27.820

of the stream of history and try to conjure up historical absolutes either of status quo or revolution. And they will have nothing of value to communicate to those who are engaged in practical struggles

00:32:28.000 - 00:32:36.840

to create a new society. Now, there's that political note at the end, which I cited at the beginning, though I'd not read this when I talked to you last Wednesday.

00:32:38.960 - 00:32:50.520

Scholars should contribute something to those who are engaged in practical struggles to create a new society or putting a little more broadly, the scholar cannot help taking some part in this.

00:32:51.400 - 00:33:02.500

If I ostentatiously say nothing about the struggle to create a new society, then I'm being political because I'm supporting the status quo. If my remarks seem to have some bearing on the struggle

00:33:02.640 - 00:33:14.600

to create a new society, then I'm being political because I seem to side with them. And this, as I've said, is inevitable in any course that isn't pure antiquarianism and not worth studying as such.

00:33:18.400 - 00:33:28.660

Now, having stressed in both these discussions than this intense importance of what I've called historical attitude or historical thinking, in which I'm going to be in the process of describing

00:33:28.840 - 00:33:37.420

for the next nine months, really, and which is, in a sense, more important than the actual subject matter, which you could get out of the encyclopedia on your own,

00:33:39.320 - 00:33:49.420

I'm going to set up still another hypothesis here. Remember, hypotheses are working arguments or working theories which will test as we go along as the evidence comes in.

00:33:50.040 - 00:33:57.900

You may, next June, want to reject all of the hypotheses I've set up. You may want to accept one and reject others. I want you to keep them in your minds

00:33:58.020 - 00:34:09.300

however as we go along. I'm going to argue at this particular society we're looking at, we call Western, has been uniquely concerned with this historical attitude

00:34:09.300 - 00:34:31.360

even if this was true only of a small, educated elite at one time or another. When we say the Greeks invented history, for instance, this is what we're talking about. Not that other societies didn't have some sense of the past, or keep lists of priests, for instance, as the Egyptians did, but as the Greeks who are supposed to have invented

00:34:31.480 - 00:34:48.340

really, this notion of a critical analysis of events, of a sense of relationship between past and present, and of the notion that this is the way you understand things. The notion implicit in the passage I just read

00:34:48.560 - 00:34:57.660

and implicit in many of the remarks I've been making to you, both here and at our meeting last Wednesday. I'm going to say that this society of ours

00:34:57.800 - 00:35:09.260

is particularly concerned with that, More so by implication than other non-Western societies, without saying this is good or bad, but simply a factual statement, not necessarily

00:35:09.460 - 00:35:18.000

normative, as we say. Normative is what you think ought to be, as opposed to descriptive, what it actually is. This is a descriptive statement, or a hypothesis,

00:35:18.160 - 00:35:34.080

rather, of Western society. And I'm going to add to that at the outset the notion that we can't evaluate till we get to the end, that the last part of the story, what we refer to as the 20th century because we don't know

00:35:34.140 - 00:35:55.980

what else to call it, that the last part of the story has been even more obsessed, despite all the talk of rejecting history and living in the present and so on. The last part of the story has been even more obsessed with the notion of the past, the idea of history, possibly as things get worse or seem to get worse.

00:35:58.540 - 00:36:14.700

There is more pressure felt to understand how it got to be this way. The title of a book of the 40s, "Something Went Wrong," subtitle, "The Story of Modern History." Now, this is a good 20th century view of the matter.

00:36:15.320 - 00:36:31.280

Something went wrong. If something went wrong, it must be because something happened in the past. Because we abandoned religion or because we took up nationalism or because we did this, that or the other thing according to the person who's arguing the theory. Any case we feel

00:36:31.360 - 00:37:00.760

this is where we have to start. You often find this in literature as well as in strictly social science areas. Now I've read you a passage from a sociologist and I've talked as an historian. But I want to look at this as the novelist would put this in the 20th though this is not a course primarily in literature, but it is a course in civilization,

00:37:02.120 - 00:37:24.180

in order to bring out this point that our western society is deeply concerned with history in the sense that I've described it and will be explaining it for the next nine months, and that particularly this is the case almost to the point of obsessiveness in the last part of the story, despite a countertrend away from it,

00:37:24.940 - 00:37:47.580

towards irrationalism centering on the present, things of this kind. Now take the very title of this famous novel of the early 20s, Ulysses, which more or less brackets our work in so far as we start with Ulysses, almost at the very beginning, now almost because we actually read the Iliad,

00:37:48.880 - 00:38:05.980

But the Odyssey and the Iliad are part of the same story. And the modern novel Ulysses, in so far as the ordinary reader can understand it without a guide from some professor, is about a wandering, hence the name.

00:38:07.900 - 00:38:17.780

And as you know, this is very explicit in the author's mind. He explained this to a friend, and the friend wrote a book about it. And we know now that all the characters

00:38:17.780 - 00:38:30.280

are most of the characters anyway, are modeled on characters in the Homeric story, that the situations are modeled on situations in the Homeric story, so that it's difficult to read it

00:38:30.540 - 00:38:42.460

aside from its experimental techniques in language. It's difficult to read if you don't know the original Homeric story, which is so much in the mind of the author, as the name suggests.

00:38:43.880 - 00:38:56.480

Now, while this doesn't concern us in the present context, you'll catch, of course, the tremendous irony, the difference between the Ulysses as described by Homer and the Ulysses as described by Joyce.

00:38:58.020 - 00:39:12.500

But what concerns me particularly here is this interest in history put in the most explicit fashion early in the book where our hero, who has a classical name, Detalus--

00:39:12.500 - 00:39:27.440

and you remember Detalus and Icarus-- The hero is a teacher in a wretched prep school, with his mind only half on his work. He is examining rather dull students in history

00:39:28.900 - 00:39:37.840

on the most factual, literal basis. Now, the kind of thing that has killed history over the centuries for most people. When did so-and-so live?

00:39:38.040 - 00:39:46.420

What was the date of this treaty, that kind of thing? This is why all students learn to hate history in the high schools in our own day, because there's so much of this.

00:39:48.380 - 00:39:59.080

He's talking now about Pyrrhus, and you remember Pyrrhus was that famous general in the ancient world who won a victory at such tremendous cost that he said a few more such victories and were ruined.

00:39:59.880 - 00:40:06.880

This is what's called a Pyrrhic victory when you win at such a tremendous cost that it actually is a loss, and you can't go on that forever.

00:40:08.120 - 00:40:20.540

Fortunately, this has no application to the modern world, so I pass this on to you as purely an ancient notion. And he's examining the students here about Pyrrhus, and he says, "You, Cochran, what city sent for him?"

00:40:20.640 - 00:40:25.200

"Torrentum, sir." Very good. Well, there was a battle, sir. Very good.

00:40:25.380 - 00:40:37.840

Where? The boy's blank face asked the blank window. And then the constant stream of consciousness, you remember, which was the revolutionary technique

00:40:38.020 - 00:40:48.280

in this book, since become habitual to novelists. Fable by the daughters of memory. This is passing through the teacher's mind, and you're perhaps aware of the fact that teachers often

00:40:48.380 - 00:41:00.420

have their minds way off somewhere out of the classroom even while they're examining you. Fable by the daughters of memory, and yet it was in some way, if not as memory fabled it,

00:41:01.390 - 00:41:16.500

a phrase then of impatience, a thud of blakes, wings of excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling and Masonry, and time won livid final flame. What's left us then?

00:41:18.980 - 00:41:31.700

Now this could well be said by someone in the year 1970. The idea is perfectly clear, the collapse of civilization. I forgot the place, sir, breaking in on his thoughts. I forgot the place, sir, 279 BC.

00:41:32.980 - 00:41:49.300

Osculum, Stephen said, glancing at the name and date in the Gorskard book. Yes, sir, and he said, another victory like that, we're done for. The phrase the world had remembered, a dull ease of the mind. From a hill above

00:41:49.320 - 00:42:10.220

a corp strewn plain, a general speaking to his officers, leaned upon his spear. Any general to any officers, they land here. You arm strong, Stephen said. What was the end of Purus? End of Purus, sir? I know, sir, ask me. Wait, you arm strong. You know anything about Purus? And then it breaks down into a disciplinary problem.

00:42:13.260 - 00:42:26.720

Then later on, he goes to the wretched headmaster of this wretched school. Mr. Daisy, who is supposed to be like Nestor-- now, Nestor in the old story is a wise man

00:42:26.920 - 00:42:40.220

in the traditional sense of the wise old sage. Just as the Ulysses of Mr. Bloom is so different from the Ulysses of the past. And just as Mrs. Bloom is so different

00:42:40.320 - 00:42:53.440

from the faithful Penelope of the past, so Mr. Daisy is as an old, footy daddy from the wise sage Nestor of the past. He goes to collect his pay.

00:42:56.040 - 00:43:06.840

And they're getting a little discussion of history. History, Stephen said, here's perhaps our punchline for some months to come. History, Stephen said, is a nightmare

00:43:07.160 - 00:43:22.860

from which I am trying to awake. History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. A nightmare for which-- if I can digress now my own words-- a nightmare for which we had no responsibility whatsoever.

00:43:23.880 - 00:43:37.020

We had nothing to do with the fact that European nations set up empires far across the sea. Though the results of that now are literally of life and death affect our property and our fortunes

00:43:37.160 - 00:43:49.940

in the most immediate sense every day. But we had nothing to do with the origins of this. It clearly is a nightmare from which we would like to awaken, but from which we really cannot awaken.

00:43:51.640 - 00:44:02.220

History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake. From the playing field, the boys raised a shout, a whirring whistle, goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?

00:44:04.040 - 00:44:15.260

A nightmare, at least, is something you wake up from. Suppose you get up in the morning, history gives you a kick in the slats to begin with. The ways of the creator are not our ways, Mr. Daisy said.

00:44:15.900 - 00:44:24.240

Now, Mr. Daisy, like all teachers, has something sententious to say when you have a problem. He says some platitude to offer, which will make you feel better.

00:44:25.580 - 00:44:36.000

The ways of the creator are not our ways, Mr. Daisy said. All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God. Now this was the traditional view of history

00:44:36.080 - 00:44:45.000

for many centuries. We'll run into it again and again. It's a view that the middle-aged man has here and the young man cannot share

00:44:45.160 - 00:44:57.860

what we call generation gap now. Is history a vast ordered process, moving toward a goal set by God? The notion we'll first meet with in the Bible, perhaps.

00:44:59.280 - 00:45:13.880

Or is it this nightmare, this malevolent, mysterious force that gives us a kick when we start the day in the morning? The ways of the creator are not our ways, Mr. Daisy. He said, all history moves towards one great goal,

00:45:14.060 - 00:45:25.600

the manifestation of God. Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying, that is God. Hooray, I, and here he attempts to imitate the whistle

00:45:25.600 - 00:45:38.960

various linguistic experiments the book. What Mr. Daisy asked, a shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders. Now Nietzsche's famous phrase, written some years before this,

00:45:39.100 - 00:45:50.600

"God is dead." There's no meaning, this is what we come to call absurd. And you'll notice how old in a sense are a lot of our avant-garde notions of today.

00:45:51.340 - 00:46:12.420

For people who know nothing of history, the present is always full of novelties because they're not aware of the repetition of them. Stephen is in effect saying there's no purpose, there's no discernible order, or put in theological terms, "God is dead," a mere shout in the street, and that's the end of it. "I foresee, Mr. Daisy said,

00:46:12.540 - 00:46:38.900

you will not remain very long at this work. You were not born to be a teacher, I think. Perhaps A learner who doesn't or can't begin with this traditional faith. Notice how long ago this is to us around 1920. A learner who can't begin with this traditional faith that is all for the best, there's some

00:46:39.000 - 00:47:02.480

pattern. History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to await. Now, I've written about the same time another novel, Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. And I think the Magic Mountain, another hypothesis, in its own way tells us much about the 20th

00:47:02.640 - 00:47:26.780

century as any historian ever did, though it was written a long time ago between the end of the First World War and the mid-20s, when so much had not happened, which impinges upon our consciousness in understanding the 20th century. By the time this was written in the mid-20s, Mann had seen the first signs of totalitarianism, communism in Russia and

00:47:26.840 - 00:47:53.640

Mussolini's fascism. He had not yet, of course, seen the German form of fascism. But he be intuited or anticipated or whatever the explanation is for the artist. So many things that we now talk about as characteristic of the 20th century. One chapter is called "Valpergus Night" or "Valpergus Knocked."

00:47:55.020 - 00:48:12.780

Now Justice Joyce is based very closely on Homer. So Mann's novel is based very closely on Goethe. After we've read Goethe, we'll appreciate this more. There are some passages which are almost paraphrases of Faust.

00:48:14.340 - 00:48:34.360

Not surprising in the sense that this is the national classics, classic for Germans, and hence for a German author. The very title itself is taken from the part in Faust in which he is taken to the witch's the Volpergus Knight, he is taken by

00:48:34.560 - 00:48:49.340

Mephistopheles the Devil to observe the witches Sabbath and on the way up the mountain, Faust is warned, der Berg ist heute Saubertoe, the mountain is magic mad

00:48:49.980 - 00:49:09.560

today. This is the source of the title of the book, the Sauber Berg, the enchanted mountain or the magic mountain. Enchanted in the sense of the irrational, the mad, the mysterious, not just the magic in the sense of doing the card tricks.

00:49:12.440 - 00:49:43.420

And if a will of the wisp misguides you, this is an ear-lished, a light that errs, the emphasis is on the irrational, the mad, the unusual. And this, of course, has become a commonplace for any interpretation of the 20th century, the 20th century as the madhouse, as the hospital, as the absurd world. This has become almost habitual with us.

00:49:45.580 - 00:49:57.040

The whole story, remember, takes place in a sanitarium in the Alps, and the symbolism is obvious here. It is supposed to be pre-1914. this is the sick civilization talking itself to death.

00:49:58.900 - 00:50:20.380

It assumes on the part of the reader a knowledge of western civilization and it is in its own way a coming to grips with that civilization as one might with the aid of artistic intuition in the mid-twenties. His chief character, now something like Stephen Dedalus, though quite different other ways,

00:50:20.380 - 00:50:39.120

His chief character is described at the beginning as Einfach. The translator says simple. It literally means one division, one compartment, an uncomplicated young man, an uncomplicated young man, an engineer by training.

00:50:40.200 - 00:51:01.300

He has little sense of the humanities, no experience, intellectual or direct, with the mysteries of life. He has led a sheltered life comes from a place which we would think of in terms of Kansas City or Boston perhaps Hamburg a very rigid stratified society and

00:51:02.680 - 00:51:23.600

He has come to visit his cousin on this Magic Mountain for just a few weeks because Thankfully, he's not sick and won't have to stay there more than a few weeks as it happens he stays there for the mystic seven years and And on this magic mountain is able to relive most of the experiences of Western civilization

00:51:24.640 - 00:51:42.140

so that he descends the mountain at the end to die in the First World War, presumably, a quite different person. Just as I trust you will descend from the mountain nine months hence, a quite different person, though hopefully not to march off to the war, as our hero did here.

00:51:43.500 - 00:52:03.600

One of his chief mentors is Her Setembrini, an Italian who embodies the qualities of the Italian Renaissance and the French Enlightenment. He is the spirit of rationalism, the spirit of humanism, words which we will appreciate more after we've seen them in their actual historical context.

00:52:05.660 - 00:52:33.260

Setembrini is most upset by this Valpeurges Nacht, which is a kind of carnival of the patience in the sanitarium. It's what we would call sick in every sense of the word. They get up the most ingenious costumes. One comes out dressed as a thermometer, for instance. And other such garish things. There are men dressed as women and women dressed as men.

00:52:34.020 - 00:52:49.320

nothing left unsaid here about 20th century society. And one of the liberties-- and our hero is a very cautious, careful, unsophisticated, simple young man as yet, as befits an engineer,

00:52:49.420 - 00:53:00.300

some of you might say-- one of the liberties our hero takes is to use the intimate form of address. Now, this is lost in the English translation,

00:53:00.440 - 00:53:18.660

but as you know, the European languages make a very careful distinction between, in this case, the "D" and the "Z" whether you address a person with the formal form of address or whether it's the intimate form of address. Our hero uses the intimate form of address, which is a symbol of the dropping of the barriers.

00:53:19.500 - 00:53:33.860

You see the collapse of good form. The very thing we're all talking so much about nowadays in our so-called unbuttoned age in the middle of the 20th century, he becomes rather unbuttoned and is sternly taken to task

00:53:34.080 - 00:53:46.640

by his mentor. Harky engineer, Setembrini answered frowning, "You will kindly address me with the accepted form employed in the educated countries of the West."

00:53:46.660 - 00:53:55.680

Notice the West capitalized as opposed to the East, which is something quite different. The educated countries of the West in the third person pluralis--

00:53:55.680 - 00:54:05.020

and he uses the Latin to show his classic background. In the third person pluralis, if I may make bolder suggested, you will address me as Z, not as do,

00:54:05.560 - 00:54:14.560

or when they talk French, you will not to tooye me, you will not use to. Why isn't this carnival? This is the accepted form everywhere tonight.

00:54:15.340 - 00:54:24.200

Everybody's doing it. It's in, I wanna be with it, as we would say. Yes, it is. And its charm lies in its very abandon,

00:54:25.080 - 00:54:50.780

the collapse of all standards, the end of the old aristocratic world, symbolized by this to us seemingly harmless distinction between a form of speech, but extremely important to this mind and characteristic of the West as he sees it. Setem Brini is extremely upset by the entire Valpergus night,

00:54:51.720 - 00:55:06.940

It's abandoned, it's weird costumes, and he maliciously and sardonically quotes passages from Goethe, again showing his education, tying in the witches Sabbath in Faust

00:55:07.240 - 00:55:18.620

with this festival at the sanitarium, described here in the book. But Hans Kostorp, as his name is, is lured away from his mentor,

00:55:19.240 - 00:55:34.340

from rationalism, enlightenment, classicism, good form. By a married lady he has become smitten with, he's most inexperienced in these matters, as is constantly underlined.

00:55:35.760 - 00:55:44.880

Her name is symbolic. She is Madame Chauchat. And if you remember your French show and cha, this is Mrs. Hotcat,

00:55:46.540 - 00:56:00.000

who symbolizes all the temptations of the flesh, the subconscious, the emotional. And as our young man is tempted away from his mentor, the point made so often in the book,

00:56:01.370 - 00:56:19.520

the challenge in the 20th century to classicism, humanism, renaissance, enlightenment by the subconscious, the irrational, the mad, the exotic, symbolized in a fairly harmless way by the use of speech in this much more

00:56:19.580 - 00:56:50.440

important way in the novel by the temptation between the two attractions the teacher of humanism and Madame Chauchat and said and Brini calls after him in Italian Italian the language of culture the language of the Renaissance the language of Dante. Hold on engineer, Aspeti Kekosipha, and he urges ragione.

00:56:51.040 - 00:57:21.460

Now ragione, rationality, reason, reasonableness, proportion, relationship, one of the key words of the Italian Renaissance as we'll see, and a key classic word in its Latin origin, "ratio", "un po di ragione", be a little reasonable about this, or have a little rationality. Now there's no place for rationality when the magic mountain is

00:57:22.160 - 00:57:49.140

concerned. The magic is "mountain mad today", "sauberto", full of the irrational, the weird, the mad, the unbuttoned. He hears this voice in the foreign tongue and as he drifts off towards the lady in her carnival hat, he wearing the same ridiculous outfit and using this unbuttoned form of discourse, the do

00:57:49.340 - 00:58:12.600

and the to. He more or less forgets his old mentor and he and the lady settle down to chat in French because one drops one's Protestant Puritan sense of responsibility when one chats in French. When one chats in German as in English, one cannot say the things that one would say in

00:58:12.660 - 00:58:26.240

French. And they have a most intimate and mad discussion at the end of this party. But Embrini gives up on him. Ma-e-mato, he's mad, queso ragazzo.

00:58:26.380 - 00:58:44.840

This young man is mad, crazy. Just like the mountain is mad, and like all these people around him. And this old traditional Western force of rationalism, science, humanism, enlightenment, renaissance, the Greeks, all the rest.

00:58:46.960 - 00:59:11.080

His force is seriously challenged, in part, by the emotional, the subconscious, the mad, the unbuttoned, as well as by other very sinister forces, the totalitarian, which come later in the book. But he drowned out the voice with his own, Hans Kastorp did, and drift off towards this

00:59:11.340 - 00:59:35.620

charming French conversation for many pages, not translated because you as educated readers all these languages, in which one can say what one really means as a symbol of this general breakdown of the Western society, or at least this danger of a breakdown in the 20th century. Now all of this sounds very familiar in 1970. It seemed much

00:59:35.880 - 00:59:59.480

newer to many readers perhaps in the 20s, though to some contemporaries the 20s were just as bad as the 60s have been to us. And we can take that now as a starting point, this obsession with history, the hypothesis I've been speaking about the last few minutes, and this concern now for what we're going to start with, the classic,

00:59:59.750 - 01:00:19.440

the humanistic, the rational, that we've come to think of as one of the chief possessions of the Western culture, and it seems to sum the key to the understanding of the 20th century that this is now on the defensive, if not actually destroyed by these newer forces.

01:00:20.220 - 01:00:59.160

All right, we'll continue with that next time. (audience applauding) [BLANK_AUDIO]