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On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society

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Gertrude Himmerfarb has been writing sharp and insightful critiques of history and society for over 50 years, and her more recent books are as good or better than anything she has published in her long career.

In "On Looking Into the Abyss" Himmerfarb demolishes literary deconstruction and exposes its frauds as devistatingly as any critic. Her contrast of the Marxian and Hegelian views show us both the continuing attraction of Marxism as well as its fatal flaws, and make us understand why a 160 year old debate is still relevant.

In an age where discourse is often reduced to televised shouting matches, the half-baked opinions of celebrities and carefully crafted statements matched to opinion poles, read Himmelfarb to re-discover what intelligent argument and essays can and should be.

Himmelfarb's observations on post-modern 'history' are right on target. The apologists for the Holocaust (revisionism is always apologetics) in academia are hideously indifferent to the greatest devastation and assault on humanity ever known. I had to laugh at the post-modern historian's lament about the 'fact fettish' of traditional historians. This book may be considered the starting point in the inquiry on why many students leave academia less able to think critically than when they enter. This is a tragedy, particularly because the 'new' history (or literature or psychology, etc.) is so boring and formula-driven that a daily newspaper is more informative, relevant, and interesting in comparison. This book is an eye-opener for those who wonder why so many college graduates are clueless about where they are in human history and how they got here. Those who have long suspected the intrusion of academic nincompoopery in our universities in recent decades will enjoy this book.

With impressive scholarship, keen insight and courteous polemics, Himmelfarb challenges the intellectual deception and spiritual poverty of our era. Most of the essays examine the trash that's become intellectually fashionable since the1980s. The title essay braves the swamps of postmodernism inhabited by the demons of nihilism, irrationality and immorality. She dissects deconstruction and related pseudo-philosophies particularly for their baleful effect upon philosophy, literary criticism and historical studies. In the madhouse of deconstruction, the interpreter takes precedence over the text that is interpreted, with comical or insane results. The objective is to undermine reality by denying that it exists.

She warns of the consequences when we are informed that philosophy has nothing to do with wisdom or virtue, that metaphysics is really linguistics, that morality is a form of aesthetics and that the best approach is not to take philosophy seriously. And about what happens to our sense of the past when we are told there is no past except that which the historian creates, or to our perception of the significance of history when we are assured that it is we who give it meaning, or to that terrifying historical event, the Holocaust, when it can be so easily 'demystified' and 'deconstructed'?

Hegel deified Reason, arguing that every individual could rely on their own reason, accepting as true what seems rational according to individual judgment. Thus a train of thought was set in motion that led to Feuerbach representing religion as the failure of humanity's critical reason and Max Stirner claiming the Ego as the only reality. The destination becomes obvious. Himmelfarb shows up many contradictions in Marx: his habit of portraying his proletarian protagonist in pejorative ways, his counterfactual assertion that the needy would forever become poorer and the sinister sacrificial vision lurking behind his materialist interpretation of history. The author's epitaph for Marx has proved to be far too optimistic: the collectivist serpent returns from Hades again and again.

The essay on Liberty confronts the icon of modern liberalism, John Stuart Mill. She convincingly argues that his doctrine of the absolute freedom of the individual inevitably leads to relativism. And if truth can be relativized, morality will follow. She laments our materialist culture that bans unhealthy foods but not sadistic movies and forbids racial segregation but not moral degradation. Absolute liberty tends to subvert the very freedom it seeks to maintain as it grants itself the right to assault the foundations. This was also clearly pointed out by Polanyi in his seminal work Science, Faith and Society.

The Dark and Bloody Crossroads Where Nationalism and Religion Meet includes a comparison between the newer versus the established nation states. As the newer ones become more assertive and brutal, the older nations are becoming spineless and passive, ashamed of affirming the legitimacy of their own benevolent expression of nationalism and afraid of challenging the legitimacy of the oppressive tribal mode. The same can be said for Western standards of decency and what's left of our religion. In this regard, The Return of History and the End of Dreams by Robert Kagan is most relevant.

Himmelfarb believes that the historian should be able to identify heroes and villains in history and judge their behavior. The denial of good and evil trivializes the Shoah/Holocaust and the Gulag. It is incumbent upon us to maintain the reality of the past. She maintains that professionalism in history respects the reader and our ancestors whilst upholding the credibility of the discipline. The practice of professionalism confirms the humility of the serious historian that rejects both the arrogant claim to exactly recapture the past and the ludicrous notion of the past's unreality.

Historians educated in the old school of footnoting is struck by the increasing number of academic publications that have no notes at all and even boasts about their lack of sources. The skeptic Voltaire called historical details "the pests that destroy books." His heirs the postmodernists have taken this disdain for research to extremes by denying truth itself. The fatuousness with which postmodernists proclaim the failure of beauty, truth and value contrasts sharply with the reverence of the modernists who defined it. Chantal Delsol sets out an interesting diagnosis of this affliction in her books Icarus Fallen and The Unlearned Lessons Of the Twentieth Century.

Himmelfarb explains how postmodernist historians long to be considered creative and imaginative but by rejecting the causal and chronological narrative, they turn history into fiction. Like all honest historians, the modernists were aware that total objectivity is impossible but they still pursued it through the critical evaluation of evidence. They placed a premium on research and primary sources, the authenticity of documents, reliability of witnesses, the need to obtain substantiating and countervailing evidence, the accuracy of quotations and citations and prescribed forms of documentation in footnotes and bibliography.

Postmodernist philosophy holds truth in such contempt that one doubts the jokers themselves believe their assertions. Just like literary critics play with texts by twisting them in a myriad ways, so postmodern historians tell tales aimed at empowering whatever victim group is the flavor of the moment. Himmelfarb's abyss refers to the chasm of meaninglessness and despite her courtesy, at times a tone of exasperation and more rarely of revulsion surfaces in her writing. She takes on both the originators like Nietzsche, Mill, De Mann and Heidegger and their disciples such as inter alia Derrida, Foucault and Rorty.

I also recommend The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics by Mark Lilla, Last Exit to Utopia by Jean-François Revel, Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks, Why Truth Matters by Ophelia Benson & Jeremy Stangroom, Experiments Against Reality by Roger Kimball and the same author's Tenured Radicals in the 3rd edition of which he demonstrates how the trends he observed in the early 1990s had taken over the humanities and started to seep into popular culture within the space of a decade.

"The purpose of a college education is to teach you how to think". Regardless of your current opinions, this book is going to make you think. If you are not afraid to check your values and judgements, read the book.

P.xi "Historians who think it the highest calling of their profession to resurrect the 'daily life of ordinary people' can find little evidence in the daily life of ordinary Germans of the overwhelming fact of life-and of death-for millions of Jews; those who look for the 'long-term' processes and impersonal 'structures' in history tend to explain this 'short-term event' in such a way as to explain it away; and those seeking to 'deconstruct' the history of the Holocaust as they deconstruct all of history come perilously close to the 'revisionists' who deny the reality of the Holocaust. And so with philosophers and literary critics for whom there is no reality but only language, no philosophy but only a play of mind, no morality but only rhetoric and aesthetics."

P.6 "The beasts of modernism have mutated into the beasts of postmodernism-relativism into nihilism, amorality into immorality, irrationality into insanity, sexual deviancy into polymorphous perversity. And since then, generations of intelligent students under the guidance of their enlightened professors have looked into the abyss, have contemplated those beasts, and have said, 'How interesting how exciting.' Today, students in some of the most distinguished departments of literature are all too often reading books about how to read books. Literary theory has replaced literature itself as the fashionable subject of study. Structuralism and deconstruction, gender theory and the new historicism, reader-response and speech-act theory-these are more hotly debated than the content and style of particular novels or poems."

P.17 "This is the intention behind some of the most fashionable schools of history: that which explains everything in terms of race, class, and gender; that which focuses entirely upon the daily lives of ordinary people; that which structuralizes history, displacing individuals, events, and ideas by impersonal structures, forces, and institutions. The effect in each case is to mute the drama of history, to void it of moral content, to mitigate evil and belittle greatness. Looking into the most fearsome abysses of modern times, these historians see not beasts but faceless bureaucrats, not corpses but statistics."

There is a whole chapter on Marx and his writings. Also a chapter on the significance in the long story of history of nationalism and post modernism.

"Formerly, when historians invoked the idea of imagination, they meant the exercise of imagination required to transcend the present and immerse oneself in the past. This is the genius attributed to the great nineteenth-century historians: 'empathy, imagination, the attempt to place oneself in an historic situation and into an historic character without prejudgment.' For the postmodernist it means exactly the opposite: the imagination to create a past in the image of the present and in accord with the prejudgment of the present-minded historian."

- Gertrude Himmelfarb
(From: Postmodernist History)

Essay List -

On Looking into the Abyss

Of Heroes, Villains, and Valets

From Marx to Hegel

Liberty: "One Very Simple Principle"?

The Dark and Bloody Crossroads Where Nationalism and Religion Meet

Where Have All the Footnotes Gone?

Postmodernist History

The moral debility of our Western universities has no more incisive a critic than Gertrude Himmelfarb. A refreshing read for anyone sick of the doubletalk of the multiculturalists.