The focus of our educational systems on popular culture,
political correctness, and the cult of self-esteem has had two
consequences for everyday speech. First, young people prefer to
remain silent rather than risk an opinion. Secondly, when they do
talk, it is in an outpouring, in the belief that one person’s
language is as good as any other’s. Bon
mots, aphorisms, insightful quotations, nuggets of wisdom,
or even ordinary apt remarks form only a tiny part of their
conversation.
American speech, like English speech, used to sparkle. The
dialogues invented by Henry James are scintillating, alert to
implications, never redundant or blunt. Their stylized air is
exaggerated, if at all, only in the cause of art. The dialogues of
the old Hollywood movies, like the lyrics of the Broadway musicals,
are masterpieces of apt condensation, in which every word and every
feeling counts. The aphorisms of Groucho Marx, the repartee of Tony
Curtis, the lyrics of Cole Porter and Oscar Hammerstein, have an
immediacy that has impressed them on the hearts and minds of
educated Americans to this day. A foreigner, coming for the first
time to the great American novelists and playwrights, the great
Hollywood movies, or the Great American Songbook, would quickly
come to believe that American culture is a culture of the aphorism,
and that the principal delight of Americans in every walk of life
is to condense thought and emotion into a nugget of wisdom or a
stinging phrase.
But what exactly is an aphorism, and what distinguishes the good
from the bad example? Aphorisms are like stock cubes. They are dry,
salty, compact; and they are intended, when dissolved in thought,
to be nourishing. But not all aphorisms are of equal value. There
are true aphorisms and false ones, witty aphorisms and dull ones.
True wit, Pope said, “is Nature to advantage dressed, /What oft was
thought but ne’er so well expressed.” That characterizes one kind
of aphorism — the true and commonsensical kind, of which Pope
himself was a master, as in “fools rush in, where angels fear to
tread.” There are also aphorisms that capture a truth that never
was thought until so well expressed.
Such is La Rochefoucauld’s maxim that “hypocrisy is the tribute
that vice pays to virtue.” Is he praising hypocrisy or condemning
it? Asking that question reveals the depth and originality of La
Rochefoucauld’s insight.
Some of the greatest aphorisms are American — notably those of
Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s
Dictionary, to whom we owe a definition of the brain (“an
apparatus with which we think we think”) that ought to be inscribed
above the entrance to every department of neuroscience. There is no
more useful definition of Puritanism than that given by H. L.
Mencken: “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be
happy,” and never has the paradox of social mobility been better
captured than by Groucho Marx’s famous aphorism: “I don’t want to
belong to any club that will accept me as a member” — surely the
equal of La Rochefoucauld’s insight into the real meaning of
hypocrisy.
But there are false, unfunny, and eccentric aphorisms too, and
they are just as likely to have a far-reaching influence as the
true and the witty. Oscar Wilde shaped his many bons mots in ways that sweetened the pill of
unwelcome truth: for instance “in matters of the greatest
importance it is style and not sincerity that counts,” and “it is
only a very shallow person who does not judge by appearances”:
aphorisms that have some of the depth and density of La
Rochefoucauld’s. But Wilde’s much quoted dismissal of foxhunting,
as “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable,” is an
instance of a false aphorism. False at both ends, and monstrously
unfunny to those who have knowledge of the matter.
FALSE APHORISMS are not as rare as one might think. More
significant than Wilde’s, on account of its influence, is Marx’s
dismissal of religion as “the opium of the people.” For this
implies that religion is adopted purely for its ability to soothe
the wounds of society, and that there is some other condition to
which humanity might advance in which religion would no longer be
needed. Both those implications are false, but they are boiled into
a stock cube as tasty as any that has been seen on the intellectual
menu. How many would-be intellectuals have dissolved this cube into
their prose and given their thought, in the manner of Christopher
Hitchens, a specious air of wisdom?
Marx’s writings contain an elaborate attempt at a system: but
the system was refuted and Marx survived. We know Marx instead as
the author of famous phrases: alienated labor, surplus value, the
fetishism of commodities, wage slavery, the crisis of capitalism,
and a thousand more. He told the workers of the world to unite,
since they had nothing to lose but their chains — and the chains
of aphorisms that subsequently bound them proved to be stronger
than any chains of steel. In one of the aphorisms contained in
The German Ideology, the
workers were promised hunting in the morning, fishing in the
afternoon, and literary criticism after dinner — and, apart from
the absence of game, fish, and literature, not to speak of dinner,
that was what they got.
If you lived through the '60s, as I did, you would have no
doubt, today, of the power of aphorisms. And I blame our
educational system for the fact that, in their hunger for witty
phrases, and finding nothing of use in the pronouncements of the
politicians of the day, the young people of the '60s took their
aphorisms from the store of falsehoods accumulated by the Marxists.
Overnight the facetious leftisms rose up and seized control of the
intellectual economy. The French situationists made some nice
additions — “It is forbidden to forbid,” for example — and a few
crept in from the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao, such as “no army
can resist an idea whose time has come” (which lacks the wit of
Voltaire’s sarcastic aphorism about the big battalions). However,
it was the aphorisms of Marx that set the intellectual agenda.
“Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world; but the point is
to change it.” “Consciousness does not determine life but life
determines consciousness.” “The history of all previously existing
societies is the history of class struggles.” And so on.
Take a look at The Communist Manifesto and you will encounter one
of the most influential sequences of aphorisms in history. And most
of them are false. Why, then, were they so successful? I think the
reason is this. It is in the nature of an aphorism to aim at
success — to present a complex nugget of intellectual flavor that
makes the brain water in the way that the mouth waters when touched
by monosodium glutamate. And success comes more easily for the one
who promises power than for the one who offers only truth. Wilde’s
aphorism about hunting made its mark because it was a weapon in a
battle — indeed in one of the few “class struggles” that the
English have known in recent times. And the same is true of
The Communist
Manifesto. People have only a circumscribed interest in
truth. But their interest in power is insatiable. Falsehoods that
give confidence or amplify power will, in the moment of contest,
eclipse those paltry truths that warn us to hold on a moment and be
careful. The point was made by another great aphorist among
19th-century philosophers, Nietzsche. And Nietzsche’s popularity
today is owing to the same feature that explains Marx’s popularity
in the ’60s: the promise of power.
MARX AND NIETZSCHE don’t do much, to my way of thinking, by way
of justifying the philosophical aphorism. The element of surprise
is achieved too easily, and by recruiting our knee-jerk
resentments. There is a refusal to face the difficult questions
concerning our relations with others and our knowledge of the
world. Their power-directed aphorisms are more like spells than
statements. They are designed, as Marx rightly said, not to
interpret the world but to change it — and to change it purely by
being repeated again and again. Which is, in Marx’s case, exactly
what happened. And the world was changed for the worse, as
everybody knows who saw those aphorisms used and abused across the
Soviet Empire: hitched on the roofs of city buildings, spread in
red letters over shop fronts, inscribed on plates of alloy and hung
in heavy frames on the walls of lecture halls. Orwell, who saw this
with penetrating insight, wrote two great works that are not so
much novels as tracts against the aphorism. “All animals are equal,
but some are more equal than others” (Animal Farm); “who controls the present
controls the past, and who controls the past controls the future”
(1984) — aphorisms that go
one stage further than the Communist slogans they satirize.
Orwell was documenting the decline of the aphorism, its abuse as
an instrument of oppression and an assault on the sovereignty of
truth. But the thing that was abused by Marx and the Marxists is
also a necessary part of speaking properly and to good effect. How
are we to recapture the forgotten ways of wit, and the use of
aphorisms in the cause of truth? It seems to me that this is
something that we ought to be teaching in our universities. A
degree in the humanities should have something of the ancient study
of rhetoric. It should be equipping students to persuade, to use
language gracefully and succinctly, and to speak and write with
style. Persuasion comes not through statistics and theories, but
through the artful aphorism that summarizes, in the heart of the
listeners, the things that they suspect but don’t yet know. The
educational challenge then becomes that of teaching students not
only to think and speak in witty phrases, but at the same time to
be guided by the truth. Can it be done? To that question I answer:
we can but try.
