Charisma
Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken Away from Us, by Philip Rieff (Pantheon, 2007)
The inevitable thrust of the cultural elite in western civilization, certainly from 1750 on, though many would date it back to the earlier emergence of empirical science as a licit activity, has been the destruction of any viewpoints not based on empirical observation, well expressed in many statements but driven home very strongly by Courbet’s statement: “Show me an angel and I’ll paint you one.” The very fact of basing a world view on such a position threatens faith, belief and of course their object: religion.
Science itself, the reformation, the industrial revolution are all a part of a long historical process that de-centered the Catholic Church and turned it into a fossilised object of abjection, no matter what residual power it is able to draw from outside the west.
The church that Gibbon saw as a major factor in the decline of Rome became the sheltering force under which life found its meaning for well over 1,000 years.
For most there was no choice: to live in what we now call Europe meant that one was a Christian within the confines of the church. Life was focused upon subsistence and salvation and the promise of the after life controlled all of the energy directed towards the pursuits that we now call knowledge acquisition.
Thus all one needed to know was contained in the Bible that most could not read and those who translated it into the vernacular, for those who could, were burnt. The Catholic Church burnt vernacular bibles well into the eighteenth century. One could obtain knowledge and salvation only through the church. Monopoly gathers power, and is of course corrupting.
The Reformation that Martin Luther began in the second decade of the sixteenth century was certainly a response to this corruption, shifting the focus of salvation to a more direct encounter between the individual and God. He questioned the way in which religion was organized; he certainly did not criticize the object of salvation.
Yet, his criticism and the change of focus that the Reformation brought about, lead to the Bible becoming an object of study rather than one of total veneration as the word of God brought to the people under the aegis of the church.
It inevitably lead to what is known as the higher criticism which brought the Bible to earth and demonstrated by assiduous gathering of fact, the process by which it was created, when and how. This process inevitably ate into its power and began a long process of what we now call secularisation.
At the highest cultural levels this process culminated in the works of Nietzsche, the product of a long line of German Protestant pastors, whose entire opus can be viewed as a continual questioning of the basis of western Christian civilization and the values upon which it is founded.
He was an offshoot of the tradition of higher criticism as is all of the German academic tradition that still reigns in the west and governs the activities of those scholars, whether Protestant, Jewish or Catholic who have broken the link between knowledge and salvation.
Anyone who seriously engages with Nietzsche encounters a mind that shakes the very foundation of any faith or belief that our religious tradition is the last word on the nature of reality.
Science, of course, has triumphed in the empirical realm, though perhaps ultimately based upon the habits of mind engendered by over 1,000 years of theology, as Whitehead points out in one of the great books of the twentieth century: Science and the Modern World.
The western world is now secular. The magic has fled and for most the bread and wine is just bread and wine. Yet faith and belief seem integral to our humanity, and in spite of total disenchantment, refuse to go away.
Philip Rieff s Charisma speaks to these issues with a depth and intensity that few can muster, for he has been musing upon the effects of what I outlined above for over sixty years.
His recent death did not cause the stir that the death of his one time wife, Susan Sontag caused, but I have no doubt that Rieff will be read long after Sontag is a distant memory.
Think for a moment upon the continual fuss – mainly media generated – for that is our indication of importance (an appearance on TV), around Brittney Spears, Paris Hilton or Amy Winehouse. It is the attention paid to them and their supposed charisma that is the focus of Rieff s book, though of course he never mentions them.
Rieff s focus is the use of the term ‘charisma’ and the employment of it by one of his historical mentors – Max Weber, one of the great scholars of the twentieth century and an emblem of German culture that two world wars destroyed, to the benefit of NASA, the Institute of Advanced Study and umpteen American Nobel prizes.
Weber and his fellow German mandarins created a culture whose last reflection can now only dimly be glimpsed in a few fossil remainders.
Having been fortunate enough to spend seven of my formative years with a man who lived the American version of that German intellectual life, I have some sense of what has been lost and just how debased our life of the mind, or what is left of it, has become.
Rieff lived in our tradition of the professor whose task is to maintain the standards that tradition has bequeathed to us. Yet all his early work – work that earned him a chair and a University Professorship at my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania – was about the creation of a new type: the therapeutic.
It is the path that Protestant scholarship has taken us on from Luther on through Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Weber and of course Rieff and my close companion and mentor: Morse Peckham.
The therapeutic, which is of course associated with Freud and his work on the unconscious, projection, transference and those childhood pattern which determine how we encounter others for the rest of our lives, is akin to the post-modern which Derrida made so popular among academics looking for a way to destroy the grund upon which their own disciplines were formulated.
Those who wish to grasp the real power of this erasure – to borrow a term from Derrida that goes back to the Schwartzwald mortal dwarf, Martin Heidder’s SEIN – must go back and read Nietzsche, for as ‘deep’ as Derrida and Heidiger might seem at times, they are both water carriers for Nietzsche, who has yet to be fully grasped, though his work is the most influential source of what Rieff is deeply upset about in Charisma.
The 60s brought Nietzsche to a popular conjuncture by taking his proclamation about ‘The death of God” into every aspect of life. The challenge still reverberates as so much of USA history, 1972-2008, has been a response to the fear brought to the surface by the shock administrated to the entire culture by the 60s eruption.
The 60s was about the death of the father in both a symbolic and a literal sense. Father had disappeared from the American home in terms of actual time spent and the deeper and related symbolic sense of authority.
Rieff’s concern is about the loss of this authority as it relates to the very root of our Judeo-Christian culture. And let me be clear about this: Rieff, as all western thinkers tend to do, speaks in universal terms, though his data only refers to the west.
A religious structure is promulgated by a leader who inculcates a mode of existing in the world and whose charisma transmits a code of conduct that forms a consistent framework of interdicts that give structure to the lives of those who call themselves by the name of the charismatic figure: Christians, Buddhists, etc.
Those who live within these interdicts form a covenant that is a structure of moral demand. To violate these demands, to transgress, is to experience guilt.
The culture that is maintained and transmitted is the means by which a transgression is severely limited, produces guilt and is quickly punished. That Rieff is talking about a limited spectrum of such situations should be obvious from the above.
The conscious intention of the therapeutic is freedom from this internal structure of authority, for true guilt is produced by the ‘police’ who live within and were inculcated with the imbibing of our mother’s milk and our father’s NO!
The Freudian analytical situation is designed to create a situation in which the unconscious forces that control are re-enacted and thus objectified in such a way, by analysing their transference with respect to the analyst, and thus depotentiated, thus ideally doing away with the projections that lead to the submission to authority, producing an individual who can’t be manipulated or interdicted in a charismatic matter.
The manufactured charisma of our present moment is to Rieff an indication of our loss. I don’t disagree. What could any semi-mature adult want with a Paris Hilton or a Brittney Spears besides the administration of a good spanking.
Rieff is also correct when he looks upon a great deal of modern art as being transgressive, not a surprise to anyone who has fully grasped Nietzsche, the strongest nineteenth century influence upon the art of the last 100 years.
Rieff’s analysis bodes well for the eventual triumph of Islam, in the west, for Europe now mainly lives outside the covenant that reinforces the interdicts that Rieff rues the passing of and feels to be essential to the maintenance and transmission of culture. The elite, for the most part, has long said goodbye to religion.
The USA is a parody of interdiction, for the Catholic Church lives in paedophilic incipient bankruptcy, both actual and moral and ever proliferating Protestant sects may do lots of good works, but are drifting into a consumer religion that is a parody of the original charismatic transmission and can live quite happily with pornography and wife swapping.
And alas the kicker: eight years of a supposedly religious president whose continual lies could only disgust a genuinely religious person.
Rieff possesses a depth and intensity that dwarfs most of the scholars that I have spent a lot of time reading.He is addressing questions that will determine our very future.
Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and their ilk pale in contrast to his more refulgent light as do the Catholics who give up meat for lent in light of the martyrs who were roasted on slow fires.
The utter triviality of our culture is what comes off of each page of Charisma and reflects the experience I have had in seven years back in the United States.
If one searches for American Innerlichkeit, one quickly discovers that it is akin to Gertrude Stein’s Oakland: there is no there there.
Rieff is posing questions of utmost importance: can a culture live without religion and the interdicts that flow from such charismatic structures? Can rational authority replace charismatic authority? And perhaps most important: can love survive the dissolution of authority? His answer is no and I tend to agree.
We don’t seem to be able to live without a real sense of sin and evil. That conjecture is deeply substantiated by the fact that one in every hundred American adult is now in prison.
Something is broken and the utterly immoral behavior of our last two presidents seem indicative of the fact of the breakdown, and alas I am totally unmoved by the thought of an Obama presidency, though I have nothing but good feeling for the man.
I feel as if the ‘help’ is being brought in to clean up the mess or be a caretaker as in Detroit, Newark or Philadelphia.
