I can’t help thinking that Nobility of Spirit and The Gift are twins living together on an island, deracinated, almost dangerously so, from the hubbub of the world in which they exist: their idealized dream of the right universe seems so far from what I see in my work and at the University as to make them ephemeral, like an overwrought sonata that has to end. Neither has the feel of Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass, which ends with a call to attempt to build the Republic of Heaven wherever one lives, but without perverse religious inclination. It recognizes that imperfection and working toward an ideal that can never be realized can and should be part of the same drive. The attempt to realize a concrete, defined version of the Republic of Heaven, or any utopian ideal, shuts down dissent and freedom, leading toward quasi-fascism.
Now, Nobility of Spirit doesn’t incline one towards fascism or anything like that, but it lacks that practical, roll-up-your-sleeves quality that I like in Pullman. It’s fragile, like the ideas described within it, and yet amorphous. The nobility of spirit referenced in the title seems to refer to high regard for mankind along with high regard for art, which reinforce one another in a feedback loop, along with suspicion of, say, reality TV and McDonald’s. It’s an argument I find sympathetic: I listen to Sibelius sometimes and haven’t had a Big Mac for a decade if not more. But Riemen never goes into sufficient detail about what he means by the nobility of spirit, so the tongue-in-cheek summary is more inference than anything else.
Nobility of Spirit is relentlessly idealistic in a way that seems like it ought to be refreshing and yet isn’t. The introduction, for example, describes listening to Whitman set to music, and the composer announcing in conversation that “Nobility of spirit is the great ideal! it is the realization of true freedom, and there can be no democracy, no free world, without this moral foundation.” Well, maybe, but it would seem like there would be no free world without people who are willing to restrict their own power, and fight to restrict the power of others, rather than out of devotion to mankind in the muddled way presented here.
Some of the muddle comes from high-mindedness, and some of the complaints are familiar. “… The Western world attributes superiority to everything that is new and fast and shows progress,” Riemen says, without saying what “superiority” means in this context. Later, he says that “It is remarkable that in a world where so much is reported publicly, this violent medieval theocracy [referring to the Taliban] could be installed without the Western intellectual elite ever making a single attempt to put a stop to its barbarism.” It’s not apparent what “put a stop to its barbarism” means, but the Western intellectual elite did complain vociferously about the Taliban’s oppression of women and its tendency to destroy art and the rest. But what would he have had Western intellectuals do? Advocate for invasion, which was the only means available to overthrown barbarism? Eventually he got his wish, and the results have been mixed. When he drops into something approaching stream of consciousness on page 62 in his complaints about universities, the results is closer to “unedited” than to what he’s shooting for.
On page 101, Riemen has a neat chiasmus when he says “Culture cannot exist where there is no freedom; but where culture is banished, freedom is meaningless, and all that remains is arbitrary and trivial.” Who is banishing culture? How is the culture being banished? These kinds of banalities shouldn’t survive freshman comp, but they appear in this book. In addition, there’s an opposite argument that says high culture thrives most on repression: look at the seriousness with which literature was taken in the former Soviet Union, or the efforts of totalitarian regimes to suppress writers and artists. I read an equally clever formulation somewhere that says in the Soviet Union, nothing was allowed and therefore everything was meaningful, while in the United States everything is allowed and nothing is meaningful (if anyone has the source for this, send it to me and I’ll append it to this post).
I want to believe in the nobility of spirit as described here and yet can’t—at least, not in the same way, because I don’t know what it is. One might call this book The Impracticality of Spirit, unless you’re an 18th Century aristocrat who doesn’t live in this world or has never taken an economics or psychology class. Granted, I’m not opposed to aspiring to a higher level, but the religious/mystical dream verges on silly.
