"FOR THE MODERN post-religious man," Susan Sontag wrote in a 1961 essay, "the religious museum, like the world of the modern spectator of art, is without walls; he can pick and choose as he likes, and be committed to nothing except his own reverent spectatorship."
Sontag was denouncing a sentiment she called "religious fellow-travelling"-- a mentality that included, as she put it, "both nostalgia and relief: nostalgia for the loss of the sense of sacredness and relief that an intolerable burden has been lifted." It admired mystical passion and theological seriousness-- but kept a safe distance from the demands of any established creed.
I have long suspected that Sontag's essay-included in her first collection, "Against Interpretation" (1966)-was actually a portrait of one "modern post-religious man" in particular: her ex-husband, Philip Rieff, whose landmark 1959 study, "Freud: The Mind of the Moralist," she had helped write. Rieff, who died on July 1 at the age of 83, was for many years a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He never reached anything like the prominence of his first wife, or even of their son, David Rieff, the foreign-policy commentator. Indeed, he very deliberately avoided public accessibility.
Early this year, the University of Virginia Press published "My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority"-- the first volume, of three, from Rieff's magnum opus, "Sacred Order/Social Order." It is a typical product of his late phase: gnomic, allusive, a strange blend of cultural analysis and sermon. It resembles one of Kierkegaard's oblique pamphlets more than the latest celebrity-academic bestseller. At the same time, Rieff's ideas are still very much in the vein of what Sontag denounced, not long after their divorce in 1958, as "piety without content." That makes it all the stranger (and almost embarrassingly poignant) that Rieff dedicated the book to her memory. Some of her late pronouncements could even be dropped into the book without anyone noticing-- as if the standoff between her '60s radicalism and his tweedy cultural conservatism had been a strange misunderstanding.
Now, with both authors gone, the relationship between them passes from gossip into the realm of intellectual history. And yet Rieff's work is a labyrinth it may take some while to map. By the early 1970s, he began cultivating a dense, knotty, ironic style designed to warn off impatient readers. You had to unpack his aphorisms carefully. And this took a while. As a result, his thinking had a time-release effect. It has sometimes taken years for the full import of his ideas to register.
His book "Fellow Teachers" (1973), for example, lodged many complaints about academic culture later found in Allan Bloom's best-selling jeremiad "The Closing of the American Mind" (1988). The latter book set the terms for what became known as the "culture wars," accusing tenured radicals of fostering an unholy alliance between hedonistic self-indulgence and nihilistic moral relativism. Similar worries had animated Rieff's book 15 years earlier-but with less spleen, and more theory.
Rieff was frank about his aversion to reader-friendly polemics. "We
teachers of various theories," he wrote, "have to imagine truths still
to be stable old men, never fickle young women ever itchy to bed down
with the latest winners in the perpetual intellectual-political style
show." A striking image-alluding, in part, to the opening line of
"Beyond Good and Evil," where Nietzsche asks, "Supposing truth were a
woman-- what then?" But also (chances are) a reference to one stylish
young woman in particular.
. . .
The best way into the core of Rieff's thought might be through that loaded term, culture. Two counterposed understandings of it have shown up for duty in the recent "culture wars." On the left (as these things are usually defined) there is a more or less anthropological sense of the word that defines culture as the way of life of any distinctive group. Algerian peasants, Connecticut WASPS, and gay punk vegetarians each have "a culture." And on the right, there is what might be called the Great Books view, which regards culture as a canon of master works that have proven themselves over time.
Rieff-who has been hailed in the pages of Commentary magazine as "a neglected conservative thinker"-- was a master of culture in this sense. "I am glad to say that I have never had an original thought in my life," he once claimed. "I owe my every thought to some predecessor." And yet the Rieffian concept of culture is not quite that of self-proclaimed "defenders of the canon." As he understood it, any meaningful notion of culture treats it as part of what he called the "sacred order."
In effect, the sacred order is our basic intuition that some values are higher than others-- and that there are forms of behavior that must be forbidden, at the cost of losing whatever makes human beings more noble than animals. The demands of the sacred order are harsh. One of Rieff's essential concepts for understanding culture is what he calls its "interdicts," or commandments. Rieff carefully avoided saying just who or what gives those commandments, referring only to the "god terms" in any given culture-the highest concepts for understanding the universe and our place in it. But these need not be explicitly religious in content. In short, every society is going to say "Thou shalt not..." on some very basic points-with particular emphasis on both sexuality and aggressive behavior, since these tend to induce chaos. Culture is, in essence, "a pattern of moral demands," as Rieff put it, "in the face of infinite possibilities."
Rieff's point is not that authority is desirable, but that it is inevitable. And the things we regard as cultural artifacts-- books, art, philosophical systems, films, etc.-- are always part of how we come to terms with the tension between our "infinite possibilities" and the stern interdicts of the sacred order.
The only problem is that the sacred order isn't what it used to be. In Rieff's telling, a deep mutation has occurred over the past couple of centuries. The decline of the patriarchal family, the rough egalitarianism of mass culture, and a widespread loss of faith in religion have meant that older patterns of authority have been shaken to their foundations.
They haven't entirely collapsed, of course. There are plenty of fundamentalists, Christian or otherwise, who have never heard of Nietzsche's announcement that God is dead. (Or of Nietzsche, for that matter.) At the same time, some of us welcome the breaches in established authority-- on the grounds that, after all, we might be able to construct forms of life worth living even without a sacred order to back them up.
But Rieff's analysis emphasizes the terrible cost of this disintegration, which resulted in the emergence of what he called "psychological man"-- a new kind of personality who, as he put it in "The Triumph of the Therapeutic" (1966), "turns away from the arenas of public failure to reexamine himself and his own emotions." Much of what the historian and social critic Christopher Lasch later wrote about the American "culture of narcissism" was anticipated by Rieff during the 1950s, in the final pages of his book on Freud.
Rieff was particularly disgusted to think that academics and intellectuals (who ought, in his view, to serve not just as interpreters of cultural artifacts but guardians of the sacred order itself) had grown mindlessly cynical about all forms of authority. "How dare we dismiss the authority of the past as if we understood it?" he wrote in 1973.
Rieff's aphorisms-- their eloquent crankiness-- have a way of getting under your skin. "A culture in which everything can be said and shown," he wrote in 1968, "will produce, as night follows day, a society in which everything, no matter how terrible, can be done."
That sentence might well have appeared in "Regarding the Torture of Others," Sontag's commentary on the Abu Ghraib photographs. And in 1996, looking back on her first collection of essays, including the one denouncing "piety without content," she sounded this Rieffian note: "The time we live in is experienced as the end-- more exactly, just past the end-- of every ideal....The undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete."
If the sacred order includes an afterlife, then perhaps they are worrying-- together, amicably-- about the mess here below.
Scott McLemee is the Intellectual Affairs columnist for Inside Higher Ed,
the online journal of academic life.