Surely progressives and liberals today should not want to be part of the untutored majority of culturally conservative middle-class American philistines. Instead, progressives and liberals today should aspire to be part of the cultivated middle-class.
Progressives and liberals today such as Paul Krugman tend to favor Keynesian economics. The economist John Maynard Keynes, who was part of the Bloomsbury group that included Virginia Woolf and other people who were part of modernism. No doubt the Bloomsbury group was decidedly dedicated to avant-garde modernism.
By contrast, as progressives and liberals know, libertarians today like to inveigh against Keynesian economics.
Perhaps I should also mention that James Strachey was another member of the Bloomsbury group. A psychoanalyst, he became the official English translator of Sigmund Freud's works. Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard Woolf owned and operated Hogarth Press, which published the English translations of Freud's works.
However familiar Virginia Woolf may have been with Freud's thought, she was exactly a fan of his thought, nor did she ever undergo psychoanalysis, which was a fashionable in her circle and elsewhere at the time. For his part, Freud evidently never read any of her novels. But Gay, having written extensively about Freud, is quite familiar with Freud's thought, which he mentions in various places in MODERNISM (2008).
Now, even if the spirit of what Gay terms modernism had played out by the end of the 1960s, or had mostly played out by then, I trust that the spirit that had emerged earlier in the Romantic Movement has not yet played out in American and Western culture. However, to explain why I say this, I need to delineate the larger framework of thought about our American and Western cultural history and the Romantic Movement with which I work.
In Plato's dialogues known as the REPUBLIC and the PHAEDRUS, we learn that the human psyche has three parts: (1) the reasoning and adjudicating part, (2) the desiring part, and (3) the spirited part (the Greek word can be transliterated as "thumos" or "thymos"). Thumos involves our fight-flight-freeze reaction and all manifestations of brashness, cowardice, and courage and assertiveness and non-assertiveness and hostility.
(1) THE REASONING AND ADJUDICATING PART OF THE HUMAN PSYCHE
Engaging the psychodynamics of thumos in his psyche, Ong devoted himself to addressing the reasoning and adjudicating part of the human psyche in his pioneering works about our Western cultural history.
Ong liked to say that we need both proximity (closeness) and distance to understand something. Ong's sweeping account of our Western cultural history can provide us with the distance we need to understand various aspects of our Western cultural history. Figuratively speaking, Ong enables us to see the forest.
However, if you don't think that we need to have Ong's sweeping framework of thought about our Western cultural history, then I would invite you to consider the following autobiographical passage from Harold Bloom's new book THE DAEMONE KNOWS: LITERARY GREATNESS AND THE AMERICAN SUBLIME (2015):
"For [T. S. Eliot] acolytes like Allen Tate and Cleanth Brooks, Helen Gardner, and even Frank Kermode, a much more considerable figure, Eliot was the prophet who claimed the onetime existence of a great blob of classical and Christian butter that started to melt in the later seventeenth century, slid down Enlightenment and Romantic slopes, and at last congealed in "The Waste Land" [1922]. As a young scholar-critic in the period 1957-1977, I was a Romantic Revivalist, furiously battling to restore many great writers to the canon. . . . Many if not most of these had been exiled by Eliot and his churchwardens" (page 91).
Perhaps I should point out that Bloom credits Northrop Frye as the source of the butter imagery.
Bloom's evaluation of the British conventional literary critic Frank Kermode as a supposedly "considerable figure" shows that Bloom himself is also a rather conventional literary critic -- like Kermode, Tate, Brooks, and Gardner. Conventional birds of a feather flock together. But Ong was not a conventional literary critic. In this way, he can be aligned with the unconventional spirit of modernism.
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