Review of Eric Larsen’s "A Nation Gone Blind"
VTR
By Sean M. Madden
Online Journal Contributing Writer
http://inoodle.com/2008/04/review-of-eric-larsens-nation-gone.html
Apr 10, 2008
A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit
By Eric Larsen
Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006
ISBN: 1-59376-098-1
291 pp.; $16.00
Two years have passed since Eric Larsen’s A Nation Gone Blind was published -- two long years
during which time I, and doubtless many others, would have been less pained had I, we, known
that another soul had penned these words of truth, nowadays so seldom heard. For it is truth
which is central to Larsen’s book, his solitary search for it, and his well-wrought conclusion
that the public at large and even our so-called intellectual classes -- including writers,
editors and academics (in the humanities no less) -- are no longer able to think well due to a
preponderance of feeling and zeal which has largely crowded out clear reasoning based on
empirical evidence and logic.
Al Gore said as much, a year later, in The Assault on Reason. Like Larsen, Gore points out that
the foot soldiers and carpet bombers of this assault are the mass media, especially the
television broadcasters who have brought us -- in their quest for maximized profits -- not to
our knees but onto our derrieres. In Gore’s words, “The Republic of Letters has been invaded
and occupied by the empire of television,” which he goes on to report Americans watch “an
average of four hours and thirty-five minutes every day,” or “almost three-quarters of all the
discretionary time that the average American has.”
Yet ever the scripted statesman and corporate board member, Gore perpetuates in his treatise
the platitudes which are, themselves, indicative of what Larsen refers to as the Age of
Simplification:
"It is too easy -- and too partisan -- to simply place the blame on the policies of President
George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress.
We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have
free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us?"
Need we ask? Need Gore have asked, as late as 2007? Of course they have failed us, utterly and
miserably. But the more foundational question is whether we do, in fact, have a Congress, an
independent judiciary, checks and balances, free speech or a free press, or whether “we are a
nation of laws”?
At best, Gore’s platitudes are half-truths. At worst, they bespeak of the farce which Frederick
Douglass decried in his July 5, 1852 speech in his hometown of Rochester, New York, after being
invited to join his fellow townspeople in commemorating the signing of the Declaration of
Independence:
"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more
than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant
victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your
national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your
denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow
mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade
and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin
veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the
earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at
this very hour."
Like Douglass, Larsen has the chutzpah to resist politic bromides:
"For the same reasons [that America’s literary future looks grim], the social-political future
is equally or more unpromising. The odds in favor of the United States remaining a free country
are insufficient to encourage a bet on the prospect. Worse, the question as to whether we’re
now a free country may be a mere technicality."
The author was born in 1941, the timing of which Larsen sees as fortuitous as he thereby caught
a brief glimpse of the old America, when our representative democratic republic had yet to
devolve into a national security state, a ruinous amalgamation of government, corporation and
mass media which has programmatically de-educated erstwhile citizens, converting us in our
blind passivity into mere consumers. “Each person,” he says, “must be transformed in such a way
as not only to remain indolent in the face of leadership’s tyrannies and injustices, but also
to adhere to his or her role as a cog, if you will, in the vast economic machine that keeps the
whole state going.”
Therefore the mass media, television in particular but also radio and print media, must
propagate “the Big Lie -- the Umbrella Lie -- [which] is that any half-truth the media gives us
is in fact a whole truth.” Real-world complexity must be simplified and neutered of meaningful
content so as not to scare off advertisers or, more fundamentally, to cause the public to
question the corporate-state paradigm the overbearing existence of which is the missing and
unspeakable other half of “the Big Lie.”
In other words, our nominal democracy relies upon we the people -- its nominal citizens -- not
being given any information of significance which may cause us to think, or even to feel fully,
to see and to feel reality as it truly and objectively is.
In the Brave New World which is the present-day United States, we must be transfigured,
disfigured, into something less than human. “The ideal consumer could be identified as the
person who never votes but always buys, who never thinks but always wants. This wanting should
always be kept, insofar as possible, on the sensory, emotional, and voluptuary level: It must
be, as with food or sex, a desire that results in its own gratification but awakens again as
desire soon afterward.” As an American living in the UK, I would say -- to the displeasure of
Britons who by and large (blindly) consider themselves to be above the American fray --
Larsen’s words hold as true here as well. Why wouldn’t they when the U.S. and the UK have long
operated as conjoined twins?
A retired English professor, prize-winning novelist, and critic -- and, I daresay, a
philosopher -- Larsen traces the advent of the Age of Simplification to 1947, the year, he
points out, which heralded in the National Security Council. I hasten to add that the same
National Security Act which established the NSC also and simultaneously created the CIA, the
permanent and, by its nature, secretive and extralegal agency which serves not to protect our
national security so much as it precludes the very possibility of any semblance of open,
transparent democracy -- that is to say democracy, period -- whose people are secure from
arbitrary lawlessness and tyranny, from without, yes, but more so from within. Further, the
agency’s exploits abroad have a history of at-home blowback.
In follow-up to his discussion that television must not broadcast content of any “significance
or importance” which “might trigger emotion or inspire thinking, thereby harming or endangering
the sponsor’s interest by jeopardizing the continued acceptance of the half-truth as whole,”
Larsen asks, rhetorically:
"Would HBO, on the other hand, run a noncomic and nonfictional dramatic series about U.S.
government figures or agencies assassinating foreign statesmen and American citizens,
laundering money for corporate interests, importing drugs into the United States, or “allowing”
catastrophes like 9/11 to occur, if only by not preventing them, for the purpose of reaping
political benefit therefrom?"
Clearly Larsen therein refers, in great part, to the CIA, which it is worth noting is but one
of 16 member agencies of the U.S. intelligence community.
Like a philosopher of old before philosophy itself was shut up, split up and stifled within the
academy, Larsen’s purview spans the whole of what it means to be human, and his sweep of
subject matter exerts itself as an opposing force against the tendency to arbitrarily truncate,
categorize and proscribe.
So while A Nation Gone Blind has been pigeonholed as a book on “Current Affairs & Politics,” it
likewise abounds with words of wisdom concerning the arts of writing and thinking, the uses and
abuses of language, and the key teaching of the literary arts and the arts generally. This
teaching Larsen sees as the engaging, in equal measure, of the intellectual and the emotional
(or thinking-feeling) self in an “art-experience” which enables us, as necessarily solitary
beings, to be able to partake of the universal.
This thesis, as with the rest of the rich, layered tapestry which composes the whole of
Larsen’s argument, is woven with great care -- a complexity which may be mistaken by the
blinded as insufficiently linear -- until Larsen has shaped, molded and finely articulated four
decades of thought during which time he led college classes in English language and literature,
the literary arts, generally, as well as in the seminal texts of Western civilization. And it
is clear that he has thought long and hard about the changes he witnessed in the classroom and
in his colleagues during his teaching career.
In brief, Larsen’s less-senior colleagues -- themselves educated, de-educated or anti-educated
in the midst of the Age of Simplification -- have been politicized. As Larsen is also political
this, in itself, is not the problem. The problem arises when his colleagues in the humanities,
generally, but in the literary arts and in English departments, in particular, forsake
literature as art to, instead, push sociopolitical messages, or propaganda, by way of the
books. Larsen acknowledges that this liberal-left “new professoriate” means well. But in the
process of doggedly pursuing social and political justice, these teachers -- many no doubt
unwittingly, which amounts to another sign of their blindedness -- are not educating, but
indoctrinating students, not teaching them how to think, but what to think:
"And this atrocity, believe it or not, this benighted ruination of all that undergraduate
education ought to be, this example of simplification and almost perfect failure and of -- I’ll
say it, tyranny -- comes about, in large part, from the desire to do good."
Yet, Larsen observes:
"Instead, unbeknownst to themselves, they are actually laboring for their own worst enemy, the
oppressive and not-to-be-trusted political-economic-corporate “government.” They are, in truth,
actively helping to demean, subvert, and destroy what’s genuinely individual in people, and
they are helping to replace it with the latest perfected model of the diminished, obedient,
passive consumer. They are, from dawn to dusk, collaborating with the very enemy they think
that they especially have the wisdom to defeat."
By this point the simplification-inflicted may have stopped reading this review in anger and
disgust at having landed upon another right-wing rant concerning the great cultural divide. But
they would be mistaken, and this would provide yet more evidence of their infliction, as Larsen
-- no Allan Bloom, politically -- is himself “a left-leaning liberal” and, as we’ve seen, a
vociferous critic of the corporate-state. To his credit, Larsen doesn’t divulge where he is on
the left-right continuum until Page 244, as he rejects the notion that the entirety of one’s
being must fit into one monolithic political package. He laments the loss of an age when T.S.
Eliot could consider himself “an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a
royalist in politics,” and adds:
"Almost no one any longer believes, or is capable of believing, that the individual life can
consist of or be made up simultaneously of different areas, elements, or categories; and that
these elements can (or must) be governed by different rules or assumptions from one another;
and, above all, that these different areas, however greatly different, can still be equal to
one another in significance."
So goes the gist of Larsen’s indictment of his academic colleagues.
Perhaps not surprisingly, he is no less critical of a group of 15 prominent American writers
who after 9/11 were invited, and paid, by the U.S. State Department to submit essays for an
anthology to be issued abroad. As official propaganda, the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 prohibits
domestic distribution of the anthology; however, it is available on the State Department’s
website designed for foreign readers (
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http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/writers/).
The essay question which the State Department assigned was, “In what sense do you see yourself
as an American writer?”
Larsen’s critique of the essays composes the bulk of Part 1 of his three-part book. For our
purposes, it is sufficient to say that the writers -- amongst them four Pulitzer Prize winners
and two U.S. poet laureates, including the then-standing laureate, Billy Collins (Robert
Pinsky’s the other) -- fared poorly overall. Larsen assigned grades to the essays as he would
to his students’ work. While the essays “were, by and large, just awful,” having just now named
two of the writers, I must add that Larsen gave Collins an A+ and Pinsky a B-. Significantly,
however, both of these writers were born before 1947.
Even to read Larsen’s criticism as a bystander is to undergo many a cringing moment. He is
brutally honest as he dissects the essays. But as they were written by premier American writers
to share with the world, to in effect serve as narrative-based American ambassadors -- and
were, presumably, the very best that each of these writers could produce on the topic of what
it means to be an American writer -- the essays and their authors are fair game for the
criticism they elicit from Larsen. And while frank, he also criticizes with compassion as he
sees that many of the writers, those who produced the worst essays, are products of the Age of
Simplification and have been blinded by their milieu. They are simply unable to think well,
their thinking and their writing lacking specificity or any indication that they are aware of
their own thinking or their own selves.
I shudder to contemplate the many writers, thinkers and academics who may never come across
Larsen’s uncommon -- and thus all the more vital -- observations and admonitions which he has
shared with us, and who continue to portray themselves as intellectuals, but whose intellectual
prowess may be considerably less than they imagine. But despite the prognosis, Larsen continues
to hope against failing hope that we who claim, or aspire, to participate in the life of the
mind and the arts will awaken to our plight and then act to, literally, save our own selves
and, thereby, our failing nation.
Books like A Nation Gone Blind can, indeed, inspire an individual toward these ends, for I
myself was similarly moved, in the spring of 2001, by Stephen Bertman’s Cultural Amnesia:
America’s Future and the Crisis of Memory in which the author makes a case for general
education as a means for Americans to regain a sense of the past which we are so dangerously
close to losing. In Chapter 6, entitled “National Therapy,” Bertman discusses various Great
Books programs, and specifically St. John’s College, as doing their part to solidify our
tenuous connections to the historical events and great minds that have shaped modern society.
Had I not discovered his book on the “New Books” shelf as I was about to leave the Forbes
Library in Northampton, Massachusetts, I likely would never have decided to attend, let alone
earn two master’s degrees from, the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College, a tiny pocket of
the world (actually two tiny pockets as SJC exists on two campuses, in Annapolis, Maryland and
Santa Fe, New Mexico) where the literary life is, against all odds, alive and well.
But these tiny pockets are clinging like barnacles against an ocean of mass-media-induced
passivity and mediocrity, tidal waves of deception, half-truths, misdirection and, perhaps most
damaging of all, a litany of lies of omission.
And even St. John’s has its own creeping ideology -- which to the extent that it surfaces at
all in explicit form appears antithetical to that of Larsen’s “new professoriate” but, in the
end, has the very same effect -- which, through propagandizing, threatens to extinguish the
light of a true liberal arts education. That ideology is Straussianism, the presence of which,
a senior tutor confided to me in hushed tones, “is a millstone around the neck of the College.”
Like Larsen, this now-deceased St. John’s tutor, Beate Ruhm von Oppen, expressed concern that
students were being indoctrinated, not educated. And her assessment is all the more poignant
given her 40-plus years teaching at St. John’s in addition to working in British intelligence
during WWII analyzing Nazi propaganda.
Let us return, in closing, to Frederick Douglass’s speech of July 5, 1852:
"Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of
the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. [ . . . ] I, therefore, leave off
where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the
great principles it contains, and the genius of American institutions, my spirit is also
cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. [ . . . ] Knowledge was [in the past] confined
and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. [ . . . ]
Intelligence is [presently] penetrating the darkest corners of the globe."
Whereas Douglass found hope, encouragement and even cheer in the intelligence of his age as
well as in the principles and outcomes of the Age of Enlightenment, Larsen’s hope is
understandably, and almost unbearably, diminished in this, our, Age of Simplification. “And the
last thing the corporate-state wants is large numbers of true selves that actually have whole
consciousness.” Yet the fulfillment of Larsen’s fading hope is contingent upon just such a
whole self, and, indeed, many such selves:
"Only such a person, therefore, will be able to see through the omnipresent lies, deceit,
conditionings, shortcuts, and hypocrisies that constitute and perpetuate the Age of
Simplification all around us at every moment of the day and night and that nevertheless are
unseen and unsensed by most. Only such a person, one who still can see, could make it possible
that something, somehow, might still be done to save us all.
"And yet where such a person might come from, although I may once have known, I no longer have
the least idea."
Will we -- can we -- grasp the lifeline Larsen has thrown us?
Sean M. Madden is an American writer living in East Sussex, England. His work appears on
websites ranging from Information Clearing House to UPI’s ReligionAndSpirituality.com, from
Thomas Paine’s Corner to Guerrilla News Network, and from Carolyn Baker’s popular website to
the Populist Party of America website. Sean also edits and writes for his iNoodle.com and
MindfulLivingGuide.com blogs, and welcomes correspondence from readers. His email address is
se...@inoodle.com
© copyright 2008 by Sean M. Madden
Eric Larsen is a MUJCA supporter and an outspoken proponent of 9/11 truth and the author of A
Nation Gone Blind: http://www.ericlarsen.net His most recent essay "The Premeditated Murder of
the United States of America" is a must-read:
http://www.ericlarsen.net/foodforthought2.1.1.2008.html