One returns from reunion at the gracious halls of academia back to the hot humid city where stomach contents liquify in the heat, morale sags, appetites wane, enthusiasms crumble...

A thought occurs:

To have any kind of a decent life these days, one must commit a basic treason against that which encourages us to be our finest as human beings.  This Julien Benda essayed about in his work, written between 1924 and 1927, La Trahison des Clercs, or, The Treason of the Clerics, a critique of the practices of the intellectual classes who came at the time to preach not Socrates and Aristotle but nationalism, creating a new morality based on political pragmatism's material ends.  After wading in such waters as a semi-recent translation of Benda (which reads like Old French) a reader is grateful for the novelistic eye of All Quiet on the Western Front to translate abstractions into the real world.  Here, the supposed intellectual cleric schoolmaster preaches military might, conquest and glory to his boys.  "The Fatherland," as opposed to other land and the other people that sit on them.  And then the boys go out into the world, into the events that are the terrible fruits of such treason, and guess what.  Modernity.  A simple but decent example of what Benda is talking about, even if it's on the tail end of moral corruption.  It's enough to give us a rounded picture of preaching and dissemination.  You go away not having to wonder how it all happened, because it happened quite plainly in the classroom under the guise of perfect respectability.

And so, having mingled with the successful, one asks himself, is it true that you have to turn completely into a specialist, a nationalist, a lay business leader, an instrument of the economic might just to have the basics of family, social standing, security that comprise a respectable life?  What happens if you follow the instinctive drive toward, on the other hand, disinterested truth, science, beauty, thought, the broad increase of human potential, something an individual might even join in to, and maybe even add to?

Well, it all makes sense, you say to yourself.  The sharp loneliness, the subtle ostracism that led to depression that led to a disruption of circadian rhythms ('MacBeth doth murder sleep'--Shakespeare knew the night and depression), the odd inability to join in with the normal professions, the choice of an odd one, chosen as if to insure the falling away of normal possibility.  It makes sense that the cleric intellectual these days is your server, who still must play the economic game while her real projects are relegated to the side.

It has come to pass that we generally regard with contempt and disdain those who are not playing along with the great treason and with all its economic raisons d'être. "What, can't you do anything productive?  Can't you join in with the great nationalistic effort to demonstrate might?  You, with the fine education..."  One is naturally excluded for not being card-carrying member of the self-congratulatory age, an age that has led us down the road.

So it happens that when you are most down, most out of heart, most in the state of bottoming out, you come to the realization of the deeper matter.  You would not be as open to it if you were busy with the taste of the rewards of the current system.  And no wonder that the trenches of WWI were one place of clarity in noticing the great treason that led us all to such.

And it is not the fault of anyone in particular, nor can you now find anyone particularly blamable; it is not the fault of a particular professor, because the roots of the treason are so deep their rootedness is obscure to us, and so touching upon everything.  We still blame people, or say "the German people," when the attitude of humanity in society had changed significantly before through gradual steps, courtesy of public intellectuals like Nietzsche and the gang, who have indeed a long and vigorous trail of ancestors operating today, turn on Fox.  Societies have become so immersed in the colonizing habit, we can no longer hold back except by some strange, massive, deep, and yet unknown effort or possibility, to grab what we can out of otherness.  And, as in Afghanistan and before in Iran, other people basically just want to be left alone to do their own thing.

The only refuge is the poet.  Or sometimes a leader like Abraham Lincoln who nudged those who would listen back to a more abstract ideal.

Like wine, poetry, Emily Dickinson's say, is eternal, at least in some cases, not speaking directly of the historical present, but of the deeper roots.  Even Hemingway looks toward the deeper eternal.  Van Gogh as well, though it did not serve him particularly well to argue on behalf of the human spirit in the form of art, any more than it had when he was attempting a more directly spiritual service in the Borinage.

So, what can you do, besides throw your hands up?  Well, I suppose it is still worth the try.  It is still worth the effort to be one of those uncorrupted intellectual teacher types quietly going about fostering the belief in humanity's and the individual's potential to be what we call 'spiritual,' or decent, or constructive.

The Weather Channel guy, like every other weatherman on television, speaks of a vast tornado system approaching, of a coming severe heatwave in the South, but where and when, he will tell you after the commercial break.  I might feel obliged to watch the commercial if he had told us where the tornado was to be, or when exactly the heatwave, but instead, I turn the TV off, and I think it's for the best actually.  I would read things if they weren't immediately upon inception so tailored to the commercial market.

Take any problem today of any shape and size, and within, at the core you will find a treason of the intellectual.  And the only thing effective to treating all the vast ills around us, is for us not to commit treason, treason on behalf of dubious materialism.

The human critter can't be all bad, it occurs to me, if he can still get up and sit down and write something of his thoughts out.  That is a good sign.  Hemingway who knew the daily battle to write had a line for it, from The Old Man and the Sea: "But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated."

I wonder, as I go for a slow walk in Rock Creek Park down and under the Massachusetts Avenue bridge and up behind Montrose Park, to get enough sun on me to combat the late night adrenaline, what would the last few remaining public intellectuals substantially free from the basic treason look like?  Where would they be found?  On television, agreeing with David Gregory?  (Probably not.)  At this point, you'd probably have to go looking for them, as a bird watcher might, discovering one holed up in a tree, or out sleeping on a branch above the creek or down along the bank, out in nature, in other words.  They might be something like we have the picture of Jesus Christ as, mainly passive (though certainly scrappy when he felt it necessary.)  And yet we know ourselves what happens when you adopt a life of passive habits, a blend of horror to chagrin, shoulders stooped under 'truth and wisdom' of handy expressions like 'nice guys finish last,' or 'snooze, you lose,' stuff we seemingly have to buy into these days for an efficacious life.  This is why we are kind to kind people, of those who can conduct themselves with at least a semblance of the social contract and basic decency, as their kindness bears the lamp of the intellectual life fostered by civilization.  (Lincoln was an empathic sort of guy, that side of him shining at Gettysburg.)  They bear a vestige of what we may be significantly in the process of losing, a basic overall sense of things, good and bad, right and wrong, before we get defrayed into small arguments of a thousand cuts.

Perhaps the popular fascination with Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code indicates a readiness to at least imagine that original non-treasonous cleric Jesus as operating in the world as far as his influence.