"The Empire of Ugliness" - The Desire to Tear Down Everything that Stands Above Us
"The Empire of Ugliness" - The Desire to Tear Down Everything that Stands Above Us
Simon Leys on Mother Teresa, Christopher Hitchens, and a warning against the power of envy, sour grapes and tearing down the good because it threatens our own mediocrity.
One of my favorite contemporary writers is Theodore Dalrymple, the pen name of Anthony Daniels, whose essays I first discovered in The New Criterion over 20 years ago. He is a prolific writer and the author of a number of books including Life at the Bottom. I had the chance to interview him for the documentary, Poverty, Inc. Dalrymple wrote that one of his favorite writers was the essayist and critic Simon Leys, who died in 2014.
The Hall of Uselessness
Simon Leys was the pen name of the Belgian Sinologist and literary and cultural critic, Pierre Ryckmans, who spent the last forty years of his life in Australia. He wrote on Chinese culture, translated the Analects of Confucius , and wrote The Chairman’s New Clothes, a severe critique of Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution when most others were fawning over Mao.
A 2013 collection of Ley’s essays The Hall of Uselessness is a great place to begin. The title comes from a line from the Taoist philosopher Zhuang Zi
“Everyone knows the usefulness of what is useful, but few know the usefulness of what is useless.”
The collection has essays on various topics: China, the sea, and several on literature including essays on George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Victor Hugo, and a wonderful essay on G.K. Chesterton. Leys writes:
“In Chesterton’s experience the mere fact of being is so miraculous in itself that no subsequent misfortune could ever exempt a man from feeling a sort of cosmic thankfulness.”
On Christopher Hitchens & Mother Teresa
One of my favorite essays - and related to the theme of cosmic thankfulness and the goodness of being - is his essay “The Empire of Ugliness,” a critical review of the late Christopher Hitchens’ 1997 book on Mother Teresa. Leys called the essay an “epistolary review” because it included some of the correspondence between Leys and Hitchens, two very rhetorically gifted writers. Their correspondence began after Leys critiqued Hitchens’ portrayal of Mother Teresa in the New York Review of Books ( Leys is the second letter to the editor)
Hitchens was one of the Four Horsemen of the “New Atheists” along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Daniel Dennett. Hitches was very critical of Christianity and argued that Mother Teresa was a fanatic, and “not a friend of the poor, but a friend of poverty,” that she took money from corrupt sources, and that she kept her hospice in bad repair while she herself received special medical treatment in California. While Hitchens was generally against abortion, he was critical of her opposition to contraception writing:
“She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”
Leys was critical of both Hitchens’ argument and his tone. He said the title of the book was obscene and that
“Bashing an elderly nun under an obscene label does not seem to be a particularly brave or stylish thing to do”
Leys wrote that Hitchens’ book was filled with so many errors he would need a longer review to address them, and within days he received a personal letter from Hitchens which included his mailing address asking Leys to send the review when it was finished. In his reply to Hitchens in a letter to the New York Review, Leys wrote:
If Mr. Hitchens were to write an essay on His Holiness the Dalai Lama, being a competent journalist, he would no doubt first acquaint himself with Buddhism in general and with Tibetan Buddhism in particular. On the subject of Mother Theresa, however, he does not seem to have felt the need to acquire much information on her spiritual motivations–his book contains remarkable howlers on elementary aspects of Christianity…
In this respect, his strong vehement distaste for Mother Teresa reminds me of the indignation of the patron in a restaurant who, having been served caviar on toast, complained that the jam had a funny taste of fish.
The Desire to Tear Down Everything that Stands Above Us
At the end of the essay “The Empire of Ugliness,” Leys turns to a fundamental problem that underlies not only Hitchens’ assessment of Mother Teresa, but that plagues every one of us: a desire to tear down everything that stands above us -whether it is beauty, goodness, or truth, courage, nobility, self-sacrifice. Leys described how he was writing in a cafe when this revelation hit him.
Like many lazy people, I enjoy a measure of hustle and bustle around me while I am supposed to work–it gives me an illusion of activity and thus the surrounding din of conversations and calls did not disturb me in the least. The radio that had been blaring in a corner all morning did not bother me either: pop songs, stockmarket figures, muzak, horseracing reports, more pop songs, a lecture on foot-and-mouth disease in cows–whatever: this audio-pap kept dripping like lukewarm water from a leaky faucet and nobody was listening anyway.
Suddenly a miracle occurred. For a reason that will forever remain mysterious, this vulgar broadcasting routine gave way without transition (or if there had been one, it escaped my attention) to the most sublime music: the first bars of Mozart’s clarinet quintet began to flow and with serene authority filled the entire space of the cafe, turning it at once into an antechamber of Paradise.
(If I am not mistaken, it is this clarinet quintet that Shinichi Suzuki wrote in Nurtured by Love that was one of his favorite piece of music and that opened him up to transcendent beauty.)
Leys relates that at the moment Mozart’s quintet began everyone stopped, “all faces turned around frowning with puzzled concern.” Almost immediately someone got up and changed the station to some banal series of songs and chatter “which everyone could again comfortably ignore.”
At that moment the realization hit me–and has never left me since:
true Philistines are not people who are incapable of recognizing beauty. They recognize it all too well; they detect its presence anywhere, immediately, and with a flare as infallible as that of the most sensitive aesthete — but for them, it is in order to be able better to pounce upon it at once and to destroy it before it can gain a foothold in their universal empire of ugliness.
Ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge, obscurantism does not result from a dearth of light, bad taste is not merely a lack of good taste, stupidity is not a simple want of intelligence: all these are fiercely active forces, that angrily asserts themselves on every occasion; they tolerate no challenge to their omnipresence rule. In every department of human endeavor inspired talent IS AN intolerable insults to mediocrity.
If this is true in the realm of aesthetics it is even more true in the world of ethics.
More than artistic beauty moral beauty seems to exasperate our sorry species. The need to bring down to our own wretched level, to deface, to deride and debunk any splendor that is towering above us is probably the saddest urge of human nature.
The power of Leys’ essay was not simply his critique of Hitchens, which though polite, was brutal. That’s the easy part. Especially if you are a Christian and enjoy seeing someone like the rhetorically gifted and witty Hitchens put in his place and bested by someone even more rhetorically talented. This is where is where the danger lies - and even more so in our age of memes, cleverness, and one-upmanship. If we stop there, we can miss the deeper point.
More important is the warning about the power of envy, ressentiment, sour grapes, and tearing down the good because it exposes our own moral, intellectual, physical, and spiritual mediocrity. This is the true challenge - to respond to all excellence, especially moral and spiritual with appreciation, proper admiration, and with zealousness to make the most of the talents and opportunities we have been given.
Addendum
One note on the late Christopher Hitchens. While I am deeply critical of Hitchens’ materialism and atheism, Leys noted that Hitchen’s letter was “naturally most amiable and good humored.” He was willing to engage in debate as evidenced by the letter he wrote to Leys inviting further critique - a virtue often missing today. I had the chance to meet Hitchens twice, and while he could be rough and provocative in a debate, he was also very kind and attentive to others. Once in the middle of a conference many years ago my elderly mother got an irritation in her throat and began to cough. Mr. Hitchens, who was speaking on a panel, stopped to inquire if she was ok and needed any help. Several years later we met in Palo Alto before his debate with my friend Jay Richards. I told him about the incident and thanked him. He remembered, and I was impressed. After the debate he invited Jay and me to join him for dinner, but to my regret we had another commitment. I would have enjoyed a dinner conversation with Mr. Hitchens. But I did have the chance in a small way to return his favor of kindness to my mother by giving his father-in-law a ride home. Eternal Memory. May he rest in peace.