'A New Dark Age of Enlightenment'

“To sink oneself into a party is fatal, no matter how noble the tenets of that party may be. For all tenets tend to harden into dogma, and all dogma breeds hatred and bigotry, and is therefore stultifying.”

Never underestimate the influence of laziness in human affairs. Dogma appeals to lazy natures. We don’t need to think, weigh evidence or even feel much of anything if truth more closely resembles a bowling ball than a river – hard, heavy, emphatic, not fluid. Louise Bogan is answering a questionnaire prepared by the editors of Partisan Review in 1939 and collected in A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2005). Eighty years ago she writes near the end of “a low dishonest decade” not unlike our own. Our dogmas too are metastasizing. Even writers, people we persist in believing ought to be independent thinkers, happily join the herd. Bogan continues:

“The true artist will instinctively reject ‘burning questions’ and all ‘crude oppositions’ which can cloud his vision or block his ability to deal with the world. All this has been fought through before now: Turgenev showed up the pretensions of the political critic Belinsky; Flaubert fought the battle against ‘usefulness’ all his life; Yeats wrote the most superb anti-political poetry ever written. Flaubert wrote, in the midst of one bad political period: ‘Let us [as writers] remain the river and turn the mill.”

In a passage that dates from just five years later, Michael Oakeshott writes in Notebooks, 1922-86 (2014, Imprint Academic): “We live in an age of dogmatism, which has only to continue in the way it is going, to bring us to a new dark age of enlightenment: what may save us is conversation.”