'To Take the Bad Taste Out of My Mouth'

“We live in a fanatical age, an age of propaganda, when everybody wants the support of the whole herd in order to be quite at peace in his own conscience.” 

George Santayana is writing to his friend and future literary executor Daniel Cory on April 13, 1938. It’s the age of Hitler and Stalin, Mussolini and Franco. Santayana is seventy-four and in a few years will move into a convent run by the Little Company of Mary sisters in Rome. He already lives as a monastic atheist, withdrawn from most worldly affairs. He reads and writes and has few material demands. Here is the next and final sentence in his letter to Cory: “I am reading the Upanishads, St. Augustine’s Confessions, and Spinoza’s Politics, to take the bad taste out of my mouth.”

 

The flip side of the sentence at the top, as true today as it was in 1938 -- the year of the Anschluss, Munich, the continuance of Stalin’s great purge and Kristallnacht – is that strays from the herd face suspicion and rancorous contempt. Independence of thought has grown scarce. In 1936, Michael Oakeshottt wrote in his notebook: “Politics are an inferior form of human activity.”

 

[For the Oakeshott see Notebooks, 1922-86 (Imprint Academic, 2014).]