Letter from the Editor: No Longer Waiting for the Barbarians
Christopher Bernard
When I dreamt up Caveat Lector in a café in San Francisco’s Mission district, one afternoon in the early 1980s, the barbarians were still at bay; though just beginning to feel their oats, resentful and envious, they were still cowed by the bien pensants of the liberal left.
I conceived of the magazine as a tiny island, an islet of civilized life, a small yet sturdy stronghold of integrity in permanent tension (hence the ironic title: “Watch out, reader!”) with the temptations of a culture of the tenth-rate aspiring to be third-rate. Though this may describe the common culture of any era. As Thomas Carlyle memorably put it, “The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always has been.”
He did not say “a republic of mediocrities periodically invaded by barbarians,” but he might have, had he looked into the future.
We live in such a time, when power’s citadel has been invaded by a radical right intent on dismantling many of our – and indeed (and here is the bitter irony) their – protections that have defined life in the United States for almost a century.
In such a time it may behoove each of us to make our commitments clear. Commitments such as just what Caveat Lector is trying to accomplish.
As source of the idea from which the magazine grew, and one of its founding members, I can state only what the magazine has meant to me.
But who am I? Since “identity” is all the rage, let me begin with a stab at self-definition; this may help explain why I felt drawn to dream up the magazine in the first place.
I generally avoid “self-definitions,” my favorite response to such questions being, “I don’t care who anyone is; I only care what they do.”
Nevertheless, let me take a stab at this mercurial target; with luck, some of what I say will resonate with our readers.
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I do not define myself in the terms most commonly used in today’s culture – race, “gender,” sexual orientation, and the like; these have always struck me as irrelevant, uninteresting, and meaningless. They tell me nothing whatsoever about anyone I actually know – nothing about their personality, character, intelligence, honesty, humanity – in other words, anything that has any relevance whatsoever about a human being – about you.
I define myself, when I must, in philosophical terms; terms themselves that may need defining.
“Neoplatonist Epicureanism” may seem an oxymoron to students of classical philosophy, or eccentrically out of date to other people. And I admit it is a novel formulation, to say nothing of being a bit of a mouthful.
But, as I have come to understand them, these two philosophies, in their classic formulations, are in effect two sides of the same coin: the one is an extreme form of idealism, the other an equally extreme form of materialism.
Neoplatonism is a family of doctrines from Plotinus (from the third century AD) to Marsilio Ficino, in the Renaissance, to such philosophically oriented poets as Percy Bysshe Shelley and aesthetes such as Walter Pater. Its central doctrine can be characterized as the following: The basis of reality is “the One,” a simple, ineffable, essentially unknowable subsistence, beyond being and non-being, that is the creative source of all of reality. What this philosophy, by itself, does not adequately address is the the immense diversity we find in the universe and the conflicts between many of its constituents.
Epicureanism asserts that the ultimate constituents of reality are atoms in random motion and the void within which they move; it is a form of materialism, but one that does not account for the sources of creation and order that we do find in the world.
Neither of these philosophies stands comfortably on its own. But combined and modernized, and redrawn to make them conform, for example, to the discoveries of modern science, they can be seen to make up for each other’s deficiencies.
This philosophy is, of course, not in itself scientific; it is pre-scientific; a metaphysic.
One name for this philosophical synthesis is “Neoplatonist Epicureanism”; other names might be “idealist Epicureanism,” or “idealist materialism,” using the term “idealist” in its broadest philosophical sense.
As I see it, existence as a whole is made up of two modes of being: matter and energy (including everything from quarks to Higg’s bosons), on the one hand, and, on the other, an ideal “world” of abstractions, values, and ideals epistemological, moral, and aesthetic (including the values of compassion, morality, and ethics, the laws of physics, and the rules of mathematics) that are expressed, sometimes imperfectly, through energy and matter. These modes of being intersect to form the basis of the world we experience.
This “reality,” it seems clear to me, has a purpose and, in some sense, even a kind of consciousness: what we call “reality,” as defined above, is a self-organizing function (for example, “autocatalytic reaction networks” of chemicals that provide a possible basis for the creation of life in its most primitive forms), ultimately producing an infinite number of families of beings and of being itself.
The universe (or multiverse, which strikes me as self-evident; I use the term “metaverse” to describe the multiverse as a single entity) is, according to this theory, in perpetual creation, and in perpetual destruction in order to create again, its purpose being to work out the infinite possibilities of incarnation in energy and matter.
The attainment of eudaimonia (enjoyment, happiness), and in particular ataraxia (peace of mind) while embracing the perpetual motion that is existence by contributing to it creatively, is human life’s highest good, and this is attained through the consistent pursuit of goodness and beauty and truth in ways whether large or small, whether completely unknown or widely celebrated.
This pursuit can be mere passive enjoyment of the good, the true, the beautiful. But it also includes resistance to evils both natural and human, including such things as injustice and cruelty. Goodness includes intelligent heroism (hence I sometimes lean toward political progressives); yet truth can be a very bitter, however necessary, medicine. Its bitterness can even be part of the medicinal effect: in the right doses, it stimulates and strengthens.
On this point I feel that I am essentially conservative. I also believe, along with conservatives, that humanity is limited and by no means perfectible, or if so, only briefly, because the material reality within which we live is ephemeral and headed for oblivion at any given moment.
Yet, by the same token, the evils we face are also ephemeral; if we can remove them, even if only temporarily, we are free to do so; human life is the eternal challenge to transform the evils of our condition into good.
The fact is that we do not know what our limits are until we try to push past them. In this I join many a so-called moderate liberal; neither as despairing of humanity as the reactionary right nor as giddily optimistic as the sometimes unbalanced left, but preferring a cautious optimism to either the faith, on the one hand, that “history is progressive and will vindicate us” or, on the other, a nihilistic certainty that destruction of the good that we do know is the only certain promise of dramatic change.
I see civilization (which I define as a society organized to accommodate the well-being of all of its members) as the best condition in which to pursue a truly human life.
I see barbarism (which I define as any human force opposed to the well-being of all or a large contingent of a society’s members) to be the supreme enemy of that way of life, of “civilization” in the sense I use, and of whatever is possible of human happiness. And by that I mean barbarism of whatever kind, including the peculiar kinds that civilization itself sometimes produces: we have seen that often enough in the last hundred and fifty years, from the malignancy of fascism to the sweet silliness of the “Woodstock generation” to the economic carnage caused by neoliberalism and the ravages of hyperindividualism.
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In the 1980s, I dreamed of a publication that would serve as an avenue of expression for a kind of cultural “loyal opposition” to a world that seemed to be growing increasingly barbarous – a world where politics was becoming either a monstrosity or a dead end, and popular culture a form of flattery of humanity’s poor taste and worst instincts. Deception and self-deception seemed to ride humankind, from either the grotesqueness of the capitalist, theocratic right or the delusions and philosophical absurdities of the left.
Though ignorance, dishonesty, and folly often held sway among mankind, where mediocrity is often king and integrity hard, if not impossible, to find, it is, nevertheless, a world that was not without real and powerful good in both the present and the past, and hope and promise for the future. The publication I dreamt of would help give expression to that good, that promise, and that hope, in however a modest yet not insignificant way: our means would be through poetry and the art of the written word, the other arts, ideas, philosophy.
After all, there is many an ancient civilization whose only survival, after several thousand years, is a few lines of poetry. Civilizations come and go, but a beautiful poem is written in eternity.
It was certainly a lofty goal, quite unapologetically so, for such a small publication.
The story has been told how a handful of monasteries, off on a dark western island, helped keep the intellectual achievements of Greco-Roman civilization alive through the bitterest centuries of the Dark Ages as they settled across Europe.
That may be somewhat of an exaggeration – a better insight may be that it was the Islamic civilization of the East that kept the lights of Greco-Roman culture, and certainly of philosophy, burning. But there is no doubt enough truth in the story to inspire a few of us today.
And everyone knows of the single beat of a butterfly’s wing that affects the stock exchange on Wall Street. So, small, indeed tiny things, can have inordinately large, indeed world-changing consequences. As I said in a recent poem:
“Empires have been born
from a word written in a room.”
At the time of Caveat Lector’s founding, we were still in the midst of the absurdity and callousness of the Reagan/Thatcher decade. The left, in an act of self-destructive despair, was just about to be swallowed whole by the panoply of irrationalisms that make up “postmodernism.” Cynicism and the ghost of Ayn Rand fought for control of the American illusion.
I have to give myself painful credit for foreseeing the coming, not only of a Trump, but of an openly fascist Republican Party. Some writers and thinkers saw this earlier than I did (Gore Vidal may have been the first to make a public prediction; I had friends tell me that “America was six inches from fascism” as early as 1979, though I pooh-poohed it as typical paranoia from the left. Alas, paranoia is sometimes the simplest realism).
However, twenty years ago, by 2004, I came to the grim conclusion that both of these dangers would be realized sometime over the next generation. I noted that every Republican president since Nixon (and every candidate since Barry Goldwater) had been closer to “fascism” than the last (Bush I being a possible, if weak, exception). If you graphed this, it plotted a curve that was predictable, though terrible.
In 2024, the barbarians, long seething at the gates, took over the citadel. Though they have not yet entirely taken over the city. But we are now no longer waiting for them.
At this moment, we are entering 2025, and the winter ahead looks dark and cold indeed.
We will do our own best to keep alive (as Walter Pater put it a century and a half ago) the “hard, gemlike flame” of beauty, and goodness, and truth, not only in this issue and this year, but, with the help of our readers and contributors, past this perilous time and for the years to come.
Watch out, reader! You might be changed by the words within.
Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet, novelist and essayist, and a co-editor (with Ho Lin, Steven Hill, and Jonah Raskin) as well as the original founder of Caveat Lector. His third collection of poems The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of “The Top Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews. He is also
recipient of an Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. His novels include A Spy in the Ruins (“one of the best American novels since Thomas Pynchon and William Gass,” Miguel de Cervantes–award winning novelist Juan Goytisolo), Voyage to a Phantom City (“an enormous achievement,” award-winning translator Peter Bush), and Meditations on Love and
Catastrophe at The Liars’ Cafe. (“puts one in mind of Ulysses as much as Naked Lunch,” award-winning poet Ernest Hilbert). His most recent books are the middle-grade stories, the first in the
“Otherwise” series, – If You Ride A Crooked Trolley... and The Judgment Of Biestia.
Image from National Geographic