BOOKS IN BRIEF
Sacred Order/Social Order: My Life Among the Deathworks by Philip Rieff (University of Virginia, 234 pp., $34.95). Philip Rieff, the hermitic sociologist whose last proper book, Fellow Teachers, appeared in 1973, has returned. His diagnoses of cultural decline, including The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966), belong in the pantheon of conservative writing. They made him an intellectual alien to both the academy and America at large.
As the ivory tower was once a primary source of culture, it is now a primary source of culture's death. Joining technological and artistic elites in the creation of deathworks--Rieff's term for "all-out" assaults "upon something vital to the established culture"--our cultural guardians are now foes of the very principle of guardianship, dedicated to the negation of authority and the erection of an "anti-culture" as "all-consuming" as it is "godless."
The war in which Rieff enlists rages "between those who assert that there are no truths, only readings, that is, fictions (which assume the very ephemeral status of truth for negational purposes) and what is left of . . . elites in the priesthood, rabbinate, and other teaching/directive elites dedicated to the proposition that the truths have been revealed and require constant rereading and application in the light of the particular historical circumstance in which we live."
By putting the stakes of the present struggle in those terms, Rieff is one of the most important philosophers in America. He has grasped with both hands the most important problem facing Western civilization and throttles it into submission. Anyone at all concerned with joining him--and to oppose him is to join the anti--culture--must read this book.
It is not an easy read, nor is it supposed to be. Culture is work. Rieff is notoriously dense. His clearest writing comes on obtuse ideas--topics like the competing contradictions of Freudian and Jungian therapy. In dissecting the implications of the analytic attitude driving socio-psychology, Rieff aims over people's heads. When his work intersected with more popular topics, crossing over did not make him more pedestrian. Before he fled to privacy, Rieff dazzled. He lectured around the world (once with a cardinal named Ratzinger), showed up in other people's novels, and received the best fellowships.
Rieff's obscurity, however, is now more personal than intellectual. Deathworks is by far his most user-friendly book: This is, literally, Rieff with pictures. The reader is shown what he is told--deathworks by Picasso,-Duchamp, Mapple-thorpe. Jesus appears in Michelangelo's marble and Serrano's urine. Rieff's "image entries" are helpful--vital--"sorties into an otherwise invisible sacred order that is inseparable from our lives in social order." In his urgent journey, Rieff is more personal, more direct, and more ontological than ever before.
Rieff is urgent for a reason. We have moved from a civilization that sculpts with marble to one that prefers playing with marbles. The atomization of society into a rabble of radical individualists has been followed by its real objective: the atomization of individuals themselves. Rieff describes in merciless terms how this mission must terminate in death--the untimely death of truth as well as human souls. This is no hyperbole. Rieff measures a cultural parabola, teaching by aesthetic parables: of our movement from the first point of primitive primordialism ("fate") to the heights of civilized "second culture" ("faith") to the new low of the anti-culture ("fiction").
His enemy is those who kill the authority of permanent things and reanimate the murdered with endless fictions. These knights of the living dead come under direct attack in Volume II of Sacred Order/Social Order, The Crises of the Officer Class: "The rot starts at the top, always." Rieff calls this his "first law of sociology." Our task is simple (not easy): to stop the rot. Step one is our timely apprehension of this remarkable mind's remarkable new lifework.
- James Poulos