Love, Law, and Culture
As commonly taught in the United States and Great Britain, cultural studies is founded on the premise
that Western culture is oppressive, that right thinking teachers must intervene against it, and that the
point of their teaching is liberation. Philip Rieff’s writings argued against this position, which Rieff felt
was symptomatic of the real problems within Western culture.
Rieff’s understanding of the role of the teacher was ambivalent. On the one hand, Rieff thought that
academic” battle lines are not to be trusted. Fighting attitudes do not mix well with analytic.” Rieff
refused the role of Allen Bloom or the neoconservatives because he believed that teachers should “trust
only that sides will change faster than we can or should change our minds. Our duty is to hang back” (4).
On the other hand, Rieff believed that objectivity always originates within culture and springs from
values and therefore cannot be value-neutral.
Rieff believed that culture itself must be founded on god-terms, on the sacred. The sacred is a
privileged knowledge “which can only be conveyed by the art of concealment.” The temptation is
towards dogmatism, assuming that the sacred can be confined and codified, and all too often used to
enhance the position of the codifier. Therefore, Rieff contrasted the teacher proper with the guru, who
claims to have understood god-terms, or the entrepreneur, who sees what god-terms will bring on the
market. Rieff interpreted Eliot’s praise of Henry James as having a mind so fine that no idea could
violate it as rejection of the confinement of dogmatism, “those ideas excited minds acquire when they
are released from patient thoughts” (13).
God-terms have authority, and this authority differs from the pseudo-authority of dogmatism that stops
thought and imprisons the soul in its own formulations. God-terms teach by touching; one learns from
them not by memorizing them but by struggling with them. Their truth derives from interior power, not
from equivalence with themselves. Rieff complained that dismissing the god-terms of the past as
repressive is only pseudo-liberating; it is attacking “what is already so broken that our students have
scarcely done more than hear rumors” of its existence. Students then are left weightless and empty.
The heart of the present cultural studies movement is dogmatic in this way. Its central premise is that
the study of culture is practical, that the problems of culture are soluble and that the proper study of
culture will solve them. Rieff argued that the central problem of culture is not the distribution of
political power, but the formation of selves. Without god-terms the self floats empty and dissatisfied.
This has political consequences: Rieff saw fascism and Stalinism as such consequences, but the answer
to this emptiness is not political but spiritual. Spiritual problems are not solved; they are dissolved as
we approach newer issues.
Rieff believed the study of art as central to the study of culture, and his procedure resembled that of the
New Critics. His focus was on ambivalences, contradictions. He would open up the text, not sum it up in
a meaning. The purpose of his reading was not so much aesthetic or conventionally hermeneutic. It
was less to understand the meaning of a text than it is to understand the god-terms the text uncovers.
Rieff taught that “art is the deepest form of social direction. Either a work of art deepens the thrust of
culture into character, creating ever deeper loyalties to the godheads most fully alive in (only in) their
deepest order; or, in its present extremity, art subverts that order, goes down to murder its own
godheads, and often, to mock its use of god-terms. It is interior space that is first reshaped, preliminary
to the reshaping of social order” (20-21). Rieff contrasted his notion of art to the use of god-terms
today, which are used to manipulate desire. These are “manufactured for instant use; none are
constraining; all oppose constraint” (21).
Rieff believed that modern culture rejects authority and acknowledges only power. The force
subverting authority he called therapy. Therapy is a consequence of an acceptance of diversity. Rieff
admitted that “a variety of faiths suits the complexity of human relations.” God-terms reduce
complexity; in that sense they are world-rejecting. Therapy accepts the world in its complexity. In
doing so, it is unable to accept the reality of evil. I’m OK, You’re OK. Rieff argued that this is a rejection
of faith is formerly understood. “Faith is the horrified suspicion of justification” (23). Through eyes of
faith, neither of us is OK. It is difficult to act without justification, and so we crave therapy or its more
intellectual sibling ideology.
As a cursory reading of the first books of the Bible indicate, god-terms tend towards blood-thirstiness,
and therefore, those who would be teachers must “exercise a passion for good manners, grace, wit, and
decorum—whatever will keep the life of the mind and its enacted violations a little distant from one
another, away from the taste of blood” (24). Culture would teach the subtleties and complexities of
god-terms. However, Rieff did not believe that it is simply the religious who have a taste for blood. He
is frightened by the prospect of barbarianism. “Barbarians have never before existed. At the end of this
tremendous cultural development, we moderns shall arrive at barbarism. Barbarians are people
without historical memory. Barbarism is the real meaning of radical contemporaneity. Released from
all authoritative pasts, we progress towards barbarism, not away from it” (39).
Since romanticism modern culture has sought this release, and the result is the therapeutic. The
therapeutic character above all desires to be free. The therapeutic character does not possess the
passion of the romantic. It does not revolt from a single overwhelming authority. Instead it negotiates
among a number of “authorities so long divided that none can assert themselves strongly” (45). This
division prevents any single authority from writing itself deeply into the character, so that allegiances
are superficial. One can wear one’s commitments on a tee shirt or a button. The therapeutic character
is acutely sensitive because it lives on surfaces, but it feels its own emptiness and therefore it seeks a
sublime for which it is not prepared. Instead it realizes the transgressive.
Rieff argued that the modern world with its gulags and Gotterdammerungs has moved the transgressive
from an aesthetic to a political sphere. In art the transgressive violates old forms to discover new forms.
One sees this in the work of artists like Baudelaire, Joyce, or Beckett. An aesthetic movement during
the Rieff’s own time took the notion of aesthetic violation to its ultimate conclusion; it rejected any form
at all in favor of spontaneity, “first word best word.” But “first word best word” is very different from
Baudelaire. Baudelaire is rebelling. He is discovering new possibilities the god-terms in the tradition he
inherited. “First word best word” is a denial of the possibility of god-terms. All is the same. There is
nothing to transgress against. Guilt has become neurotic and should be talked into oblivion.
One of Rieff’s more striking formulations concluded an essay on Oscar Wilde: “God is not love; God is
fear.” Fear must precede love. The promoters of “first word best word” have a similar take on love. “I
met this guy in Wichita, and this other guy in DeKalb, and this other guy . . .” Rieff was very suspicious of
the popular slogan of the sixties “Make Love, not War.” He pointed out that the kind of love being
espoused was actually a form of war, the war of each against each. I think this is an accurate description
of Ovid’s The Art of Love. In a world of culture” sexuality cannot be ‘liberated’; it can be more or less
transgressive” (144). Fellow Teachers is a polemic against writers like Norman O. Brown, R. D. Laing and
Charles Reich, proponents of eroticized reality. These writers have lost their cachet, but in many ways
the world the world they advocated is ours without the countercultural trappings. Rieff feared the
world they advocated. He saw their love as “disorder, rancorous, and perverse, a sentiment against
authoritative form within which selves can be civil to others” (197). One response to Kipnis might be
that love very inadequately tries to fill in the gap vacated when our culture gave up the respect
necessary for civility. Love without respect becomes predatory. I value my worth on the market and
then go out to seek an at least equivalent partner. As my market value fluctuates, I can shed or be shed.
Such a reduction violates the very basis of previous cultural life.
Life as an erotic adventure is a parody of self-perpetuation. The tendency of evolutionary biologists is to
substitute self-perpetuation for telos. The ideology of erotic adventure denies even the telos of eros.
We can think of eros as a calling of the body, a calling that becomes more powerful as other callings
become muted. Rieff seems to me one of those who would stifle that call. He ignores the dictates of
the body and proposes a law that challenges the flesh. The law is transcendent and in a different way
calls us to itself. It asks us to discard much of what we are.
Perfect love may cast out fear, but there must be an initial fear there to be cast out. Our culture, which
fluctuates between a fundamentalist dogmatism and a narcissistic commercialism, is not creating the
conditions under which such a love could arise.