BY DR. AGONSON
I recently listened to Dr. Gad Saad’s book, Suicidal Empathy. The subtitle, Dying to be Kind, sold me. It’s a fairly short work and worth the read. One comparison stood out to me, though, and I’m not sure it would be one Saad would welcome; a quote from Chesterton kept coming to mind as I listened to Saad jump from one sarcasm to the next: “And it must be remembered that the most purely practical science does take this view of mental evil; it does not seek to argue with it like a heresy but simply to snap it like a spell.”
The strength of this book does not necessarily lie in its use of reasoned argumentation. How do you reason with someone who lies to you? When someone says that black is white, man is woman, up is down, good is evil, you cannot argue. That is the power of a blatant lie; it does not even try to be true.
The strength of this book is its wit, its satire, its cutting remarks. It is, in some degree, Saad’s greatest hits, a collection of some of his best Reductiones ad absurdum.
I suspect, though, that Saad would not approve of Chesterton, which is the weakness one feels in this work. Saad ends his book with that old canard of a “call to action,” and it falls flat, at least to me. After mocking the world for choosing to be unreasonable, Saad enjoins reason. One hears an irritated Bob Newhart shouting, “Stop it!” but why should they?
The problem is that wokeism, or leftism, or progressivism, or whatever it is being called this exact second, is not unreasonable. Saad even discusses this as he describes male feminists in the technical term of “Sneaky fuckers.” Sneaky fuckers are not unreasonable, they are liars; they will use reason when it suits them, or unreason. They have an end in mind, and no means are off the table. Because they have a reason, they are prepared to be as unreasonable as they please.
That is the problem with the book. The end Saad has in mind is not an end. Man cannot stay awake forever. Man must sleep. The sentence proceeding my earlier Chesterton quote undermines Saad’s libertarianism: “Neither modern science nor ancient religion believes in complete free thought.” Saad writes seven chapters showing why certain thoughts ought not to be allowed and ends his book by extolling the virtues of dialogue. He and I both prize dialogue, but why on earth should Saad’s prescriptions of how to have a good dialogue change the minds of the avowed enemies of dialogue?
Early in his final chapter, Saad references a work of Goya’s, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.” “Arise, sleeper, and reason,” Saad seems to command, and yet, I think our problem is that we need to sleep.
Between the two, the world of dreams is the master of the world of reason. Dreams love to make use of reason. Dreams play with reason as a man dangles a bit of string in front of a cat. Reason, on the other hand, struggles to make any sense of the dream at all.
We, as a culture, are committing suicide. Saad’s diagnosis is right. Our sin is despair. If Chesterton says that the madman has lost everything but his capacity to reason, we have gained everything, all the kingdoms of the world, at the cost of our teleological reason. Reason must grow from first principles; first principles must come from beyond us and are necessarily exclusive. If I take it as a first principle, as Saad and I both do, that truth is good, I cannot then allow into the conversation the rising voice of Thrasymachus which says truth is just a fantasy used by the powerful to control the weak.
No, I leave The Republic early with Cephalus. I do not find much of any worth in this great work of Plato. One can only suffer so many dead ends before one begins to wonder if Saad is wrong in his initial bias, and that, despite liberal sensibilities, there really are directions of the intellect that constitute “forbidden knowledge” which will kill you.
The West is committing suicide: reason has a place in combating that, but reason is not the end. Reason is a tool that ends in clarity, and clarity in truth. Saad provides clarity and stops there. The house is swept, but the demons are not finally exorcised; they come back when they’re thirsty. If the last state of the West is not to be worse than the first, the West needs to actually come to terms with itself. Nature abhors a vacuum; evil spirits will fill the places left wanting the good, the true, and the beautiful.
The West, to me, needs a nap. Our discourse is screaming hysterics, like children up past their bedtime. It needs to dream. It needs the insight that can only come from the mysterious place of the unknown. Without that, I think we will be fighting phantoms, like an insomniac’s hallucinations, unable to make any use of reason at all.
We cannot, in the end, stay awake forever. If I were to ever have the honor of getting to know Saad, we’d probably end up arguing. That is because, fundamentally, we both want the truth. Blessed are those who want the truth, for they shall spend hours talking over cigars. If we did argue, we would both agree upon what constitutes reason, but we might spend a very long time on trying to settle what ends we ought to aim for.
Saad ends his book: “A society dies when it cares more about exhibiting infinite tolerance and empathy than invoking its survival instinct. It truly is that simple.” The statement is true, but what would Saad say to the man who truly is trying to commit suicide, or to the civilization? Here is the weakness of science: It can tell you that X will kill you but cannot tell you that you ought to live. Saad perceives a suicidal West, describing the problem clearly, reasonably, lovingly, and humorously, but the inoculation of chapter eight, which would help the West to live, cannot help the West to live until our culture chooses to live.
The West will not decide to live if it is simply to be an open forum for debate. The West will not find a will to live in the pursuit of scientific progress. Free thought and knowledge are not ends in and of themselves. The West cannot turn from suicide unless it turns toward something meaningful.
Saad prescribes reason and clarity for this suicidal patient, but what to do if the once confused patient returns with a now lucid plan for self-destruction? There is a time for all things under the sun, even a time to wake and a time to sleep. Saad seems to be telling an exhausted mind to wake up, but he cannot wake but that he sleeps. If the sleep of reason produces monsters, perhaps this is the time for monsters, for nightmares, maybe we need to be scared a little.
I think it is at least time for a dream, for a story, for the discretion of the poet who is not merely following a pattern. The good poet does follow a pattern, even when he breaks it. The good story has a plot, even if the plot is as simple as “Boy meets girl.” The great artist may use math and science to get the proportions of his sculpture right, but these are the means of his art, not the end. The portrait painter may indeed draw lines like Pythagoras, but the painter has a subject in his vision beyond mere mathematical relations.
What good is it to win all the kingdoms of the world and lose one’s soul? That is, in the end, the real critique postmodernism uses to pollute the world with its nonsense, albeit a hidden truth rarely acknowledged. It really is no good to be always talking of means and facts. Story is far more real than any accident of gravity. Saad has done a great job in reminding the West of the pattern it should follow, but the West has no reason to follow it anymore.
Paragraph after paragraph, and I feel I have not quite said what I have been trying to say. It is driving me mad. I shall add this; perhaps I shall find a way to express it. I have, in the past, had bouts of depression, and I can often feel when they’re coming on. One night, as the looming shadow rose, I prayed for help. I went to bed and had horrible nightmares I cannot now recall. However, I do remember, upon waking, a wonderful sense of relief. The shadow had passed.
I have leaned into this. I have loved monsters. I play with nightmares and even look forward to having them. Night, I hope not a permanent night, is falling. We are in a twilight. I stand with what Saad says, but if we are to wake up, as we desperately need to do, we must first go to sleep. Who knows but that the monsters that come may be just the thing to shock us awake; when we run from death, we may realize that we actually do want to live.
Tale Told 