The last curmudgeon

PF: They don't want to know because it's painful and requires adjustments to their assumptions that obviously they don't want to make.

PT: You're committed to stripping away those illusions.

PF: Yes, but it's part of my general intellectual operation. It's what I do to literature as well and have done through a long career of university teaching. I rub my students' noses in the most offensive critical materials. When they want to read Mark Twain, I say, all right, let's read Democratic Vistas, in which Mark Twain surprises us by finding the United States one of the worst places in the world. It shocks most people. That wakes up students and gets them ready to use their minds freely.

The war book and the war understanding are part of my general career of stripping off the wrappings from things which make them look pleasant or acceptable and showing how complicated real life is. In order to save Europe, you destroy it, which is what we did in the Second World War. In order to turn the Germans into democratic people, we killed a great number of them. I like to be the agent of such interesting truths from time to time.

PT: People sometimes prefer delusion to the truth because it's easier. But sometimes people do it to protect themselves. They couldn't go on if they faced the truth.

PF: Yes. It's not something to be easily sarcastic or satiric about. One should be sympathetic with people who need a false world, because the real one is intolerable. It's the lesson of all literature since the Greeks.

As T. S. Eliot put it, humankind cannot stand very much reality. Hence we have religion, art, higher education. All that is beneficial, but it all stems from our difficulty in dealing with actuality, which is too nasty to look at -- the shortness of human life, which wipes out everything you do; the pain of death; the pain of love. Love always ends badly, as Hemingway said. Unless the two people die at the same time, once they undertake a relationship, they're asking for misery and they're going to get it.

Those truths aren't pleasant to contemplate. And therefore we go into Disney fantasies and fool ourselves about how easy it is to recover our lost youth with surgical operations, exercise. It's all hockey One's going to get older, and it's not going to be much fun. One should get ready for it early and not be surprised when it happens; it's a way of joining the human race.

PT: Do you ever think, "This is more reality than I can stomach"? You're never tempted to protect yourself?.

PF: No, because I have a sense of humor. I think the whole thing is funny. The Greeks thought the gods were jokers, essentially, and enjoyed practical jokes. Living in a society that began as a Christian society where God is sincere and doesn't play games, it's harder to embrace that attitude, but it's not hard for me.

PT: Is it harder for us as Americans because we didn't have an antiquity or a Middle Ages...

PF: It's harder for the Americans, or other countries that have styled themselves upon the American promise. That's one of the tasks of education. The high schools have utterly failed in it, by the way. We need to chip away at this optimism constantly, at this sense that when the stock market goes up, it's not going to go down.

Wouldn't it be nice if life were like the life depicted in Snow White, and we had cute little dwarfs to amuse us and no evil that cannot be easily dealt with? Now and then, there is something like that utterly motiveless mass murder accomplished by the two children in Arkansas that ought to shake our sensibilities. But it doesn't. We can easily override it with optimism. We say, "well, we'll have better gun control" or "there must be a solution to that problem."

There's no solution to it. It's a human problem. People are meaninglessly wicked sometimes. Religion used to show why, but religion doesn't help any more at all. Psychiatry used to show why, but that's discredited now. Most Americans don't like when I say it, but most problems have no answer.

That's not really a pessimistic philosophy. It says you can survive this bizarre life without damage if you have the right attitude and regard the whole thing as a massive irony

PT: Do you think that's a cultural immaturity, to not want to face up to that?

PF: Yes, I do, but we're only 150 years old. This kind of philosophy comes much more readily to Europeans, which is one reason why I love living in Europe. There's a natural joyous pessimism, which encourages people to expect the most awful things and to laugh about it.