The soft tyranny of institutions, authorities, and experts

In Under Which Lyre, A Reactionary Tract for the Times by W.H. Auden there is a particular line which has always amused me.

Thou shalt not sit

With statisticians nor commit

        A social science.

Indeed.  Not if one wishes to maintain healthy habits of thought.  But this is merely one injunction of a set of ten, a Hermetic Decalog:

Keep well the Hermetic Decalogue,

Which runs as follows:

Thou shalt not do as the dean pleases,

Thou shalt not write thy doctor's thesis

On education,

Thou shalt not worship projects nor

Shalt thou or thine bow down before

Administration.

Thou shalt not answer questionnaires

Or quizzes upon World-Affairs,

Nor with compliance

Take any test. Thou shalt not sit

With statisticians nor commit

A social science.

Thou shalt not be on friendly terms

With guys in advertising firms,

Nor speak with such

As read the Bible for its prose,

Nor, above all, make love to those

Who wash too much.

Thou shalt not live within thy means

Nor on plain water and raw greens.

If thou must choose

Between the chances, choose the odd;

Read The New Yorker, trust in God;

And take short views.

This is all part of the longer poem, Under Which Lyre.  I recently came across an essay by Adam Kirsch, A Poet's Warning which provides background and context.  Auden wrote Under Which Lyre for the 1946 Commencement Ceremony at Harvard, the first since the conclusion of World War II.  

In 174 witty, neatly rhymed lines, Auden set out his prescient vision of the challenges facing postwar America in general, and the postwar university in particular. Occasional poems usually fade pretty quickly, but even in 2007, the year of Auden’s centenary, “Under Which Lyre” remains one of his most charming and perceptive works.

Auden had officially become an American citizen just a few weeks before Commencement. He had been living in the United States since 1939, when he left his native England shortly before the outbreak of World War II. But this symbolic confirmation of his new nationality must have been on Auden’s mind when he wrote “Under Which Lyre,” a poem full of American references—from the New Yorker to Broadway to the “over-Whitmanated” style so popular with patriotic balladeers. In fact, the poem is Auden’s warning to his new fellow countrymen, and in particular, to the kind of worthies who would be found at a Harvard Commencement.

Here is where the poem and Auden are surprisingly prescient.  After the pandemic of bad governance and expert judgment which was authoritarian but incorrect during Covid-19 and while we still battle the Woke infestation of Social Justice and CRT, both mere guises for authoritarianism, it is impossible not to read Auden's 1946 poem as a distant warning.

Yet even as the College returns to its civilian pursuits and petty vanities—students struggling with the poems of Donne, “professors back from secret missions” bragging about their adventures—Auden sees another kind of conflict taking shape. This is the war between the two sensibilities, the two social and spiritual visions, that Auden names Apollo and Hermes. Apollo, the Greek god of light and music, becomes for Auden “pompous Apollo,” the patron saint of “official art.” Against him, Auden sets Hermes, the trickster god, protector of thieves and liars, who is “precocious” and undisciplined. Both of these gods can make a kind of music, but Auden asks the reader to decide “under which lyre” he will take his stand.

The comedy of the poem, and its prescience, lies in Auden’s description of Apollo, the presiding spirit of what he calls “the fattening forties.” The danger to postwar America, the poet suggests, lies in the soft tyranny of institutions, authorities, and experts—of people who know what’s best for you and don’t hesitate to make sure you know it, too. Auden gives a wonderful catalog of the things these Apollonians want to impose: colleges where “Truth is replaced by Useful Knowledge,” with courses on “Public Relations, Hygiene, Sport”; poems that “Extol the doughnut and commend/The Common Man” (did Byron Price flinch at those lines?); even processed foods: “a glass of prune juice or a nice/Marsh-mallow salad.” In short, Auden is already predicting the dullest, most conformist aspects of American life in the Cold War years, the kind of prosperous mediocrity that gave the 1950s a bad name.

But if it’s impossible to dislodge Apollo from his throne, Auden suggests, you can still follow Hermes in private. 

 

And we can still practice free thought and speech, no matter which lyre we might stand under.  Its not the lyre, it's the propensity towards authoritarianism which kills us.