BY DANIEL JUPP

Conservatives and traditionalists know that a worm of madness has burrowed its way into the heart of the western world. When our most highly educated children are chasing after Jews in the halls of academia, it is tempting to consider them all just plain mad, but it is more important to recognise that their hearts, as well as their minds, have been twisted by contemporary ideology.

The university campus features in Saul Bellow’s magnificent novel Mr Sammler’s Planet. First published in 1970, it is even more powerful and relevant today. It’s a book informed by Bellow’s Jewishness and by reflections on the Holocaust.

The plot concerns the life and feelings of an elderly European scholar connected with Columbia University in New York. Mr Artur Sammler is a Holocaust survivor, an intellectual, and the novel revolves around a lecture Sammler gives at Columbia somewhere in the midst of the 1960s. Sammler represents Old World courtesy, gentility and decency, the kind of civilised traits associated with European High Culture before the barbarism of Nazism emerged. He is a living preserved relic, a survivor out of his natural time and place, not just of a Jewry that died in the false showers and burning ovens of industrial genocide, but of the entire European claim to civilisation itself.

As a scholar who loves and is defined by his relationship with the great works of the past, Sammler also represents the life of the mind, the promise of human rationality. This, too, was almost extinguished entirely by Nazism. He is a true scholar and a true thinker in the most humanist sense of what that means because his thinking is predicated on his humanity and the humanity of others. He is a man not only deserving of compassion, but feeling it, feeling it as a flood of real emotion that threatens to overwhelm his conscious reserve and civilised restraint. Having seen horror in its most obvious manifestations, he is “sorry for all and sore at heart”.

There is a wonderfully comic and sad scene in which Sammler accidentally finds himself at a funeral wake for a total stranger. He has dived uninvited into a room to escape the street and his heightened emotions, only to find himself shuffling along a line of people towards an open casket to pay respects to a dead man. He is forced by embarrassment and circumstance to be part of this private mourning, where both Life and Death seem to conspire in a cosmic joke at his expense, or one designed to prompt the outpouring of emotion he is desperately trying to hold back. He finds himself sobbing uncontrollably for himself, but this is taken by strangers as overwhelming grief for a dead man he doesn’t know. Bellow would have provided us with an astonishing mix of melancholy and humour with just this much, but he adds even more. The genuine mourners are jealous of both this stranger who seems to grieve more than they do, and of the dead man for seemingly prompting such uncontrollable grief.

It’s a scene that is deeper and richer precisely because it is about both real grief and real pettiness, about the mortality we share as well as the capacity for selfishness we share, about both understanding universal compassion for the condition of human suffering and the finality of Death AND a marvellously droll example of human folly and misunderstanding. All of this collectively means that Sammler is not just crying for himself. He is also crying for the stranger, although he does not fully know it. He is of course crying for the victims of the Holocaust. But ultimately he is crying for all Mankind, for our wisdom and for our folly, for our unique capacity for both good and evil.

He is all of us, and so is his grief.

The other truly important scene in the book comes when Mr Sammler delivers his lecture. What he is confronted with in so doing is the phenomenon of barbarians on the campus, barbarians as the product of the campus. He still wants to share art and literature and culture as antidotes to barbarism, he is still offering European civilisation as it was at its height. But of course, two things make them impossible. The first is that the most highly, self-consciously cultured nation in Europe – the nation of Goethe and Wagner – willingly embraced genocide. And the second is that the nation that emerged as a superpower from World War Two had already produced its own generation of barbarians.

The students Sammler tries to reach do not care about gentility, civility, scholarship or culture. They do not value the highest products of European civilisation. They aren’t astonished by cathedrals or enraptured by arias and operas. They don’t love books and writers and the process of learning from them. They aren’t at university to study the past and cherish its lessons. They don’t have a shared understanding of the respectful treatment of that past and its custodians. They don’t have any human sympathy or compassion for Sammler and what he represents. They treat him with rudeness, scorn and contempt. They ignore him as he speaks, or engage in their own conversations, or signal disinterest and disgust and a boorish, pervasive philistinism at the very notion that this ‘old white dude’ has something to say worth hearing.

They are woke, of course, before the term was invented.

They are the 1960s student radicals, who wanted everything torn down but ended up running everything into the ground with themselves in charge. They are perfect modern barbarians. What is it that they lack, that Sammler possesses, that a decent person possesses?

Their thoughts are programmed, their sentences all clichés, their ideas all hand me down forms of Marxism. Wokeness is the death of independent rational thinking, of self-aware consciousness, of the very capacity to think. It’s been entirely replaced with various forms of dogma.

Radical leftism kills the human heart. Hatred of the past kills the human heart. Hatred of the two and a half thousand years of western civilisation kills the human heart. Hatred of white people and all the achievements and advances and glories of western nations with majority white populations kills the human heart.

Dismissing Shakespeare and Corneille, or Voltaire and Edmund Burke, or Gustave Moreau and JMW Turner, as ‘dead white males’, assuredly kills the human heart.

And hatred of Jews, of course, kills the human heart.

Daniel Jupp is the author of A Gift for Treason: The Cultural Marxist Assault on Western Civilisation, which was published in 2019. He has had previous articles published by Spiked, The Spectator and Politicalite, and is a married father of two from Essex. Daniel’s SubStack is available here.