Agnology - a study in human ignorance

A notice from Screwtape.

Some old movie trivia.

When John F. Kennedy was running for President in 1960, he made a shrewd political move. As one of the first Roman Catholics to actually have a shot at the presidency[1], he had encountered a great deal of resistance to his church membership, particularly in the deeply Protestant South. In order to assuage the fears of potential Southern supporters, he delivered a speech to the Southern Baptist leaders in which he declared:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be a Catholic) how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.

Apparently, this was assurance enough the democratically-minded Baptists, and Kennedy went on to capture the vast majority of Southern electoral votes.

Until I began researching Graham Greene for my thesis, I never realized that Mexico was violently atheistic for a fair portion of the 20th century. Actually, literally, violently anti-God. Plutarco Elías Calles, the Mexican president from 1924-28, declared clerical vestments illegal, divested Catholic clergy of the right to vote, stole church property for the state, and threatened clergy who were critical of the state with imprisonment and death. One particular governor, Tomás Garrido Canabal, went so far as to actually hunt down practicing priests. A profane man both privately and publicly, the governor's atheism was so exaggerated that he named his children Lenin and Zoila Libertad (he also had a nephew named Lucifer), and chose to call his farm animals "God," "Pope," "Mary," and "Jesus."

According to Wikipedia, he encouraged a local satirical play which featured a stud bull being paraded around "called 'the bishop' or an ass labeled 'the pope.'”

See Reformed News.

A little stale now, but worth it:

The fundamental issue here is of much greater importance than arguments about the justice (or lack thereof) of this particular war. Weigel would have the church effectively abdicate its moral judgment in matters of war to the leaders of the nation-state. It is hard to imagine what could do greater damage to both church and nation. If the church does not have an independent process of discernment to bring the gospel to bear on matters of war and peace, then any hope that the Prince of Peace will be heard over the din of self-interest and fear will be lost. History is already littered with the wreckage caused by Christian capitulation to reasons of state.

Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. - Charles Baudelaire

Modernity itself goes by different names and glides by under different guises. As one raised in a fairly stereotypical conservative evangelical home, I particularly remember associating modernism with atheism, with evolution and humanism—to be modern was to be of the world, in the worst possible way. Modernity was the avant-garde—the art which put crucifixes in vials of urine, which spilt buckets of paint over canvases. Modernity was at the same time the hyper-rationalism of the scientist in his God-proof laboratory where he killed babies in utero in order to perform stem-cell research. Modernity also, to my mind, managed to produce confusing literature populated with anti-heroes and confused sexuality.

The reader should be aware of this personal background. However, while modernism can certainly claim these associations, the sense in which I now wish to define modernity takes a different angle....

From the new issue of First Things: What is Anglicanism?" by the archbishop in the middle of it all--Henry Luke Orombi of Uganda. I don't think it's possible to read this essay and not feel moved.

For four hundred years Anglicanism represented both the theological convictions of the English Reformation and the culture of the Christian Church in Britain. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Anglican divines gave voice to both: English Reformation theology (doctrine) and British culture (discipline). The Anglican churches around the world, however, have ended the assumption that Anglican belief and practice must be clothed in historic British culture....

Take, for instance, the traditional Anglican characteristics of restraint and moderation. Are they part of doctrine, as Anglican theology, or discipline, as British culture? At the recent consecration of the fourth bishop of the Karamoja diocese, the preacher was the bishop of a neighboring diocese whose people have historically been at odds with the Karimajong (principally because of cattle rustling). At the end of his sermon, the preacher appealed for peace between the two tribes and began singing a song of peace. One by one, members of the congregation began singing. By the end of the song, the attending bishops, members of Parliament, and Karimajong warriors were all in the aisles dancing.

The vision of Christ breaking down the dividing walls of hostility between these historic rivals was so compelling that joy literally broke out in our midst. At that point in the service, I dare say, we were hardly restrained or moderate in our enthusiasm for the hope of peace given to us in Jesus Christ. Did we fail, then, in being Anglican in that moment? Was the spontaneity that overcame us a part of doctrine or of discipline? Surely, African joy in song and dance is an expression of discipline. Yet our confidence that the Word of God remains true, and our confidence that it transforms individuals and communities—all this is part of doctrine: the substance of the Faith that shall not change but shall be “kept entire.”

On the evening of December 31, 1900, the town of Toledo, Ohio, gathered downtown for a ceremony sponsored by the local Red Cross to ring in the new century. Local luminaries took turns behind the podium offering their own guesses at what 20th century might hold. The town mayor, a man by the name of Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones, offered his starry-eyed predictions about space travel, every man having his own private air yacht, and the extermination of mice, rats, and other urban pests. Moving beyond these futuristic trivialities, Mayor Jones moved on to grander presumptions—utopian soliloquies and Enlightenment fantasies of a century of Reason and justice. Like a man taken up to the seventh heaven, he offered a glimpse forward into the next century:

Looking forward into the distant yonder, in my visions I see the people of Toledo of 100 years hence, assembled for a purpose similar to that which called us together tonight. In fancy I listen to their speeches and hear their songs. The white dove of peace spreads her beneficent wings over the nations of the earth, for they shall “learn war no more.” I listen intently to the music of their voices and I find that they have learned the lesson of life. Its key note is harmony and the words of their song are “Peace on earth, good will towards men.”

A utopian dream dies hard. Yet by the end of this 20th century of harmony and universal good will, the hopes of Mr. Golden Rule Jones were lying under the toxic heap of two world wars, a catastrophic nuclear threat, the breakdown of traditional Western morals, the fracturing of many European nation-states, as well as a host of less overt but equally destructive cultural trends.

None of this is a terribly original observation. The “Death of the West,” in its many facets, has been predicted, feared, or celebrated for at least one hundred years. Whether or not the old Grand Sire of modernism has actually been bumped off by some irreverent deconstructive nephew is still up for debate. But even the staunchest modernist around must admit that things aren’t quite what they used to be.

Modernism is now a little like the emperor who was parading through the streets in what he told everyone was the newest fashion. But on the street corner a little boy stood there wondering aloud why the emperor was walking through town with his family jewels out for display. Much has been written about the emperor’s senile mishap over the past several decades; it is the purpose of this little work to take another look at that little boy on the corner who knew before anyone else just what a fool the emperor was. Or rather, my thesis concerns three Roman Catholic novelists who dared propose that Western modernism was nothing more than a rotting skeleton.

From Books & Culture:

What follows will presume knowledge of the first six books, so those who have not made it so far should perhaps take this opportunity to retreat. And those who have managed altogether to escape being drawn into the Potter vortex will find nothing to entertain them here, so, with a heart full of pity, I bid such folks farewell for now....

Rusell Arben Fox has written thoughtfully about these matters, and he calls our attention to comments that Joanne Rowling has made about her own religious beliefs. I'll close with her words. "Every time I've been asked if I believe in God, I've said yes, because I do, but no one ever really has gone any more deeply into it than that, and I have to say that does suit me, because if I talk too freely about that I think the intelligent reader, whether 10 or 60, will be able to guess what's coming in the books. … This [talking about religion] is so frustrating. Again, there is so much I would like to say, and come back when I've written book seven. But then maybe you won't need to even say it because you'll have found it out anyway. You'll have read it."

Read up on the mysterious R.A.B., the ambiguity of Snape, the identity of the Horcruxes, and the question of Harry's fate.

From Slate V:

I also love this spot on Mike Gravel's strange little ad. "...Pet him, he won't hurt you..."

John Armstrong just blogged about the three Christians who were arrested for interrupting the first Hindu prayer in the Senate.See the video. He raises several interesting questions:

Are these three Christians in the Senate chamber acting courageously? Are they right in what they actually pray? Should they have been there taking these actions in this place? What do their actions say about who we all are as Christians today. How should we appropriately respond to the presence of numerous non-Christian religions that now share the public religious platform with us in modern America? What should a genuinely missional Christian do in the face of modern pluralism and the various false teachings that confront the one true faith as it is revealed in Jesus Christ alone?

Of course, the way this is going to break down is that the fundamentalist evangelicals will argue that the protesters were completely justified (the same way that Operation Rescue workers were in the 1980s and 90s); the younger, emerging crowd will say the protesters got everything wrong--Christians must be humble and loving to woo the new pluralistic world.

I don't see an easy answer. But I can see warnings to each side. First, we can't be afraid of giving offense, if that offense is the gospel. There's no doubt that the protesters were completely right on substance. They believed they were following the example of John the Baptist or Elijah. But the other question that remains, then, is whether it is the time to be Elijah or the time to be Obadiah. The Christian protesters, as true and noble as they were, come across as shrill, to say the least. It's one thing to call down fire from heaven to consume the Baalites. It's another to act like an embittered ex who can't believe that her former boyfriend has run away with that slut. In effect, that's what we're doing. We've loved and nurtured and fed the ego of America for so long, that we feel a sense of entitlement -- regardless of the fact that our nation was founded on the principles of Enlightenment pluralism. We get angry that George Bush won't declare holy war back on the Islamists, instead playing patsy -- but our second president, John Adams, did the same thing. Our ex has been cheating on us from the beginning, and we're just starting to wake up to the fact.

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. -- Treaty of Tripoli, 1797

It’s common to see the two world wars as the events which finally dealt the lethal blow to modernism’s utopian dream. However, several decades before Europe burst into flames, the enigmatic works of Friedrich Nietzsche hinted at the consequences of modernity. In 1882, he wrote what might be his most famous passage, a brief story about a wild-eyed madman who in the early morning light runs into a marketplace to ask the incredulous shoppers all around him, Where is God? He answers himself, "I want to tell you. We have killed him, you and I. We are all his murderers." For Nietzsche, the rationalistic Christianity which had oppressed the West for centuries had about run its course. The truce between reason and myth, between order and chaos, was soon to be broken. And this was all because the “God” of the Enlightenment—the respectable divinity which modernism had domesticated—had finally died. Nietzsche’s madman continues on, asking what sort of atonement or holy ceremony will replace the old dead God. “How shall we console ourselves, we, the murderers among all murderers?” Nietzsche concludes his story:

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners: they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering—it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves!"— It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

For Nietzsche’s madman, “God” is the god of Western rationalism (which, to him, is nothing more than Socrates’ wicked bastard child). In his wide-eyed frenzy, the madman sees what the respectable Victorians fail to recognize: modern rationalism has outlived its ability to maintain respectability. Modernism has been living among the tombs which were once the holy temples of Christendom. It is nothing more than a squatter on hallowed ground. As the madman saw it, modernism had thereby invited its own destruction. The “tremendous event” which was prowling about in search of something to destroy had already set it sights on the pomposity which was Western rationalism. The end was inevitable, only the moment of judgment remained unclear.

Western Christians have usually been careful to find ways to make Christianity palatable to secularists—never more so than at the turn of the 20th century. The assault on church dogma had perhaps never been more fierce. Darwinism, social engineering, abortion, women’s suffrage, temperance, and a host of other movements threatened the traditional stands of the old Western Christendom. It was becoming socially unacceptable to hold to the beliefs that had been commonly held for centuries. The Church had for centuries been told that its authority was limited to the supernatural realm. Liberty of conscience, the great modern idol, meant that everyone was allowed to believe what their conscience dictated so long as it did not harm anyone else. This liberty of conscience neutralized the Church under the pretense of protecting us all from the abusive power that the Catholic Church supposedly wielded in the late middle ages. This was a particularly convincing nightmare for Western Protestants, for whom confusing the spiritual and secular worlds summoned up the collective bad memories of the Inquisition, Jesuitical oppression, papal tyranny, and a host of other medieval outrages.

While the Enlightenment neutralized the Church’s authority for several hundred years, the end of the 19th century saw modernism begin an all-out assault against what remained of the old Christendom. The truce which had been tentatively held since Descartes and Hume was broken with great violence as traditional morality, authority, sexuality, and human identity were challenged. The radical Mikhail Bakunin made this very clear, writing in 1871: "The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth." The authority of the Church—its judgments, rituals, and its pulpit—is the great idol against which the priests of modernity utter their imprecations. A private religion might be tolerated, but one which claims the power to bind and loose cannot. Modernity, according to Bakunin, “is the revolt of the individual against all divine, collective, and individual authority.” The grand story that modernity tells itself is just this—no priest or divinity can pass judgment on an individual conscience.

...The “tremendous event” which was prowling about in search of something to destroy had already set it sights on the pomposity which was Western rationalism. The end was inevitable, only the moment of judgment remained unclear.

That moment came with the advent of what was ironically called “The Great War.” Europe had experienced a rare century of near peace, excepting a few minor wars between France and Germany, and Britain and Russia. Certainly nothing to equal the Napoleonic wars of the early 19th century. The irrepressible optimism which clouded over Europe at the outset of the 20th century managed to carry even into the first days of the Great War. Englishman H.G. Wells wrote a little volume titled The War That Will End War. It would seem that the reality of millions mired in the trenches, choking on blood and mustard gas would eliminate the last drop of hope from Europe. But, initially at least, Mr. Wells was not alone in believing that the Great War would serve as a purgation of Europe’s remaining evil. Namely (for the Anglo-American alliance), the Kaiser and his Germanic serfs—a distasteful reminder of medieval feudalism. President Woodrow Wilson emphasized in his declaration of war that the free peoples of the West were not declaring war on a “free” people, but on an oppressive empire. The Anglo-American mission was suitably modern: “Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power.”

The violence of the war, however, did manage to penetrate deeper than the idealists at first admitted. An extended wartime note from Winston Churchill details the horrific, unimaginable nature of the new kind of war:

All the horrors of all the ages were brought together, and not only armies but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them. The mighty educated States involved conceived – not without reason – that their very existence was at stake. Neither peoples nor rulers drew the line at any deed which they thought could help them to win. Germany, having let hell loose, kept well in the van of terror; but she was followed step by step by the desperate and ultimately avenging nations she had assailed…. Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery. Bombs from the air were cast down indiscriminately. Poison gas in many forms stifled or seared the soldiers. Liquid fire was projected upon their bodies. Men fell from the air in flames, or were smothered often slowly in the dark recesses of the sea…. When it was all over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and they were of doubtful utility.

The old guard still proclaimed that the Great War had served its prophetic purpose: the dead had fallen in the trenches to make straight the way for democracy. But the younger generation that survived the war began to develop a different view of things. It was not lost upon the younger generation that “there had been an unimaginable unprecedented moral degeneration.” In fact, they seemed to embrace the moral freefall into which Europe had been thrown.

Last minute predictions before HP7 is released:

- Harry dies. Really. There's gotta be some peek behind the veil, or some resurrection of sorts. Harry is taken to his Avalon.
- Snape becomes a hero. Willingly, I hope. But if not, at least a Gollum-like hero.
- Lupin is killed by Pettigrew, or nearly so.
- Hermione and Ron kiss. Ew.
- Harry is revealed at the last remaining descendant of Godric Gryffindor.
- Harry's scar is revealed as the last remained Horcrux.
- Tonks has a tearful moment at Lupin's deathbed (or near-deathbed).
- Harry dies before Voldemort. (Harry's blood is in Voldemort, which has to connect somehow with Voldemort's destruction.)

I'll check back in a week (once Kate and I read it through).

The novelist writes about the coming end in order to warn about present ills and so avert the end....[but he] is less like a prophet than he is like the canary that coal miners used to take down into the shaft to test the air. When the canary gets unhappy, utters plaintive cries, and collapses, it may be time for the miners to surface and think things over. - Walker Percy

Very little can be said about the recent misadventures of modernism that hasn’t already been pointed out by some postmodern critic who regularly dances on the grave of certainty, rationality, and objectivity. The purpose of this work is not to argue that we are living in a postmodern world; this much is assumed, for better or worse. Something has changed. Some current of belief or unbelief has pushed modernity into waters it hadn’t charted out.

The scope of this work is focused on three Roman Catholic novelists of the 20th century: Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), Graham Greene (1904-1991), and Walker Percy (1916-1990). Each entered the scene while modernity was trying to recover from its freefall into relativism and uncertainty. Each novelist picked up on the signs that modernity was in its death-throes (something many modern evangelicals fail to notice even now). And each shared a common idea of what needed to be restored in order to bring peace back to an age of violence and uncertainty. In the middle of all the hundreds of postmodern philosophers and their weighty tomes, the books of Waugh, Greene, and Percy provide a perspective on our age which is accessible, relevant, and counter-intuitive. Many Christians still attempt to defend the faith within a modernist framework. Others have abandoned certainty and dogma, failing into the warm embraces of a postmodernity which is all-too-welcoming of any group which has fled from the abusive arms of dogma and Christendom. Claims to exclusivity or objectivity of belief were supposed to have been buried under the rubble of modernism. They now are left only to haunt the hollow cathedrals of dead Christianity with its dead god, drifting between gargoyles with a grotesque face only a medievalist could love.

The three novelists that will be analyzed subsequently are worthy of infinitely more ink than this thesis can afford. However, collectively, their works form a unique microcosm of the death of modernity. In their own ways, they perform individual autopsies on the haggard god which Nietzsche pronounced dead in 1882. These autopsies can be outlined in three overlapping parts: 1) an observation of the excess of immorality which presaged modernism’s final fall (Waugh); 2) an analysis of Europe’s senility and moroseness after two world wars (Greene); and, 3) a prognosis of what is to come based on the symptoms that plague the West (Percy). If this outline is a little vague, I trust excerpts of the stories and images of the novelists themselves will serve to clear things up.

The death of modernism can be (and has been) analyzed from a great many angles. The perspective which Waugh, Greene, and Percy (and hopefully this work) provide shares the outlook of the Preacher from Ecclesiastes. There truly is nothing new under the sun—a sermon which modernity apparently slept through during its youth. One finds in Ecclesiastes a pattern of youth, middle age, senility, and death which applies not just to individuals, but also to cultures and to ages. As our three novelists will demonstrate, the Preacher could’ve warned modernity about the evil that lay in wait for it. All the knowledge that can be stored up in books and minds and ages eventually falls under judgment. All that is hollow and vain will be exposed. All that vaunts itself will be lowered into earth at last. And every evil work will be burned under the same blood-red sun.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Dark Ages’ view of ailments was pretty bright. From MSNBC:

Treatment of the sick in the Dark Ages is poorly understood today because none of it was governed by law or written down, Lee said, but assuming that it was backwards and steeped in superstition would be a mistake....

Some of the most forward-thinking science in the Dark Ages was actually going on in monasteries, where monks trying to understand all of God's works — including the mysteries of the body — toiled with healing methods.

Caring for the sick, regardless of the motivation, is an important measure of what's going on in a culture, Lee said.

"I think the way people behave towards the weak is the hallmark of a civilization," she said.

From an older (excellent) article on justification:

It is false to say that I suggest that Paul would have seen the hopes of Israel in 'political' terms; in our world, that word carries the overtones of 'and therefore not religious'; whereas my point is that, as is easily provable from almost any second-Temple Jewish writing, the 'religious', the 'political', and for that matter the 'personal' and the 'communal', are cheerfully mixed up together in ways that baffle post-enlightenment readers (and so much evangelicalism is, alas, still in complete thrall to the enlightenment), but were obvious to people in that day. When it comes to the word dikaiosune and its cognates, it isn't a matter of 'what Wright thinks the word would have meant then', but what serious historical lexicography tells us....

Let me risk labouring this point by adding the following. What I am doing, often enough, is exactly parallel, in terms of method, to what Martin Luther did when he took the gospel word metanoeite and insisted that it didn't mean 'do penance', as the Vulgate indicated, but 'repent' in a much more personal and heartfelt way. The only way to make that sort of point is to show that that's what the word would have meant at the time. That's the kind of serious biblical scholarship the Protestant Reformation was built on, and I for one am proud to carry on that tradition -- if need be, against those who have turned the Reformation itself into a tradition to be set up over scripture itself.

Adam Fenwyck-Symes has a depressing existence as far as fictional characters go. He is the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh’s second novel, Vile Bodies, and his character confirms the fact that Evelyn Waugh was a sadist when it came to his own literary creations. Symes is a modern young man—one of T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Men—a typical example of his own Lost Generation (as Hemmingway would call it). The setting of Vile Bodies is inter-war Britain, with its dichotomized society of old-line Victorians shell-shocked by the Great War and up-and-coming ne’er-do-wells, interested only in the latest gossip, fashion, and anything unserious. Compared to the other characters who populate the novel, Adam Fenwyck-Symes is at least an occasionally sympathetic figure. His story is introduced as he has the misfortune to run afoul of an old-fashioned customs official while returning home from overseas.

One by one he took the books out and piled them on the county. A copy of Dante’s Purgatorio excited his especial disgust.

“French, eh?” he said. “I guessed as much, and pretty dirty, too, I shouldn’t wonder. Now just you wait while I look up these here books” –how he said it!—“in my list. Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can’t stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside. That’s what he said the other day in Parliament. I says ‘Hear, hear….’

Symes’ copy of Dante is confiscated by the zealous official, along with Symes’ own memoirs which he was planning to publish in order to prove to Nina that he was ready to marry her. This confrontation with an older Victorian generation is only the first of many in Vile Bodies. Another memorable episode is Adam’s visit with Nina’s father, a retired and senile British colonel who is too cheap to pay for a bus or cab fare, but endlessly excited about the prospect of funding a new religious film about the life of John Wesley. Adam petitions the old man for financial aid, but discovers too late that the check the old man gives him is signed “Charlie Chaplin.” Tellingly, the Colonel’s home is named “Doubting Hall,” which Adam’s cabbie mispronounces as “Doubting ‘All.” It’s more than hinted that both the old and the young generation in Vile Bodies suffer from a great, all-encompassing meaningless. There is nothing sacred, nothing stable any longer. The war was proved meaningless; virtue is meaningless, certainly; marriage is meaningless—and most frustratingly, pleasure is meaningless. After Nina and Adam spend the night together, Nina comments, “I never hated anything so much in my life... still as long as you enjoyed it that's something.” Nothing brings fullness or resolution—even sex fails to bring intimacy or fulfillment. It is societal impotency on a number of levels.

From the opening episodes in Vile Bodies, it’s easy to assume that the target of the novelist’s satire is the older generation of Victorians—with their comically stodgy notions about money and fashion, literature and movies (not to mention their pride and xenophobia). They are certainly comedic figures throughout the novel—they are even antagonists quite often of Adam and his fiancée. Yet as Symes and his friends get into comedic tangles and scrapes, the reader is left with the nagging idea that there’s something wrong with the younger crowd, too—for all their charm, wit, and vivacity.

Adam’s friends are all over-the-top. Agatha Runcible, a Paris Hilton figure with infinitely more verbal flair, commands the attention of all the London gossip rags. Her greatest moment comes after she sponsors a drunken party with some rather naïve young girls, wakes the next morning to an extremely awkward breakfast with their parents, then walks out the door to discover she had been partying and dining at Number 10 Downing Street, the residence of the prime minister (whose tenure doesn’t last long after the newspapers spread the word of what happened under his very nose). Among other misadventures, the voice of the narrator remains passive and unamused as the “bright young things” flit about between various excesses and comedic immoralities.. The younger generation knows how to laugh at itself, if nothing else. But gradually, the narrator does seem to develop an acid tone as he relates the endless frivolity of Symes and his friends. The narrative voice notes how they pass their time with

Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John's Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity…. Those vile bodies….

In the end, the bright young things reach the end of their own “fatal hunger for permanence,” as a Jesuit character phrases it. Agatha Runcible dies among her own hallucinations, turning to Symes: “How people are disappearing, Adam.” Another of Adam’s friends is exiled to France on account of homosexuality. Others fall prey to malicious gossip, backbiting, and fashion faux-pas. In the end, everything comes crashing down as an apocalyptic war consumes Europe.