Terry Eagleton and Permanent Things

It is a strange feeling to be reminded by a radical like Terry Eagleton of the existence of what Russel Kirk called the permanent things. Writing in Sweet Violence , his recent study of tragedy, Eagleton says “Radicals are suspicious of the transhistorical because it suggests that there are things which cannot be changed, hence fostering a political fatalism. There are indeed good grounds for suspicion here. But the truth is that there are things which cannot be changed, as well as some which are highly unlikely to change, and in some cases this is a matter to celebrate rather than lament. It is reassuring that not ritually slaughtering all those over the age of forty seems to be a reasonably permanent feature of human cultures.” True enough; but I suspect that’s not exactly what Kirk had in mind.

And then this delightfully grim point: “phenomena such as love, ageing, diease, fear of one’s own death and sorrow for the death of others, the brevity and frailty of human existence, the contrast between the weakness of humanity and the apparent infinite of the cosmos: these are recurrent features of human cultures, however variously they may be represented. However left-historicism may suspect that universals are governing-class conspiracies, the fact is we die anyway. It is, to be sure, a consoling thought for pluralists that we meet our end in such a richly diverse series of ways, that our modes of exiting from existence are so splendidly heterogeneous, that there is no drearily essentialist ‘death’ but a diffuse range of cultural styles of expiring. Indeed, perhaps we should speak of death as a way of being ‘challenged,’ a mode of being which is neither inferior nor superior to breathing or love-making, simply different. Perhaps the dead are not really dead, just differently capacitated. But we die anyway.”

If someone hasn’t said it, they should: “Old radicals never die, because, faced with death, they become conservatives.”