The Unquashed Masses

Donald N. McCloskey from the July 1994 issue

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Amazingly, he quotes with approval from Mein Kampf: "The day will certainly come when the whole of mankind will be forced to check the augmentation of the human species. Nobody can doubt that this world will one day be the scene of dreadful struggles for existence." In a sentence that could have come equally from Mein Kampf or the newsletter of the Sierra Club, Carey writes: "The remedies of the twenty-first century...will entail the recognition that, given the state of the planet, humans, or some humans, must now be categorized as vermin." My Lord. As Carey himself says of the crypto-fascist director of the Third Programme of the BBC, Rayner Heppenstall, this detestation of humanity "is perhaps best regarded as insane."

One should adjust for the sanity of the source, therefore, when hearing a page later in the Postscript that Carey also detests literary theory, which he collapses, as do the deep literary thinkers at The New York Times, into that most terrifying of words, "deconstruction." (What do you suppose the conservative judge and writer Richard Posner titled the section of Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relationship [1988] when he wanted to frighten his lawyer readers into rejecting all interpretation of law or literature? "Deconstruction and Other Schools of Criticism." It's enough these days to call someone a "deconstructionist" to arouse a McCarthyite fury.)

True, some literary theorists are anti-bourgeois, anti-meaning, anti-capitalist, like their heroes and heroines the literary modernists. Shame on them. We should ask them all to take a course in economics and in modern economic history. The literary critics should learn that modern economic growth can easily handle much greater human numbers, that natural resources have become a trivial constraint on production, and that the real welfare of the workers has increased since the 18th century by a factor of 12. But the hysteria against deconstruction has, as hysterias tend to do, blotted out distinctions. It is surprising that Carey, who is Merton Professor of English at Oxford, should descend to such crudities--although not perhaps in view of the Canon Wars that have so embittered English departments in Britain. Wars do that.

I wish Carey had not written the "Postscript." I would prefer to think of him as a literary man who knows enough about economics to know that Malthus was wrong and enough about literary theory to know that critics do much good work with its aid. But on his own theory of literary interpretation I cannot. If D.H. Lawrence's epistolary insanities about the will to power are to color our readings, so must Carey's postscriptive insanities about the future of the race and the wickedness of Jacques Derrida. It's a pity, because otherwise he has written a most illuminating book.