Apocalypse Passe

I'm a book collector. I'm also a music lover. The two things sometimes cross like intersecting orbits, and sometimes result in revelation. Sometimes not.

As a book and music collector, and also a big fan of the music of Gustav Mahler, I was a sucker for a title I spotted on the local public library's "giveaway" shelf one morning: Late Night Thoughts On Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony by Lewis Thomas. Thomas, I gathered from reading the dust jacket, was a sort of updated Loren Eiseley, a scientist who writes about science and other things human. The book was published in 1983, a while back to be sure, (hence, I'm also sure, the library's giving it away) but the title was too intriguing to resist, as was the price (free.) I took it home.

For some time, I merely gazed at the little book's spine as it sat on my shelf. I was saving it for a treat. What, I wondered, could these "late night thoughts" engendered by Mahler's sublime Ninth Symphony possibly be? I had no idea, but naively assumed that the essay in question would be some meditation on music and subjects related to it. I have Leonard Bernstein's 1973 Charles Eliot Norton lectures from Harvard on videotape, and have watched many times his dissertation on the Mahler Ninth, which closes out the fifth of the series of six lectures. Yes, Bernstein's comments are a bit dated now--the USSR was still in business in 1973, the cold war was at its chilliest, and Bernstein used the last movement of the Mahler Ninth as a springboard to talk about "global death," e.g. nuclear holocaust. The last movement of the Ninth, at least its final bars, seems to simulate the act of dying: Bernstein used it as a starting point for his own little pedagogical thanatopsis.

Fair enough. I turned 18 in 1973 and remember that time. But imagine my disappointment when I opened Thomas' book to the title essay and found it little more than a rehashing of what I had heard Leonard Bernstein say on tape many times before. And it was published 10 years after Bernstein's lectures!

And it's so quaint. Imagine: late night thoughts (or any kind of thoughts) tied to a masterpiece like Mahler's Ninth, becoming quaint. Still, quaint it is, because Lewis' message was politically loaded, and loaded for its time. He was purveying the conventional wisdom of 1983, which turned out to be so wrong, and which in turn accounts for its quaintness. Bernstein's ruminations about "global death" a decade earlier seem ingenuous by comparison: after all, in 1973 the Vietnam war was not yet over; Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev were running the show in Washington and Moscow, and China was a good five years away from admitting Coca-Cola behind the wall. No doubt Bernstein thought he was doing his duty as a good liberal, sounding the warning. No doubt Thomas was doing the same. But the agenda in Thomas' case is so much more transparent, and from the standpoint of more than two decades later, so much more deserving of criticism.

So what was the conventional wisdom of 1983? Well, as handed to us by the television networks, talking heads and eastern university pundits, it was that President Ronald Reagan was some sort of nuclear nut, an out-of-control cowboy (sound familiar?) who was going to send us all up in festering heat by dint of his insane insistence upon standing up to the Soviets instead of accomodating them at every turn. The hand-wringers were having quite a big time that year: 1983 was the year of The Day After, a TV movie that got more media hype prior to its airing than any other TV movie in the history of the medium. Its subject was, of course, the impending nuclear holocaust. But this nuclear-war show exploded with all the impact of a wet firecracker: when the dust had settled, it turned out to be just another TV movie, hardly worth a critic's nod. Everyone yawned and moved on to TV's finest moment of that year, the last episode of M*A*S*H*. The movie WarGames also appeared that year, another nuclear-apocalypse fantasy.

And of course 1983 was also the year in which the Strategic Defense Initiative, known derisively to the hand-wringers as "Star Wars," ignited nationwide debate about the wisdom of trying to protect ourselves against nuclear attack. Mutually-Assured Destruction or MAD, as it was called, had prevented a nuclear duke-out between Washington and Moscow up till then, or so we were told, and to deviate from the status quo would surely "upset the apple cart" as one of my Rainbow Coalition friends told me.

Oh yeah? Well, as it turned out, the Lewis Thomases, E.L. Doctorows and Leonard Bernsteins of the world (remember "Peacequake?") were...wrong. Not only did we not go up in festering heat, but by raising the stakes on the table to the point where the Soviets could not say "call," because SDI or anything like it was far too expensive for them to build and they damn well knew it, Reagan cut them off at the knees, and with a smile on his face, no less. He even offered to share SDI technology with the Russians, knowing that he was safe in making the offer: their economy, trashed by decades of witless central planning, could not bear the expense of anything so sophisticated. When Mikhail S. Gorbachev came to power in Moscow in 1985, it was already commonplace to refer to the USSR as "Burkina Faso with missiles." No wonder the Russians threw a global hissy fit over SDI, screaming and shaking their fists. Oh, it wasn't that they were incapable of duplicating it. After all, the Soviets had led the way into space in the late 1950s, and for a number of years, their space program was significantly ahead of America's. There was nothing wrong with Russian science. They had the know-how; what they didn't have was the money, and Reagan knew it. The Soviets were poker players without a poke. They couldn't call the bet, so they did all they could do: they undertook what was called in the psychedelic era "agonizing re-appraisal." Gorbachev did exactly that, and found his position decidedly wanting. The result, a half-dozen years later, was the dismantling of the Soviet empire and shortly thereafter, the death of the Soviet Union and the removal of communism as a threat to peace and stability in Europe.

So, in the light of history, Thomas and his cohort were wrong: blatantly, glaringly wrong. Did any of them ever admit it? Not to my knowledge.

Yes, the world is still a dangerous place. It always was. Nuclear war was a very real danger before the implosion of the Soviet empire, and could become one again if the United States and China truly end up on the sort of global collision course that some of the pundits are now telling us is imminent within the next decade or so.

But even before the atom was split, the world was a dangerous place. It always has been. Would you want to have been raising a family on the banks of the Seine in the first decades of the Tenth Century, when those first Viking ships came sliding silently past the Ile de la Cite, manned with crews to whom murder, rape and pillage were all in a day's work? Would you have wanted to be anywhere in western Europe in 1348, when the Black Plague was marching across the continent, decimating populations (as the Asian Bird Flu may soon do worldwide?) Probably not.

No doubt the world will be a dangerous place until the end of recorded time. But the way to deal with danger isn't always by cringing and hand-wringing. Sometimes bold and decisive action will win the day. They did in the 1980s, even as a chorus of nay-sayers was announcing the apocalypse and insisting that we should leave the Soviets in peace to pursue their goal of hegemony in all corners of the globe, in the interest of preserving the peace. Instead, we ended up ridding the world of one its most insidious and dangerous police states.

Mahler's Ninth Symphony has nothing to do with any of this. Instrumental music is abstract; it is capable of carrying a "message" only in the most general of ways. Where Lewis Thomas' mind wandered as he listened to the Ninth is a matter of relative unimportance now. Mahler knew nothing of nuclear holocaust, or of Asian Bird Flu for that matter. He did know, when he wrote the Ninth, that he was dying. And we all know that eventually every one of us will die in one circumstance or another. So the message of the Ninth, if it has one, is perennial and for all time. The message of Lewis Thomas' meditations on the Ninth belongs to another time, one that is now past.