8/CHRONICLESnPERSPECTIVEnSPEAK THE WORD ONLY by Thomas FlemingnModern man often seems ill at ease. It is as if the worldnhas been broken and the human community shatteredninto millions of charged particles, attracting or repellingneach other in their chance meetings. Some such notionnhas threatened many of the best (and second best) minds ofnthe past two centuries. For Hegelians, Marxians, andnFreudians (among others), the operative concept has beennsome version of “alienation,” estrangement from others andnthe world and even one’s self to the point that a man looksnupon his very life as only a means to an end that has little tondo with himself. Enemies of our civilization, like Frommnand Marcuse, have used “alienation” as weapons in theirnwar against bourgeois society, but the sense of horror is notnconfined to the radical leadership of the Frankfurt school.nRobert Nisbet, both in The Sociological Tradition and innThe Quest for Community, has identified something verynsimilar as one of the recurrent themes of conservativennnthought. Social and spiritual estrangement is touched uponnin the most moving passages of T.S. Eliot—I thinknespecially of Ash Wednesday. Hart Crane, in one of hisnmost perplexing and ecstatic poems (“The Broken Tower”)ninterrupts his celebration of bells to say.nAnd so it was I entered the broken worldnTo trace the visionary company of love, its voicenAn instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)nBut not for long to hold each desperate choice.nA few months later, sailing back from Mexico, he slippednoverboard, a lyric poet who failed to create the greatnAmerican epic, an alcoholic visionary who in the end couldnnot even put the pieces of his life together.nModern poets who survive—Eliot and Frost—are madenof sterner but not necessarily finer stuff than losers like HartnCrane, Ezra Pound, and Dylan Thomas. But it is surely ansign of something dreadfully wrong in our moral universenwhen so many of our best minds drink themselves to death,ngo mad, or commit suicide. In the examples of BrendannBehan and perhaps even Dylan Thomas, they selfconsciouslynassumed the mantle of the poete maudit andnended up strangling themselves with it. But even in theirncase, we ought to be interested in why poets should bendamned, unless in some sense our civilization itself isndoomed.nI wish I knew an answer which might serve as a bettern”anodyne for torture and despair” than extinction. It maynbe heresy to suppose that a mere idea can wound or cure thenworld, although Perceval had but to speak the word and thenKing and his realm would be cured. There is, at least, onenidea and one set of words that has proved in the long run tonbe very destructive. In my view, it is an idea that is asnpernicious as the positive-minded advice the serpent whisperednto Eve. I refer to the notion that there is a gapnbetween the realm of fact (or nature) and the realm of valuenand morality, because it is through this gap that many of thenmost desperately wrong ideas have entered the world.nMost older schools of thought had taken it for grantednthat there was some connection between the physicalnuniverse (including the bodies and brains of the humannspecies) and the moral universe of right and wrong. Innanswer to the Athenian sophists, who taught such unedifyingndoctrines as cultural relativism and “might makesnright,” Socrates and Plato turned to an ideal realm of whichnthis world is a mere reflection. Christians (including PlatonizingnChristians) have usually insisted that this world bears ancrude resemblance to the other. While our vision “throughna glass darkly” gives only a distorted representation of whatn