Shadowboxing: Ball’s Bearings and Monster from the Midlands

While not exactly an encounter on the operating table between a sewing machine and an umbrella, a 21st-century reading of Hugo Ball’s Critique of the German Intelligentsia (1919) creates one of those discomforting juxtapositions that were the very essence of surrealism.

A founder of Dada and the influential Café Voltaire in Zurich, Ball exposes the sometimes informed, sometimes blind eagerness with which German intellectuals over centuries abetted the growth of an increasingly militaristic culture. Ball’s study deserves to be read alongside Simone Weil’s classic Nationhood and Uprootedness—for the forcefulness of its thought as well as its insight into the evolutionary possibilities still latent in Catholic mysticism. Both writers emphasize the terrible effects of confusing earthly with heavenly powers—of mixing religion with politics. Ball specifically focuses on the vicissitudes of spiritual freedom and its gradual co-optation by the rising Prussian military state as fueled by the logic of the Reformation. Improbable as it sounds, the world Ball describes sounds eerily like the United States of today.

First, Hugo Ball asks, What is culture? His definition is memorable: “Interceding for the poorest and most humble among the people as if from them the noblest beings and the rich plenitude of heaven are to be born.” The clarity of this insight is startling, and of course hard for us to take seriously. Ball’s subsequent arguments and criticism grow out of this central observation, which conditions all his values. To a society gone mad with quantification, seized by a lunatic faith that more money and higher property values and better test scores will bring happiness, Ball must sound as though he’s from another planet. Needless to say, his definition of intellect does not translate into a three-digit number. Instead, he observes that intellect is “conscience applied to culture.” Money and a cultivated intelligence are understandably coveted but they become meaningful primarily when used as tools for encouraging the growth of juster societies.

Do we need to reflect very long before realizing just how we as a nation would fare on the Ball Test? The cost of one Stealth bomber would cover the annual salaries, including benefits, for 38,000 elementary school teachers. In the current climate, an argument for the fair and equitable distribution of resources seems an unpatriotic heresy.

And that’s because the struggle of our time is between the ideal of democracy and the reality of feudalism. Unfortunately, most of the New Feudalists are firmly ensconced inside Western governments and corporations. And much of the world suffers under their savage reign. Today just about everyone in this country uses whatever advantages they have to advance themselves and theirs—even the liberal rich do what they can to secure for their families an edge in education, health-care, and living arrangements. How can they not? It would be unnatural for them not to.

Quite possibly, Justice is not a “natural” state of affairs.

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A lay person reading the potted science elaborated by Steven Hawking in The Universe in a Nutshell must conclude that according to the new physics, virtually nothing imaginable is off-limits. The vivid and expensive sci-fi epics saturating popular culture are based on fact, or rather on possibility: somewhere in the universe is that planet specializing in hybridizing bromeliads with blondes. It therefore isn’t inconceivable that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are no more than holograms projected by a malevolent spirit residing in a distant galaxy.

One fears an autopsy on most members of the current administration would reveal a common yet utterly remarkable physiological abnormality: somehow we have generated an entire governing class who look more or less normal yet whose very existence testifies to the presence of a supernatural element. It is, after all, still impossible for a human to live without a heart.

Class divisions today are so extreme they make it hard even for friends to communicate and understand each other above their great and growing differences. The rich and the poor do not live, shop, or fight wars together; they do not go to school or on holiday to the same places. Indeed, they see each other, if at all, largely in severely circumscribed roles in which, in order to ensure their own physical survival, the have-nots are forced to act as supplicants to the haves.

With no demonstrable commitment to the values of real equality and justice, the sort of “free market capitalism” we suffer under barely masks under the soft folds and dark hues of Hugo Boss a savagery found in no jungle. This, alas, is a cliché. And that fact is itself increasingly a problem. A writer’s job is to keep the language efficient so that it communicates. But words wear out; through misuse and overuse, they grow unmoored from meaning. When slaughter is defined as liberation, when justice is color-coded, when governments feel free to pull a bait-and-switch in a matter so serious as a war costing thousands of lives, when that same government can continue decimating after-school programs for children, summer programs for teenagers, and support for the mentally disabled while escalating expenditures on state-sponsored murder, when society continues to sanction improbable levels of compensation for a handful of people while turning a blind eye to the distance between the minimum wage and a realistic living one, then language may indeed have reached a dead end.

“Satanic forces are at work,” Ball warned, “where the torment with which everyone is born is doubled by existence instead of being relieved.” The system in which we live strives to persuade us that a status quo of gross inequality is precisely what it is aiming to change. But evidence suggests the contrary. Eventually people will recognize this. And when they awaken, someone will pay.