“On the theme of the military uniform Bertrand could have supplied some such theory as this:
Once upon a time it was the Church alone that was exalted as judge over mankind, and every layman knew that was a sinner. Nowadays, it is the layman who has to judge his fellow-sinner if all values are not to fall into anarchy, and instead of weeping with him, brother must say to brother: “You have done wrong.” And as once it was only the garments of the priest that marked a man off from his fellows as something higher, some hint of the layman peeping through even the uniform and the robe of office, so, when the great intolerance of faith was lost, the secular robe of office had to supplant the scared one, and society has to separate itself into secular hierachies with secular uniforms and invest these with the absolute authority of a creed. And because, when the secular exalts itself as absolute, the result is always romanticism, so the real and characteristic romanticism of that age was the cult of the uniform, which implied, as it were, a superterrestrial and supertemporal idea of uniform, an idea which did not really exist and yet was so powerful that it took hold of men far more completely thanany secular vocation could, a non-existent and yet so potent idea that it transformed the man in uniform into a property of his uniform, and never into a professional man in the civilian sense; and this perhaps simply because the man who wears the uniform is content to feel that he is fulfilling the most essential function of his age and therefore guaranteeing the secuity of his own life.
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So when in the morning a man has fastened up his uniform to the last button, he acquires a second steadfast being. Closed up in his hard casing, braced in with straps and belts, he begins to forget his own undergarments, and the uncertainty of life, yes, life itself, recedes to a distance.”
Well I’m obsessing over it now. I read the passage above again and again, and it still retains the same ability to pull me into it again and again. What was Broch illustrating? The mere disintegration of values? But disintegration, how?
I’m sure he has his version of the answer, his version of the truth, couched in the phrase “disintegration of values”, something of a motif in, apparently, all his works. Is it merely the loss of the divine, that loss which was so boldly declared by that German madman? Echoing Nietzsche, Heidegger once remarked that it would be, to paraphrase, impossible to remove the notion of God from our language. Well, it looks to me like we can’t remove the notion of God from our collective consciousness (or maybe that’s precisely what he meant).
He remarks: ‘Nowadays, it is the layman who has to judge his fellow-sinner if all values are not to fall into anarchy, and instead of weeping with him, brother must say to brother: “You have done wrong.”‘ It is the layman who must judge. Layman, not citizen, not civilian, not person, not the personalized ‘he’ or ’she’, but layman who must judge. It is the one still caught in the throes of belief who must judge, this very same person who always stood in opposition (or rather, distinction) to the priesthood, who must judge his fellow man. It is the same person still entrapped within a circle of belief that still acknowledges God as supreme judge.
Not just the sudden elevation to godhood of the common layman, but just imagine the kind of person Broch’s characterizing, I think. The sort of person who would be in mourning for the loss of his God and yet drunk on the sudden freedom from the same; the sort of person imprison anew in the responsibility to himself where this was once the purview of God’s preordination; the euphoria and fear — he now judges and now is judged by arbitrary, finite beings with no other basis than ‘right thinking’. And the layman now wishes to acquire the same bulwark against his own shame reflected in his own fellow man. He acquires a uniform, not just a bulwark of cloth and the other devices Broch illustrates above, but also a bulwark of uniformity, of certitude: one absolute basis for certainty replacing another — he is “fulfilling the most essential function of his age and therefore guaranteeing the secuity of his own life.” He is securing his footing in a world that has become alien with something alien to himself.
I want to think about this some more, later.
