Copyright © 2013
By Garry Leonard and Deirdre Flynn
All rights reserved
The Library and Archives of Canada has catalogued the electronic version of this book under the following ISBN: 978-0-9878062-2-2.
The Library and Archives of Canada has catalogued the trade paperback version of this book under the following ISBN: 978-0-9878062-3-9.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, but taking into consideration the online universe today, we ask that if part of this publication is reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), those who do the reproducing and those who enjoy the free versions also buy a copy of the book or e-book. Ideally, you can share it with someone else whom you think might enjoy it. That way, we can afford to write more books so as to share more ideas about film, literature, and life. Your support of our copyrights (and small wallets) is appreciated. Your feedback, too, is appreciated. Feel free to email us at leonardgarry@hotmail.com or flynnd@sympatico.ca.
For all those courageous students who commit to asking better questions—thanks for listening!
Also By Garry Leonard and Deirdre Flynn
When Harry Met Godzilla: How Hollywood Genres Hold the Key to Your Personality (And Everybody Else’s, Too!)
Also By Garry Leonard
“Let’s Get Fiscal: Hollywood Romance and the Modern Economy” in Film International
“Monsters and Mortgages: Hollywood Horror Films as a Prime Economic Indicator” in Film International
“Technically Human: From Apes to Astronauts in Kubrick’s Space Odyssey” in Film Criticism
Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce
Reading Dubliners Again: A Lacanian Perspective
Also By Deirdre Flynn
The McGraw-Hill Handbook, First Canadian Edition
“An Uncomfortable Fit: Joyce’s Women”
in Joyce and the City
“Virginia Woolf and the Fashionable Elite”
in Virginia Woolf and Communities
“Proust’s Fashion Sketches,”
in The Bulletin of Proust Studies
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Widening Gyre: Darwin, Marx, and the Beginning of Modernity
Chapter 2 Losing Our Religion: Freud, Nietzsche, and the Loss of Transcendental Certitude
Chapter 3 Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing: Morality, Ethics, and Sociopathic Narcissism in The Picture of Dorian Gray
Chapter 4 Ebony and Ivory: Binaries, Ideology, Hegemonic Discourse, and the Construction of the “White Man” in Heart of Darkness
Chapter 5 Mistah Kurtz, He Dead: Things Fall Apart in the Congo (The Horror!)
Chapter 6 A Pleasant and Vicious Region: Childhood in Dubliners
Chapter 7 The Snow is General Everywhere: Moral Paralysis and Adulthood in Dubliners
Chapter 8 The Rough Beast is Born: The Soldier Poets and World War I
Chapter 9 The Cruelest Poem: Cultural Trauma in The Waste Land
Chapter 10 Communication is Health: The Silencing of Septimus and the Re-Birth of Clarissa in Mrs. Dalloway
Chapter 11 Modern Times: Welcome to the Machine
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
Stanza 3 of “Circus Animals’ Desertion”
by William Butler Yeats
“Most Canadians are aware that on average, your odds to earn more are better with a degree in engineering than a degree in medieval history. But it’s not clear that students, armed with that knowledge, have been making the most profitable decisions.” (CIBC World Investment Group, August 2013).
This is the most concise statement we could find for why we wrote this book and dedicated it to our students: to celebrate and support their decision to make “unprofitable” decisions. The hubris of this report is truly breathtaking but hardly unique. You can hardly get through a newspaper without at least one article about the “death of the Humanities.” Most of them, like the CIBC report, casually voice their vague befuddlement about why anyone would major in the humanities when charts can demonstrate the big bucks are elsewhere. The author of this particular report goes further and suggests that majoring in the humanities adds up to a “negative premium” because, “[i]f you have a B.A. in history and I graduate from high school, I can go work on an assembly line but you will not work on that assembly line. There is a negative premium.” Oh, so this is the problem: students who take a humanities class feel there may be more to life than a minimum wage job with no job security. How inconvenient for corporations. How much more efficient it will be when the humanities are eliminated and there seems to be no alternative except to do the job assigned to you for the least amount it is possible to pay you. In the future, it will be clear that when someone says they want to major in English, McDonalds can just email them a job application before their aptitude for the job gets ruined.
The politicians have piled on, too. In Florida they suggested that humanities majors should pay more because the state should not have to subsidize their “unprofitable” decision to sit under a tree and read Shakespeare. In addition to being a luxury we can no longer afford, the humanities are increasingly seen as entirely irrelevant. The nicer commentaries seem willing to give it a pat on the head before putting it down, while others cannot contain their glee at the possibility of making all of Academia a vast training ground for whatever the corporate mindset thinks it needs in the future. There is a sense that the world is in crisis and there is no time to sit around and talk about ideas, read books, and talk some more.
Our point is the opposite of this, but equally simple: if we do not renew our relationship with the wisdom of great art we truly are doomed, and at an even more accelerated pace. The way we are living is unsustainable but the only way to understand why we keep doing it anyway is to study great art. We won’t find the answer in yet another advertisement saying buy more, yet another self-help book saying shore up your boundaries and make sure you get your share, yet another gadget advertised as what will make us a “success.” That way apocalypse lies. We know it. Our popular culture knows it—zombies are lurching their way through television shows, movies, and video games. A zombie is someone who mindlessly consumes without any capacity for critical thought or reflection. There is no fear of zombies majoring in the humanities. If we continue to ridicule the wisdom contained in art, we will become just such walkers, unstoppable by anything less than a bullet to the brain.
We have both taught the material taught in this class many times. I, Garry, have taught the material for twenty years, every year, except for two sabbatical breaks. I, Deirdre, have taught a version of the class five times, once during Garry’s most recent sabbatical and four times on a different campus. The course began with an enrolment of 60 in 1992 and this fall, 2013, it will hit 372—and even that number would go higher but for the capacity of the room. When we look out at this crowd--some even in the aisles because they are visiting—we know young people want wisdom and not just knowledge, insight and not just information, life skills and not just better gadgets, an understanding of their society and not just another social media platform.
But they want this knowledge and understanding in a way that makes it relevant. For the younger generation, the world is a blizzard of information. It would seem you could learn whatever you want with a keystroke. But there is something missing. William Blake said “wisdom is sold in the market place where nobody comes to buy.” No doubt, CIBC would point out that a market place where nobody comes to buy is unprofitable. Well, yes it is, if by “profit” you only mean accruing capital. Is that really the only kind of “profit” we can imagine? As educators, we imagine something very different. We imagine profit more in the light of William Butler Yeats’ pronouncement: “education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire.” And students today do want to be inspired, even if a series of disappointments in there University classes might leave them feeling alienated from the process, and more inclined to view it as something to “get through” on their way to a career.
Such alienation is not what students want, though it is what they too often get. They don’t want to be told what they should think of great works; they want to experience for themselves why a book is great, why they are better off for having read it, why not reading it would have been an opportunity missed. Franz Kaka said “books are the axe for the frozen sea within us” and that sea is perhaps more frozen in our current age than ever before. Everyone is encouraged to tune into his or her personal social platforms and devices. A relentless cult of “individualism” steadily diminishes genuine community. We all feel we are alone and, in many ways, we are not far wrong. How are we to stay connected? Dorian Gray declares, “there is a heaven and hell in each of us,” and he ought to know since he destroys the heaven and celebrates the hell. How are we to cultivate the one and understand the dark energy of the other? How are we to know a great teacher from someone who is manipulating us? How are we to distinguish what we are told we must have from what we really need?
Bob Dylan says in his song “Political World” that “as soon as you’re awake/you’re trained to take/what looks like the easy way out.” How do we learn the value of struggling, the wisdom contained in our suffering, the necessity of confusion as a prelude to genuine enlightenment, the necessity of community for understanding anything? Sadly, the best way to train people to “take the easy way out” is to convince them the harder ways are all pointless—and, even worse, “unprofitable.” Great Art is not always easy to engage and it does not yield up its secrets quickly and efficiently. How could it do that and still take up its task of getting us to think again and feel anew? Flannery O’Connor said “the purpose of art is not to explain the mystery of life, but to deepen it,” and we are grateful for the opportunity to deepen this mystery, year after year, for ourselves and for others, with the kind forbearance of, literally, thousands of students. It is to you that we dedicate this book: students past, present, and future. You keep us learning and growing.
Humanity is, unfortunately, capable of terrible things; it is also capable of incredible compassion and caring. How might one emerge and not the other? Statistics won’t help. Flow charts won’t help. Such things delineate how things are not what they could be. When we encounter sorrow, can we learn from it and not just feel diminished by it? How do we share our burdens with others, or invite them to share their burdens with us? How can we be caring without feeling naïve? How can we invite people to take from us without being “taken”? In our current world, it can be surprisingly difficult to be kind. It takes a delicate balance of an open heart and a keen mind. Of course, we are not the first to ponder these questions. Remarkable people before us have wrestled with these questions as well. They have left breathtakingly crafted records of what it was like, how it happened, why it got worse, why it got better, how they kept going on when they saw no way to do so. After years of studying and teaching these works, we are here making an attempt to write down some of the most important insights we have gleaned from them. We hope all who take this class and read the following chapters feel they, too, are learning something important about themselves and about western culture.
This seems like an apt question to ask when beginning a discussion of Twentieth Century literature and film. How did we get here? How is our individual experience here and now “the same as it ever was”? How is it different? And what is the connection between events and experiences in the late Nineteenth century and events and experiences now, in the early Twenty-First century? What is it we want to say about the Twentieth century? What might others say centuries hence? What makes it different from any other century? What issues from former centuries are still present, either as a difficult legacy, a promise unfulfilled, or a nightmare as yet forestalled but still an ominous possibility? And, given these questions, what is the role of art, literature and film that is also unique to the twentieth century?
A preliminary answer to these questions might be posed as follows: Because “answers” have less and less credibility in a more and more subjective world view, art in the Twentieth Century develops more and more sophisticated ways to ask more subtle and more challenging questions.
How do writers convey the experience of subjects who are no longer stably moored by their religious community and social system? What kinds of subjects do we get instead? One difference we see is a shift from all seeing, third person objective narrators, to shifting and unreliable narrators who are hard to pinpoint. This unreliability is obvious when characters are lying, but even when they are telling their truth it might appear to us to be the result of self-delusion. Noticing this may make us wonder about our own “truths.” What about when this instability and mobility increases exponentially with the moving image of cinema, which erupted at the end of the Nineteenth century, when the Lumière brothers showed their first films in 1895: each, one-minute, single shot films, including Train Arriving At Station and Workers Leaving the Factory? People gather and disperse—in train stations, factories, etc. What do they all have in common? The Twentieth century shows the rise of individualism above community. Overarching beliefs are replaced by personal creeds.
What is the effect of this splintering vision of reality? How does it feel when your small, enclosed world goes global, and when you begin to question all that you held as firmly true? One reaction might be to turn inward and to meditate only on your individual subjective experience of reality, as the impressionists did in the early Twentieth century, in part in reaction to the rising art of cinema. And how does Claude Monet capture an impulse that is just as courageous as the ethnographic filmmakers, maybe even more courageous, when he turns away from the clamor of globalization and mobility, and, instead, meditates for days and weeks on lilies. Why are Monet’s water lilies so important then and now? What makes this single, momentary impression universal and meaningful to this day? What can we learn from it? What does it encourage us to do? What does it warn us against doing? The Twentieth Century is a time of crisis primarily in the domain of reality, knowledge, values, meaning, and authenticity. What makes one thing more valuable than another? How can we be sure what anything means? And how can we also acknowledge the subjective experiences of others, who, when seeing the same object, will see it differently depending on their perspective, as is so apparent in the art of Pablo Picasso.
Cubists like Picasso showed objects as viewed from all sides, breaking them apart and reassembling them in a way that conveys their multi-dimensionality and refuses to privilege one “position” of the object over another, or one perspective over another. For centuries, it was assumed the viewer who looked at a painting had the “correct” perspective from which to judge the content of the painting. But if the same object, or face, is painted, simultaneously, both looking straight out of the paining and to the side, which position is “right?” Neither, of course, and this reinforces, in another medium, the point I began with: the Twentieth century finds itself with an excess of answers, but not very revealing questions, at least when it comes to thinking about life and living. The Twentieth Century has been called both “The Age of Anxiety” and “The Age of Science” and the two things are related. Science provides incredible insight into matter and various mechanical dynamics but it does not, nor does it wish to, provide insight into feelings or what is often referred to as the “soul”—that ineffable part of us that represents “spirit.” Soul, of course, is a religious term, but Religion, in general, has given way before the relentless logic and rationality of Science.
But a diminishment in what Matthew Arnold calls “the sea of faith” which has “shrunk” does not remove the importance of spirit to the experience of being human. To borrow a phrase that has become one of the dominant clichés of our time: is anything sacred? What do we hold dear, above and beyond all else? In a world where a new iPhone is released every few months, promising, yet again, to save us, and, presumably, replacing, for all time, the one before it-- what is it in our time that endures for all time? What is immune to the march of time? With all nature reduced to scientific principle, how are we to quantify our own Humanity? Science helps us understand how matter reacts to matter, but how should people treat each other? Why be good?
We are anxious because morals and ethics are not quantifiable. Is it true “nice guys finish last”? Are the rewards for taking, anyway we can, as much as we can, greater than “doing the right thing”? More often than not, the answer seems “yes.” This is why the poet Yeats laments that, in our time, “the worst are filled with passionate intensity” and “the best lack all conviction.” In our time--and Dorian Gray illustrates this chillingly--a conscience is a liability. Lock it in the attic, and you can be purely performative, purely devoted to appearance as reality, a reality that can shift whenever its convenient—and “convenient” really means “profitable”; that is to say, likely to net you more than someone else, in the process of some kind of exchange. Tell people what they want to hear, and then, when you meet different people who want to hear something else, tell them that. The point is no longer “are you right or wrong” but rather “are you persuasive or not”? In this atmosphere of constantly shifting values, what can you depend upon to stay constant? How can you navigate with a moral compass that keeps changing what is “true North”? What is the GPS of your soul? What remains impossible to lose, or corrupt, in a world of planned obsolescence? As Lord Henry accurately observes, “nowadays we know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.”
How, in other words, did we get where we are? Where is it we began from? How to we get to where we wish to go next and how do we know it’s a good idea? In the absence of collectively agreed upon hierarchies of what matters and what doesn’t (what used to be called “the great chain of being,” where everything has a place), we have the freedom both to arrange our lives as we see fit, and the possibility of discovering we don’t know what our lives mean, why its organized that way, or even how it got organized that way. The soldiers who went off to WWI and came back, wondering what the point of all the destruction was, unable to resume their lives, were though to be victims of “shell shock”—the unproven idea that a shell might physical damage the brain even if it exploded elsewhere. Now we know the changes were cognitive and emotional and we call it “post-traumatic stress syndrome.” But we live in a time where the entire culture seems to suffer from this. Can you get all the way though the day without saying at least once, “I’m so stressed out” or, in the charming internet acronym, “FML?” Felling wounded, alienated, disenfranchised, and disillusioned now just seems to be a typical day.
How did these individuals use art to communicate their sense that they didn’t know where they were or how they got there? We need only look at the post WWI German expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, to begin to see this representation. The script of this film was, in fact, written by two WWI vets suffering from what we now call post-traumatic stress syndrome. Along with the director, they show us a character who projects this interior horror outside, literally making the walls and scenery reflect the disorientation and distress he is experiencing when he was expected to simply fit back into small town life after having suffered the horrors of trench warfare. In other words, the internal states must be expressed in a way that will make an impression. Thus impressionism and expressionism both make the point that what is “out there” in the world may be REAL, but how we see it is inflected by how we feel and so our “reality” is a very particular vision of what’s real: two people looking at the same tree do not see the “same” tree. Reality is what’s real filtered and reconfigured by mood. And “mood disorders” become epidemic in the Twentieth Century: hysteria, depression, obsession, compulsion, and so forth. The pharmaceutical industry makes billions of dollars a year and is one of the most successful and lucrative businesses of our time.
With no externally consistent structures and order, what is reality, other than our experience of reality based on our feelings about it? Reality is not all that is real, anymore. Reality is your edited version of what is real. Reality is not false, nor is it the totality of all that is real. Traumatic events—event too painful to be felt at the time they occur—haunt our present consciousness and influence how we experience and see the world. Trauma itself is not unique to the Twentieth century but it is here we see on major site of damage based on the shrinking of community and other faith-based models for helping people cope with the events that overwhelm them. Dorian Gray is an abandoned child—a father murdered, a mother dead from grief, a conniving grandfather (who engineered the death of his father) refusing to have anything to do with him. And then Lord Henry and Basil come along and proceed, each in their own way, to abuse him yet more, offering self-serving advice that makes themselves feel better at his expense.
Trauma shatters the prism that allows us to focus all happens into a coherent reality we can understand. It helps us understand events in the present both in the context of what has occurred before and in relation to what we imagine could happen next. When that prism is shattered, our sense of reality is fractured and our sense of our self is fragmented. What are we, if our coherent self loses its sense of coherency? Unable to see the relevance of the past, unable to believe in the possibilities of our own future, we spiral into depression. For Dorian Gray, he staves off a lifetime of meaninglessness by indulging in distractions of the moment. But, all the while, the portrait grows darker. When he stabs it in frustration, all the debilitating feelings of a life lived without meaning, without significance, without genuine relationship, comes crashing in on him and he is discovered lying on the floor, dead, a broken old man. Modernity is not just the wars and other historical traumas that influence modern subjects. Modernity is also the every day experiences of living in an increasingly global, urban, technologically dominated time.
How can art be both historically specific and universally relevant? The works mentioned above pose these questions and more; and they all point to one answer: What the Twentieth Century (and, now, the Twenty-First century) needs is not more answers, but better questions. The most dangerous attitude of our time is not uncertainty. The most dangerous attitude of our time is a false certitude presented as “just the way things are.” And this is not mere semantics about questions and answers. History shows us that there is a deep urgency among creative people to forego easy answers and generate instead more insightful questions. In fact, some of the worst episodes of the Twentieth Century and now of the Twenty-First Century—imperialism, two world wars, genocide, fascism, the atomic bomb, and the neo-imperialism of globalized capitalism—all came from people and institutions “sure” that they had the answers, and therefore determined to ignore (or worse, eliminate) whatever or whoever challenged these answers.
A good deal of Twentieth Century Art, therefore, is devoted to calling into question commonly held beliefs and suggesting alternative “realities” so that being told “that’s just the way it is” can be countered with “yes, it seems so, but how did it get that way?” In other words, a traditional belief in “essentialism” -–that things have some fundamental essence that can be discerned—gets replaced by “constructivism”–a sense that the “meaning” we think is “inherent” in the thing, has actually been placed there by us, and represents what we need to see, and what we want to find, rather than something essential and separate from us. Essentialism is the belief that things have some fundamental unalterable essence, and hence “meaning”; constructivism is a sense that the meaning we think is inherent in the thing has actually been imposed by us. Indeed, “thinking” itself is not a natural or inalterable construct.
To think is to use the dominant knowledge constructions of one’s time to make sense of one’s surrounding. It was once assumed the sun revolved around the Earth, and so people “thought” the sun moved across the sky everyday from East to West. There were various speculations about where the sun “went” at night—that it extinguished itself in the ocean every night and was “re-born” every day in the East where it began anew its journey across the sky. Not knowing anything of bacteria or viruses, people assumed disease was a moral judgment from God. People we would now judge mentally ill were assumed to be possessed by a demon.
It is easy to imagine we have cleared up such mysteries completely—every age tends to think its way of thinking is adequate for explaining everything it is possible to explain. And so we know about the importance of hygiene, about washing your hands during flu season, or sneezing into the crook of your arm to prevent the spread of germs. But is disease strictly mechanical? Why do some people recover from cancer and others don’t? We have delineated mental illnesses, but what is the mind/body component of depression, really? Is it a way of thinking? A chemical imbalance? Does first one occur then the other? If so, which one first? As the comedian CK Lewis put it, “everything is amazing and nobody is happy.” (Check out his hilarious interview with Conan O’Brien.) To paraphrase this, there is nothing we can’t figure out, with rationality and the scientific method, and yet, on another level, nobody seems to really understand what’s going on. Is an oil-based economy sustainable? Is the polar ice cap melting? Are the ocean levels rising? Does it matter? Is globalization fair? Is the stock market real, or just some kind of financial alchemy benefitting the few at the expense of the many? Is democracy democratic? Do we elect the officials who make the rules, or just think we do? Are your thoughts your own, or do they just seem to be?
It would seem that, potentially, we are all “in the Matrix” like Neo waiting for our own personal Morpheus, like some sort of existential valet, to offer us the right pill that will allow us to see where we actually are in “the Desert of the Real.” If theology used to be the overarching order that directed the process of thinking, then the Twentieth Century has replaced this function with ideology, which we might define as our imagined relationship to our actual existence. When our imaginings feel in sync we are “happy,” when they begin to fray and the actual threatens to push through we become agitated, anxious, fearful. Roughly speaking, our choice is to face this emergent reality and cope with it or find a way to burrow back deeper into the imaginary protective cocoon of ideology.
Every character we read about in the course will face this choice in one way or another. Dorian Gray, most obviously, perhaps, when told by Lord Henry he is nothing but his good looks, desperately gives up everything to preserve this rather than contest it by finding out what else gives him worth. Again, with the lack of communal support in our time, it is much easier to burrow deeper into the imaginary than face emerging realities. Our coping strategies become addictions—often literally—where we cling to them more and more desperately with less and less return on our sacrifices. We opt for blind repetition rather than thoughtful review—for addiction rather than ritual. Ritual is a repeated ceremony that promotes insight. Addiction is a repeated ceremony that promotes continued self-delusion. Ritual points a sway forward, addiction allows us to just stay in the same place while feeling like we are going forward. Dorian Gray becomes addicted to the secret pleasure of appearing young over the years. But he fails to learn anything or develop empathy, sympathy, compassion or wisdom. And all the while his portrait grows uglier. The same stress that teaches us empathy can become “ugly” when we ignore and hide it. Rather than teaching it us, it taunts us. Rather than incorporating what it conveys into an increased wisdom about our self and the world and others, it becomes something we first fear, then avoid, then deny altogether.
In contrast to this confusing and often painful discrepancy between our imagined and actual existence, science has developed an extraordinary capacity to discover “objective knowledge,” supposedly untainted by all this moral and subjective incertitude. We ha d become a culture given over to “specialization” and “expertise,” looking for a “professional opinion” upon which we can base our decisions so as to feel confident about them. Again, such opinions can be useful in matters of health, career, and so forth, but “expertise” cannot offer up to any of us the “meaning” of our life, however much they might help us realize this or that goal (a good job, a better physique, whiter teeth, smoother skin). Centering our lives on pursing “self-improvement” through such expertise in some ways sets us on the path of Dorian Gray where superficial improvement gets put in the place of significance and we wonder why life can seem flat and empty. While scientific discourse does permit one the most objective systems of knowledge ever devised, capable of feats that earlier ages would have to view as “magic,” the uses to which this Science then gets put remain very subjective indeed.
One reason the wars of the Twentieth century have been so devastating—each exponentially more son than the last-- is that the weaponry has been improved at a never before seen rate courtesy of various scientific discoveries. From the musket to the atomic bomb the span of time is less than two hundred years, with no corresponding increase in our ethical capacity. When we compare our capacity for wisdom with the increase in our capacity for mass-destruction, we are like apes playing with a loaded gun. (This point is beautifully illustrated by Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey when the ape tosses a bone into the air and it “becomes” an orbiting space station in the middle of the Russia/US cold war.) Scientific discovery, in other words, may be “objective,” but the uses to which it is put, is not. Corporations like Monsanto have learned to “manufacture” disease-resistant seeds, but in order to monetize their invention the seeds are designed to sprout only once. The resulting disturbance of the eco-system is then addressed with chemical pesticides that are decimating our bee population and imperiling future crops. Being able to manipulate nature also makes us capable of “breaking” it. False objectivity deludes people into false certainty. A recent Monsanto ad asks “how do we get more out of a raindrop?” You don’t. You ask yourself why the raindrop is not enough. Our problems are caused by how we see and understand ourselves and the world around us, not by underachieving raindrops.
And what exactly do we see? We see the Twentieth Century as a time of proclamations, a time during which various ambitious projects are outlined that will “solve,” once and for all, centuries old problems. World War I, billed as “the war to end all wars,” directly paved the way to World War II. Industry seemed capable of producing whatever is needed for a good life-- then came news of exploitation in various colonies, children sent to work in factories, dangerous and unhealthy pollution. The Twentieth Century promised to be a time of freedom from religious tyranny and despotic monarchs--then came what Sartre calls “the burden of freedom” or the painful confusion about why we should do one thing and not another. A search for masters to guide us led to fascism: a totalitarian form of government that promises to make our decisions for us; whole nations gratefully acquiesced, handing over absolute control to individual determined to control us absolutely. Lord Henry is a proto-fascist with his self-gratifying fascination with how easy it is to manipulate the frightened and unsure Dorian Gray, to give him thoughts and let him assume they are his own, to experiment on him. One can have an entire nation of Dorian Grays, acting in unison, doing the bidding of the one who has promised to make their lives meaningful—but only if they do as they are told.
The great thinkers of the late Nineteenth Century can help us understand how this process unfolded. Indeed, in their own time, certain intellectual architects of the Twentieth Century exposed the foundations upon which previous eras based their construction of reality. They did not necessarily set out to expose this foundation, though some were more provocative than others. They wanted to see things “as they are” as clearly, and objectively as possible. Not surprisingly, then, a scientist was the first of what I will refer to as “ the four intellectual architects of the Twentieth century.” He did not set out to tear down the entire foundation of his time at all; and yet, his discoveries and reflections began to shift dominant paradigms despite his wish to avoid such drama. His name was Charles Darwin.
Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, but he had already delayed publication for years, fearing the controversy his work would cause. He knew that his work would upend the prevailing paradigm concerning the relationship between man, God and Nature. As Charles Pervere notes in a Toronto Star review of a book on Darwin:
Where a concept of divine design in nature had prevailed for centuries, Darwin – a non-religious scientific materialist – offered something radically, startlingly and heretically different: a vision of nature processing change in life forms by force of circumstance, a process of constant situational adaptation that saw survival as the only `design’ at work.
It is small wonder, then, that “Darwin himself sat on the revelation for years before publishing it. He knew what was coming. As he wrote in a letter, he felt like he was “committing murder.” According to Darwin scholar David Quammen (author of The Reluctant Mr. Darwin), what is most threatening is not the idea of evolution, but the idea of natural selection: “His biggest idea, bigger than mere evolution, was just too big, too harsh and threatening. It was called `natural selection’ and identified as the primary mechanism of evolutionary change.” What natural selection does is take away the idea of the endowment of an essential nature in all living creatures by an infallible, all-powerful God God. As Quammen states
[Natural selection] embodies a deep chanciness, that is contradictory to the notion that Earth’s living creatures, their capacities (including human capacities), their histories, their indigenousness to particular locales, and their interrelations all reflect some sort of divinely preordained plan. Creationist proselytizers pursuing Christian political agendas are therefore right to regard it with loathing and alarm.” (Quammen qtd. in Pervere)
With his concept of natural selection, Darwin became one of the great architects of modern constructivist thought. His work, based on observations and various objective classifications, inadvertently undermines deeply held beliefs that God is the transcendent, all-powerful designer of life (though this was never his purpose, and it was a personal crisis for him that his work led him in this direction).
We should note here the relationship between transcendence and certitude. In order for there to be absolute certitude, there must be inviolable transcendence. Something above and beyond “all there is” must fundamentally determine the nature of things. That way, if you get lost, or stray off the path, this transcendent standard will remain where it has to be, awaiting your rediscovery of it. But if you lose this transcendental certitude, you lose absolute certainty. It doesn’t mean you can’t be sure of anything; it means you can’t be sure of what you’re sure of. Wanting to be sure becomes one of the most dominant urges of our time. There is even a deodorant called “Sure” with the slogan “raise your arm if you’re sure.” Indeed, many commodities are advertised to us as something that will return certitude to our lives. (There is actually a lipstick called “Infallible.”) Of course, since they can do no such thing, the process of buying such products must be repeated—over and over—and thus our entire consumer culture runs on the dynamic of addiction where we must continue to consume, thoughtlessly, even mindlessly: no longer one of the dominant popular metaphors or our time is the zombie, a creature that has no urge other than to consume and for whom no amount of consumption is ever sufficient.
Though Darwin was quite a reluctant revolutionary, he was part of the spirit of his time—the Zeitgeist—and others working in different fields were arriving at similar paradigm shifts. Among them was Karl Marx. In fact, Marx greatly admired Darwin’s Origin of Species. He even sent Darwin a personally inscribed copy of (the second edition) Das Kapital in 1873. We know this because Darwin wrote him a thank you note. (So when your parents tell you to be sure to write thank you notes, you should do so in case you become famous.) Anyway his note dated in October 1873 reads as follows:
Dear Sir:
I thank you for the honour which you have done me by sending me your great work on Capital; & I heartily wish that I was more worthy to receive it, by understanding more of the deep and important subject of political Economy. Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of Knowledge, & that this is in the long run sure to add to the happiness of Mankind.
I remain, Dear Sir
Yours faithfully,
Charles Darwin
Darwin’s letter of acknowledgment delighted Marx, who used it as proof that the great scientist appreciated his work. In fact, Darwin was merely being polite: it appears that he never read Marx’s book, the vast majority of whose pages remained uncut in his library.
Later, Marx did request Darwin’s permission to cite him and to dedicate Das Kapital to him, but Darwin declined this invitation in a letter dated Oct 13, 1880:
Dear Sir:
I am much obliged for your kind letter & the Enclosure.— The publication in any form of your remarks on my writing really requires no consent on my part, & it would be ridiculous in me to give consent to what requires none. I shd prefer the Part or Volume not to be dedicated to me (though I thank you for the intended honour) as this implies to a certain extent my approval of the general publication, about which I know nothing.— Moreover though I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds, which follow from the advance of science. It has, therefore, always been my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biased by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion.— I am sorry to refuse you any request, but I am old & have very little strength, and looking over proof-sheets (as I know by present experience) fatigues me much.
I remain Dear Sir,
Yours faithfully,
Ch. Darwin
It is interesting that Darwin sees Marx’s Kapital as a direct attack on Christianity and Theism, when Das Kapital is, in fact, a book on economics. Despite Marx’s well-documented view that religion was, “the opiate of the masses,” this particular book makes no direct attack on religion. So what is going on? How does Marx’s economic theory (like Darwin’s theory of natural selection) indirectly challenge the belief in God? It does so through its constructivist approach: Marx suggested that personal wealth was not simply an extension of character, or a reward from God. People weren’t wealthy because they deserved to be, or because they had the aristocratic “blood” necessary for taking care of great wealth. (Wealth, in other words, was not something distributed by God and therefore immune to all critiques of it.) Conversely, the poor were not poor because that’s all they were capable of.
The notion that you were born into your station in life and to protest this was to offend God was thus effectively challenged. Wealth accumulated to people who controlled production and this wealth, in turn, permitted them to legislate laws that protected their privilege. Accordingly, wealth could not longer be viewed purely as evidence of God’s grace. Nor was it at all certain that the rich were rich because God understood they knew how to look after the poor. Marx suggested the opposite: the rich were rich because they exploited the poor and lived off their efforts, and profited from their suffering, and had no motivation, therefore, to do anything to alleviate it as long as their labor continued to be available. (We can see how thin this line becomes between survival and productivity when we read of such things as fires in factories where workers have been shut in to enforce greater productivity.)
We will trace this process in detail in Heart of Darkness; the desire to extract ivory from the Congo using the labor of the native Congolese creates a situation where approximately five million natives will die in a span of five years. This mortality rate was deemed permissible because the result was so profitable. It was easier and cheaper to replace a Congolese person who had been worked to death than it was to provide any of the workers with the necessities of life. Such an approach to a humanity deemed inferior is, of course, unethical in the extreme, but in the absence of any communal belief in transcendent standards—standards that can be enforced by an omnipotent God—there is no “real” downside to harvesting humans in this manner and treating them like livestock. Slavery in general, and the treatment of the native people in the Congo in particular was, of course, designated as a “special case”: Those exploited were viewed not only as “non-white” but also as “sub-human.” It was even possible to still believe in a great chain of being—with a God at the top—as long as the Congolese were assigned a rank “below” that of human and slightly “higher” (though not all the time) than animals.
By the time of the fascist regime in Nazi Germany (1933-1945), this rationale will be extended beyond “non-white” to include Jews, homosexuals, and political dissidents who will also be worked to death in the exact same manner—except it will be done even more efficiently-- in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and elsewhere. And in this case, the ante will be upped by the “pro-active” elimination of those deemed unable to work—the old, the infirm, children, the disabled. The rationale here was that eliminating this population preserved the food and resources they would otherwise consume. This God-forsaken harvesting of human potential runs like a brilliant machine and is best understood as a product of “instrumental rationality”—that is, of a way of thinking that assigns value and worth strictly, and only, in terms of the degree of profit that might be extracted.
Anything that increases the profit margin in a “sustainable” way is not only permissible but the only possible response. This does not mean that instrumental rationality can never dictate an overall positive response. If a factory, for example, is spewing a toxic waste that might eliminate the very people already targeted as the likely consumers for the product being manufactured there, then the pollution manifestly threatens the “bottom line” and must be alleviated. On the surface, it appears the factory is “doing the right thing,” but if the presumed demographic for the product lives elsewhere, or the eventual death is too incrementally slow for it to be traced back to the factory, “instrumental rationality” would forbid diverting potential profit in the direction of curtailing it. Think of the cigarette industries in this regard. The manufacturing plants for tobacco products did not produce overtly harmful by products, but the product itself caused cancer. The tobacco industry marketed and sold a product that would, in time, eliminate a large percentage of its own best consumers. But the amount of money to be made in the de cade or more it would take for this to happen, and the prospect of new consumers joining in every year, assured a high profit margin.
In terms of ideology, that is, in terms of the way everyone would like it to be, the Twentieth Century is seen as a massive shift from an aristocracy to a meritocracy, a movement from getting what you inherit, to getting what you earn. But Marx’s great insight was that it was not a level playing field. If Monarchs were the stewards of wealth in their time, those who owned the means of production became the stewards of wealth in our time. To own a factory was to have access to wealth that a wage earner working in the factory would never reach. The many laws enacted to support the new meritocracy also tended to reward and perpetuate this system, while not acknowledging it.
Marx, whom I consider the second great “architect of the Twentieth Century,” describes this economic system of capitalism and instrumental rationality by talking about a “superstructure”—or an apparent reality—that is underwritten by an “infrastructure”—or the actual power structure behind the superstructure. Notice this is the same dynamic as the ideology that helps construct individual thought and create for each of us “an imagined relationship to our actual existence.” The ever-youthful Dorian Gray, presenting a face to the world, is a “superstructure”; but this eternal youth is possible because of a hidden infrastructure: the moldering portrait in his attic. People who meet Dorian Gray and ruin themselves spurred on by his intoxicating charm never know there is an infrastructure behind this superstructure that has seduced them into destroying themselves (here I’m thinking of Campbell and Gray’s other victims whom he bumps into in various opium dens). This is a metaphor of how it works on the personal and psycho-social level, while Heart of Darkness gives us a look at how it works on the political and economic level.
The Matrix