Self-Transcendence Part IV

Part I    Self-Betrayal

Part II  The Destroyers

Part III The Heroes

Part IV The Defenses

Part V  Today and Tomorrow

The Defenses

Introduction

So that there’s no confusion, let’s clearly state exactly what the problem was. Given what was happening to European culture in the 19th century, and to its geographical extensions as well, namely the United States, the artist and intellectual, the thinkers, writers, and innovative scientists, could only become alienated within their society. They became what the courts of that time and into the early 20th century, referred to as alienists, individuals who tend to the insane, which is what society was becoming.*

*And what it is now more than ever. Just look around. Hence the timeliness of this post.

And by the way, it wasn’t as if the artist and intellectual of the 19th century was walking around claiming to have all of the answers, though that is true of Marx and later Freud. But then, they were pseudo-intellectuals who wrote for the Cultural Philistines. Put bluntly, Marx and Freud's perception of the problems facing mankind were as childish as their solutions were destructive. That's why their work was so easily absorbed and put to use by The Destroyers, the very group from which they were deposited. No. The gift to us of the real Heroes of the Culture Crisis of the 19th century was their ability to remain immovably centered while looking life in the eye. They had, in the words of Orwell, the power to face unpleasant facts.

But the irony here was that at that period of cultural development, their response to the situation they were in led to an attitude of permanent defense, which was not only inadequate, but unhealthy and dangerous, to them. The fact is, the alienated intellectual, if he simply adopts a position of defense, is threatened with certain weaknesses within his own walls. And sooner or later, all of our defenses become enemies. So there are three principle defenses used by the cultural rebels of the 19th century, defenses that eventually became their enemies, that we will look at today in Part IV.

I

The first enemy is conservatism.

Wordsworth and Coleridge adopted it. So did Carlyle and Ruskin. It’s a strangely ambiguous and paradoxical position. What accounts for this?

Because it implies rehabilitating society, even re-creating it, while at the same time preserving the order which the conservative fancies at one time existed, and also setting up institutions which will foster those values and that beauty of the world which is so horribly threatened. But the problem here is that this response is founded on a sentimentality (and this from a group that prides itself on its tough-minded realism). There was never a time when our social institutions were an adequate adaptation of humanity to the world, and the emphasis on an imaginary order that we can only assert but never know, can lead to a world more terrible than the one the hostile elite is trying to destroy, the very elite the conservative claims to be fightnig against in defense of Western Civilization. That is, to be more precise, the conservative's idea of what Western Civilization was and ought to be.

Such a response, that got its start in the 19th century, ultimately led in the 20th to fascism. But, in doing so, it revealed something that is still of great interest and relevance to us today. What it revealed was that conservativism’s blind spot left them defenseless to infiltration and the subversion of the very thing they claimed to be defending, and to the very thing they claimed to be - conservatives (hence the terms, RINO and CPAC, ie; Republican In Name Only and Communists Posing As Conservatives).

The fact is, the real radicalism that ultimately destroyed Philadelphia, and the rest of the Western world during the 20th century, masked itself, especially through its use of classical economics, as conservatism! They’re not called the stupid party for nothing. But at least they can say that about themselves. There’s at least some irony. But there is no irony at all with their polarized opposite, “The Left”, or whatever else they're called today.

But one thing we can say about them is that, just as the conservative is supposedly represented by The RNC, “The Left” is represented by The DNC, which the conservative rightfully identifies as The Evil Party. Which means, in the USA - stupidity follows evil - and not just in the USA.

That’s why the Left has been kicking the Right’s ass since The French Revolution. And now we’re back to the value of cultural, and therefore, self-transcendence, but how that value was blocked in the 19th century not just by the Cultural Philistines, or The Destroyers they served, but by the defenses of the Heroes, defenses they had developed in their very attempt to achieve a genuine and lasting change through cultural transcendence. Hence, the first defense on our short list, conservativism, or, Stupidity as a Defense.

II

The next form of treason within The Hero’s walls is Neurosis.

That this is a real threat, the pitiful, painfully touching experience of John Ruskin, and so many others, fully demonstrates. The strategy against this treason is something like conservatism, which is why it is often confused with it. It is the adoption of neurosis as a defense against society, especially against The Destroyers and their Useful Idiot, The Cultural Philistine.

People like Rimbaud and Baudelaire and Browning (in both his life style and, more importantly, his style of writing), and Joyce feigned neurosis in order to protect themselves against it. Baudelaire was, as he himself said, in so many words, crazy like a fox. This stategy was a kind of willed paranoia.

The results are often magnificent, but the strategy has one really big weakness, as the history of the reputation and public reception of modern art only too painfully shows; it is easy to dimiss the work of these men, and the men themselves, as simply crazy. The reason is that they depart so far from the expected norms of “polite society” and artistic creation that they are incomprehensible. Or they depart so far from from the accepted standards of behavior that their work is dismissed as necessarily useless to said society.*

*As if society, then and now, hasn't long since proven to be useless to even itself. Again, just look around.

Even worse, their life style and work is so easily imitated by the pretentious, lazy, and untalented, that it is discredited. The Cultural Philistine, and the public, simply makes fun of it and moves on. Do not forget that there are still plently of people, respected scholars (an oxymoron if ever there was one, given how scholarship is practiced today), philosophers, and critics, to whom James Joyce's Ulysses is simply the irresponsible ravings of a disturbed and perverted maniac. Such people have not only been found in The New York Times, they have also occupied and, of course, still occupy, some of the most respected and powerful positions in the academic world.

III

The third enemy within the walls is the mask of conformity.

The hero, sufficiently protected, so he thinks, by his values, which he is sure are the basic values of mankind, thinks he can be most effective by a kind of controlled schizophrenia. He achieves acceptance by conforming to the expected aesthetic, intellectual and behavioral patterns of a world which he detests. But this is hypocirsy, and the penalty of hypocrisy, even of honest hypocrisy, is that one becomes what they pretend to be. Max Beerbohm pointed this out in The Happy Hypocrite. This was the strategy of Tennyson, Browning, and Thomas Mann. But the older men, with less of a tradition behind them, often failed, and perhaps Tennyson always failed. But Mann, diabolically clever, continued the masquerade to the end, and in his last work, Felix Krull, with an irresistable irony, presented the artist as a con man. Melville, too, wrote The Confidence Man - and then gave up.

IV

All of these strategies, conservativism, neurosis and conformity, have their possibilities, but all are open to grave dangers. What the hero needs is some means of self-transformation without self-betrayal, some way that will not involve him in stupidity, illness, or hypocrisy, with their various dangers.

For all three are dangerous devices. They can destroy you unless you use them with eternal vigilance, and perhaps even if you do. But worse, they are exhausting, they use up energy, they distract you from the real problem - reality itself - and our need to both adapt to and make it adapt to us.

True. Adaptation is more a difficulty to be lived with than it is a problem to be solved. Nevertheless, the point still stands. And the point is that each of the three defenses discussed here in Part IV (just three of many, but certainly the most historically identifiable) can become an end in itself.

Designed to preserve independence, they can and must inhibit growth. And the failure of so many in the 19th century, whether artist, thinker, writer, or innovative scientist, such as Darwin, can be found that same failure to grow.

And yet no cultural hero in human history strove so hard to maintain and continue growth than the cultural heroes of the 19th century. Because, to a man, they knew that in the concept of growth lies not only what they were trying to do, but the way out of their intolerable dilemma, and ours.

Concluding Remarks

In spite of their many failures, none of which could ever discredit their extraordinary achievements, what our heroic rebels perceived was that the forms with which mankind had organized experience, the very structure of our thinking, would have to be changed. It was not a matter of simple adaptation. That wouldn’t work. They had only to look at what was happening around them, ie; to what The Destoyers were doing, to see that it wouldn’t work. What was needed was something else, some new idea, some new principle, some way whereby our culture as a whole could transform itself without betraying itself, some way of re-creation which would involve at once defense and abandon, preservation and change, some way in which the desperate act, by achieving a goal, could at once convert the goal from an end into a means. And they found it! But first, it was necessary to make certain decisions. So, to those decisions, and the idea that those decisions would serve by turning the potential into the actual, we shall turn in Part V.

Until then!