Tuesday 29 December 2020

The Allure of the Apocalypse

I've just finished a bit of light Christmas reading - John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939. Despite the intimidating title, it turns out to be an amusing, sometimes even laugh-out-loud funny read, but also rather blithe and superficial. Carey's thesis is simply stated. It is that the modernists (DH Lawrence, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, Jean Rhys, EM Forster, etc.), were almost all dreadful snobs who often entertained fantasies of genocide perpetrated against 'the masses' - and that Hitler's own such fantasies stemmed from a similar kind of snobbery. And, naturally, Nietzsche was to blame. The book is mostly a gleeful collection of quotes cherry-picked for evidence in support of this (deliberately) provocative idea. 

The book is vicious and lacking in generosity. Yes, undoubtedly many of the people Carey skewers were elitists and said silly things in the course of their lives (who hasn't?). But as this goes on, chapter after chapter, one increasingly begins to feel some sympathy for those, like Wells, Lawrence, or Eliot, who worried about the ecological devastation that would follow from overpopulation and economic development, and the corrosive effects of mass consumerism on the culture. Those worries were often expressed in sweeping and over-exaggerated (not to mention ridiculous and sometimes disgusting) ways, but it is hardly absurd to have had them at all. Moreover, I think there is something entirely normal, maybe even natural, about entertaining fantasies of being able to escape from 'the mass' and have the world to oneself. Who hasn't, at times, thought fleetingly about how great it would be if there were no, or very few, other people in the world? (Except perhaps a few attractive and promiscuous specimens of the sex of your choice.) Who hasn't occasionally in an idle moment been struck that it would be wondrous if one could experience, if only for an afternoon, a world after people?

There is nothing wrong with that thought - it doesn't make you an incipient Nazi or psychopath. It is the inevitable, occasional flight of fancy of an individual member of a social species living in conditions of hypersociality in which it can be difficult to feel as though one is important and distinct, combined with an undoubted yearning which each of us feels - some more than others - for connection with a natural world from which we are increasingly alienated. 

An apocalypse would be dreadful. But there are moments when it has its allure. I was struck by this thought earlier today while walking with a friend and fellow blogger on a local tidal island. Windswept, desolate, silent of traffic noise, it was easy to imagine the feeling of being alone in such a place in the aftermath of a war or plague. Just you and the grass, the beach, the sea, the golden sunlight streaming through the clouds onto the hills in the distance - and a few cormorants, oystercatchers and a stray heron minding their own business nearby. Bliss. No, I wouldn't like to live on Gamma World. But it might be nice to visit for a day.



17 comments:

  1. I often fantasize about being the one and only final inhabitant of my city. Free to wander around & explore the local mini version of Nessus. Of course it's a nice post-apocalyps: the people are gone but their buildings & stuff are still there.

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  2. This seems to be a copycat or followup to Paul Johnson's earlier Intellectuals, which exposes similar sentiments in the ranks of celebrated intellectual figures from Rousseau and Marx to Hemingway and Chomsky. I am familiar with Johnson's work, which became a widely read text for Hungary's modern conservative movement, and made a large impression on Yours Truly at the impressionable age of nineteen. In hindsight, it has a certain "haw-haw" quality that revels in iconoclasm and tabloid-style smear jobs focused on personal vices, distinctly non-conservative traits. "Lacking in generosity", most certainly.

    However, the book's central thesis - that utopian thinkers, famous public intellectuals, philanthropists and other "friends of humanity" have often entertained rotten views, or ideas which were viciously totalitarian and would end up doing unimaginable harm if realised - is solid, and has a firm historical basis, particularly in the wretched 20th century. It is a happy society which can keep its romantic poets, philosophers, do-gooders and wannabe revolutionaries from doing griveous harm, by force if necessary - "kill your messiahs before they kill you" and all.

    Sure, I am also interested in the idea of the post-human landscape, and have used its image multiple times in my games to good effect. But just because Speer's Ruinenwert theory makes for good imagery does not mean the idea behind is not profoundly corrupt. When it comes to putting the idea into practice, somehow it is always "you first!"

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    1. Sure, I agree, but I think the interesting question is *why* intellectuals are given to these fantasies. Saying "it's because they read too much Nietzsche" doesn't seem sufficient. What is it about intelligence and too much learning that leads people to want to boss others around?

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    2. "An ungodly contract there's aglow
      'twixt reason and Evil will:
      therefore your raging follies grow
      in feverish wars to kill.
      Satan and Reason the strife began:
      whichever wins, the loser's Man,
      this God-faced beast, this lump of mud insane:
      All hope is vain!

      Man pains the Earth. * Beyond the spate
      of years of war and peace,
      the curses of fraternal hate
      upon her brow increase.
      And should we think he'll learn in time,
      he plots an even viler crime:
      from dragon's teeth will spring his budding grain:
      All hope is vain! All hope is vain!"

      At least this is the misanthrope's take.

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  3. Following Melan's earlier reference, there is the still earlier book of 1927 by Julien Benda, La Trahison des Clercs, translated in the US English edition of 1928 as The Treason of the Intellectuals. There is no shortage of screeds over the centuries against thinkers for the mistakes they make or for their differences of opinions. The tradition of philosophers condemning philosophers for their failure to agree uniformly goes back to, e.g., Diodorus Siculus, and others still earlier, such as Plato (his own works a goldmine for fascists). As for the masses, they turn out to be a problem tamed better by electronics than by genocide.

    The thoughts here about the apocalypse edge closer to those of Thanos in the last Avengers films. What if we could, with a snap of the fingers, remove half of life from the universe? Then there would be resources and quiet space aplenty. My son saw the movies and asked why Thanos would not used the ultimate power to snap and double the universe's resources instead.

    As Melan said, "You first!" is the ideologue's favorite slogan.

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    1. Plato just seems to be the earliest example of the phenomenon identified: the connection between being highly educated and wanting to control others.

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  5. I agree with Melan, that your description of John Carey's book also puts me in mind of Johnson's 1988 work, Intellectuals.

    I too have had a "alone on a deserted island" or "last person on Earth" fantasy since boyhood. I got a small taste of it when I happened to have reason to cross the length of urban university campus in the U.S. late on a Friday afternoon before a (Monday) holiday weekend. I saw open spaces, empty or nearly empty buildings, and no other humans until I got to my destination. The effect was rather eerie. My reverie at the time was of being one of the few colonists who stayed on Mars when all the rest fled back to Earth to have a few more face-to-face days with loved ones on the eve of an atomic war which took place in one of Ray Bradbury's Mars stories.

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    1. It reminds me of a documentary I saw once about Japan's emptying countryside. There was a school somewhere which just had one pupil, one teacher and a headmaster.

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    2. I wonder if that could make for an interesting RPG setting. Ok, maybe not just 3 people, but a bit more, say tens at most and they're all unique named individual characters, not the usually anonymous cast of many thousands. And maybe not the modern japanese countryside, but something fantasy. Maybe a world like the one you find in the first Masters of the Universe mini-comics that came with the early action figures of that line, where you pretty much had two small groups of adventurers, one good, one evil, a magic castle and endless wastelands. Later on more & more people & places get added to the world, so perhaps it's not enough, though it always remained a relatively uncrowded world.

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    3. That actually sounds a lot like the Dying Earth. I have a weakness for that kind of setting.

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    4. well the tone is very different :-p But you're right, Dying Earth could be an example of that too, at least in the Rhialto stories. In the Cugel stories there are still way too many people about.

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  6. All that splendid isolation somehow lost its appeal this year. Right now I want nothing else but play tabletop RPGs and slamdance with real live people, plenty of them.

    José Ortega y Gasset's 1930 book, The revolt of the masses btw gives some bona fide loathing of the hoi polloi if that's your thing, a notion perfectly justified just by judging on the many instances down history lane when the stupidity and blind hatred of the poor innocent underclass brought on tyrannies, universal destruction and the death of millions, not just for the said underclass but for whole societies.

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    1. Yeah, I feel you.

      Carey actually cites a bit of Ortega y Gasset.

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  7. I don't recall ever seeing a hedgerow or alleyway that was improved by the addition of an empty lager can, or a double-dozen cigarette stubs. Briefly taking the position 'Wouldn't it be better if nobody came here' or the wider stance 'Wouldn't it be better if there was nobody to come here' doesn't strike me as appalling.

    I have occasionally posed the question to myself 'What if I had to spend the rest of my life in this room/this house?' Presuming some benevolent magic to furnish fresh food, clean air and drinkable water, it's an interesting exercise that makes you think about the comfort and worth of your surroundings. Particularly in those times when a long afternoon can feel like eternity.

    As at least one commentator has memorably said, the appeal of the apocalypse is shattered as soon as you start thinking about plumbing.

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    1. Yes. Richard Matheson nicely got around that problem by only having the apocalypse appear at night. During the day you can just go to the local Tesco and raid the frozen food aisle.

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    2. Hell's teeth, not only are all my friends dead, but I have to spend the rest of my life living on fishfingers?

      PD James's The Children of Men has humanity (or, at any rate, Britain) slowly winding down, making preparations for when the food and medicine stops coming. Bits of that book indicate a fair degree of potential comfort.

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