INTELLECTUAL NOSTALGIA
When I was a young man at university, the intellectual firmament was settled. There was Darwin, Marx and Freud. There was Einstein. There was Eliot and Frost.
But time erodes the hardest granite. Time effaces the most beautiful marble. Different conditions require different solutions. The young are arrogant in their intelligence and heedless of their elders, ---as they should be.
Darwin remains a great intellect. His concentration for such a long period of time on the biological issue he set for himself proves it. The fact of evolution in broad outline cannot be challenged. But the theory of evolution in detail poses as many problems as it solves. Natural selection is proven in parameters so narrow as to be unable to be extrapolated for universal application. The fossil record in comparison with the time elapsed and species involved is infinitesimal. There is no proof of the transformation of species. There are no records for the existence of varieties of our species, Homo sapiens. (Such varieties exist in all other species.) There is the problem of the arising of human organs. There is not time enough for them to have evolved piecemeal. But the supposition of their spontaneous evolution in toto is improbable. The modern theories invented to explain the irregularities in evolution have become increasingly complex and bitterly partisan. Computer simulations of theories of evolution contain the biases of their programmers. (These inadequacies have spawned creationism, an ideational revanchism.)
A billion years is a long time. It is a time out of mind. No one can know what transpired in a time out of mind. It is unable to be comprehended by men, who often cannot remember what happened to them personally last week. (Or, in our age of writing and note-taking, interpret with precision what was once meant by even our own writings.)
Marx is discredited. It is difficult to imagine how something considered science, as dialectical materialism, could have been developed from his works. Sophisticated Marxists will inform you that there was not communism in the Soviet Union or in China, but rather state capitalism. That is true. The problem is that communism invariably defaults to authoritarianism of whatever cupidity. (No one has ever explicated the semantic corruption of the phrase “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” It is romantic-sounding fantasy.) Communism is rather a religion than a science, as Bertrand Russell observed long ago. It is false and harmful like all religions. (The insight on religion has not penetrated the mass of humankind, so tenaciously is it entangled with the emotions. Evil men seek to exploit their fellow human beings by manipulating their fear and hope in religious belief.) Dialectical materialism is dialectical diabolism, (should one believe in a metaphysical devil).
The justification for Marxism is that it sought to relieve the misery of the people in the early industrial era. But it failed, and miserably, and exactly against the people.
None of the hypotheses of Sigmund Freud have been proven. He was a brilliant theorizer on shifting sands of fact. Freud should have been a novelist, and perhaps he was. Novelists and creative writers have long been considered great intuitive psychologists. Witness Stendhal, Flaubert, Conrad and Henry James, for a few. In Freud we have a psychologist who was a creative writer. For his works, rather than constituting a new science, are imaginative insights. They should be classified as what we now call creative nonfiction.
But then, if you listen sympathetically to someone without injecting your ego, that person will feel better about himself. And that person will love you (with all the contrariness that love involves). This is the key insight of psychoanalysis. But neither do human beings listen to each other better today than they did in Freud’s time, or in Caesar’s, or in Plato’s. What is called “conversation” is rather an assault by the ego using language.
Einstein, of course, like Newton before him, can never be false. Newtonian physics, classical physics, will remain true. But Einstein, again like Newton before him, could be superseded. Light has both been stopped and accelerated up to three times its normal speed in laboratory experiments. If this was done experimentally, there must be mathematics to explain it, and use it. There is someone now calculating to supersede Einstein, I would suspect. The ramifications of the superseding of relativity physics are unimaginable. They would rattle the mind in its bony cage.
And Eliot? Of course he was fated to be a major poet. He is the last Anglo-Saxon to reach the poetic heights. Besides the fact that he is less of a poet (and less of uno fabbro) than Ezra Pound, no one now cares about a timid little man abashed by his bald spot, or his other deficiencies, social and physical. And doormen have proven not to be eternal. For one of them remaining, a snicker would get the “snickerer” a kick in the ass, or a lawsuit. Eliot’s poetry has become pretentious and his verse cloying. (Pound was both an anti-Semite and a fascist, both exclusionary flaws in our contemporary society. When his Cantos are fully explicated, they will be seen as the superior poetic work of the 20th century. And why should it not be? Dante, a generation ago in the academy, was considered not readable because of his Catholicism.)
There is Frost to consider. He was criticized in his day for not recognizing in his verse elements in New England that today we call diversity. His societal milieu was obsolete even when he took it up. New England is apt for that old time, old stock American milieu---in a word, quaint. Even today, the three northernmost states of New England are the whitest of any of the states, (according to the 2000 census). He is the poet of a bygone Yankeedom, dour and wry. His hardscrabble New England verse is just like that old Yankee type that is now defunct. He depicted a fairy tale land of departed down-easters. It is summed up in their typical exclamation, “a-yup.” But the decision on Frost is “a-nope.”
So who remains? After ripping away the firmament to see the stars, or unseating the boulder to reveal the slugs underneath, what is revealed? There is Nietzsche, a poor, tormented soul if I ever read about (and read) one! He is the sole intellectual figure that remains relevant. After Nietzsche, there was fascism and communism, those totalitarian deadly twins. After Nietzsche, there has been continuous warfare since 1914, despite the 100 years of peace in Europe following the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, (and ignoring the very bloody American Civil War and the Russo-Japanese War). And after the great and bloodthirsty world wars and holocausts of the 20th century, there was the Cold War (with all its individual hot battles in Greece, in Malaysia, in Korea, in Vietnam), then the Balkans atrocities, the Gulf War, and now the terrorist war, offensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and war looming against both resurgent China and Islam. (You wait!). Nor would I believe that Japan would defer to the West indefinitely. There is war against our own people, in the Waco burnout, and in the survivalist shoot-outs. (The reparations issue has the potential to sunder the country.) After Nietzsche we developed Feminism in its radical leftist (or rightist phase, who could tell?), the semasiological prevarications of deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, (which only dear Jacques could understand), positive racism, American “knownothingism,” white and racist, religious fundamentalism, political correctness, alien-from-outer-space-terran-interventionism (the Raelians---and they could be right!), social crudity as a lifestyle, and consumerism, which may indeed consume the world in its entirety. Nor shall we forget genocide, ethnic cleansing, and Islamic terrorist massacre, though human beings have killed off each other en masse since the species began, and limited only by technology. (It may take a monograph to disentangle the semantic grotesqueness of the phrase “political correctness.” It is the direct heir of the dogma of “the party line” that used to emanate from the Soviet Union of past despicable remembrance, now more cultural than political.)
Of course Nietzsche did not cause these social maladies. He was the conduit of the budding narcissism, egoism, hatred, nihilism and racist mass murder in the psyche of the human species. Nietzsche was tortured by it. His works are matches meant to ignite the intellect of adults, academics, and responsible intellectuals. But, you see, children got into them and burned down the goddamned house!
Ah, my old friend Nietzsche, what fun it has all been! Dear Friedrich Wilhelm, what have you been doing with yourself since your embrace of that poor whipped horse that set you off on a purely private intellectualism? It was a horse of the Apocalypse, I assume. Do you meditate on the Will to Power, that happy and bloodthirsty bullshit? I cannot tell you what fun it has all been! I can hardly wait for the next round! I will re-read you assiduously. What mutant and disgusting “isms” are gathering their potency in the wicked hearts of men?
It is certainly true. Ego rules the world. Human beings simply cannot leave things alone, but must assert their own monstrous egos into everything. It is why the human species will limit itself. Ithas no future. Its cycle of atrocity and liberal benignity is precisely that cycle of tumescence and detumescence (in all their meanings in sexuality, emotion and language) that rules the loins of the individual. There is nothing else. It will destroy itself with technology. I am reminded of that simultaneously cynical and profound statement of Georges Clemenceau about the presence of large standing armies in Europe in the early 20th century, and the invention of the bayonet: “There’s only one thing you can’t do with a bayonet, and that’s sit on it.” Technology is a bayonet. Bioengineering is my favorite technology for the 21st century. Once we destroy the biological imperative, all hell will break loose in the universe! And we will it because we love death. (There is no conclusion more certain in the history of the species.) When the fascist general José Millán Astray exclaimed, in the passion of the Spanish Civil War, “¡Viva la muerte!” he was speaking for all humanity. H.G. Wells was the prophet of it in his book, The Island of Dr. Moreau.
I believe we are seeing the mass effects of humankind on the planet, and it is ugly.
My considerations unhinge the natural order. Many have attested to a reality underlying the imperfections of our sense perceptions. I believe that ultimate reality negates, shatters and abandons all the conceptions of humankind, and throws them onto that great trash heap of our illusions. The foundation of knowledge is built on sands that shift, change form and color, and alter in composition.
Yes, I will see the next round of intellectual atrocities. It will take place within a triumphant capitalism. (The capitalists think that they have abolished world war because of the democratic and liberal benefits of free trade. Ha! Ha! What idiocy! Trade does not obviate war. Trade whets the appetite for what can be acquired and thus raises the ante for war.) But I will not see the next one after that. I will have had enough. I will be gone.
I give you, the human race, Homo sapiens sapiens (so-called), the ultimate kiss-off: Goodbye, and good luck!
(TRC 09-20-09)
