by Colin Wilson
It is relevant to The Age that although it largely avoids excursions into arcana, preferring to keep its focus on sociological and literary-sociological topics, its immediate precursor-text in Wilson’s canon blazes a trail through the varieties of religious experience. It is equally relevant to The Age that one of its sequels, The New Existentialism, devotes an entire chapter to the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. The story of Husserl’s authorship offers a distant, but not insignificant, parallel to the story of Wilson’s authorship. Phenomenology concerns itself with the investigation of consciousness, as revealed to the investigator by the representations that consciousness makes for itself, not only of external things, but of its self-intuition. Husserl’s early work conforms itself to the epistemological reservations of modernity. Towards the end of his authorship, however, in order to explain consciousness, Husserl began to invoke what he dubbed the Transcendental Ego—an inexplicable gift of recording subjectivity such that the external world might be revealed to it, while it yet could not be derived from that world. The reaction of Husserl’s contemporaries was swift and vindictive. The Transcendental Ego sounded to them like a euphemism for God, which indeed it was, and references to a First Principle were strictly enjoined. Just as wickedly, Husserl’s critics charged, he had suggested that the narrow interests of physical science disqualified it from pronouncing on topics external to its purview. Thirty years after Husserl’s death in 1936, ideologically modern philosophers like Jacques Derrida were still—desperately—trying to refute Husserl’s theses. Anticipating Wilson, Husserl declared in so many words that he had exited the cave, proving it to be a cave as well as a prison, and had returned to the cave with that news, but no one wanted to hear it.
II. The discussion might appear to have strayed somewhat from its dedicated topic, Wilson’s Age, and Wilson’s central argument in that book that the strictures of modernity have left human courage gelded, and the stature of man, which appears fully only in the light of extraordinary moments, humiliatingly diminished. The point, however, is to provide a context for The Age. A large portion of that context consists in the strand of Twentieth-Century anti-modern critique that often styles itself as the rebuke of nihilism, the nihilistic impulse furnishing modernity with a deeply-seated and rarely revealed basic motive. The critique of nihilism cannot be other than a critique of puritanical secularity; and that critique will necessarily defer to the religious or mystical view of life, the universe, and everything because it intuits that beyond the mere existence of this world, there is a generative source of being, to the inexplicable generosity of which all existing things, especially the human subject, owe a debt. By redemptive participation in the élan of that source the subject transcends the merely personal or egoistic and he overcomes its paltriness. This anti-modern critique that rejects nihilism first appears decisively in the Romantic Movement at the commencement of the Nineteenth Century. An earlier paragraph has quoted Wordsworth on modern man’s alienation from the natural and divine dimensions. Wordsworth also believed that by cultivating the visionary faculty men might salvage the best part of themselves and participate again in the transcendental cycles. Wilson quotes more habitually from William Blake than from Wordsworth, but he responds to the same motive as that of the Wordsworthian. In his little poem “London,” Blake tells how “I wander thro’ each charter’d street, / Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. / And mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe.” That word chartered exercises even more relevance today than it did in Blake’s day. Managerialism would charter – that is to say, regulate—everything, including the inner life of man; it would even prohibit acknowledgement of the inner life as though the notion were a holdover from some superstitious age—as though it was heresy.
Wordsworth and Blake engendered many successors in the Nineteenth Century, not only in England. The French Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire, for example, deplores the spiritual cowardice of his day. In a notebook entry from the 1840s, Baudelaire writes that “nations—like families—only produce great men in spite of themselves”; in fact, Baudelaire continues, “they make every effort not to produce them.” Elsewhere in his notebooks, Baudelaire opines that “to be a useful person has always appeared to me something particularly horrible.” If life were an end in itself, its own justification to the degree that a man lives it, reducing life to a resource that might be used would be to annihilate it. For just this reason, in yet another notebook entry, Baudelaire writes that “the Revolution and the Cult of Reason confirm the doctrine of sacrifice.” Baudelaire’s meaning in his squib parallels Blake’s meaning in “London.” The Jacobin insurrection let itself be guided by materialist and communist dogmas; it rejected the idea of transcendence and attempted the brutal suppression of the Christian religion. Being materialist and communist, the Revolution was likewise utilitarian. Under its regime of pretended liberation, human beings became a resource, as they are to this day in large corporations. When a man proves himself other than useful, the corporate regime will see fit to discard him. It is useful meanwhile to the corporate regime that people should resemble one another as much as possible so as to be interchangeable. The corporate regime therefore encourages a radical type of conformity at the lowest level, which Baudelaire already saw in the middle of his century. The corporate regime reveals itself through that program as seeking the annihilation of the individual, and it thereby qualifies itself as nihilistic.
Two important early Twentieth Century studies that offer a critique of modernity as necessarily being a critique of nihilism are José Ortega-y-Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses (1929) and Oswald Spengler’s Hour of Decision (1936), both of which Wilson would certainly have known (he comments at length on Spengler in Religion and the Rebel). Ortega remarks the conjunction in modernity’s notion of itself of an auto-idolatrous attitude and a celebration of conformist mediocrity over meritorious individual achievement: “The very name is a disturbing one; this time calls itself ‘modern,’ that is to say, final, definitive, in whose presence all the rest is mere preterite, humble preparation and aspiration towards this present.” The notion ensconces itself in a framework of so-called democracy, which the ancients saw as the equivalent of rule by the rabble. “The mass-man regards himself as perfect,” as Ortega writes; and “it never occurs to the mediocre man of our days, to the New Adam, to doubt of his own plenitude.” The mass-man—being filled to the brim with a baseless self-confidence—rejects all standards, and because standards can only originate in a past, mass-man rejects the past. He is ahistorical; he is cultureless, his only leisure is in entertainment or sport, activities that others perform for him while he spectates. Ortega writes, “When all these things are lacking… there is in the strictest sense of the word, barbarism.” Ortega describes mass-man as moving with the crowd, as merging with the crowd, as finally discarding his individuality altogether by sacrificing it to the crowd. As Ortega puts it in one of his chapter titles, humanity in the age of the masses has devolved to the level of “a statistical fact.” He quotes Friedrich Nietzsche, “I see the flood-tide of nihilism rising.”
Ortega mentions Spengler in The Revolt and Spengler had undoubtedly studied Ortega’s treatise by the time he started to write The Hour of Decision—a book that the National Socialist Government of Germany would ban on its publication. Had Spengler not died in 1936, the same year as Husserl, the totalitarian state would certainly have proscribed him. Spengler’s analysis of nihilism begins with the observation that “the opposite of noble is not poor, but vulgar.” Vulgar sentiments drive “the uprooted masses of great cities” whose ends are reducible to “revenge and destruction.” But revenge on and destruction of what? Anything that might offer an objective measure. Objectivity, a sign of reality, is the devil of crowd which the crowd would expel. Out of such motives, as Spengler writes, “a Radical bloc is formed whose trade is to fight against the formative forces of the Culture and [that] puts the masses in [its] tutelage by means of franchise, freedom of
the press, and terrorism.” Such a mass-mentality will choose ugliness over beauty, slovenliness over decorum, coercion over procedure. “Thus is born Nihilism,” Spengler writes, “the abysmal hatred of the proletarian of higher form of every sort, of culture as its essence, of society as its upholder and historical product.” In the milieu of nihilism, “superiority, manners, taste, and every description of inward rank are crimes.” There can be no heroism of any kind, but only conformity and anonymity. National Socialist propaganda, and Communist propaganda, included a theme of pseudo-heroism, but it consisted entirely in the nihilistic self-sacrifice of the individual to the state. In place of heroism, the modern world has bureaucratic promotion.
In Religion and the Rebel, addressing not The Hour but The Decline, Wilson expresses his admiration for “the depth of intuition” and “the unified vision of history” conveyed in Spengler’s prose. In another comment whose context is the discussion of The Decline, Wilson observes that “the mark of greatness [in human endeavor] is always intuition, not logic.” Wilson concludes that Spengler “was actually a historical existentialist.” Wilson then adds a train of thought that implicates The Age directly and likely also forecasts its major lines of argument. To rise above mediocrity, the human being requires goals that provoke and challenge him. In the Gothic Middle Ages the images of the Apocalypse and the Kingdom of God provoked and challenged people to rise above ordinary achievement, the practical results of which demonstrate themselves in the great Lady Churches of Europe, built according to multi-generational schedules organized and sustained by volunteer organizations acting more or less by improvisation under religious zeal. As Spengler would note, a Lady Church with its flying buttresses expresses an ascendant urge, a struggle to rise above oneself. Wilson, commenting on the Enlightenment, writes: “With eighteenth-century rationalism, the idea of the goal of history disappeared,” with history becoming a meaningless “succession of events”; and this transformation found its codification when “the scientific attitude replaced the religious attitude” and “banished free will from the universe.” Unsurprisingly, Wilson’s own critique of modernity lines up with a discernible tradition of such critique of which Ortega’s book and Spengler’s are exemplars.
Even so, The Age comes across to the reader as a calmer discussion than either Ortega’s or Spengler’s, and calmer again than Wilson’s own earlier discussions in The Outsider and Religion and the Rebel. The range of references while yet broad and deep is somewhat more modest than in the two earlier titles. In its presentation, The Age, at least in its first two chapters, qualifies itself as Wilson’s most American and most academic book, but such remarks constitute no disparagement of it. On the contrary, the very calmness signifies a kind of catching-one’s-breath, a type of rehearsing-to-oneself, very quietly, but still with urgency, the essential points of one’s previously exhortative presentation in a language and with references of which a potentially skeptical readership such as an academic readership might incline to approve. The book’s “American-ness” would derive from its reliance in its first two chapters on the work of two American sociology professors, David Riesman (1909—2002) and William H. Whyte (1914—2000) and of its emphasis on mid-century American literature. Professors have a reputation, whether deserved or not, of boring the audience. Sociology has the reputation, whether deserved or not, for being one of the most boring of academic pursuits—reducing humanity to so many statistical facts. An enthusiast of The Outsider and Religion and the Rebel (not to mention Ritual in the Dark, Wilson’s first novel) would in 1962 hardly have expected their author to defer to the departments of sociology of American universities. Wilson’s intuition was working splendidly, however, for Riesman’s Lonely Crowd (1950) and Whyte’s Organization Man (1956), while cautious and scholarly in the mildly condemnatory sense of the latter term, and while couching themselves in the jargon of the university departments of their day, nevertheless see into the trends seen earlier and reported with greater alarm, perhaps, by Ortega and Spengler, and later by Wilson himself.
Riesman even makes forays into literature. In a discussion of then-current adolescent literature, as propagated through the public schools and therefore carrying an imprimatur of institutional approval, Riesman observes that, in contrast to the adolescent books of the now-superseded “era of inner direction,” the books offered to young readers by the prevailing “other-directed” era work their stories around heroes whose heroism is only ostensible in that it has no internal moral correlative. “Morality in the sense of a literary character’s development, rather than morality in the sense of being on the side of law and right, is not explored in the story.” Riesman’s coinages of “inner-directed” and “other-directed” take the rhetorical edge off their counterpart terms in Ortega and Spengler, a tendency attributable perhaps to the genteel criteria of mid-century academic exposition. Nevertheless those coinages can be seen to link up with their aforementioned counterparts. In his excursion through literary criticism, Riesman devotes a long paragraph to a novel by Helen Howe, We Happy Few (1946), which concerns, in Riesman’s words, “Harvard academic life.” The novel has a hero or rather a heroine, but Riesman is curious that the novelist wishes her protagonist, Dorothea, to de-individualize and lower herself. Riesman writes: “The heroine Dorothea is viewed by Miss Howe as a selfish woman who, during the war, escapes from her social duties by having a love affair and playing Bach and Mozart on the piano.” Howe would “deflate [Dorothea’s] intellectual snobbery.” Thus Howe drags Dorothea through a series of “group-adjusting” experiences among people who are “fine and dull.” One such experience has its scene “in the stench of the ladies room.” We Happy Few and its author are totally forgotten in 2017, but Riesman’s assessment resonates with the critique of nihilism as readers find it in Ortega and Spengler.
Howe’s plot in Riesman’s résumé of it is the opposite of Classical and Medieval hero-narrative, in which the ordeals undertaken and overcome by the protagonist increase his sense of individuality, augment his inner-directedness, while increasing at the same time his value as an exemplar of self-achieved rank in his community. The Nineteenth-Century Bildungsroman adheres to the same plot-outline. Howe seems to belong to Spengler’s vulgate. To be extraordinary is a priori a type of offense to the “dull and fine.” Whatever appears to the crowd as extraordinary it will tear down, invoking its self-endowed and self-leveling privilege to do so. Riesman comments trenchantly on Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead (1948), a moment of interest in The Lonely Crowd because Riesman reaches the same conclusion concerning Rand that Wilson would in an essay in Eagle and Earwig (1965). Rand criticizes the mob, to be sure: “The group is made out not tolerant but mean, inartistic and corrupt”; but “group resistance is seen in terms of nobility on the part of the sadistic hero, who wants to deny any ties to humanity.” Riesman refers to Howard Roark as a “superman for adults.” In sum, “the Ayn Rand audience that applauds the fiery denunciations of group-mindedness and submission to others is quite unaware of its own tendencies to submission in the small, undramatic situations of daily life.” The Great Leveling, as it might be called, operates insidiously even among those whose self-image corresponds to non-conformism. Riesman’s definition of other-directedness should be quoted: “What is common to all the other-directed people is that their contemporaries are the source of direction for the individual—either those known to him or those with whom he is indirectly acquainted, through friends and through the mass media.”
Scrutinizers of the public square in Europe, North America, and most of the rest of the world today have evidence aplenty before their eyes of the prophetic truth in Riesman’s observation, in a way that Riesman could not have imagined in 1951: Everyone today goes about with his cell phone held directly in front of his face. The cell phone represents the perfected technology of other-directedness. As such the cell phone is a dehumanizing, anti-heroic device designed to obliterate internal resource by preventing its formation in the first place and to e
nforce the uninterrupted deferral of one person to another, as fast as the speed of light. Everyone wants to know, second by second, what everyone else is doing, and that is because no one knows what to do—or for that matter what to be—without the cues given by another. The paradox is that with everyone looking for cues it is the cues that define the reality, not the people constantly on lookout for them. As the cues are not really alive, they exercise a deadening effect through their instrumentally mediated propagation.
III. Whyte’s Organization Man reads a bit more ponderously than Riesman’s Lonely Crowd, but a glance through Whyte’s chapter-titles is enough to show that he attunes himself to the same trends and offers the same judgment of them as Riesman. Chapter 3 carries the title “Scientism,” Chapter 4 the title “Belongingness,” and Chapter 16 the title “The Fight against Genius.” The discussion of scientism must have piqued Wilson’s imagination, as he was already familiar with the phenomenon. The ideology of Scientism derives at a late stage from developments centuries earlier in René Descartes’ narrow redefinition of rationality, in John Locke’s “blank slate” anthropology, and in Jeremy Bentham’s theory of Utilitarianism. As Whyte defines it, Scientism is “the practical part of the Social Ethic, for it is the promise that with the same techniques that have worked in the physical sciences we can eventually create an exact science of man,” and after that, an exact technique of man-manipulation. Scientism belonged already to the Jacobin Revolution in France, with its Cult of Reason, to Marxism and Communism, both of which claimed to be scientific, to the socialist regimes of the Twentieth Century, and to the international corporate structures and the supranational nongovernmental organizations that have succeeded those regimes. “Belongingness” is the hive-mentality that Scientism believes it can engineer on the basis of the current, unsatisfactory psyche, which displays far too much spontaneity and idiosyncrasy to serve in its proper function as a unit of resource in a magazine of resources. The “Fight against Genius” adjoins itself to the agenda of reducing all people to a state of “Belongingness.” On this topic, Whyte takes a startlingly classical position: That creativity requires leisure and that leisure is essentially private and individual. Real thinking, Whyte argues, is “purposeless.” And that is because discovery is purposeless, requiring as it does blazing the trail in the absence of any map, and as possessing “an accidental quality.”