Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth

by John C. Wright

  They are Socialists in economic issues, feminists on family questions, Greens on questions of industrial policy, Race-baiters and Hatemongers on questions of race, absurdist in art and vulgarians in culture, totalitarians in politics but libertarians when it comes to questions of vice and victimless crimes. They are materialists on philosophical issues, secularists on religious issues, pacifists on military issues, (unless the question is civil war and the overthrow of their own institutions, whereupon they are bloodthirsty war hawks and apologists, nay, groupies and shrieking bobby-soxers of the world’s filthiest dictators).

  In sum, they are idolaters who substitute the worship of Caesar for the worship of Christ; they are Gnostics in the posture of eternal rebellion both against God in Heaven and civil society on Earth. They are chameleons who adopt any ideals or values or party lines needed for so long as needed to destroy them, including Pragmatism, including Worldliness. They are Politically Correct and factually incorrect.

  They seek to destroy civilized institutions here on Earth and drag Utopia down from heaven to replace them, indifferent, or even glorying, in the bloodshed required.

  To avoid confusion, let us call them Ideologues. They are utterly unworldly, rejecting the pragmatism of the Worldly Man as cold and loveless and unspiritual.

  The Ideologues are as nearly a pure evil as mankind has ever produced or can imagine, but please note that their motives are the highest and noblest imaginable: they seek things of the spirit, peace on earth, food for the poor, dignity given to all men, and all such things which are the only things, the holy things, that can electrify dull mankind and stir him to take up the banner and trumpet and shining lance of high and holy crusade.

  The pure putrefaction of their evil springs from their materialist philosophy, which says that man can create Eden on Earth; and overthrow the Curse on Adam, that he must labor for his bread; overthrow the Curse of Eve, that says she will be subject to her husband; and overthrow the curse on the snake, that says he will be bruised. Merely reaching out one’s hand, breaking all the laws of reason and morality, will allow one’s eyes to be opened, and to be God.

  The materialist philosophy says that in a godless world all we need do to overthrow the laws of economics and the limits of human nature is shed enough blood and make enough sacrifices of other innocent people, and the mouths of endless cornucopias will be opened. You cannot make an omelet without a genocide of innocent eggs, and without Walter Duranty to get a Pulitzer for lying his ass off about it.

  The Ideologue position is a revulsion and a rejection of the Worldly Man and his civilized pragmatism. The Worldly Man accepts necessary evils. The Worldly Man is willing to go to war for peace, and willing to tolerate his neighbor for peace. The Ideologue tolerates no one and nothing, not even an unspoken thought, if it is against the Party, against the Program, against the Great Leader, or against the Great Dream. The Ideologue is a heresy-hunter. But he is also a coward, since he is not willing to go to war; it revolts him that reality makes war necessary. He thinks peace comes from placating enemies with gifts, or enlightening them through education to the wonders of the Great Dream.

  A third school of thought is in sharp rebellion against the first two. These are otherworldly types, Theosophists and Spiritualists and New Age gurus and believers in various Americanized forms of Buddhism or Witchcraft or Astrology who utterly reject both the materialistic worldliness of the Worldly Man, and the fanaticism and bloodlust of the Ideologue.

  The otherworldly men seek peace through renunciation, and escape from the turmoil of life through the pursuit of inner tranquility, perhaps aided by mystic visions, meditations, or voices from the outer worlds, or hallucinogenic drugs.

  Not for them the looming smokestacks of the scientifically planned socialist utopia of the Ideologues, nor the loud billboards and hungry strip malls of the Worldly. They want to live in Hobbiton, or Arcadia, or with the tribes that only exist in the imagination of Rousseau, noble savages in harmony with nature, or perhaps the movie Dances With Wolves or Avatar (not the real one).

  This movement has never been numerous enough to merit its own name, and although they often combine with their enemies, the Ideologues against their mutual enemies the Worldly Men, these otherworldly men have no name. Call them Spiritualists.

  The Spiritualists are utterly unpragmatic and irrational about their religious sentiments. They are the type of men who believe in angels but not in God. They have no use for theology or reasoning about spiritual or moral issues, much less metaphysics. They are the dilettantes and aesthetes of the spirit world, seeking sensation rather than understanding, novelty rather than certainty, seeking a spiritual truth that will serve them and flatter them and provide for them, not a God whom they must serve.

  They feel toward the things of the spirit what the Worldly Man feels towards worldly goods in the marketplace. The only thing the Spiritualist does not want is a final answer, an organized religion, a Church. He wants to hear gossip from the Ghost of Cleopatra but not words of power from the Prophet Jeremiah. The only thing the spiritual seeker does not want is for the Holy Spirit to come to seek him out.

  The Spiritualists are as nearly worthless in peace or war as it is possible for any warm bodies occupying space and breathing in otherwise useful oxygen can be, but their motive is noble and high and pure. They suffer the same revulsion about worldliness and the same yearning for something better as does a hermit standing on a pillar in the desert.

  Their drive is indeed purely spiritual, but it does not drive them toward the only reality worth seeking in the spirit world, namely, the Holy Spirit. Hence the effort is self-centered, reaches nowhere, inspires no social revolutions, builds no observatories, erects no universities, opens no charity hospitals, captures no Holy Lands, kills no Saracens, galvanizes no missionaries to spread the Good News of Fashionable Theosophist Blither to the unenlightened savages. Charity, the burning love of the Christian, is impossible in the Spiritualist framework because charity requires an objective standard of values, a living truth as terrible as unquenchable fire, and not merely a selfish seeking for truth.

  Although much less violent and much, much, much less dishonest than the Ideologues, the Spiritualists are also, ironically, farther from God and farther from the truth. The Ideologue is at least willing to join a crusade, man a barricade, march in a protest, send money and mash notes to gangsters in Russia and sadists in Cuba, and falsify news reports about the murders and enormities of their fellow travelers.

  The Ideologue has a perverted ideal of charity toward the poor and downtrodden in the same way that the homosexual has a perverted ideal of romantic love; and it is just as sterile and vile. But in the same way that the sodomite at least is a step above masturbation, in that his love at least turns outward toward another man, the Ideologue is at least concerned with destroying allegedly unjust social institutions such as church and state and marriage and sanity, whereas the Spiritualist wishes, like the shy cenobite, to withdraw from the shock and jar of the world and seek the ineffable in private. Spiritualism is the otherworldly version of the Sin of Onan.

  The final school of thought is not a school of thought at all, but an exhausted rejection of thought. This is Nihilism, and it is the dominant philosophy of our age, and the unspoken assumption underlying nearly every major social policy debated or enacted today.

  Nihilism is the metaphysical posture that no truth is actually true. If no truth is true, life is what you yourself have the strength of will to decree it to be, like God separating Light from Darkness at the dawn of time, by fiat. If no truth is true, no flag is truly worth dying for or fighting for or even arguing about, and no marriage is final and no contract is binding and your word of honor means nothing, and you owe your friends no loyalty.

  If no truth is true, the only impermissible sin is to believe and preach and practice the truth.

  Nihilism shares with Worldliness its patience for dissent. Since no truth is true, there is no point in dis
agreeing with another man, nor even having a deep conversation with him on any topic, not even to discover whether he disagrees or not.

  Nihilism shares with Ideologues their contempt for worldly and material things, for ambition and self-made men. None of these things are worth seeking in and of themselves, but only if you, in your godlike self-sovereignty, deem or decree them to be worth seeking.

  Nihilism shares with Spiritualism its distaste for theology or reason or organized religion.

  The Nihilist lives in a formless void, and believes only in himself, his willpower, his self-image and his self-esteem. His motto is that life is what you make it.

  He sees the long and tragic history of man, with all its kings and slaves and wars and empires and monarchs and democracies and despots and with all its philosophers and saints and sages, and sees that none of these things have brought peace.

  And so he condemns all systems, all sagacity and all saintliness to oblivion, and promises that as soon as men realize that there is nothing in the universe, then nothing will be worth fighting for, and man will have peace.

  The Nihilist does not mention that man will no longer be man in any recognizable sense of the word, merely a dull lump of meat seeking to beguile the hours with diversions both refined and profane until kindly death relieves him of the intolerable burden of a conscious existence he did not seek and does not use. Nihilism is the cult of death.

  Unlike the Worldly Man, or the Ideologue, or the Spiritualist, the Nihilist seeks nothing but to bolster his self-esteem and entertain himself to death. Nihilism is an end-state. There is no room for a rebellion away from Nihilism because there is nothing away from which to rebel.

  The reason why I say the scheme of Seraphim Rose maps out the mental landscape from now until the end of the world is that Nihilism is a dead end. There is no further point of degeneration beneath which to fall. Once your philosophy tells you all philosophy is vain, you cannot erect a new philosophical variation on that foundation. There will never be such a thing as Neo-Nihilism or Post-Nihilism.

  The reason why I say the scheme is complete is that there are no other major variations possible, once Christianity is abandoned, for a worldview.

  Christianity is the only religion that combines reason, ethics, spiritualism and individualism into one coherent theological picture of the cosmos and man’s place in it. Christianity is the center of the map of possible worldviews. Everything that deviates from it abandons one of these or the other in order to emphasize its opposite.

  Imagine the map with reason to the north, spiritualism to the south, individualism to the west, and ethics to the east.

  The Worldly Man moves north toward great Reason, abandoning the mysticism of Spiritualism to the south. He keeps his ethics and his individualism, but in a distorted form; for he attempt to shift ethics and individualism onto a secular footing, and give practical rather than idealistic reasons to justify his ideals.

  The Ideologue moves east, abandoning individualism and self-centeredness in favor of the great collectivist daydream of a unified crusade to create a unified world. His effort, odd as it sounds considering the appalling evil of his means and goals, is toward ethics. He wants life to have an overall ethical meaning, a crusade, a moral structure worthy of his devotion. Absent God, of course, what he gets is a political party. His spiritualism becomes distorted and placed on a secular footing, so that instead of seeking the Utopia of the New Jerusalem in Heaven, he seeks the Utopia of the Socialist Commonwealth in Tomorrowland, and instead of worshiping God he worships science, (or, rather, SCIENCE!), which promises him an endless uplift to superhuman wealth and power. His reason is likewise distorted. Reason becomes ‘freethinking’ which means an idolatry of scientific materialism, and involving a loss of philosophy and free inquiry. Instead of debate, the freethinker merely accuses his opponents of bigotry and bias, or undermines the opponent’s argument as being illegitimate for some other reason. And this he calls reason, and he is much inflated with his self-opinion on how reasonable and scientific he is.

  The Spiritualist moves south, losing sight of reason, seeking intuition and mystic revelation. He is an individualist in that his quest is a lonely one, but whether it ends in the Buddhist desire to quench the self, or in the Christian desire for redemption and glorification via non-Christian means, cannot be known beforehand. His ethics continue but they are distorted in the opposite fashion as the Worldly Man’s, for the Spiritualist seeks emotional and mystical and ineffable reasons for his ethical behavior. Moral rules have force not because they were revealed by God, but because they were revealed by personal visions.

  The Nihilist moves toward individualism and abandons ethics. He keeps a distorted view of spirituality and reason, just enough to justify his belief in himself and his own ability to create his own reality for himself.

  Again, we may be able to assign certain meaning to the diagonals of this diagram, such as by placing Fabians, (peaceful Ideologues, socialists rather than communists), to the northeast, or Nazis with their mystical worship of Blood and Iron to the southeast, Libertarians and other arch-rational individualists to the northwest, and Satanists and Witches with their self-centered view of the spirit world, which they regard as no more than a source of power, to the southwest.

  There is of course a pagan worldview possible before Christianity is introduced, and heretical or breakaway worldviews copying only some aspects of Christianity, such as Islam or Mormonism. But as a practical matter, classical paganism has been absorbed into the Christian worldview and baptized, so that one cannot be an Aristotelian or Neoplatonist or Stoic without gravitating toward Christianity. Neopaganism has nothing to do with paganism except its name: Neopagans are Spiritualists, men seeking an undemanding form of spirituality without the demands of a strict moral code. Pre-Christian schools of thought would tend to gravitate nearer the center, with Oriental religions such as Taoism toward the spiritual, Oriental systems like Confucianism toward the ethical, (away from the individual), and Greek philosophy toward the reason.

  We can also assign the various Protestant sects positions nearer and farther from the center. Calvinists and Lutherans, for example, who have a deep mistrust both of Aristotelian philosophy and organized religion, might be placed either westward or southward of the very center, more spiritual or more individual, or, due to their greater keenness to avoid the evils of drink and concupiscence, the Puritans might be placed immediately to the east, closer to the ethical pole.

  But this would involve needless complications, and give an appearance of particularity where none exists: this chart is good only as a very rude overview of what large numbers of smart people, taken as a group, have in common in their thinking, and the commonality is one of mood and worldview, not one of specific philosophical axioms.

  We science fiction fans can, however, place any author famous for any strong opinions without much debate on this map. (We are only identifying how the way each portrays his characters betrays his view of man in the cosmos, not making any bold assumption about what the author himself might think on a given issue.)

  Heinlein and the John W. Campbell, Jr. authors, whether conservative or liberal on any particular question, portrayed in their books a view of man as strong and independent, a creature evolved to explore, expand, and conquer: they are Worldly Men, ranging to the north. Ursula K. Le Guin portrayed a view of man as a creature best served by seeking a tranquil life, preferably in a bucolic setting. She is to the south, a Spiritualist, specifically a Taoist. China Mieville is an Ideologue; Michael Moorcock is a Nihilist.

  Armed with this perhaps over complex and inefficient classification system, the stance of Tancredi Dalton, and perhaps of Keith Laumer, becomes more clear. Like a character in a Noir story, Tan is a tarnished knight, someone who does the right thing despite the jeers and brickbats of the world, not for the greater glory of God and recompense in heaven, but for no glory and without recompense. It is an absurdly bitter worldview, for it calls upon m
en to embrace the tribulations and torments of martyrdom, but denies them the martyr’s palm in heaven. The most you can hope for is the quiet nod of fatherly approval from your own conscience.

  Dalton’s stance is that of a purely Worldly Man who has pulled away from the spiritual axis of the map so far that the question is not even raised once in the text, and the only mention of God is in the context of what not to pretend to be. But he is still near enough to the center to admire and promote Christian ideals of knightly behavior, such as mercy toward a fallen foe, or such as keeping one’s word of honor, which have clear justification in the Christian worldview but only sentimental justification, or none, in a pagan worldview or a pragmatic one.

  But Dalton is drifting, rudderless and unanchored, toward the drear and muddy waters of Nihilism. The only source of his moral code is a brusque Darwinian view of the inevitability of war, due, (of all stupid things), to population pressures and pollution increases. This view cannot logically justify honor toward a fallen foe nor self-sacrifice when faced by a dilemma, but it can justify those things in terms of mood and worldview, that is, man is presented as being both foolish and brave for climbing from the safe tree to the dangerous lion-haunted grasslands, and this foolhardiness will carry him one day to the stars, but will not banish the lion from the haunted darkness, nor make it lie down with the lamb.

  This is the point of view of a Western man, raised in a culture seeped with Christian notions of chivalry and fair play and equality and nobility, but who has lost confidence in the center. It is the point of view of the knight errant who lacks faith in the crusade, and hides the red cross he wears.

  We must also add a historical note to put this in perspective:

  The 1970′s, when this was written, at the height of the Cold War, was a low point, perhaps the lowest point, in the confidence of the West.