Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth

by John C. Wright

  Let me explain what I mean. I propose that, with minor variations or precursors, in the modern world, there are only three true and honest philosophies which make an honest attempt to deal with the intolerable truth of the world of despair and death in which we live.

  Here again is the intolerable truth: without hope of heaven, without true love, every single desire and aspiration of any kind whatsoever is in vain, for in time, long or short, all pleasure will be gone, and even the pleasure of memory will fail as memory fades.

  Death comes unto all estates: princes, prelate, potentates, both rich and poor of all degree. His awful strike no man can flee. Timor Mortis Conturbat Me.

  Even an elf as immortal as Oberon would perish when the Earth is swallowed by the sun; even a living machine, long ago having lost all trace of his human origin, who flees beyond the farthest star, will in time be overcome by entropy, degrade, and perish.

  The three ways to deal with this intolerable truth are Stoicism, Hedonism, Christianity. Stoicism is true to the character of the noble pagan; Hedonism to that of the ignoble.

  When I speak of pagans, I do not mean only those who serve the classical gods and spirits of wood and mountain, sky and underworld. I include their modern brethren who believe in nothing but mortal matter and mortal minds.

  Those who speak in cold tones about how life is a Darwinian war of all against all, and pity and mercy have no place, but the state needs self-sacrifice and noble courage to fall in battle if the state is to survive — such men are pagans even if they are atheists, because they are Stoics. They are dignified and noble, but doomed, for in their world mankind is the most rough and tough hardcore streetfighter in the circus of life, and we will flourish until some monsters rougher and tougher overwhelm us, and we go down fighting, gaily, to the unmarked grave. Read Robert Heinlein’s STARSHIP TROOPERS if you want an undisguised dose of such rhetoric.

  Likewise, those who speak of life as a hunt for pleasure, the soaring fumes of wine sparkling in the sun or the profound kisses of women in the dark, and that the deep matters of the end of life or the ends of life need not concern us, for today we laugh, and scorn those who mock our fellowship and cheer — such men are pagans, even if they are atheists, for they crown themselves with floral wreathes and loll at ease like lotus-eaters. Read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley to see the logical outcome of such a philosophy in action.

  Hedonism seeks to distract the mind with pleasures, and find fulfillment in them, as a means to turn away from the looming and silent inevitability of death. It says, let us eat and drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

  Stoicism turns to look at the oncoming night, and, knowing there is no remedy, seeks to train the soul to die without fear or tears. The choice is to die with dignity like a man or to die shrieking and begging like a slave. The Stoic logic is cold and irrefutable: man has no power to avert death forever, nor to escape pain, but he does have the power to do his duty and to adjust his mind to reality, and live according to nature, that is, according to logic. What he cannot avert or avoid, such as death, he accepts with tranquility; what he can avert and avoid, such as falsehood or immodesty or cravenness, he rejects absolutely.

  The Stoic teaches that man can only find what tranquility is open to him, within his own mind, where he is sovereign, but in absolute obedience to reason, which is to say, to the conscience. And he leaves the world to inflict pain and wounds and death upon him when so events decree, and he suffers without fear and without regret, knowing that these external things are indeed indifferent to him. He takes firm hold only of what is in his grasp, namely, his soul, and he does not reach for things beyond him, namely, his fortune and his body and his life.

  The Christian is akin to the Stoic in despising the world, but surrenders more, even his own soul, into hands he trusts more than he trusts his own, and he hopes for more than merely tranquility and the hope of enduring pain with dignity. He does not resign himself to death, because his Master has overcome it, and promises to share the endless joy of that infinite victory with any who follow Him.

  For the pagan, wishing on a star, or holding a feather of hope to help one to fly, or trying to overcome the rude nature of our birth so as to grow one day into a real boy, all these things, if at all, are pleasing distractions.

  They are the distractions of the hedonist, the child’s version of sex and drugs and rock and roll, and the suicide by morphine in the needle of a euthanasia doctor, once hope for luxurious pleasure in life is gone.

  For the Christian, wishing on a star is childhood practice to train the sterner mind of young women and men to wish upon the Bethlehem Star. Holding onto hope as thin and light as a feather is practice to train for grasping angels’ feathers as they bear us aloft in rapture. Seeing puppets made in the image and likeness of man grow by miracle into the higher life of man is practice for man growing into the higher life into which he is made.

  Fairy tales are sometimes claimed by the pagans to be their special property, growing from their traditions. Nonsense. They are as thoroughly Christian as diatonic music, or chivalry, or the Gothic Arch, or the romance, or the Gregorian calendar, and the pagan names for months and weekdays mean only that those lesser gods are now vassals of our greater.

  Greek tragedies, I grant you, belong to the pagans, and express in perfect clarity the hopelessness of a world where death leads either to nothingness, or to the endless suffering of an endless torture-wheel of reincarnation.

  No doubt some alert reader will object that there are many other views of life, many other ways of addressing the tragedy of the human condition aside from these three. What about the Eudaimonism of Aristotle, or the sober philosophy of Confucius? What about the mysticism of Lao Tzu, the sublime visions of Theosophy, the rash boldness of Nietzsche, or the Millenarianism of Marx? What about the faithful Mohammedan or the observant Jew? Surely none of these fit into those three categories.

  If the categories are taken in their broad sense, these three suffice: whatever is not done for duty and not done for pleasure is done for the sake of the divine. Buddha preached a mystical form of Stoicism, but it was still an attempt to reject the attachments human nature forms to vain and transitory life in this world. Confucius sought the good in the discipline of the social order, and this was to serve human ends defined by duties and pleasures: a combination of Stoic and Hedonistic philosophy. Nietzsche was a pure hedonist, but his pleasure was in spiritual pride, and he scorned bodily pleasures. Mohammedanism is an offshoot of Christianity and Judaism is a precursor, but both place faith in God rather than in duty or pleasure. In sum, there are only three reasons for any ethical imperative: you should do this because you ought to, (and it is noble to do as one ought, no matter any pain involved); you should do this because you want to, (or you should want to, considering your long term best interest); you should do this because God wants you to.

  If I wanted to be technically accurate, I would distinguish between Hedonists, who seek base and bodily pleasures only, and Epicureans, who seek the longer lasting and truer pleasures involved in a clean conscience, good fellowship, the educated life and the uplifted sentiment — but even this endless essay must have some metes.

  Back to the matter:

  So the second clatter of the tumbler falling into place was hearing this sad, doomed voice of a tired old man, old as Nestor, still talking with the zest of youth about how he had created his own life himself, by his rules, made himself, saved himself, and owed nothing to any.

  And I seemed to see his face, still boasting vainly and smiling an empty smile, as it might look if he were trapped in a coffin of glass like Snow White, and sinking ever deeper into a dark and silent ocean with no farther shore and no bottom, drifting slowly out of sight into oblivion, void, and darkness. If his nerve does not break, he can spend his last hours in the airless oblong box playing with his fingers and toes, or writing brave sonnets in his blood on the inner surface of the cover.

  Do not think for a moment
I am mocking or joking. I would honor and salute any man brave enough to face that prospect unafraid. All my life I sought such stoic courage as that, and indeed, deemed it the only prize in life worth having: the Stoic fortitude to live life without craving life. Ah, but experience is a cunning jester. The only time I ever lost my fear of death and become a true Stoic was the hour when the Holy Spirit came to me and baptized my soul, and I became a Christian and left the vain and empty arrogance of Stoicism behind forever. Throwing my Stoic philosophy to the wind, I found the Christ returned that and more to me.

  Because Christianity is the fulfillment and perfection of human nature, and humans should not fear death, not after death is swallowed up in Christ. Stoicism, much as I admire it, was an early attempt to abolish human nature, by decreeing certain fears and desires absolutely central to human nature, such as the desire for life and fear of death, to be illogical and unbecoming.

  Let us return to the question from whose seed this oak of vast and sprawling essay sprung. Why are the Abolishers of Man filled with hatred for all things normal to human sentiment and human pleasure, of which Disney, by his sheer charm and goodwill, surely must serve as the best example of optimism, hope, wishing upon those highest and fairest and brightest of things we call stars?

  Why are the Abolishers so angry, so unhappy, so noisy, so bent on destruction and on self-destruction?

  I will tell you the secret of happiness Oriental sages sought in vain for eons. It is gratitude. When you are grateful for it, a spoonful is a feast. When ungrateful, a feast is a spoonful.

  The Abolishers have fled their source of strength, which is Christ. The noble ones fled to Stoicism or some form or variation of it, such as Buddhism, the hardheaded willingness to take the harsh world at it is, without complaint. The ignoble ones fled to the harem and the barroom and the opium joint, seeking to drown their awareness of life’s harsh reality in the soft haze of distraction and entertainment. The ignoble pagan becomes infantile and whiny, and wants his Nanny and Nurse to do everything for him, from wipe his bottom to pat his fluffy head and feed him pablum. These cravings are shifted by a psychological maladjustment to the government in this modern time, hence, the modern Liberal movement.

  Do you see? The noble pagan condemns Christian hope as if it were the false haze of distraction and diversion of the ignoble pagan. The noble pagan cannot tell the difference between the ignoble pagan’s desire for the opium of paradise, and the hard command of Christ that we take up our crosses and follow Him. One moron actually called Christianity the opium of the masses.

  Hence, the noble pagan thinks hope is false and despair is truth.

  When one knows despair, there is no room for gratitude. Hence, no gratitude, hence, no happiness.

  They can never be happy, and so their hearts are restless.

  Another quote from Chesterton is here needed:

  … the pagan was (in the main) happier and happier as he approached the earth, but sadder and sadder as he approached the heavens. The gaiety of the best Paganism, as in the playfulness of Catullus or Theocritus, is, indeed, an eternal gaiety never to be forgotten by a grateful humanity. But it is all a gaiety about the facts of life, not about its origin.

  To the pagan the small things are as sweet as the small brooks breaking out of the mountain; but the broad things are as bitter as the sea. When the pagan looks at the very core of the cosmos he is struck cold. Behind the gods, who are merely despotic, sit the fates, who are deadly. Nay, the fates are worse than deadly; they are dead.

  The common bond is in the fact that ancients and moderns have both been miserable about existence, about everything, while mediaevals were happy about that at least. I freely grant that the pagans, like the moderns, were only miserable about everything—they were quite jolly about everything else. I concede that the Christians of the Middle Ages were only at peace about everything—they were at war about everything else.

  The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live. Yet, according to the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic, this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled.

  Joy ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must cling to one corner of the world. Grief ought to be a concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread through an unthinkable eternity.

  This is what I call being born upside down. The sceptic may truly be said to be topsy-turvy; for his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstacies, while his brain is in the abyss. To the modern man the heavens are actually below the earth. The explanation is simple; he is standing on his head; which is a very weak pedestal to stand on. But when he has found his feet again he knows it.

  Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man’s ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small. The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness in a sick-room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy: because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.

  Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.

  Perhaps, like me, you have wondered how it is that so many people, otherwise honest, can adopt without demur the Orwellian anti-language of Political Correctness; how it is that so many people, otherwise rational, can adopt without demur the paradoxes, self-contradictions and logical absurdities involved in relativistic morality, materialistic ontology, subjective epistemology, and the other nuggets of vacuous blither forming the foundations of modern thought; how it is that so many people, otherwise possessing good taste, can without demur fund and support and praise the blurry aberrations of modern art, praise ugliness, despise beauty; how it is that so many people, otherwise good and peaceful, can praise and support and excuse the hellish enormities and mass murders of figures like Che and Mao and Stalin and Castro, and make such enemies of the human race into heroes; or can view with cold eye the piles of tiny corpses heaped outside abortion mills; or can rush to the defense of Mohammedan terrorists with freakish shrieks of ‘Islamophobia!’ and ‘Racist!’ even though to be wary of Jihadists bent on your destruction is rational rather than phobic, and even though Mohammedanism is a religion, not a race; how otherwise happy, moral, reasonable and decent people can not merely excuse sexual perversion, but will be swept up in a fervor of righteous indignation even if someone points out the biological or Biblical reality of the situation; and likewise excuse lies in their leaders, and adulteries, and abuses of power, and abuses of drugs, and any number of things these otherwise ordinary people would never do themselves.

  And, finally, perhaps, as have I, you have wondered why it is that these people who are otherwise civil nonetheless can neither explain their positions nor stop talking, and their talk consists of nothing, nothing, nothing aside from childish personal attacks, slanders, sneers, and accusation, accusation, accusation. Why are they so angry? Why are they so noisy? Why are they so blissfully unaware of the vice, injustice, ugliness and evil they support?

  As I said in a previous essay, I had an insight into the answer, or part of the answer, to this question. It is an answer which I
do not pretend is original, but which I happened never to have seen before, so it is new to me.

  The insight grew out of three conversations and one non-conversation.

  Two of those conversations, (and one non-conversation), I have described previously, and they convinced me that the core of postmodern, Progressive thought, or, (to be precise), thought-avoidance mechanisms, consists of the following:

  (1) Human nature is cultural, that is, manmade.

  (2) Your nature is made by you, including your natural talents, gifts and good fortune.

  (3) There is no point in discussing the matter.

  I examined these points previously. First, if human nature is cultural, then the sorrows and limitations of human nature, including such things as the inevitability of death and the ineluctability of decay can be met and overcome by some change to the culture, some progressive improvement to our laws and customs. However, in reality, the attempts to change the culture lead to four stages of decay, from the Christian to the Worldly Man, to the Ideologue, to the Mystic, to the Nihilist. The conclusion of my investigation was that the belief that human nature is infinitely plastic or pliant leads to despair.

  Second, if individual nature is personal, then for the sorrows and failures of life you have none to blame but yourself; and likewise for the glories and accomplishments you have no one to whom to be grateful, nor to give thanks, but yourself.

  Again, if individual nature is personal, and death is inevitable, the only available philosophies to contend with this intractable fact are the Stoic or the Hedonistic, which means either the idea of living for duty or the idea of living for pleasure.

  The conclusion of my investigation was that individualism logically necessitates ingratitude as the default emotional response to life. This is an airless and suffocating emotional atmosphere, one not suited to sustain human psychology.