There are two ways to get rid of this sin, said the intellectuals. One is to force all children to conform to the ancient rules without ever questioning whether these rules are right or wrong. The other is to study the social patterns that have led to this condemnation and see how they can be altered to allow the natural inclinations of an innocent child to fulfill his needs without this charge of sinfulness arising. If the child is behaving naturally, then it is the society that calls him sinful that needs correction. If children are shown kindness and affection and given freedom to think and explore for themselves, children can arrive rationally at what is best for themselves and for the world. Why should they want to go in any other direction?
The new intellectualism of the twenties argued that if there are principles for right social conduct they are to be discovered by social experiment to see what produces the greatest satisfaction. The greatest satisfaction of the greatest number, rather than social tradition, is what determines what is moral and what is not. The scientific test of a vice should not be, Does society approve or disapprove? The test should be, Is it rational or irrational?
For example, drinking that causes car accidents or loss of work or family problems is irrational. That kind of drinking is a vice. It does not contribute to the greatest satisfaction of the greatest number. On the other hand, drinking is not irrational when it produces mere social or intellectual relaxation. That kind of drinking is not a vice. The same test can be applied to gambling, swearing, lying, slandering or any other vice. It is the intellectual aspect not the social aspect that dictates the answer.
Of all the vices none was more controversial than premarital and extramarital sex. There was no depravity the Victorians condemned more vehemently and no freedom the new intellectuals have defended more ardently. Scientifically speaking, sexual activity is neither good nor evil, the intellectuals said. It is merely a biological function, like eating or sleeping. Denial of this normal physical function for some pseudo-moral reasons is irrational. If you open the door to premarital sex you simply allow freedom that does nobody any harm.
Books such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer were defended as great salients in the struggle against social oppression. Prostitution and adultery laws were eased. It was expected that with the new application of reason, sex could be handled much like other commodities without the terrible tensions and frustrations of social repression exposed by Sigmund Freud.
Thus, throughout this century we have seen over and over again that intellectuals weren’t blaming crime on man’s biological nature, but on the social patterns that had repressed this biological nature. At every opportunity, it seems, they derided, denounced, weakened and undercut these Victorian social patterns of repression in the belief that this would be the cure of man’s criminal tendencies. It was as a part of this new dominance over society that intellectuals became excited about anthropology in the hope that the field would provide facts upon which to base new scientific rules for the proper governing of our own society. That was the significance of Coming of Age in Samoa.
Here in this country, American Indians — who since Custer’s Last Stand had been reduced to near-pariahs by the Victorians — were suddenly revived as models of primitive communal virtue. Victorians had despised Indians because they were so primitive. Indians were at the opposite extreme of society from the Europeans that the American Victorians adored. But now anthros from everywhere swarmed to huts and teepees and hogans of every tribe they could find, jockeying to be in on the great treasure hunt for new information about possible new moral indigenous American ways of life.
This was illogical since, if subject-object science sees no morals anywhere, then no scientific study of any kind is going to fill the moral void left by the overthrow of Victorian society. Intellectual permissiveness and destruction of social authority are no more scientific than Victorian discipline.
Phædrus thought that this lapse in logic magically fitted the thesis he had started with: that the American personality has two components, European and Indian. The moral values that were replacing the old European Victorian ones were the moral values of American Indians: kindness to children, maximum freedom, openness of speech, love of simplicity, affinity for nature. Without any real awareness of where the new morals were coming from, the whole country was moving in a direction that it felt was right.
The new intellectualism looked to the common people as a source of cultural values rather than to the old Victorian European models. Artists and writers of the thirties such as Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, James Farrell, Faulkner, Steinbeck and hundreds of others dug deep into the illiterate roots of white American culture to find the new morality, not understanding that it was this white illiterate American culture that was closest to the values of the Indian. The twentieth-century intellectuals were claiming scientific sanction for what they were doing, but the changes that were actually taking place in America were changes toward the values of the Indian.
Even the language was changing from European to Indian. Victorian language was as ornamental as their wallpaper: full of involutions and curlicues and floral patterns that had no practical function whatsoever, and distracted you from whatever content was there. But the new style of the twentieth century was Indian in its simplicity and directness. Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Dos Passos and many others were using a style that in the past would have been thought crude. Now this style was a reincarnation of the directness and honesty of the common man.
The western movie was another example of this change, showing Indian values which had become cowboy values which had become twentieth-century all-American values. Everyone knew the cowboys of the silver screen had little to do with their actual counterparts, but it didn’t matter. It was the values, not the historical accuracy, that counted.
It was in this new world of technological achievement, of weakening social patterns of authority, of scientific amoralism, of adoration of the common man, and of an unconscious drift toward Indian values, that Phædrus grew up. The drift away from European social values had worked all right at first, and the first generation children of the Victorians, benefiting from ingrained Victorian social habits seem to have been enormously liberated intellectually by the new freedom. But with the second generation, Phædrus' own generation, problems began to emerge.
Indian values are all right for an Indian style of life, but they don’t work so well in a complex technological society. Indians themselves have a terrible time when they move from the reservation to the city. Cities function on punctuality and attention to material detail. They depend on the ability to subordinate to authority, whether it is a cop or an office manager or a bus driver. An upbringing that allows the child to grow naturally in the Indian fashion does not necessarily guarantee the finest sort of urban adjustment.
In the time that Phædrus grew up, intellect was dominant over society, but the results of the new social looseness weren’t turning out as predicted. Something was wrong. The world was no doubt in better shape intellectually and technologically but despite that, somehow, the quality of it was not good. There was no way you could say why this quality was no good. You just felt it.
Sometimes you could see little fragments of reflections of what was wrong but they were just fragments and you couldn’t put them together. He remembered seeing The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, in which one edge of the stage had an arrow-shaped neon sign flashing on and off, on and off, and beneath the arrow was the word, PARADISE, also flashing on and off. Paradise, it kept saying, is right where this arrow points:
PARADISE -→ PARADISE -→ PARADISE -→
But the Paradise was always somewhere pointed to, always somewhere else. Paradise was never here. Paradise was always at the end of some intellectual, technological ride, but you knew that when you got there paradise wouldn’t be there either. You would just see another sign saying:
PARADISE -→ PARADISE -→ PARADISE -→
and poin
ting another direction to go.
On a theater marquee, the title Rebel Without a Cause caught his attention in the same way. It pointed to the same low-quality thing that he saw everywhere but which couldn’t be put into words.
You had to be a rebel without a cause. The intellectuals had preempted all the causes. Causes were to the twentieth-century intellectuals as manners had been to Victorians. There was no way you could beat a Victorian on manners and there was no way you could beat a twentieth-century intellectual on causes. They had everything figured out. That was part of the problem. That was what was being rebelled against. All that neat scientific knowledge that was supposed to guide the world.
Phædrus had no cause that he could explain to anybody. His cause was the Quality of his life, which could not be framed in the objective language of the intellectuals and therefore in their eyes was not a cause at all. He knew that intellectually contrived technological devices had increased in number and complexity, but he didn’t think the ability to enjoy these devices had increased in proportion. He didn’t think you could say with certainty that people are any happier than they were during the Victorian era. This pursuit of happiness seemed to have become like the pursuit of some scientifically created, mechanical rabbit that moves ahead at whatever speed it is pursued. If you ever did catch it for a few moments it had a peculiar synthetic, technological taste that made the whole pursuit seem senseless.
Everyone seemed to be guided by an objective, scientific view of life that told each person that his essential self is his evolved material body. Ideas and societies are a component of brains, not the other way around. No two brains can merge physically, and therefore no two people can ever really communicate except in the mode of ship’s radio operators sending messages back and forth in the night. A scientific, intellectual culture had become a culture of millions of isolated people living and dying in little cells of psychic solitary confinement, unable to talk to one another, really, and unable to judge one another because scientifically speaking it is impossible to do so. Each individual in his cell of isolation was told that no matter how hard he tried, no matter how hard he worked, his whole life is that of an animal that lives and dies like any other animal. He could invent moral goals for himself, but they are just artificial inventions. Scientifically speaking he has no goals.
Sometime after the twenties a secret loneliness, so penetrating and so encompassing that we are only beginning to realize the extent of it, descended upon the land. This scientific, psychiatric isolation and futility had become a far worse prison of the spirit than the old Victorian virtue ever was. That streetcar ride with Lila so long ago. That was the feeling. There was no way he could ever get to Lila or understand her and no way she could ever understand him because all this intellect and its relationships and products and contrivances intervened. They had lost some of their realness. They were living in some kind of movie projected by this intellectual, electromechanical machine that had been created for their happiness, saying
PARADISE -→ PARADISE -→ PARADISE -→
but which had inadvertently shut them out from direct experience of life itself — and from each other.
23
It seemed to Lila that all this was some kind of a dream she was in. Where did it start? She couldn’t remember. Her mind always went faster and faster like this when she got scared. Why did he have to take the pills out of her purse? The pills could have made it not so scary. He must have thought those pills were dope or something. That’s why he took them. She could tell when she needed them by how scary everything got. Now she needed them bad.
She should have got her suitcase this afternoon like she said she was going to. Then she wouldn’t have to go back to the boat like this. Now it was dark.
That damn waiter. He could have given her some money to help her out. Then she could have taken a cab. Now she didn’t have anything. He was acting like she had lied to him. But she hadn’t lied. And he knew she hadn’t lied. He could tell. But that didn’t matter. He had to make it look like she had done something wrong even when he knew she hadn’t done anything wrong.
It was so cold now. The wind went right through this sweater. The streets were so dirty here. Everything was dirty here. Everything was worn out and cold.
It was starting to rain.
She didn’t even know if this was the right way. It seemed like she must be getting close to the river.
When she looked down a street she could see a highway where cars were going fast. But the park wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Maybe her directions got twisted and she was walking the wrong way. The rain was shining in their headlights. She remembered when she and the Captain had walked from the boat there was a park.
Maybe she could just take a taxi and not pay. She saw one coming with its light off. She thought about waving to it but she didn’t do it. In the old days she could have done it. And spit in his face when he tried to collect. But she was so tired now. She didn’t want to fight.
Maybe she should just ask somebody for some money. No, that wouldn’t work. They wouldn’t give it. Not here. It was dangerous going up to people in this city without any reason. They could do anything.
She could go to the cops or go to a shelter somewhere… But they’d find out about her. In this town once they know you’ve got a record you don’t want to see them again.
She didn’t want to walk along the river to get to the boat. She didn’t think she’d like it down there. She’d just stay up until she saw where the marina might be. Then she’d cross down.
That man who looked at her through the restaurant window. That was bad. Ten or fifteen years ago he would have been in that door so fast they couldn’t stop him. Now he just walked away. She remembered what Allie used to say: You never change, honey, but they do. She used to say, When you don’t need 'em they’re all over the place. But when you want one you never find him.
She wondered where Allie was now. She must be about fifty by now. She was probably some old bag lady like the ones she saw yesterday. That’s what Lila was going to be. A bag lady. Sitting on a grate somewhere trying to keep warm with all those old clothes on… Like the witch in the store window. With a big nose with a wart on it hanging down over her chin…
She should touch up her hair. She was really looking ratty now. The rain was getting her hair so wet she must be looking like a witch too.
There was supposed to be a big castle with a high green steeple at the top sticking up in the air. That’s what she remembered. When she got to the castle she should turn down to the river and that’s where the boat should be. She remembered that from when they left.
Her shoes were getting all squishy. Like her clothes and this box of shirts. Maybe she should just stop walking and wait for the rain to stop. But then she wouldn’t get to the castle. Until she got to the castle there was nowhere to stop.
Why didn’t she ever learn not to get mad at people? You always think someone’s going to come along and save you but this time it was too late. Some nice man’s going to come along and save you. Like the Captain there. You always think that, don’t you? But they’re all gone now, Lila. The Captain was the last one. There won’t be any more, Lila. He was the last one.
That’s what the one in the window was telling her.
These shirts she bought for the Captain were getting all wet. He wouldn’t even pay her for them now. Maybe if she could stand in a doorway or something until the rain stopped she could keep the shirts dry. She should have kept the bag they were in. That would have kept them dry. Then she could take the shirts back to the store and she could get some money for a taxi. But she needed a taxi to get back to the store. Besides the store was closed by this time.
The receipt was in the billfold. Maybe they would remember her. No they wouldn’t… Maybe there’ll be some money in the boat. She could just go in and look through all the drawers and places like that. But then she remembered she couldn’t get in the boat. She didn’t have the comb
ination. She’d just have to wait until the Captain came to let her in. But then if he was there she couldn’t look through all the drawers. Maybe he’d give her some money then. No, he was really mad. He wouldn’t give her anything.
Maybe she would walk all night and not find the river. Probably she’d passed the castle. She’d walk and walk and never find it. She couldn’t even ask where the boat was. She didn’t remember the name of the place the boat was at. She just thought it was in this direction.
Maybe she would never find it and she would just walk and walk, on and on.
Then the Captain would just go and sail away and she would never see him again. With all her things! He was going to take her suitcase! All her things! Everything she owned was in there!
She didn’t see any sign of the river. She should ask someone where the boat place on the river is but she didn’t know what to ask for. The buildings changed slowly as she walked. She didn’t know any of them.
Someone was coming on a bicycle. He went right by. It was getting quieter and quieter here now. It looked like a better neighborhood, but you never know. This is where they come.
She must have gone too far. She didn’t remember this neighborhood. She should have stayed close to the river. Soon she’d be up in Harlem somewhere and she didn’t want to be there. Not at night. Some of the windows had iron over them and barbed wire underneath.
There wasn’t any castle. The castle would be skinny with a green pointed top that looked like a space ship, but there wasn’t any.
Why did she have to go and call the Captain names and get him mad like that? Now she didn’t know what she was going to do. If she’d just been mealy-mouthed with him instead of telling him off she’d be on her way to Florida now.
Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals Page 31