The Essential Colin Wilson

by Colin Wilson

'I cannot honestly advise you to do the same, unless you feel strongly so inclined. But I have observed in you signs of a kind of perception similar to my own. Do not try to force this; but in the event of your wishing to retire into solitude, I have made provision in my will, which is in the hands of Mr Pollard of Lake and Pollard . . .'

  There followed a sub-heading: 'Summary of my religion and philosophy', which occupied some twenty pages. The deterioration of the handwriting indicated that it had been written some time later. I shall not quote it because it seems to me that his attitude has already been explained clearly enough in the section quoted already. Only one phrase strikes me as immediately important, and this is part of a sentence that is only half decipherable; the phrase is: 'What is the logical response to being alive?'

  There is only one thing to add. Aunt Bertha told me that, two days before he died, Uncle Sam went into a kind of trance; he refused to eat, and stared in front of him with a strange, fixed expression. But Aunt Bertha told me that she thought it was an expression of joy. A few hours before he died, he drew her attention by tugging at her dress (she was asleep in an armchair beside the bed) and indicated that he wanted a pencil.

  But when she handed it to him, his hand shook so that he could hardly write. Finally, after several efforts, he managed to scrawl: 'I saw it'. He then dropped back, looking exhausted, and died quietly an hour or so later. The paper disappeared after the funeral.

  This puzzled me. If Uncle Sam had written: 'I saw Him', it might have made sense; he had spent twenty years waiting for a vision of God; but Aunt Bertha was quite definite about it; the final pronoun had been 'it'. I still have no idea of what he meant, although I suppose it is remotely possible that he was referring to some vision of the purpose of human life. Whatever it was that he saw, it had the effect of Aquinas's final vision; it robbed him of the desire to go on living.

  PEAK EXPERIENCE

  I delivered the Schumacher Lecture at Bristol University in July 1982. 1 was speaking without notes, so the style leaves something to be desired—although the tape-recorded version, printed in the magazine Resurgence, here been revised.

  I was going to write a book about Schumacher just before he died—I feel that his ideas were a natural extension, in a social direction, of my own work.

  I had always been preoccupied with the problem of the person who stands alone in a society that he feels to be too big and too impersonal. This was the basic theme of The Outsider.

  Somewhere in The Outsider I say that I feel the Outsider dislikes the whole idea of civilization itself, because it destroys the sense of individuality. That is, of course, a deliberate overstatement. And yet, lecturing in America not long after The Outsider came out, I was struck by the awful impersonality of the universities, where in many cases the classes were so big that the students had to sit in other rooms watching the lecture on a TV monitor. I could see clearly that it must be almost impossible for many of these students to get that personal, individual feeling that could develop into creativity.

  Because this, it seems to me is the fundamental aim of civilization. This is what it is about. It is an attempt to promote creativity in the individual, because this is the highest thing of which the individual is capable.

  In the late 1950s, I received a letter from the American psychologist Abraham Maslow, who was writing to me about a book of mine called The Age of Defeat. Maslow said that I was attacking the same problem that had obsessed him for years: that our civilization has a kind of premise of defeat—that our art, our literature, our culture seems to spring from the notion that ultimately the individual cannot make much of an impression on the civilization; he is helpless, a mere member of the crowd.

  Maslow also sent me some of his papers. I must admit that when I read their rather academic titles, I delayed reading them for a long time. When I did start to read one of the papers, about six months later, I was immediately excited by Maslow's central thesis, which was this: that psychologists are always studying sick people, because sick people are always talking about their sickness, while nobody had ever thought of studying healthy people, because healthy people never talk about their health. Maslow argued that we would do better to study the healthy. He enquired among his friends, asking, 'Who is the healthiest person you know?' And then he proceeded to study a number of these healthy people, and was amazed to discover something that no one had ever discovered before, because no one had ever thought of studying healthy people: that is, most of them appeared to experience with a fair degree of frequency what Maslow called 'peak experiences'. These were just sudden bubbling, overwhelming moments of happiness. They were not in any sense mystical experiences. A young mother was watching her husband and kids eating breakfast, when suddenly a beam of sunlight came in through the window, and she thought, 'Aren't I lucky', and went into the peak experience. A hostess who had just given a very successful party, looking around the room at the cigarette butts trampled into the carpet, and the wine spilled on the armchairs, nevertheless suddenly went into the peak experience. Maslow said that the peak experience seemed to characterize all healthy people. It was basically a sudden powerful surge of unconscious vitality. I was immensely struck by this, and wrote to Maslow about it. I ended by writing a book about him called New Pathways in Psychology.

  As soon as I read Schumacher's Small is Beautiful, I could see that this was a logical extension of Maslow's ideas—that the healthy person is the person who does not feel overwhelmed by his environment. He doesn't feel helpless, he doesn't feel a cog in a machine; he preserves a sense of drive, of individuality and creativity. And clearly the problem for the whole civilization is this problem of how to keep things 'small' enough, so that as many people as possible can experience the sense of individuality.

  I recognized that my own background in Leicester, my home town, had exercised a strong influence on me, largely because it was so claustrophobic and boring. And the same appears to be true of an enormous number of writers of the present century: James Joyce's Dublin, Bernard Shaw's Dublin, H. G. Wells's Lewisham, Arnold Bennett's Burslem, Proust's Combray—all very small places that enable their inhabitants to feel individual among other individuals. Of course, what it really amounts to is feeling yourself to be a small fish in a small pond. If you are a small fish in a big pond you are bound to lack that sense of individuality. I recognized this when I first went to London at about the age of nineteen: the feeling of being completely lost in crowds—that if I was knocked down by a bus, nobody would care. Obviously, we all crave this sense of individuality. Now Maslow had recognized that human beings appear to evolve through a series of needs, or values; he called it 'the hierarchy of needs'.

  What he meant was this: that if a person was starving and had never had a square meal in his life, then he would dream about food and imagine that perfect happiness would be to have one really good meal every day. Yet if he achieved this, the next level would emerge: the need for security, for a roof over one's head. (This is why every tramp daydreams of a country cottage with roses round the door.) If he achieves this 'territorial' level, then the next level emerges: the need for love, for a feeling of belongingness, of intimacy with another person or persons. If these needs are satisfied too, says Maslow, then the next level emerges: the need for self-esteem, the need to be respected and liked by other people. This is the level at which women invite the neighbours to coffee mornings, and men join Rotary Clubs.

  If the self-esteem level is thoroughly satisfied, then, said Maslow, the next level—with luck—emerges (and he said 'with luck' because, for some reason, many people do not appear to ever reach this level): this is the creative level, what Maslow called 'self-actualization'. By this, he didn't necessarily mean art or science or some other form of creativity. Self-actualization means doing something purely for the pleasure of doing it well. In one case he cited, a woman was particularly good at fostering children, and continued to do this when her own children were grown up. Another man was skilful at putting ships
in bottles, and he did it brilliantly: obviously, this satisfied the self-actualizing need in him. Self-actualization seems to be the pinnacle of the hierarchy of needs.

  Fortunately, in our society, most people have achieved the first three levels anyway—the basic needs for food, for security and for some kind of warm human relationship. The need that a majority of people have still not satisfied, and that becomes increasingly urgent in a society like ours, is the self-esteem need—the need, if you like, for some kind of 'recognition', if only by a very small group of neighbours and friends. And this is obviously one of the basic problems of our civilization, with its increasing tendency to de-individuation: self-esteem. It obviously cannot be satisfied if you are in such an enormous pond that you feel alienated from everybody else—in other words, if you feel a nobody.

  This is what I identified in The Outsider as the basic Outsider problem. Now, it seemed to me that in recognizing that it is possible to decentralize society, to live in much smaller units, Schumacher had made an immensely important contribution. He had, of course, been anticipated by idealists like G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who called their political philosophy 'Distributism'; it was usually summarized in the phrase 'Two acres and a cow'. Clearly, two acres and a cow would not solve the problems of the modern city-dweller. But Schumacher had seen that Distributism could be brought up to date—that we could live in a completely different kind of way. When I first came upon his ideas—in a television programme—they excited me so much because it was already clear to me that we have got to live in a completely different kind of way if we are to satisfy the basic human need for self-esteem. And, as Maslow said, unless we satisfy this need for self-esteem, it is impossible to move beyond it to the level of self-actualization—which would be the ideal level for society.

  I wrote to Schumacher; we corresponded, and I went to see him at his home to discuss the idea of a book about him. (He was also a friend of Maslow.) Then, while the book was still in the planning stage, he died. It was only after Guide for the Perplexed came out that I realized that Schumacher, like myself, had turned away from the social aspect of the problem—which is indeed very important—towards what seems to me to be in a sense even more important: the problem of the lone individual in our society.

  At the time when I wrote The Outsider—in my early 20s—I was hardly interested in politics, and after every lecture I gave, somebody would always ask the same question: 'This is all very well, but how could your ideas improve our society?' And I always had to admit that I couldn't see any obvious way in which they could improve our social conditions. For, as far as I could see, improving society has to start by improving the individual. It was pleasant for me to discover that this was the conclusion Schumacher came to in Guide for the Perplexed. And in that beautiful appendix—for anyone who hasn't read the book, I suggest you start with the epilogue—he quotes Dorothy L. Sayers on the subject of Dante; she said that Dante's Inferno is a picture of human society in a state of sin and corruption, and then goes on to say that these are the problems of our own society: 'Futility, lack of a living faith, drift into loose morality, greedy consumption, financial irresponsibility, self-opinionated and obstinate individualism, and violence.' Schumacher goes on to point out that Dorothy L. Sayers wrote this 30 years ago, and that things, if anything, are now much worse. Then he goes on to say that the real problem is that we are trying to live without a religion—and I don't think for a moment that Schumacher meant a religion in the sense of some religious sect. What he meant was the kind of inner certainty which provides an anchor against the sense of alienation.

  Even at the time I wrote The Outsider, I could see that this was the central problem. If you had an absolutely ideal society with enough material goods for everybody, it would obviously still not guarantee universal happiness. In point of fact, as a student of crime—I am writing A Criminal History of Mankind at the moment—I have always recognized that one of the worst consequences of an increasingly comfortable civilization is a soaring crime rate. What is worse still is that the crimes become increasingly violent and sadistic. There are certain crimes of the past two decades—particularly certain examples of mass murder—that would simply never have happened before the 1960s. There has been an increase in deliberate sadism that is obviously due to sheer frustration.

  Yes, the problem begins with the individual, because in an ideal society you could still not guarantee an end to all crimes of frustration. It is obviously necessary, as Schumacher says, to think in terms of religion. Bernard Shaw was one of the first people to recognize this clearly, and to state, 'Modern man cannot live without a religion.' Arnold Toynbee made this one of the central theses in A Study of History. And Schumacher is the third important thinker of this century to put his finger on this basic problem.

  Now religion is fundamentally something that you live by. Whitehead once said, 'Religion is what a man does with his solitude.' Religion is also the ability to induce in oneself a certain inner peace. For me, one of the most important sections in The Outsider deals with the novelist Hermann Hesse. (In fact, I was the first person to write about him extensively in England.) I was particularly excited by his novel Steppenwolf, which seemed to me to express this central problem with unparalleled clarity. Steppenwolf is a would-be writer who is fairly well-off; he lives in a comfortable room in a comfortable lodging house; he has plenty of books and gramophone records; he has a girl-friend; in fact, he seems to have most of the things that a human being needs to be happy. And yet, for some reason, Steppenwolf is not happy. His problem is a continual feeling of boredom and frustration, that inability to break through to forms of deeper mental intensity. He feels that his consciousness is somehow boring and lukewarm. In the early pages of the book, he describes his frustration and the occasional temptation to commit suicide. Then, later that day, he wanders along to a restaurant for a meat, and as he tastes his first glass of Moselle he experiences that curious sense of deep relaxation that Maslow calls the peak experience. He says, 'The golden bubble burst and I was reminded of Mozart and the stars.'

  And this goes to the heart of the matter. If only there were a way in which you could push a button and induce that experience instantly—make the golden bubble burst so that you are reminded of Mozart and the stars. If only we could do that—if we could even find some drug or chemical that would do it—then we would have solved the basic problem of modern civilization. No more crime, no more war, no more frustration and hatred. Aldous Huxley, you may remember, even suggested that we should all take mescalin for that purpose: but the trouble with mescalin is that it makes you so ecstatically lazy and happy that you don't want to do anything at all. A pile of unwashed dishes looks so beautiful that nobody would ever want to wash them. So clearly, this is not the answer. Yet you can see that, if we could find a method of inducing Maslow's peak experience at will, we would have found the answer to this problem.

  Schumacher makes another point of fundamental importance in Guide for the Perplexed, in the section called 'Adaequatio': that the problem is that the information that comes in through our senses is not reality. He points out that we see not only with our eyes, but with a great part of our mental equipment as well. And since this mental equipment varies greatly from person to person, there are inevitably many things some people can see while others can't. 'Or to put it differently, for which some people are adequate while others are not. When the level of the knower is not adequate to the level of the object of knowledge, the result is not factual error but something much more serious: an inadequate and impoverished view of reality.' Now there, it seems to me, Schumacher has gone to the very heart of the fundamental problem of human existence.

  This problem has to do with our senses, and with the curiously 'impoverished view of reality' that we hold. And this, I could see from my Outsider days, was the heart of the problem. Steppenwolf solves it for a moment by taking a drink of Moselle, but wine doesn't always work, and if you rely upon it you become an alcohol
ic. Wine, mescalin, pot—all these chemical ways of solving the problem tend to let us down half the time. This was something Maslow discovered when he and a psychologist called Hoffer were treating alcoholics. Maslow concluded that alcoholics are very often more intelligent than the average person, and consequently they find the world more dreary and boring than most people; like Wordsworth, they find that 'the world is too much with them'. They drink because drinking gives them a brief peak experience, but it doesn't always work. Sometimes you can feel completely ecstatic on a glass of wine or beer; at other times you can drink a whole bottle of gin and still feel depressed. The alcoholic nevertheless keeps on drinking because this to him seems to be the only way back to the peak experience. And, of course, as they become more resistant to the alcohol, they need larger quantities, and the problem is complicated by a feeling of guilt . . .

  Now Maslow started from the assumption that the alcoholic was probably more intelligent than the average person. He would ask, 'What kind of things gave you a peak experience before you became an alcoholic?' Some would mention visual things—paintings, beautiful scenery; others, poetry, music, ballet. What Maslow and Hoffer then did was to administer a psychedelic drug which produced a kind of artificial 'lift', and then would induce intense peak experiences by means of colours blending on a screen, music, poetry read aloud, and so on. They discovered that they got something like an 85 per cent permanent cure rate. Why? Because the alcoholic was like a man on a kind of descending escalator, doing his best to induce peak experiences but remaining essentially passive, allowing the will to remain half-asleep—waiting, in other words, for the alcohol to carry him like a magic carpet into the peak experience. But as soon as he was carried into a far more intense peak experience by the mescalin and poetry, he would recognize clearly that the peak experience depends upon health, and that health in turn depends upon a powerful will-drive.