The Stammering Century

by Gilbert Seldes

  XXVI. The Complex of Radicalism.

  THE cults and the radical movements of the nineteenth century almost all came to a single end—failure—and, for the most part, the failure lacked dignity. There is a little pathos in the remorseless dimming of high hopes, but the impulses of the cults and the ambitions of the radicals, the hopes themselves, degenerated also. If tragedy is wanted, it lies in the steady decay of radical idealism and in the intellectual muddiness of the religious cults as compared with the high, clear sources from which they flowed.

  The reasons for this decay—which has brought us into the hands of the modern type of reformer—are complex enough. The underlying motive of the radical cults was salvation—in modern jargon they were escape mechanisms—and the underlying motive of nineteenth-century America was the desire for mastery. Through cults, escape was offered: from the terror of sex, by refraining from intercourse or by a special sanctification of intercourse—the means differ, but the motive is the same; from working for a living, by communism or cooperation; from ill-health, by Christian Science; from awkwardness, by the cult of Personality; from moral responsibility, by Phrenology; from the drabness of life, by imagining a Utopia; from loneliness, by accepting the friendship of Christ; from fear, by accepting his intercession; from death, by Spiritualism, Christian Science, and Christianity. In the end radicalism and revivalism mingle and flow back, in part, to orthodoxy.

  For most of these evils, the common sense of humanity and the particular circumstances of pioneering America offered other consolations. Progress in science, progress in politics, progress in mechanics, gave the American means to dominate his world. He escaped inconvenience and misery by “doing without” for a time, in order to conquer his universe. He could be healthy by living a healthy life. His loneliness decreased as good roads, canals, steam engines, and the telephone and telegraph, came to make communication easy.

  There lay before him always the idea that he could slip out of the wage system, not by becoming a communist, but by becoming a millionaire. Moral questions convulsed him rarely and he compacted with the preacher to assure himself a ticket to Heaven. He was generally Protestant, lacking ritual to give him easy communication with Christ and lacking absolution to give him an easy conscience; but the very violence of the revivalists indicates how casual the average man was until he was awakened to his sins. The revivalist, like the radical, was intense about salvation. Both were burdened by a sense of alienation from the world, or from God. Neither could bear the unmitigated evil of life. The average man lacked sensibility. He did not believe life was utterly evil, and the evil he saw—in his private circumstances—he proceeded to destroy. For him, this process constituted sanity, and reason, and progress.

  The one significant thing to be said in favor of the American radical is that, crackbrained or perverse as he was, he did not submit entirely to the dominant purpose. He was opposed to the system of “make-money.” The conquest of the wilderness seemed secondary to him; the conquest of the spiritual world, primary. The circumstances of his own life were unlovely; but he cared intensely for beauty. He was beset by poverty; but he did not think riches a good in itself. He wanted a freer society, an easier life for men and women. In a society peculiarly preoccupied with things, he held to ideas. He cared for accomplishment more than for possessions. Likewise the revivalists, as has been noted, spoke in the harsh loneliness of the backwoods, of spiritual things, of communion and love. Ineffective as they were, they reminded people that the current mode was not the only one. They suggested the possibility of another way of life. For the sake of variety in the American scene, for the sake of not being utterly given over to material progress, even at its best, there was need of a gospel contrary to the orthodox doctrine preached by the spade, the rifle, and the steam-engine.

  It might have been preached by philosophers and saints but, for the most part, it fell into the hands of sour fanatics, crackbrained enthusiasts, monomaniacs, epileptics, and mountebanks. They were either defeated men and women, or uneasy souls, so baffled by the conflicting stresses of life that they had to flee from the struggle. The world was so abhorrent to them, or so difficult, that no ordinary way of salvation would do. The world was so hostile to them, individually, that, in the end, most of them came to believe that they had to make man over in their own image—and declared themselves either God or his near neighbor.

  To the psychologist, this indicates inevitably the presence of the inferiority complex. The common habits and the common experience of mankind are both repudiated by the maker of Utopias because, in his mind, these habits and experiences are the very sources of evil. Has man found it simpler to use coin than to barter: the radical suggests the abolition of money. Has he found it agreeable to eat filet mignon: the radical goes vegetarian. Has he persisted in breaking his adversaries in order to be rich: the radical goes in for communal living and poverty. Is he concupiscent: the radical forbids carnal intercourse. Common things must have glamor to redeem them: work and child-bearing must be sanctified. Gay things must also be transformed, so that play becomes purposeful, and one cannot lift one’s voice in melody without being caught in a community sing-song.

  There is an enormous exhilaration in the feeling of being against the current. The radical (in the phases, especially, of uplifter and prohibitory reformer) translates this into the aggrandizement of personality which comes from imposing one’s own will on others. Underneath, lies the desire to prove one’s own superiority; and under that, according to the analyst, lies the consciousness of inferiority. The classic mode of life—to know one’s capacities and exercise them to the utmost; to know one’s limitations and to overcome them by discipline; or, if that is impossible, to remain within them—encourages few neurotics and fewer radicals. The romantic mode—which considers singularity a proof of superior qualities— is the matrix of radicalism.

  The inferiority complex is, at the moment of writing, the more popular; but it seems to me that, if we accept the psychoanalyst’s terms, the older œdipus complex is equally useful as a scalpel. The hatred for authority is obviously a “transference” from the individual’s hatred of his father, the first source of authority. The desire to destroy society is equally a dramatization of the desire to overthrow parental authority. And, still to use these terms a little out of their original intention, the radical of the nineteenth century displayed a truly astounding “mother-fixation,” often enough in the literal meaning of a fixation on the mother that bore him, and, almost universally, a fixation on Mother Earth.

  It is not necessary to import Freud in order to explain these phenomena. In the cold age of reason, Dr. Johnson expressed the sense of the time when he said that one blade of grass was very much like another blade of grass; he preferred society to Nature. After him came the deluge: worship of romantic scenery, of ruined castles on promontories, of mountains, of wild ravines, of primroses by the river’s brim, which were somehow ineffably more meaningful than primroses ever thought of being before. Rusticity, the peasantry (“a bold nation’s pride” even to Goldsmith, gently romantic under the Mogul’s baleful eye), and, finally the Land, became possessed of all virtue. The state of Nature, Natural Law, the Natural Man, the Noble Savage were discovered and idolized until, in the Transcendental movement, Nature was endowed with a Moral Law and, in the communist movement, Land became the beginning and the end of all good things. American communities were all land-hungry, says Noyes, ruefully observing the careers of his predecessors. They wanted to go back to Nature, to live as Nature intended man to live; they did so, and Nature saw to it that they perished.

  The great dream of the land-hungry communist lies also in the psychoanalytic order. He wanted to creep back into the arms of his Mother Earth, to escape from complexity and the light of day into the darkness of primeval simplicity. All this is precisely parallel to the dream of being unborn, still in the mother’s womb. Nature would understand, comfort. Nature would restore health. Nature would banish or sanctify lust.
In Nature, all things would be beautified and good. The intellectually honest radical openly proclaimed his intention to depart from civilization, to cure civilization, in his return to the simple life. Somewhere, in the dim beginning of time, life had taken the wrong turning; the radical proposed to return to the crossroads and take the right one. But where was the mistake made? Perhaps it was when private property was established, or marriage, or murder, or priesthood. Or was it when man began to walk upright, or learned the distinction between Good and Evil, or ate of the Tree of Knowledge and came to know Death? It was lost in obscurity, this baleful turning point in human history; search broke down the illusion of human happiness in Hellas or in the Garden of Eden; the beginning of the evil retreated farther into the mist; anthropology was rude even to the Noble Savage with his rigid formalism, his cruelty, his weaknesses, his tabus. But the wrongness of humanity remained fixed in the radical’s brain. To him, as to the orthodox Calvinist, there could be no explanation of human misery without the assumption of a primal sin, an Error of cosmic dimensions.

  If one could only go back!

  His intention was to make a better world. He declared himself the friend of the future. He accused conservatives and reactionaries of loving the past too much. But, before he could begin, he had to retreat for his jump into the unknown. If there had never been a Golden Age or an Eden, then the present muddle could justify itself—and the present was hateful to him. He had to assume the Perfection of man in the past in order to look forward to its second coming. Theology had left a deep mark on his soul, even if he rejected God and Christ together. Impressed with the sound of the name, radical, he spoke always of Trees to the roots of which he would apply his ax—it was the Tree of Knowledge. The root would be spared, because it clung to the earth; but the tree, and the blossom, and the fruit, were civilization and must be destroyed. Vegetation is good; cultivation, evil.

  In the last quarter century, the radical has yielded ground. Mechanics and technology have instructed him. As an economic and political radical, he wants a transfer of power to himself or to his class. The ancient radical ideals are soft and ridiculous in the eyes of the modern communist, just as the old banners of democracy are trampled under the feet of Fascism. The destruction of the framework of Russian life was only an incident in the transfer of power from the upper classes to the proletariat. The destruction of Italian liberty was an incident in the transfer of power from the mass to the bourgeoisie. The next generation will learn whether the radical temper has fundamentally changed.

  All one can be sure of at the moment is that the cults of the preceding hundred years have left an adequate progeny. Greatest of all at present is the cult of diet. Throughout the past century, it has been noted, almost all fanatics held some special belief about food. In America, the attitude toward food is never based on taste; it is ethical, not esthetic. Franklin stopped eating meat in order to save money and to have a clearer mind; others could not bear the thought of the slaughter of fellow-creatures; others felt themselves out of the divine harmony if they ate anything but cereals and nuts. But that change in the character of radical endeavor which is so marked in social experiments and in revivalism, is noted too in diet. For a century of high ideals ends in diet for health, in diet for a slender figure, for beauty, and for financial success.

  After diet, run the commercial cults of personality and success and, less popular but significant enough, the cults of esthetic or interpretative dancing, of eurhythmics, of spinal elongation, of new breathings. The House of David is a religious cult quite in the old manner. The theosophists, the followers of Gurdjieff, repeat the circle of mysticism. Eugenics is a cult with old roots. Free love is another, with roots still older. Without prejudice to their intrinsic value, Pacifism and Prohibition may both be included under the head of cults. Each escapes from the classification to become something more significant, but each has some of the characteristics of a mass-mania. The belief in psychoanalysis marks the intellectual cultish mind of to-day. The worship of science may, in the future, be considered another cult. Under fresh forms, the old habit of believing persists.

  In America, a number of forms of radicalism exist side by side. There is still the political radical, diminished in ambition since the Progressive Party vanished. There is the economic radical, socialist or communist. There are the social radical, the uplifter, and the puritan reformer. The first is the true inheritor of the Revolutionary patriot, through the Abolitionist and the muck-raker. The second is in a state of uncertainty, wavering between his inherent tendency to destroy and the obligation imposed upon him by Moscow— to capture and command. The third is the triumphant type.

  In spite of superficial diversities of method these three types have much in common. A dry world, a world of sanitary tenements, a world of sexless friendliness, a world without bawdy plays, a world in which capital and labor are friends—all these are the concerns of a single temperament: the idealist. In the service of an Ideal there can be no compromise. As Carry Nation put it, one meddles. The radical-reformer-Prohibitionist is convinced of his God-given authority to interfere with the lives of other men, in order to improve them. Eighty years ago, he withdrew from society, founded his own community, and preached Abstention. To-day, he passes laws and cries, I forbid. He believes still in the depravity of man as he is. He has still the ideal of Man before the Fall.

  To the average sensual, balanced man such concern with Perfection, Ideals, Purity is extravagant. He calls it mania. Contemporary psychology suggests that the radical is neurotic, ill-adjusted to life, and so explains his tendency to flee and his equally marked tendency to destroy. This uproar about a smutty book, or a suggestive play, suggests intolerable suppressions, impotence, and envy. The radical and the saint have an answer. They say that man lives not in a single system of ideas, desires, and ideals, but in a complex one. The average man satisfies his lower instincts and considers his life well spent; the superior man must satisfy his higher ones. Sometimes an accident, sometimes a revelation from Heaven, sometimes a conversion, sets free this higher system and, from that moment, the lower is dust, an evil memory, an impediment to the higher, a corruption. In order to burn with the greatest intensity, it is necessary to cast out the slag. That is why the saint is in rags, and the radical in ugly clothes. That is why one mortifies himself with a hair shirt and another rejects all pleasures of the flesh.

  In the soul of the saint there is no regret; he has not renounced anything worthy, only dedicated himself to the single good. But when the radical is not a saint, the Old Adam persists. He cannot bear the idea that other men, in whom the higher and lower natures are in equilibrium, can care as much as he does for sanctity and beauty, and still enjoy the carnalities of life. The very fact of their enjoyment becomes proof in his mind that they do not care intensely enough—they are compromising the Ideal. To the revivalists of the great era, the infidel was not a danger. The men they hated were the ones who took their religion calmly, “the cold professors of Christianity.” They denounced these men as worse than atheists. They denied that living the moral life of a Christian and believing in Christ were of the least avail before the judgment seat. If one had Christ, one had to be all Christ, a flame of testimony. The moment of acceptance must be a terrible agony; the possession thereafter, a terrible exaltation. All other things must be cast away. And the Prohibitionist, using the drunkard as an awful example, so fears the moderate drinker that he denies his existence. For the moderate drinker, the temperate balanced man, also hates drunkenness, but he fails to make a religion of it, and he refuses to give up his drink. He lives simultaneously in both systems, sometimes allowing one the upper hand, sometimes the other. Love and lust exist side by side; he rejoices in both, sometimes forgetting love to give rein to lust, sometimes checking lust to give play to love. The radical rejects this dualism utterly; love must drive out lust and, if it does not, it is not true love. In his own experience, the two emotions have conflicted and he will not tolerate t
he idea that, in others, they may supplement each other in perfect harmony.

  The balanced man is rare. The average man’s equilibrium is often disturbed, but he readjusts himself. The radical, fanatic about himself and his discoveries, refuses to make this adjustment. As the world neglects him, or punishes, he creates another world, full of hostile phantoms. He snatches at whatever is opposed to the established order. “What have people’s clothes to do with their religion?” asks the geologist in South Wind, and proceeds to discuss a common phenomenon of radicalism: “Can’t a fellow be a Messiah without sporting a pink shirt or fancy dressing-gown or blue pyjamas or something? . . . I defy you to name me a single-barreled crank. If a man is a religious lunatic, or a vegetarian, he is sure to be touched in some other department as well; he will be an anti-vivisectionist, a nut-fooder, costume-maniac, stamp-collector, or a spiritualist into the bargain. Haven’t you ever noticed that? And isn’t he dirty? What is the connection between piety and dirt. . .?”

  The accomplishments of radicalism are hard to value. Mrs. Bloomer was entirely right in protesting against the clothes of her era; yet it was not the protest that brought into being the beautiful clothes of our day. They are the result of women’s slavery in factories and women’s activity as courtesans in Paris and women’s freedom in cycling, motoring, and sports. The Reform Dress merely substituted what was hideous for what was absurd. The reformers shouted for Abolition and created the moral atmosphere in which a non-Abolitionist Executive could emancipate the slaves; but they did nothing serious to solve the negro problem. The great change in the status of women, quite apart from the ballot, is largely due to their agitation, and that agitation is also largely responsible for the high moral tone, the evangelizing fervor, the political astuteness and chicanery of the Prohibition movement. Against the wage and property system, the radical made insignificant headway; against orthodox science, hardly any; against the American preoccupation with material success, very little; against irreligion, very little. In almost every case, the adversaries left the high ground of early controversy and descended into mud and swamp. It may go against the grain to say, There shall be no ownership—but the tone of nobility is in it; and that tone is not in the clamorous demand that I shall own, and you shall not. There is dignity in speculating about the attributes of God; none in quarreling over the text of the Bible. Even the phrenologist, speaking of Character, was superior to the commercial New Thoughter speaking of Personality.