The Disappearance

by Philip Wylie

  Psychology has (or had, until the Disappearance) the same prospect.

  Meanwhile, such pseudo sciences as economics, sociology and political “science”

  will continue to thrive anomalously because there can be no science in any of these fields, until psychology has been incorporated by them. Man’s economics, politics and society rise from currently unconscious motives; hence contemporary economists, political scientists, and sociologists merely document events without knowledge of or concern for motives. They have developed sets of tables but no instructions, directions or sensible interpretations. They deal in man and his motives without referring, as a rule, to what is known of human nature and its motivation; thus these “social sciences” are the alchemies and astrologies of the twentieth century and the “science of education” heads the claptrap retinue.

  Here, of course, is the commonest, saddest and most ludicrous posture of our species: where we think we have knowledge (a “science”) even our learned men relax, and even though the “knowledge” may be but some higher form of superstition. (In the

  “social sciences” the superstition is partly a credulity about statistics.) The belief that we know what we don’t know is another handicap of the new science of psychology. It may be set beside the damage done it by quacks, the inertia toward new learning our species has always exhibited, the fixational function of education, the diehard behavior of vested interests (in this case, of vested ideas and beliefs), and the situation of faith itself, which renders the individual impermeable to greater wisdom and especially to greater wisdom about instinct, simply because it blindly incorporates all it can of instinct. Psychology today faces a further disadvantage: Because it is a new science its most accomplished proponents and interpreters rarely apply to it that apparatus of extrapolation which would disclose something of its probable destiny—granted, of course, that man still has a destiny. The reason for that is partly the modest tradition of scholarship and partly the limitation even of good minds.

  Many psychologists and psychiatrists still think of their object only in therapeutic terms and few truly glimpse its potentialities. Old Leeuwenhoek, peering through his early microscope, hardly foresaw what changes would be made by way of the field he observed in medicine and surgery, health, sanitation, engineering, food transportation and storage, and so forth. Faraday, watching his laboratory toy revolve, did not conjure up Bonneville Dam. With our ingrained objective attitude, we Americans have been even less inclined to foresee what a new science of the mind could mean and do to our then-smug way of life.

  Such is the first dichotomy. Western society, concentrating its integrity on objects, has lost touch with the subject. Eastern societies made the opposite blunder, dwelling upon subjectivity and ignoring obvious facts and laws in the external world.

  Their “orientation” was too much inward; the Western, too much outward. It might be called “occidentation,” a style of personality able to harness atomic energy but one which has so little learning of the energies of instinct that it greets its greatest day with the cry,

  “We are doomed! Somebody save us!” “Orientation” and “occidentation” are both schizoid.

  The second dichotomy concerns sex.

  In nature, sex is an instinct served with felicitous collaboration by paired individuals for procreative purposes. It is the chain of life; it is the trunk from which life’s variegations, its evolutions, have branched ever outward toward enhanced consciousness. Sex is almost as old as life. From the cosmic standpoint, sex is measurelessly more important than humanity. Without man, sex might again produce an aware animal. Without sex, nature could but manufacture amoebas and slimes till the sun went cold and time ran out.

  It is expectable, in a species that has unconsciously perverted its instincts for its immediate vanity (as religions, faiths, dogmas, dialectics, “sciences,” and so on), that strong cultural compulsions and taboos would everywhere surround the ancient, potent instincts of sex. Such, of course, is the case. Western man’s religions (and hence his culture) are rooted in sex management and sustained by inculcated sex fears.

  Disobedience of the “sacred” rules or of the “common” law is “sin” or “crime.” Sex hunger has here been made shameful so as to elevate the vanity of man in relation to other animals and so as to enhance the controlling power of cultural tradition and its agencies—the churches, courts, and so on. The inescapable result is anxiety and tension in society—hypocrisy, confusion, neurosis and madness along with vast “safety valves”

  of vulgar activities in which libido is expended in “acceptable” forms.

  Half this nation’s sick have suffered not from physical disease but from psychic.

  Half its hospital beds were occupied by the mentally ill or mad. The figure has doubtless risen since the Disappearance and will doubtless continue to rise. Sex is innate and essential. But since it is regarded here as shameful, since this particular nation h<).s indeed tried to establish perfect shame by the abolition of such sexual customs as older societies tolerated, at least sub rosa, the American people lived to the very hour of the Disappearance in perfect guilt. There were individual exceptions. But a national neurosis was everywhere discernible and it resulted, here even more than elsewhere, in a hostility of each sex toward the other. That rancor could have been predicted by any wise, impartial mind analyzing a discipline of shame and guilt as the social means toward enforcing sex patterns designed not for the sake of sex, or to enhance its expression, but merely to exalt egos by a lustful identification with an arbitrary “god,” a varied set of righteousnesses.”

  This second dichotomy lies entirely in the subjective realm and has lain there uninvestigated through ages and until recently. A consideration of it here may shed some illumination on the broad splitting of personality—even amongst “convinced” persons.

  And that, in turn, may give rise to new and different formulations for considering the present awful predicament in which men find themselves. Such, at least, is the essayist’s reason for the undertaking.

  Such—say rather—is my personal hope, and it is but a hope. . . .

  The half of a world that now survives is, in many senses, a whole world. It is a whole world owing to the fact that nearly all of humanity, in nearly all of its recorded or known existence, has consisted of two worlds: the world of women and the world of men.

  In primitive societies, in barbaric nations, and in our civilization, the training of the two sexes has been different, the freedoms permitted them have been different, and the powers delegated to them or taken from them have been different. Man’s greater stature, his considerably greater strength, his apparently greater penchant for the hunt, for aggression, warfare, and the construction of useful apparatus, his emancipation from the reproductive functions of child carrying, childbearing and suckling, and his recently touted larger skull capacity have caused man to regard himself as the “dominant” or “superior” sex.

  For thousands of years he has exploited the role. A human tribe in which the males think of themselves as substantially inferior to the females is a rarity, although there are a few in which childbearing is deemed the supreme human function and males consider themselves of secondary importance owing to their incapacity to give birth.

  But generally, in marked degree, woman has been accorded a secondary place.

  She had been regarded as a slave in countless societies. She has a property status in numerous areas today. She has been denied many social, economic and political privileges accorded to men. Before the law, she is seldom equal.

  Where sexuality is concerned—and in this discussion the concern is nothing other—woman also has been grossly denigrated. In both the Old and the New Testament (on which Western “culture” so largely rests) woman’s biological functions have been repetitiously and remorselessly associated with filth. According to the legendary attitudes, a woman during menses is “unclean”—even though this period corresponds in certain other mammals to
“heat,” i.e., to the time of “desirability.” Conception itself, in such frames of reference, is regarded as vile; so is parturition. The female who has borne a child is often supposed to be in an “unclean” condition that demands certain rituals for the restitution of her decency.

  The etiology of those callow notions is obvious. A woman bleeds and desquamates at intervals; she bleeds again when her offspring is born; and she expels its placenta. To the naïve savage those processes may have seemed repugnant, especially since, owing to her structure and to such functions, a woman is liable to infections and parisitisms of a noxious nature during such occasions or following them.

  Furthermore, until very recently her childbearing was an ordeal whereof she became the apparent victim. Upon her, savages reasoned, an affliction rested; ergo, it was a sign of her inferiority, a punishment of the gods for what manifestly must have been implicit evil, or a visitation imposed on that weaker sex which somehow must have deserved it.

  On every hand, these old stigmata have survived. “Bloody” is foul to an Englishman because the bleeding of woman was presumed foul. To American womanhood, the menstrual period was “the curse.”

  The woman giving suck must do so many times each day; the necessity in primitive societies compelled her to feed her child openly; in so doing, she was spontaneously likened to the “lesser” beasts—and, again, unfavorably compared with man, whose sexual activities are more often concealed in the hut. Owing to man’s millenniums-long attempt to dissociate himself from other animals for the advantage of his ego, the mere biological means of infant nurture have been taken as one more evidence of woman’s beastlier estate!

  Setting aside all concern for the justness or the reasonableness of such opinion, the fact must be recognized. No male Protestant exists, no Roman Catholic (in spite of the adoration of Mary, who is, fortunately for the Church’s ends, the result of a “virgin”

  birth), and no person subject to such “Christian” traditions (or any other religious doctrine) but holds in his mind an array of the ugly, repulsive and biologically preposterous woman-concepts set forth and implied in the Holy Bible or its equivalent.

  That venerable Anthology contains most of the wisdom of the ages—and most of the blunders and prejudices. So for two thousand and more years parts of it have conveyed to every Believer the far, far older association of inferiority, of uncleanliness, with woman!

  Indeed, a Gallup Poll conducted amongst surviving men would doubtless show that the overwhelming majority still holds these special attitudes of shame and guilt and filthiness toward woman’s biologically most lofty functions. Perhaps not one in ten has availed himself of knowledge enough to dispute the slanderous delusion and not one in a hundred, on psychological examination, would prove free of derivative, unconscious impressions.

  With such views, engraved for such periods of time on all but a small fraction of the species, and with the apparently supportive physical criteria, it is not possible to consider that men and women in the modern age lived in the same world or (from both physical and psychological standpoints) even in a similar world!

  The two sexes dress differently and are differently trained. Such elaborations of different manners toward each and between each exist amongst them that hardly a word is uttered or a course of action taken that does not contain and reflect a special attitude or group of attitudes toward sexuality. In addition, while the social and outward manifestations of sex differences are given universal and incessant attention, the true biological aspects of sex are everywhere repressed and suppressed! Hence, beginning at birth with the pink or blue raiment that is the first mark, and continuing in each category of behavior to the grave, the externals of sex are forced into every cranny of consciousness while the truth and nature of it are left in a darkness as near-absolute as

  “righteous” traditionalists can keep it. In Jung’s terminology, the persona is given every emphasis, the anima, subjective sexuality, is kept at an infantile (primitive) level.

  So the sexes were set in inferior-superior relationships and so they have stood immobile for aeons. So, in recent centuries, a further terrible division has been artificially made between the sexually known and unknown. It is a rare society indeed in which male and female consider each other as equivalents or complements, evenly share work, play, counsels and society and take no magical affront, on either hand, from any aspect of the biological necessities.

  The recent efforts of women in Western society to achieve “equality” with men and “emancipation” from their ageless subservience (and their successes in obtaining certain social, economic and political opportunities and enfranchisements) indubitably sprang from the gross and deep insult women have borne since long before the time of Christ. But these enterprises merely obscured the real nature of the problem. They tended to create the impression that the sexual schism lay in the objective realm; and, of course, the orientation of Western man was a fecund soil for that sort of superficial, deluded concept.

  The “liberated” women found themselves (until we lost them) more restless and dissatisfied then ever before, precisely when they had achieved the “objectives” of their gallant crusades! For they had not removed or even sought to remove the subjective stigmas that have for so long militated against them. The attempt would have been futile, beyond doubt, since, though women suffered and even accepted the mental sickness of the species, the cure could have been effected only in the minds of the principal carriers: males. And, as in the case of every psychological blunder, the blunderer must heal himself-with whatever guidance or help.

  Here is the classic circumstance of psychological oppression: it is not (for example) the Jew who can heal anti-Semitism but the Gentile alone, whose intellectual sickness anti-Semitism is. Only the brain can change its brain and only by first recovering the emotional sensations with which inappropriate concepts were instilled and by next replacing them with realer values in the logical expectation that new and deeper emotions will then sustain a more honest and better integrated personality.

  Woman could not change her status by donning the clothes of the free male citizen and going through his motions. In the subjective realm, from which rises all outward behavior and in which reposes all inner opinion and sensation, “emancipated”

  woman was still as much prisoner of the sexual prejudice as ever. And she was unhappier; for when she thought of herself as “free” she made the walls of humanity’s most colossal bigotry invisible and so lost even the cold comforts of enslavement. She could no longer discern a boundary she still encountered. She no longer had any idea when the guards might assail her, or for what reason or under what conditions she might run headlong into barricade, or who among men might suddenly prove to be an implacable warden, or a sadistic jailer, or a male immured amongst the women in their impalpable penitentiary.

  If there is an instinct toward realizing a pattern in man (as certain uniquely informed and acutely discerning philosophers now hold), a negative evidence of it is found in this tragedy of the woman who thought she had “advanced.” For any subservient role, be it that of a slave, of a Victorian paragon and housewife, of a man-sharer in a harem, will be seen to satisfy in some degree a putative instinct for order and arrangement. But the woman who caused the conscious mind of her society to agree that no pattern could compel her, and who was nevertheless obliged to live within the frames of old phobias, compulsions, taboos, rites, formulae, fears and repugnances, was a woman damned to be unable to discover any design for herself—and her anguish in the void is evidence of what was lost.

  She was (as women sadly, if unintelligently, observed before the Vanishment) emotionally worse off even than that slave who knew she was obliged to conduct herself in accordance with the rules or die. A slave might hope for an appreciative master and a biologically effective life from which psychological satisfactions could be derived. But the modern free woman showed by her suffering the want in her ways. She walked in the dark amidst set traps, pits,
steel points, poisons, and infernal machines, where she had been led to anticipate a safer and easier passage. Consciously “free,” she was unconsciously everywhere ensnarled; and no pattern, either visible or invisible, was any longer available to her.

  The average male survivor of this age will probably reject the idea that woman’s dilemma has for ages been far greater than even she imagined, that it was not ameliorated in modern times, and that venerable, largely male attitudes have been the occasion of it all. But some readers will at least appreciate that, psychologically speaking, the man and the woman of the “West” have inhabited two utterly discrete worlds. The current absence of women and the powerful longings that consequently prevail may give rise to a degree of fresh perspective in the matter.

  I can but wish forlornly that I had the power to convey this truth as I have at last come to see it. For in the demeaning of woman man has demeaned himself. His chivalry, his mother reverence, are but sickly pretenses to hide his ageless, vile convictions. What would we say of any other beast that held its mate in secret revulsion? What do we feel of the spider that copulates and then devours its mate? Let that be said of humanity!

  The actual differences between the sexes of genus homo are not very great. Some woman are larger than most men; some have bigger brains than most men; some are stronger. It is quite possible that by the use of genetics mankind could have reversed all conventional tendencies. And had females remained on earth instead of the males, had they found a mechanism for parthenogenesis and sex determination (which they would have had a better opportunity to do than ourselves), it is likely that in a few generations they would have accomplished precisely such reversals.

  Indeed, it may be that in some remote, unrecorded period the mere ego of the male of a species possessing powers of choice not given to the lower orders became the sole determining factor-rather than any “natural” element. Men may have unconsciously commenced to keep the weaker sex weaker by electing its weaker examples for mates.