NIETZSCHE AND THE NEOPURITAN NANNIES PT. 3

In Part 2 I drew comparisons between H.G. Wells-- at least as he was when he wrote THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME in 1933-- and that modern species of ultraliberal that I've called "Neopuritans." One thing I neglected to mention, though, is that Wells himself uses the term "Puritan" in an approving manner in order to characterize his ideal world-state:

The Air Dictatorship is also called by some historians the Puritan Tyranny. We may perhaps give a section to it from this point of view.

"Puritan" is a misused word. Originally invented to convey a merely doctrinal meticulousness among those Protestants who "protested" against the Roman version of Catholicism, it came to be associated with a severely self- disciplined and disciplinary life, a life in which the fear of indolence and moral laxity was the dominant force. At its best it embodied an honourable realization: "I shall do nothing worth while and nothing worth while will be done unless I pull myself together and stiffen up my conduct." If the new Air Dictatorship was schooling the world with considerable austerity, it was certainly schooling itself much more so.

I don't know if "Puritan" carried the same negative value for 1933 English-speaking audiences as it generally does for many if not all such audiences today. It may be that Wells thought that the term's associations with austerity-- and with the process of rejecting the corrupt hierarchy of "the Roman version" of the Catholic Church--  would resonate with his readers, to whom he hoped to justify any and all measures in order to defeat all the evils of the world-- capitalism, nationalism, religion. Modern Neopuritans will not usually go quite as far as Wells in desiring to see humanity purged of everything that suggests contrariness, but they too define the world, as Wells did, in terms of finding security and placating fears.


I don't know what if any response Wells may have made to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. But given that he posits a World State so well-managed that it can, as I mentioned before, change the nature of the human animal so as to "evolve" away from combativeness, I feel sure that Wells never "got" Nietzsche's assertion that the "will to power" pervaded even the most non-combative situations:


From THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA, "On Self-Overcoming" (trans. Thomas Common):




WILL to Truth" do you call it, you wisest ones, that which impels you and makes you ardent?
Will for the thinkableness of all being: thus do I call your will!
All being would you make thinkable: for you doubt with good reason whether it be already thinkable.
But it shall accommodate and bend itself to you! So wills your will. Smooth shall it become and subject to the spirit, as its mirror and reflection.
That is your entire will, you wisest ones, as a Will to Power; and even when you speak of good and evil, and of estimates of value.


Then, toward the end of the section:




Thus did Life once teach me: and thereby, you wisest ones, do I solve you the riddle of your hearts.
I say to you: good and evil which would be everlasting- it does not exist! Of its own accord must it ever overcome itself anew.


With your values and formulae of good and evil, you exercise power, you valuing ones: and that is your secret love, and the sparkling, trembling, and overflowing of your souls.
But a stronger power grows out of your values, and a new overcoming: by it breaks egg and egg-shell.
And he who has to be a creator in good and evil- verily, he has first to be a destroyer, and break values in pieces.
Thus does the greatest evil pertain to the greatest good: that, however, is the creating good.-
Let us speak thereof, you wisest ones, even though it be bad. To be silent is worse; all suppressed truths become poisonous.
And let everything break up which- can break up by our truths! Many a house is still to be built!-


________


Nietzsche is probably saying a great many things here, but the one most apposite to Wells and his Nanny-World-State is that even though the "wisest ones" like to think that they're serving an abstract morality with their "values and formulae of good and evil," in truth they're just as in love with the exercise of power-- their "secret love"-- as are outright tyrants.


Nowhere does Wells show the would-be tyrant's love of absolutism than in Section 4 of Book Five, when he indulges in a rant about the supposed virtues and vices of the England in which he himself lived:

The contrast between present conditions and conditions seventy years ago is paralleled in history by the contrast between English social life in 1855 and 1925. There also we have a phase of extreme restraint and decorum giving way to one of remarkable freedom. We can trace every phase. Every phase is amply documented. There are not the slightest grounds for supposing that the earlier period was one of intense nervous strain and misery. There was a general absence of vivid excitation, and the sexual life flowed along in an orderly fashion. It did not get into politics or the control of businesses. It appears in plays and novels like a tame animal which is not to be made too much of. It goes out of the room whenever necessary.

One wonders if Wells was aware that one of the "remarkable freedoms" of Victorian England was its proliferation of extremely well-concealed pornography.  However, to hear Wells tell it, this was more or less an invention of 20th-century England:

By comparison England in 1920 was out for everything it could do sexually. It did everything and boasted about it and incited the young. As the gravity of economic and political problems increased and the structural unsoundness of the world became more manifest, sexual preoccupations seem to have afforded a sort of refuge from the mental strain demanded by the struggle. People distracted themselves from the immense demands of the situation by making a great noise about the intensifications and aberrations of the personal life. There was a real propaganda of drugs and homosexuality among the clever young. Literature, always so responsive to its audience, stood on its head and displayed its private parts. It produced a vast amount of solemn pornography, facetious pornography, sadistic incitement, re-sexualized religiosity and verbal gibbering in which the rich effectiveness of obscene words was abundantly exploited. It is all available for the reader to-day who cares to examine it. He will find it neither shocking, disgusting, exciting or interesting. He will find it comically pretentious and pitifully silly.

As noted earlier, I didn't give SHAPES an exhaustive reading, but from what I could see, at no point in the book did Wells identify what authors he deemed to be responsible for literature "displaying its private parts."  The passage above shows an extreme Puritanical outlook unmediated by logic or personal taste-- in tone very like the rants of Frederic Wertham and Gershon Legman. Yet, for all the flaws of those worthies, at least they cited a lot of particular works that frosted their respective butts. No specific accusation, no matter how unjust, can be as egregious as a blanket condemnation like Wells'.


It's been remarked that Wells' world-state is just another version of Plato's Republic, except for the fact that Plato's city was never supposed to encompass the whole world. Plato too believed in the suppression of "inconvenient truths" for the betterment of the greater good, and Nietzsche may have had him in mind when he spoke this particular aphorism:


To be silent is worse; all suppressed truths become poisonous.

THE SOCIALIZATION NETWORK PT. 1

       In the comments-thread of OVERTHINKING PART 4 I made a distinction between two ad hoc concepts, “socialization control” and “tyrannical control.”  I call them “ad hoc” because they were a specific response to William Moulton Marston's presentations of positive and negative forms of “control”-- presentations which, as all comics-fans should know, translated into the concrete form of “bondage.”  Though these two terms were invented for that purpose, the concepts behind them have pertinent applications beyond the bounds of WONDER WOMAN comics.

First, a definition of “socialization” from Dictionary.com:

      " a continuing process whereby an individual acquires a personal identity and learns the norms, values, behavior, and social skills appropriate to his or her social position."

Socialization, then, takes in any number of societal controls, ranging from punishments for whatever a society deems a “crime” to rituals designed to initiate its members into the society as productive citizens.  WONDER WOMAN’s Amazon society is clearly modeled on the relatively static practices used by tribal-level societies to enact initiation and/or punishment.

However, the society of an industrial nation, such as that of (obviously) the United States, cannot follow the practices of tribal societies, whether real or imagined.  When a society embodies a level of discursive thought that makes industrialization possible, that society’s members must choose a more dynamic model as regards socialization.  This means that the society must be continually debating, also in discursive manner, the nature of the practices necessary to enculturate the young or to correct those who break the society’s laws.

In a dynamic society, however, “correction” isn’t confined purely to literal crimimals.  Irrespective of the specific purposes of any given political activity, that activity generally possesses the potential to enact practices that have a socializing effect. 

  To be sure, a media-campaign to discourage some behavior—often one without overt political content, such as the advisability of smoking—is not reified by the mythopoeic beliefs that inform, say, a young man undergoing penile circumcision. 

There may be any number of attempts to confer an unquestionable mythic status upon the society’s artifacts— the assorted debates on the “essential nature” of the American Constitution, for example.  But, contrary to Roland Barthes in MYTHOLOGIES, this practice is not the result of some bizarre “myth-language” devised to facilitate the repressive bourgeoise.  It is the outgrowth of the language of socialization, which has liberal accents as well as conservative.  However, no matter what the accent, the message will always received with acrimony by someone.

I’ve defended the principles underlying William Moulton Marston’s version of “socialization control” based on its status as literature, not political discourse.  In this my OVERTHINKING essays parallel the earlier essay TORTURE GUARDIN’, which defends the fictional depiction of inquisitorial torture based on the fact that it is (usually) no more than a fictional device, functioning as a element of plot-convenience in a fictional cosmos.  In such a cosmos, Batman will always threaten criminals with dire fates, or may even dispense literal physical harm, but it will almost always be too “fictional” in its base nature to be seen as an endorsement of actual torture.  By the same token, in the world of Wonder Woman the element of “play” should defuse the seeming dictatorial methods of Aphrodite’s Law, not least because it’s a world where Aphrodite unquestionably exists.

Now, if Marston had presented his ideas in the form of political discourse, I would have opposed such a practice being enacted in reality.  I’ m sure that as a young child I would have found Marston’s instruction-through-bondage no more palatable than the real socialization practices that I did experience.  Mere dislike in itself doesn’t invalidate the proposed practice, though, since socialization practices are designed to be disliked.  Almost no one likes to be told what to do, and even those who relish being ordered about only relish that experience under specific circumstances.

Nevertheless, even small children soon absorb the basic “it’s for your own good” rhetoric, whether they mentally accede to every dictate or not.  Were it possible for any child to be reared so as to exercise unconditional free will, the wakeup call for that child would surely sound as soon as he tested his inviolability by sticking his finger in a light-socket.  It may be that in a static tribal society, rebellious members may not attempt to suss out what socialization practices can be altered.  In a dynamic one, rebels may always find some cause for revision.

It remains a fact that all societies, in order to survive, must adumbrate the unconditioned free will of their members as parents modify the behavior of their children.  Some might defend Marston’s “socialization control” on that basis.  However, though it is important to point out that dimension of Marston’s thought, this cannot be a full justification.  Phrased thusly, it would be tantamount to saying that fiction is only justifiable when it mimics the conditions of real life.  In addition, such a justification would be the simple obverse of critiquing fiction for not emulating real life closely enough, a position with which I quarrel in the OVERTHINKING essays.

Leslie Fiedler founded his theory of literature on the quasi-Freudian notion of its value as an escape valve from reality.  In 1975 he edited a science-fiction anthology entitled “In Dreams Awake,” but his critical work bestows that power upon all literature, not just science fiction: the power to mirror our nature through our dreams.

But dreams by their nature are as given to darkness as to light.  Socialization practices of all creeds exist to curse the darkness.  In dreams we light candles not to dispel the dark, but to find out just how deep it is.

More in Part 2.